!!!....Electronics world....!!!

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...

Companies take liberties. The liberty some seem to enjoy most is yours. As recessions hit and profit pressures become the sole reason for existence, bosses seem to believe that they own workers--until they discard them for younger, fresher models. Now a curiously human law has reared its head in Brazil.  According to the Associated Press , this law says that if a company e-mails you after your allotted working hours, then this is the same as if one's supervisor is giving one an instruction to perform a certain work task. (Credit:  CC ILamont.com/Flickr ) Ergo, argue Brazilian labor lawyers, if a worker receives such an e-mail and has to act on it, he or she qualifies for overtime pay. I can already hear the howling of corporate management in, say, America. I can hear sniggers suggesting that every corporate employee should be on call 24 hours a day. That is today's connected world. Some might offer, though, that today's connected world has become peculiarly inhuman-- one i...

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...

                                   It may be a small bit of protest--literally--but thousands of people have been turning to Twitter to urge their followers to help defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act. All over Twitter these days, you can find people who have plastered a "Stop SOPA" banner across their profile images. As of this writing, more than 14,000 users have added the banner, and according to the  #BlackoutSOPA  Web site, those users are reaching nearly 24.6 million followers. Twitter profile images have long been a place to express a protest message. Thousands are using their images to urge Congress not to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act. To be sure, there's a lot of energy out there on the Internet these days to defeat SOPA. The news site  Reddit has committed to going silent for 12 hours on January 18 , and the Internet meme factory Cheezburger Network has done the same. A...