Business Tech

Former Apple and Palm executive Mike Bell has been picked by Intel to steer the company's newly-formed new devices division.

AllThingsD is reporting that Bell, previously the co-leader of Intel's mobile chip group, will be focusing on "ultra-mobile" products.

The move comes as part of a bigger internal Intel organizational juggling by the company's new CEO Brian Krzanich. Hermann Eul, Bell's co-leader of the mobile chip unit, will now be running the unit solo.

Despite its 2011 purchase of Infineon to get into the mobile chip market, and the inclusion of Intel's Atom … Read more

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its newest gaming console, the Xbox One, with a slew of new capabilities. But one thing it won't do is play Xbox 360 games.

Because the new gaming system has a different chip architecture -- Advanced Micro Devices' x86 instead of IBM's PowerPC -- the Xbox One won't have native compatibility with 360 games. It's unclear at this time whether Microsoft will create a solution for that, such as making some of the more popular games compatible through emulation or allowing users to access older titles through a cloud-streaming system. But it … Read more

Sprint has decided that it doesn't want to let Clearwire out of its sights.

The company on Tuesday announced that it has revised its $2.97-per-share offer for Clearwire to $3.40 per share. The increased offer represents a 14 percent increase from Sprint's previous offer, valuing Clearwire at $10.7 billion. More importantly, it's 10 cents higher than the $3.30-per-share offer made by Dish.

Sprint already owns about 50 percent of Clearwire. The company had previously said that its offer was superior to the one Dish brought to Clearwire earlier this year, and Clearwire's board agreed. … Read more

Apple has again been crowned the most valuable global brand in the annual BrandZ report.

Released Tuesday, Millward Brown Optimor's 2013 BrandZ report pegs Apple with a brand value of $185 billion, up from $183 billion last year. Based on financial data and the opinions of potential and current buyers, Apple retained its top rank in spite of the thrashing suffered by its stock over the past several months.

"Despite a more competitive marketplace and other challengers nipping at its heels, Apple's ability to maintain its No.1 position demonstrates the value that having a strong brand … Read more

Samsung may do something it has never done: Put an Intel chip in a Galaxy Tab.

The Samsung Galaxy 10.1 Android tablet is expected to sport a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom CloverTrail+ chip, industry sources familiar with the product told CNET. The plus sign means the CloverTrial chip packs a high-performance PowerVR SGX544 MP2 graphic processing unit from Imagination Technologies.

Other specs include Android 4.2.2 and a 1,280 x 800 display.

Samsung is slated to reveal the Galaxy Tab at Computex, which starts June 4 in Taipei.

While Intel processors power a raft of Windows … Read more

Samsung will demo a new LCD screen that would top similar displays in resolution and pixel density, the company said Monday.

Geared for notebooks, the 13.3-inch WQXGA+ LCD display will offer a resolution of 3,200x1,800 pixels and a density of 276 pixels per inch. That surpasses the screen found on Apple's 13.3-inch Retina MacBook Pro, which provides a resolution of 2,560x1,600 pixels with 227 pixels per inch.

The new screen will appear at the Society for Information Display's annual exhibition, Display Week 2013. The event, which showcases display products, is running this … Read more

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg said his company saw a major uptick in Tumblr defections after news of the $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo came to light.

Writing on his personal blog Sunday evening, Mullenweg said that WordPress usually imports 400 to 600 blog posts per hour from Tumblr. After news of the deal surfaced, the number of imported posts jumped to more than 72,000 blog posts in an hour.

Mullenweg updated his own blog post on Monday morning. "Some people are reading too much into the import numbers -- I don't think there will be an … Read more

Unexpected instabilities forced Adobe Systems to hasten a planned outage for its Creative Cloud Connection, a service that keeps files made on mobile devices or uploaded to the Web in sync with customers' PCs.

Adobe launched it a half year ago in a preview version, and had planned to take it offline this week to update the interfaces the software uses to communicate with Adobe's servers. However, the company said in a blog post on Friday, " some updates...have caused instability in the service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you."

As a … Read more

Hewlett-Packard rolled out another Android device this week. This could become a pattern as PC makers hedge against a world that's less about Microsoft and more about Google.

On Tuesday, the largest PC maker in the world -- a dubious distinction these days -- added a laptop-tablet hybrid to its growing stable of products based on Google operating systems.

The $479 HP SlateBook x2 is an Android first for HP. It's "powered by Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system...100 percent tablet, 100 percent notebook, 100 percent Android," according to the company's … Read more