That seemingly ordinary iPad 2 that Apple is selling for $399 has actually been modified internally in ways that, in some cases, can yield better battery life, according to a report.

Along with the new third-generation iPad, Apple in March began selling a lower-priced, $399 iPad 2.

Among those iPad 3 models is a variant, the "iPad 2,4," that sports a more advanced 32-nanometer version of the dual-core Apple A5 series chip, according to chip review site Anandtech. (The older iPad 2 uses an A5 based on a lagging-edge 45-nanometer manufacturing process.)

And an A5 built on … Read more

Now that Samsung has announced its Galaxy S III muscle phone, one big question is how its core technology stacks up against that of its main Android rival, the HTC One X. So let's take a look under the hood and see.

The S III packs a 1.4GHz quad-core chip, as the company indicated last week. Samsung obviously believes that kind of horsepower is necessary to drive a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display with 1,280 x 720 resolution, among other things.

The One X, with a 4.7-inch screen and an identical 1,280 x 720 … Read more

Expect to see a lot of tablets milling about next year. Just don't expect to find Windows 8 on a lot of them.

Market researcher NPD DisplaySearch has upped its tablet forecast for 2013 to more than 180 million units, in a report released Thursday. That forecast, however, shows Windows 8 tablets having only a small impact through 2014.

DisplaySearch had previously pegged next year's tablet market at 168.9 million but now has revised that figure to 184.2 million.

And by 2017, the size of the market will jump to 424.9 million units, compared to … Read more

The HTC One X is living proof that big processors and LTE don't pair up easily in phones. This may offer a lesson in what to expect in the upcoming iPhone.

Qualcomm has cornered the market -- at the moment -- for putting LTE functionality and the processor on one piece of silicon. Thus, we have the HTC One X (and reportedly the Verizon Galaxy s3) coming to Verizon with dual-core and LTE -- not quad-core as some had hoped.

And we may be seeing a pattern: the same phone (e.g., the HTC One X) being announced in Europe … Read more

Facebook may venture into the rarified ranks of chip designers, a source told CNET.

Sound crazy? Well, Facebook already makes its own servers.

While designing a chip is a more ambitious undertaking than building a server -- and way outside Facebook's core competency of social networking -- market-leading companies are always looking into alternative businesses opportunities.

"They have chip designers," the source said but admitted that it's not clear what those designers are for. This person also said that it wasn't clear if Facebook was using a design from ARM, referring to the most popular … Read more

April means lots of new first-quarter market share numbers. And research firms are stepping over each other to show that Samsung is faring well vis-a-vis its nemesis Apple -- which isn't doing too badly itself.

ComScore said today that Samsung is the top handset supplier among the 30,000 mobile subscribers surveyed in the U.S., with a 26 percent share in the three-month period ending in March. (see chart below).

In that period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices, according to ComScore.

LG was No. 2 with 19.3 percent and Apple third with … Read more

Intel's second wave of Ivy Bridge chips for ultrabooks are due by early June, when Computex gets under way, an industry source told CNET.

In the first week of June, consumers can expect to see a new wave of ultrabooks based on Intel's just-announced Ivy Bridge processor, according to the source, who is familiar with the plans of Intel and PC makers.

That's the time frame in which Intel is expected to roll out power-efficient versions of Ivy Bridge. Last week, Intel announced only high-performance, quad-core versions of the processor that typically goes into larger laptops, like … Read more

Samsung's smartphone shipments soared over the same period last year, allowing it to easily grab the lion's share of the global market, while Nokia's share plummeted, a market researcher said Thursday. Another market researcher put Samsung No.1 in the overall cell phone market.

The South Korean electronics giant's share went from 12.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to a whopping 30.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Strategy Analytics (see chart below).

Apple's growth isn't too shabby either: it jumped from an 18.1 percent … Read more

Online retailer giant Amazon is quickly becoming a device heavyweight.

Amazon's Kindle Fire grabbed a 54.5 percent share in February, almost doubling its share in the past two months and "already establishing itself as the leading Android tablet by a wide margin," according to ComScore (see chart below).

ComScore said its methodology "measures unique devices accessing the Web during the time period noted, including home, enterprise and secondary devices across all age groups."

Samsung's Galaxy Tab was a distant runner-up with a 15.4 percent share in February, followed by the Motorola Xoom … Read more