January 17th, 2012 
Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via CrunchBase
Imagine being Intel at CES: They are demoing DirectX, which is known to be unstable at times, on new hardware that could have just had brand new drivers written for it.
In that case, it’s completely understandable why Intel would fake using a real-life demo – they just don’t want to end up being embarrassed like these two guys below:
January 16th, 2012 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image by blogeee.net via Flickr
Ever since Google announced its intentions to acquire Motorola Mobility, it has been widely assumed that the two largest Android manufacturers – Samsung and HTC – would react to the news in some way to retaliate and defend themselves from a possible ambush. With Google, the company that is trying to compete with everybody, noone seems to know if they are their friend of enemy, even if a prior courtship has been established.
So after a few months of obvious negotiating, it seems that Samsung have struct first.
As has been reported across every tech blog in existence, uncle Sammy have made a deal with the Intel-led Tizen project to merge its internal Bada OS operating system with Tizen OS.
This is a blockbuster.
January 16th, 2012 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via Wikipedia
For those of you wondering what all the fuss is about:
In late 2011, there was a bit of a stink kicked up about Microsoft‘s new super-fast UEFI secure boot feature in Windows 8 which allows PC manufacturers to finally ditch the traditional BIOS in new PC’s.
(As a side note, Apple have been using EFI in Macs for years now. Windows 7 offered EFI support but PC manufacturers had little incentive to want to care. With the fast boot feature using UEFI, though, they will – hence it’s ‘sudden’ emergence onto the mainstream scene.)
With the way the secure-boot feature has been written, “software freedom” activists have voiced their concerns about how the feature would lock out the ability to dual boot into another OS such as Linux and would therefore constitute foul play. Microsoft have been fairly quiet on this but have put word out there that if people want to dual boot into other OS’s, they’ll be able to. The consensus seems to be that the feature will be difficult to reverse on Intel-based PC’s and that Microsoft are just avoiding discussion of the topic until after Windows 8 ships.
January 15th, 2012 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via Wikipedia
I have to say that overall I’m pretty impressed with a fair few things that Toshiba showed at CES this week.
Toshiba’s advantage seemed to be that they didn’t try to create lots of different versions of lots of different things – instead, they’ve simply focused on making one good version of each type of major product.
And you know what? Pretty much each product I saw was fairly decent. Props.
So let’s dive in and explore each of their major announcements:
September 29th, 2011 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via Wikipedia
Sebastian Anthony at ExtremeTech asked that question in an opinion piece released earlier today based on the observation of a few things:
This certainly seems like a lot of non-Android activity for Android’s biggest manufacturer but there’s a bigger view to take here – one that doesn’t involve Samsung ditching Android at all.
September 29th, 2011 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
For those of you not in on the latest plans, Intel have forged a partership with Samsung and the Linux Foundation (which consists of a number of device manufacturers throughout the world) to shut down and abandon ‘transition’ MeeGo into a new operating system called Tizen. The first version of this OS is expected sometime in the first half of 2012.
This story kind of reminds me of an episode of my youth that I experienced often and it goes like this (and encapsulated for story-telling effect):
September 15th, 2011 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via Wikipedia
The real question here is, who ever thought that they might in the first place?
Such a bizzare statement for Intel to make in the first place – anyone with a brain would know that Intel could never buy a computer business without making regulatory hell for themselves and being alienated from every other PC maker in the business.
I mean, it’s not like there is more than one Google in the world.
Fudzilla has the original story if you’re interested.
September 4th, 2011 Aaron Holesgrove 
Err yeah, probably a good idea. MeeGo always had a limited future after Nokia ditched it so it was only a matter of time before Intel woke up to themselves.
Of course, Intel are now trying to deny that this is actually happening and if so, they need to get their heads checked. I’d say they’re trying to protect parters like Acer and Nokia who are trying to sell MeeGo devices at them moment.
DigiTimes has the full story.
August 7th, 2011 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via Wikipedia
You can read the original article here.
Now, my first reaction would be to say that with the release of Mac OS X Lion, the two operating systems have already merged to an extent – after iOS 4 adopted the Mac OS X-style dock, the computer OS has been slowly adopting more and more iOS features such as the App Store, new application launcher and the touch gestures, just to name a few.
However, it goes without saying that this claim is bogus in a few ways that most people might not have actually considered. Here’s what I’m thinking:
May 9th, 2011 Aaron Holesgrove 
Image via Wikipedia
I wrote an article a few months ago when the latest MacBook Air came out saying that the reason I felt Apple were sticking with the weak Intel Core 2 Duo‘s within the product was one of the key indicators that Apple want to eventually move to using their own CPU’s in their lines of Mac products. Check out the article itself to see the full list of points I made about why I thought this might be happening – you can find it here.
Now another publication has discovered that Apple are planning to do exactly that in their notebook line of products. They say that it’s a “done deal” – Apple will develop ARM-based CPU’s in the same vein as they do with their iDevice products and pop them into laptops.
I told you so!
