Although the new Windows offers a number of upsides, including the fact it runs on a wider range of processors, such flexibility comes at a cost.

Systems that run Windows 8 using low-power ARM processors will be able to run all of the new-style Windows applications, but it appears few traditional Windows programs will run. Microsoft demonstrated a technology preview of Office running on ARM back in January, but Sinofsky said that in general older Windows applications won’t run on ARM-based machines.

That’s not to say Microsoft didn’t make the right choices when it comes to Windows 8. Were Microsoft to have brought over all of its legacy to the new chips, it might well have lost the long battery life and other benefits that ARM-based systems can provide.

A strong case can be made that this break with the past is exactly what Microsoft needed in order to compete with a new generation of devices running operating systems designed with mobility in mind.

However, the choice means that Microsoft and its partners will need lots of new apps to make Windows 8 a success. Indeed, a big part of this week’s Build conference will be equipping developers with the tools they need to write such programs and convincing them of the upside of doing so.

Recognizing this, some of Redmond’s partners are taking matters into their own hands. Nvidia, for example, plans its own program to convince developers to write new-style Windows apps.

“We’re going to be investing in our own effort to get developers on board,” Nvidia General Manager Rene Haas said in an interview.

But if the company faces challenges getting developers to write the new apps, Haas said he is not worried about finding PC makers willing to make machines with the ARM-based processors. Such systems, he said, can be slimmer and cheaper and offer better battery life than those running traditional PC processors from Intel and AMD, he said.

“We’ve seen very big OEM interest,” Haas said, using the industry term for PC makers. “Virtually every OEM around the world wants to do something with Windows-on-ARM.”

Related posts

• Exclusive: Making Sense of Our First Look at Windows 8
• Windows 8 Gets Ready for Its Big Debut
• Gearing Up for Microsoft’s Big Week
• Microsoft Details Windows 8 at Build Conference in Anaheim
• What We Just Learned About Windows 8
• Microsoft Releases First Test Version of Windows 8
• Windows 8 Forces Some Compromises After All
• Boys and Their Toys: Developers Rush to Get Windows 8 Tablets
• Windows 8 Shows Its Server Side
• Ballmer: 500,000 Downloads of Windows 8 Since Last Night

With the rise of the smartphone and the emergence of the tablet, that threat has become real. Now, as the pressure mounts, Microsoft is due to make its case for why Windows can not only hang on to the desktop, but finally deliver on the tablet promises it has been making for a decade.

At a developer conference in Anaheim, Calif., the company is expected to offer a great deal more detail on Windows 8 — the next version of the operating system first shown at our D9 event in June. Windows 8 boasts a touchy-feely new interface, literally, along with a whole new means for writing Windows apps. Also, in a shift, Windows will run on the same kinds of ARM chips that power many of today’s smartphones and tablets.

With the changes, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky says Microsoft is in a position to deliver a “no compromise” operating system that is equally at home on small tablets and powerful desktops.

Some are hoping that Microsoft would go a step further and announce some sort of plan to allow Windows Phone apps to run on Windows 8. That, however, seems unlikely. While Windows and Windows Phone may someday converge, for now the two remain on different architectures.

Whatever Microsoft has to say, AllThingsD will be on hand to make sure our readers don’t miss a beat.

Redmond will also be talking about its bottom line, holding a financial analysts’ meeting on Wednesday. And since it is bringing out its big guns, AllThingsD is doing the same, with Kara Swisher joining me in Anaheim to bring her wit and wisdom to that part.

Maybe because it is a Friday in August, it’s natural that the Apple iPhone 5 rumors would get jacked up again.

Today, it was an erroneous report that Apple would hold a media event on Sept. 7, which was soon countered by another post by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that said the company would not.

The second is the right one, because — as John Paczkowski has previously written — October is when Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Several sources we have rechecked with today underscored that the later time frame — some had thought Apple would launch its latest products sometime in September, as they had done in previous years — was accurate.

There are always a myriad of rumors around the exact dates of basic events for Apple, a company which attracts an unusual amount of attention from consumers and the media, unlike any other tech company.

As we noted in our report, which many have also written about, “the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.”

Apple will also unveil its iCloud offering to consumers then too, which it has already released to developers in beta.

So for now, we’d like everyone to go back to their beach chairs and chillax to the haunting work of one of Apple’s favorite bands — U2 — called, of course, “October”:

In a letter to the two companies, the FCC said that it needs more time to evaluate whether this deal, as well as AT&T’s planned $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA, are in the public interest.

“The Commission’s ongoing review has confirmed that the proposed transactions raise a number of related issues, including, but not limited to, questions regarding AT&T’s aggregation of spectrum throughout the nation, particularly in overlapping areas,” the FCC said in the letter. “As a result, we have concluded that the best way to determine whether either or both of the proposed transactions serve the public interest is to consider them in a coordinated manner at this time, without prejudice to independent treatment at a later date.”

Sprint praised the enhanced scrutiny of the Qualcomm deal as well as the notion of reviewing it in conjunction with the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile deal.

“Given the complexity of the regulatory review of both proposed transactions, it’s a reasonable step for the FCC to coordinate the two reviews,” Sprint VP of government affairs Vonya McCann said in a statement. “The proposed transactions would produce game-changing effects on consumers and on competition in the wireless market. Over the next few months, we look forward to working with the FCC and other interested parties as the FCC conducts a coordinated review of the two transactions.”

Although it halted the clock and indicated it was reviewing the two deals in tandem, the FCC did not formally merge its review of the two transactions, which AT&T held out as something of a victory.

“We believe the Qualcomm transaction stands on its own merits,” AT&T spokesman Michael Balmoris said in a statement. “We are pleased that the Commission has rejected calls to officially consolidate the two deals and has expressly preserved the ability for the Qualcomm application to be resolved in advance of the T-Mobile application. We remain confident that the FCC will approve the license transfers as consistent with the public interest.”

Latest example: ChallengePost, a two-year-old start-up that helps companies and non-profits run “challenges” that use the Web to crowdsource everything from cool app ideas to slogans that promote absentee voting.

The New York company has raised a $4.1 million Series A round from a group of investors led by Bob Borchers, a former Apple executive who’s now at Opus Capital, along with names like BetaWorks, Delicious’s Joshua Schachter, Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs.

The new money, which came after $600,000 in angel funding, is being used to expand the company from a two-man operation to one that employs 14 people.

The idea is to expand the company’s client base — to date, its most visible clients have been the federal government (including Michelle Obama, who used it to run an “Apps for Healthy Kids” challenge) and New York City (which has used the company to run a Gotham-specific apps contest.  So far the challenges they’ve hosted have offered more than $40 million in prize money.

Founder Brandon Kessler says he also wants to expand the company into “problem identification,” where Web users can suggest challenges that ought to be sponsored. There shouldn’t be a shortage.

The start-up, backed by Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and Jafco Ventures, tapped McLaughlin in a sign that it is gearing up for an IPO. I talked today with Asheem Chandna, a Palo Alto Networks director and partner at Greylock, about the new hire and about the crazy growth the company is going through right now.

AllThingsD: Asheem, I always ask people to start at the top: What is Palo Alto Networks and what does it do?

Asheem Chandna: We’re in the network security space. We build next-generation firewalls technologies. We ship an appliance that contains some subscription services on it so in a way it combines the business model of Cisco with that of Salesforce.com.

And how big is the business?

We disclosed that we’re on a run-rate to $200 million in revenue, and we have 4,500 customers. We’re cash-flow positive for the past five quarters, and we’ve been shipping product for 16 consecutive quarters. We have about 450 employees in the company today and we expect to add another 350 in the coming 12 months.

So you have more than 4,500 customers. Can you name any? Security companies are often reticent to do that.

We have many we can name, several of which we’ve done seven-figure deals with. Some we announced today: Qualcomm, eBay, Verisign, Cricket, the Los Angeles Community College district. Others we’ve named before include SanDisk and Constellation Energy.

And what prompted you to hire Mark McLaughlin from Verisign? Was it him or was it his experience at Verisign that got you interested?

What we were really focused on was leadership capability, what Jim Collins would call a Level 5 leader and the raw IQ, intensity and discipline. We’ve known Mark for several years, he’s an exceptional leader and one of the best leaders I personally know.

How did the search go down?

We had a search under way for eight months. It’s taken that long because this is a one-in-a-decade company. It’s one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise IT. We were deliberate and focused on really finding the right person, who would be a good cultural fit with the team. We hired Russell Reynolds to help us with the search. We reviewed more than 150 people in detail, and interviewed more than two dozen people. There were many senior executives at public companies who were interested in this position.

Every security company tries to solve a particular problem, and my understanding is that Palo Alto Networks can detect traffic coming from certain applications. So when I’m signed into Facebook or Tweetdeck or Skype on a network where your gear is in use, you can detect it and watch out for good and evil traffic on those applications, and block the bad traffic. Is that right?

Exactly. That’s one of the three basic innovations that are our bread and butter. The one you just described is really our headline feature. We can uniquely identify applications and users as they pass through the firewall and the network. The second is around malware. We can scan for malware at very high speeds, which is also something that hasn’t been done before. Finally, we collapse multiple network functions that are usually done on individual appliances into one large system but without a degradation of performance. We do Web filtering and intrusion detection, which are traditionally done on separate network appliances. Network administrators are struggling with appliance fatigue. We are giving them the ability to roll all those things into a single appliance with no degradation of performance.

So, since everyone is going to start asking: When are you going public? Are you going to be hiring bankers soon?

We haven’t set a date for any of that yet. The focus is really to build and grow the company to the next level. Going public is just another milestone. We want to be the biggest independent network security company in the industry.

Terms were not disclosed, but Qualcomm is taking control of certain parts of GestureTek’s business geared toward smartphones, while leaving behind some non-phone-related parts concerned with public displays and digital signage.

The plan is to add GestureTek’s technology to future versions of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors for smartphones, Steve Mollenkopf, a Qualcomm executive vice president, said in a statement.

I hadn’t heard of GestureTek before today, but I did find a video from last year demonstrating its Momo engine. The technology follows the movement of your head or face or hands as part of the user interface, so you can answer a call, play a game or turn a page without having to touch a button or the screen.

The demonstration below, which is about a year old, shows the technology built into a mobile gaming device. I wonder what it would look like on a phone.

The San Diego-based company, which makes chipsets used in wireless devices and licenses out its technology to other manufacturers, also issued a current-quarter outlook that was slightly ahead of Wall Street’s estimates. Shares fell more than two percent in after-hours trades after closing the regular session with mild gains.

For the fiscal third quarter, which ended June 31, Qualcomm reported net income of $1.04 billion, or 61 cents a share, compared to net income of $767 million, or 47 cents a share, for the same period the previous year.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

What would the release of a headline-grabbing new consumer electronics device be without a handful of people buying them only to take them apart to see what’s going on inside?

So it goes with Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad, the webOS-based answer to the king of tablet computing, Apple’s iPad. The teardown team at market research firm IHS iSuppli picked one up only to skulk around its insides. The picture at right (which you can click to make bigger) is the exploded view of the device.

ISuppli isn’t the only place that does these teardown reports, but it’s one of the few that also estimates the combined cost of the parts and materials used to build the device. These bills of materials, or “BOM” estimates, as they’re called in industry parlance, are important indicators of the kind of profit margin a company can expect to see on a device on a per-unit basis. The BOM doesn’t take into account other costs that are impossible to estimate, such as software development, licensing of any intellectual property, distribution or marketing.

So what does the TouchPad cost to build? The teardown by iSuppli pegs the cost of the components used in the 16 gigabyte version, which sells for $499 at retail, at $306.65. Meanwhile, the 32GB version, which sells for $599, costs $328.65 to build. (The difference, obviously, is memory.) HP didn’t immediately comment on iSuppli’s findings.

As is often the case with tablets and notebooks, the display is the most expensive component in the device. In this case, HP went with a proven winner. It selected a 9.7-inch display from LG Electronics that is thought to be either identical or very similar to the LG-made display Apple used in the first-generation iPad. Andrew Rassweiler, iSuppli’s senior director for teardowns, pegged the cost at $69.

Internally speaking, the similarities to the iPad end there, Rassweiler told me. The components connected to the display that enable the touch-sensitive interface are different from those on the iPad. Where Apple has favored chips from Broadcom and Texas Instruments, HP has gone with a set of six chips from Cypress Semiconductor to control the touchscreen. It costs $11.75, which makes it one of the more expensive touchscreen driver products on the market, Rassweiler said. Additionally, materials used to build the capacitive glass assembly that overlays the LCD display cost another $63.50. All in, components related to the display come to a subtotal of $144.25, iSuppli estimates.

The next most expensive set of components is the memory. For the NAND-flash memory used for storing data, HP selected SanDisk’s iNAND chips. The iSuppli teardown reckons that HP paid $23 for 16GB, and $45 for 32GB. Samsung provided 8GB worth of system memory (DRAM) for both models, at an estimated cost of $26.

he TouchPad’s main application processor is interesting both for who made it — Qualcomm — and for what it isn’t: A full-fledged member of its Snapdragon chip family. “This appears to be a Snapdragon derivative without the baseband functions that would normally be seen on a Snapdragon,” Rassweiler told me. The chip costs $20, iSuppli estimates. Chances are a fully enabled Snapdragon chip will be used in a future model, he said.

For now, as The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg noted in his review of the TouchPad last week, the device is Wi-Fi only, but a model with the ability to connect to cellular networks is planned.

It’s also clear from the teardown, Rassweiler said, that there’s room for the addition of other components in the future. And other things are missing.

“We noticed there’s a gyroscope chip and an accelerometer, but we couldn’t find any GPS chips,” he said. “Plus, when we looked at the design we noticed there seems to be a lot of breathing room inside to add additional parts without having to change the design.” More stuff to expect from a future 3G-ready TouchPad.

Qualcomm supplied several other chips. Its newly acquired Atheros subsidiary provided the Wi-Fi chips, at a cost of $2.60, and two power management chips that cost another $5 combined. Texas Instruments supplied four chips — three related to power management and one display interface chip — that added $4.50 to the cost.

Of course, the TouchPad is not only intended to be a successful device on its own for HP, but represents a new strategic opportunity. As in, HP wants to license the webOS on the TouchPad to other manufacturers.

That makes it something of a showcase for the software’s capabilities. HP CEO Léo Apotheker discussed this possibility in his appearance last month at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference.

You can see his comments on the subject from the highlight clip below. And you can see the full interview here: