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AS VEGAS--Texas Instruments is offering one of the most revealing demos of Windows 8 on  ARM  yet at CES .                           That's not saying a lot, though, as demos of Microsoft's next operating system on ARM processors have been extremely restrictive, if nonexistent to date in public (Nvidia's untouchable, relatively static CES demo is behind closed glass). But TI pushed the boundaries a bit in a demo for CNET at CES. The demo  tapped TI's freshly minted OMAP4470 ARM processor , according to Bill Crean, an OMAP product marketing manager. Needless to say, I was not permitted to take video. But TI's Crean demonstrated live scrolling with Windows 8 Explorer on the CNN news site. Scrolling was fluid and I didn't see the jerkiness that I do get, by the way, with my Verizon-Motorola XyBoard  tablet  on  Android  3.2. Again, that's not revealing a lot, but Windows 8 on ARM is a...

Liu Jun of Lenovo holding up the K800, Lenovo's first Intel-powered smartphone, at CES 2012. Intel's new chip for phones is surprising in many respects, but the biggest shocker is speed. The "Medfield" Atom Z2460 chip for smartphones,  announced at CES , handily beats some of the fastest phones on the market, review site Anandtech said in  this  post. Is this fast enough to be smartphone-market disruptive? Will battery life measure up? Only Lenovo and Motorola know for sure (Anandtech  thinks Medfield will be fine  on battery life). One thing is for certain, though: neither of those companies are signing up for Medfield out of pity, as Anand Shimpi points out. And--another shocker--the results that Anandtech cites are not that different from a bar-graph slide (below) that CEO Paul Otellini showed at a Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference back in November. (I should add that I had somebody whispering in my ear before  CES  to take those be...

Row upon row of tablets at CES 2012. In spite of manufacturers' best efforts, the  tablet  hits of the past year could have been counted on the hand of a careless woodshop teacher. Among those hits are a  $199 tablet  designed as a loss leader, and an orphaned  HP tablet  that was abandoned in the liquidation bin. Needless to say, if there had been a thin selection of tablets at this year's  CES , I would have understood. But that wasn't the case. The show floor of CES 2012 was littered with tablets--perhaps even more than the previous year. Granted, the majority of these tablets were off-brands and OEMs that will never find their way into U.S. hands, but there were big-name announcements as well. Asus's Memo 370T tablet is one of the first tablets to pack Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor. As I see it, the tablets announced at CES came in three flavors: budget; premium; and mutant (not as bad as it sounds). Furthermore, I suspect that these themes wi...

                               Select Motorola Xoom owners are now getting a lick at Ice Cream Sandwich. Ice Cream Sandwich is finally providing some flavor to Motorola Xoom tablets . A Motorola representative confirmed to CNET today that the company has deployed the Ice Cream Sandwich update, aka  Android  4.0, to a small number of Xoom users for testing. The company has promised to confirm additional details when the upgrade is more broadly available, added the rep. Motorola initially seems to have  teased the update , without specifically mentioning ICS, in the following e-mail sent to select Xoom owners yesterday, according to tech blogging site AndroidCentral: Thanks for your patience as we've waited for this project to begin. Because we are dealing with a Google Experience Device (GED) we have less insight to timing than we would usually have. However, I'm happy to announce that we wi...