razr i

Motorola Mobility's market in Germany may be shrinking even further.

The company continues to offer few devices via its German Web site as it battles Microsoft over patent issues, according to Foss Patents' Florian Mueller. Mueller has been employed as a paid consultant by Microsoft and Oracle.

A check of Motorola's German Web pages by blog site Areamobile found only three smartphones currently up for sale -- the Razr, the Razr i, and the Gleam HD +.

A search by Mueller turned up the same results, with no other phones or tablets available online for German customers. A link … Read more

With signs that Apple has designed one of the fastest smartphone chips yet, Intel is getting set to rev up its smartphone silicon in 2013.

Performance benchmark site Geekbench is already showing the iPhone 5's dual-core A6 central processing unit (CPU) with roughly twice the performance of the A5 chips in the iPhone 4S and third-generation iPad. And Geekbench also has the A6 edging out the quad-core chip in Samsung's Galaxy S III.

And there may be a quad-core Apple A series chip in the works for 2013, according to Linley Gwennap, the principal analyst at The Linley … Read more

After years of talk, Intel is finally making some headway into the smartphone business.

Motorola Mobility is the latest company to unveil a smartphone, the Razr i, to be powered by an Intel processor. The Razr i is essentially the recently announced Droid Razr M for Verizon Wireless, only with the different processor. It will be available in Europe and Latin America.

The Razr i is one of a handful of smartphones now running on an Intel Atom processor, further evidence that Intel is establishing a beachhead -- albeit a small one -- in the mobile arena. Intel has shrugged … Read more

commentary Smartphones are great. But it's time to lower your expectations, because the smartphone industry has moved from an era of revolutionary improvement to a much more bland era of incremental refinement.

Progress will continue, to be sure: screens will get better, networks will get faster, prices will come down. But these days, it's just a lot harder to come up with a smartphone that makes last year's model look like an outdated relic.

This week, we'll see what Apple has in store for the next-gen iPhone. I have no doubt it will be technically impressive … Read more

"So why do you sell iPhones at all?" I ended up asking Phil, the Verizon rep.

"Because people want them," was his beautiful reply.

This was the conclusion to a morning foray to a Verizon store in the New York area, one in which I tried to discover if the rumors were true.

No, not whether the iPhone 5 is coming next week, but whether Verizon tries to sell any other smartphone, but Apple's. This notion had been fostered by several posts this week that offered Verizon's apparent reluctance to encourage anyone to buy … Read more

Ever wonder how we got along without cell phones, BlackBerrys, notebook computers, and fax machines? How did we manage to have fun without video games, MP3 players, and DVRs?

Come to think of it, how did we ever survive without the Internet?

I don't know how, but we did. And you know what? I don't remember ever thinking I was missing something. I played records, wrote letters, used the phone book, and shopped at stores.

As for work, well, the business of designing chips was a bit archaic back then. Still, at Texas Instruments we did manage to get our designs done and out the door. In fact, TI's venerable TMS320 Digital Signal Processor--the chip inside most of the world's cell phones--was invented back then in the early '80s. How about that?… Read more