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Latest News: 11th January 2012

By Toby → 11 January 2012

Intel Medfield chip on Motorola and Lenovo smartphones:

This is another attempt by intel to break into the smartphone market.

Intel's new processor designed for mobile devices will be used by Motorola Mobility and Lenovo in upcoming Android-based smartphones.

The Medfield chip is designed to help Intel make headway in a sector dominated by processors based on designs by the UK firm Arm Holdings.

The announcement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

The Motorola partnership is significant as Android's maker, Google, is in the process of taking over the phone maker.

This launch marks Intel's second attempt to get Atom-based chips used in smartphones.

LG unveiled a previous tie-up at CES in 2010, but the handset never went into production.

This time Intel has announced rough shipping dates for the new devices.

It said Lenovo would launch a Medfield-based phone in China before July, while Motorola would sell its first handset in the second half of the year with others devices to follow.

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Virgin Media to double the speed of customer broadband.

Virgin Media will double the speed of its broadband service for over four million of its customers, the company has said.

The upgrade, which begins in February, will also see the service's top speed increase from 100Mbps to 120Mbps.

The full roll-out is expected to be complete by mid-2013 at a cost to the company of £110m.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, said the investment would be a "great boost" to the UK.

"I welcome this announcement from Virgin Media," Mr Cameron said in a statement.

"It will provide a great boost for the economy and change the way many households, consumers and businesses use the internet."

"Rolling out superfast broadband across the country is a critical part of our plan to upgrade the UK's infrastructure and build a new and smarter economy."

The government has set targets to improve the UK's broadband speeds considerably in the next three years.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "Faster broadband speeds are great for customers and great for business, which is why our policy is to deliver superfast broadband to 90% of the country by 2015.

"Virgin Media's plans to double broadband speeds are really exciting and we applaud their ambition."

Last year BT announced it was investing £2.5bn to make fibre broadband available to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2015.

It has since invested a further £300m to bring that target forward to the end of 2014.

It promised significant improvements to most homes, while even faster broadband - around 300Mbps - will become available in certain "superfast" areas.

In repsonse to Virgin Media's plans, BT said: "It is no surprise to see that Virgin are following our lead by doubling speeds.

"We announced we would do this for our fibre products last autumn and so they are trying to catch up with us."

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Web domains to get major overhaul with

custom names

Applications will soon open for new top-level domains in the biggest change to the system in over two decades.

From Thursday it will be possible to register almost any word as a web address suffix.

Familiar endings like .com and .org could potentially be joined by the likes of .pepsi, .virgin or .itv.

The proposals are controversial but Icann, the organisation which regulates domain names, says the change increases choice and competition.

In December, the US Federal Trade Commission wrote to Icann warning that the expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) "has the potential to magnify both the abuse of the domain name system and the corresponding challenges we encounter in tracking down Internet fraudsters."

And in the US, the Association of National Advertisers, whose members include some of America's biggest companies, have also opposed the changes.

Not cheap

But Peter Dengate Thrush, a former chairman of Icann's board of directors, said the change was necessary.

"It's badly in need of overhaul," he told the BBC.

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