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Steve Jobs had some choice words for Intel that went beyond just censure to hubris in the just-released biography.

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Steve Jobs," the former Apple CEO, who recently passed away, had significant issues with Intel as a company as well as its world-renowned processors.

Apple switched to Intel's X86 chip design in 2005 when it dropped IBM's and Motorola's PowerPC processors. And Intel chips have been powering Apple's MacBooks and Macs exclusively ever since.

But Jobs implies in the biography that Intel wasn't keeping up with the times. He … Read more

After much delay, Facebook finally rolled out a native app for the iPad, pleasing those who, until now, have relied on third-party apps and the regular Web site for Facebook stalking.

Because of the anticipation (and endless rumors) about the iPad app release, many people missed another exciting piece of news: Facebook also implemented a new mobile Web site for phones, which boasts a very attractive, easy-to-navigate HTML5 interface.

In proper fashion, Facebook didn't make the new HTML5 web app available for the iPad, leaving users to the bulky desktop site while browsing in Safari. However, with this trick, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel hauled out its first Android tablet running on "Medfield," an upcoming Atom chip for smartphones and tablets, while two executives also chatted with CNET about their relationship with Google, all at Intel's developer conference today.

The Medfield Atom chip is one of Intel's most power-efficient chip designs--a strict requirement for tablets and smartphones. It contains a single processing core--as opposed to more power-hungry dual-core Atom chips used in Netbooks--and will be available in devices in the first half of 2012.

The tablet that Intel showed today (see photo below) is a so-called reference design … Read more

British and U.S. scientists have confirmed that an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) near London is the most accurate long-term timekeeper in the world, the NPL said.

The NPL-CsF2 is a cesium fountain clock that's used as a standard for International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time.

The machine is apparently accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second. Not bad, I guess.

The NPL's Krzysztof Szymaniec joined scientists from Pennsylvania State University in evaluating the clock. The team published its results in the journal Metrologia.

The analysis concludes that the clock will lose only a billionth of a second every two months, and represents an unprecedented accuracy. Cesium clocks are usually expected to lose or gain a second over tens of millions of years.

"Together with other improvements of the cesium fountain, these models and numerical calculations have improved the accuracy of the U.K.'s cesium fountain clock, NPL-CsF2, by reducing the uncertainty to 2.3 × 10-16--the lowest value for any primary national standard so far," Szymaniec was quoted as saying by the NPL.

In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which as of summer 2010 had an uncertainty of 3 x 10-16, meaning it would take more than 100 million years to lose or gain a second.

That will be billions of years before the sun dies, taking the Earth with it, so I expect an update on this from a future blogger. … Read more

The Internet is the Best Thing Ever for news junkies, and RSS feeds help make it that way. Pmcc's News Messenger is a free news reader that reads not only Atom and RSS pages but also HTML, so it can read headlines from sites that don't support syndication. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or higher.

We extracted and saved News Messenger's program file, which immediately scanned for updated headlines when we opened it. The program displays headlines and brief summaries as well as time stamps in a narrow vertical column that can be configured to … Read more

The Netbook craze may be over, but Acer, the company behind some of the best-selling Netbooks of all time, has a colorful new model to show off. The awkwardly named Aspire One Happy 2 (we must have missed the memo on the Happy 1) has a single notable feature--a collection of eye-popping colors that Acer says, "bring a new sense of fun and style to the ultra-light, mobile PC experience."

The systems come in four food-influenced shades, called Banana Cream, Blueberry Shake, Papaya Milk, and Strawberry Yogurt. From the product images we've seen, the chosen color is … Read more

Chronos Atomic Clock Synchronizer is a small utility that synchronizes your Windows system's internal clock with online time servers that use ultra-accurate atomic clocks. Yes, Windows already does that; Chronos adds flexibility and displays more information, such as latency and correction in fractions of a second. Best of all, you can specify a connecting interval instead of relying on Windows' unspecified "scheduled basis." By querying multiple clocks simultaneously, it returns the most accurate average of the current time.

Chronos has a small but attractively colored interface with a list of Time Servers as well as their latency … Read more

Yesterday's formal introduction of Chromebooks marked yet another category of portable computing gadget in a landscape that's starting to feel overrun.

For $499, the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook has its work cut out for it--namely, because tablets and "high-end" 11- and 12-inch laptops and Netbooks (some with faster processors) have already occupied the same landscape.

It's a question we've been pondering for a while now, writ again: what truly constitutes the perfect small-screen portable? Suddenly, instead of one or two OSes to consider, there are four: Windows 7, Apple's iOS, and Google's Android and Chrome.

While the high end of the computer spectrum remains relatively stable (desktops, laptops), the increasingly fertile (or, perhaps, unstable) ground between laptops and smartphones has bred a variety of tech forms that all, in some way, are portable. Options have never been more diverse, or confusing.

Which one would you rather spend about $500 on? Well, let's see what you get.… Read more

Intel is working on a new Atom chip architecture that goes beyond the 3D transistors announced last week as the chip giant accelerates development of its most power-efficient chip design.

The new Atom-based "micro-architecture," codenamed "Silvermont," will ship in 2013, adding a spanking new architecture on top of the new transistor structures, industry sources familiar with Intel's plans told CNET. This will be the first architectural change since Atom--widely used in small laptops today--was announced in 2008.

When coupled with the 3D transistors, Silvermont is expected to enable new levels of integration and performance and … Read more