A teardown analysis conducted by the market research firm IHS, due to be released tomorrow, has pegged Samsung’s cost of materials and manufacturing to produce the U.S. version of the 32 gigabyte model of the S4 at slightly above $237 per unit. Without a contract subsidy, the entry-level 16GB version of the phone costs $639 when sold by AT&T Wireless.

The cost is somewhat higher than that of Apple’s iPhone 5, the base model of which costs $205 to build for a 16GB version, according to an IHS analysis conducted last fall. It’s also well above the cost of Nokia’s Lumia 900, which costs $209 to build, IHS found at the time.

The S4 cost is not far below the cost of Samsung’s larger Galaxy Note tablet, the cost of which IHS estimated last year to be $270.

Most phone manufacturers source their components from many different suppliers. But Samsung, a large, diversified manufacturer of many different kinds of electronic components, has used its significant capabilities to supply itself with many of the key parts inside most versions of the S4 phone sold around the world.

“Samsung’s strength is this ability to in-source to itself,” IHS analyst Vincent Leung said in an interview. “They just keep adding to the list of components that they can supply to themselves.”

One key component that Samsung did not supply to itself for versions of the phone being sold in the U.S. was the main applications processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, which contributes $20 to the overall cost.

Versions of the phone sold in Korea and other markets around the world contain a Samsung-made chip called the Exynos 5 Octa that costs $28. Samsung is known to be manufacturing at least four variations of the phone for different market geographies around the world, including at least two being sold in the U.S., one going to AT&T and T-Mobile, and another going to Verizon Wireless and Sprint, said Andrew Rassweiler, another IHS analyst.

“Samsung is demonstrating its ability to suit the tastes of carriers in different regions of the world,” Rassweiler said. “It comes down to what the market is willing to spend on the features offered.”

The fact that Samsung used the Qualcomm-made chip is a testament to the U.S. chipmaker’s prowess. “Even with all the vertical integration it’s doing, it’s not like Samsung has given up on Qualcomm,” Rassweiler said.

One interesting difference between the U.S. and Korean versions resulted from the difference in the choice of processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain an image-processing chip made by Japan’s Fujitsu that added $1.50 to the total cost. Leung says that in the Korean versions, some of the image processing is handed off to Samsung’s Exynos chip.

Samsung also supplied the flash memory used to store data on the device. IHS estimates that 16GB of memory added $28 to the cost of the device.

The Korean giant also supplied itself with a display and touchscreen parts, which added $75 to the cost of components. The combined display package also includes Gorilla Glass, a strong glass material made by U.S.-based Corning.

Samsung is also thought to have supplied itself with several unlabeled components, including the camera module and some wireless baseband chips.

A few non-Samsung suppliers include Broadcom, which provided Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips; Maxim, which provided a power-management chip; and Triquint Semiconductor, which provided some wireless chips.

The new details about the decision to name Krzanich as the successor to retiring CEO Paul Otellini emerged in a brief report by CNBC’s Jon Fortt (video below) after he talked with Chairman Andy Bryant, who led the board’s search.

The joint pitch initially threw the board for a bit of a loop if only because it’s a highly unusual — and, one would presume, risky — move, in so delicate a matter as CEO succession at one of the world’s most influential tech companies. While the conclusion, at least as far as Krzanich goes, certainly appears to have been a predictable one — every Intel CEO since Andy Grove has been COO first — outsiders were still in the running until the very end.

Also a key selling point, though there are as yet no particulars about this, was Krzanich and James’ vision for pursuing the mobile market where Intel is as yet not participating significantly. Expect more noise on that subject once the pair starts their new jobs after May 16.

Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

The finding comes in a new report from Gartner containing the results of a survey of CIOs around the world. So it’s not for nothing that Gartner calls these BYOD strategies “the most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing” in a decade.

When you think about it, BYOD amounts to a pretty fundamental shift in the way companies handle the knotty questions around supplying employees the tools they need to get the job done. For years, standard operating procedure at pretty much every company was to give a computer and maybe a phone or BlackBerry to every employee who needed them, and for the company to bear the cost. (Gartner, incidentally, includes PCs in its BYOD definition.)

What started with an occasional request for the IT department to support smartphones and tablets with access to work email has blown up into a huge shift in the way that corporate IT services are supplied to employees.

Right now, Gartner said, mid-sized companies of $500 million to $5 billion in sales and 2,500 to 5,000 employees are most likely to be using a BYOD approach. BYOD-friendly companies are twice as common in the U.S. as in Europe, but employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device on the job.

And if you’re looking for some figures to drive the point home, here’s one: 38 percent of companies expect to stop supplying employees with their devices entirely by 2016. But executives aren’t yet completely sold on the idea: Only 22 percent say they’ve made a good business case for adopting a BYOD move. There are, Gartner said, many benefits, not the least of which are lower costs and a happier work force.

As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

But even so, for all the talk about cyberwar, it didn’t come close to eclipsing the amount of financially motivated crime that took place in the digital realm, a new study by telecom giant Verizon has found.

In its ninth annual survey of data breach investigations, which will be formally released tomorrow, Verizon found that old-fashioned financial motivations accounted for 75 percent of computer security incidents. State-sponsored attacks accounted for 20 percent. And, as you might expect, the victims are the organizations that move or hold a lot of money: Financial organizations were targets 37 percent of the time, followed by retailers (24 percent) and manufacturing, transportation and utilities (20 percent).

The study’s sample size included 621 confirmed data breaches and more than 47,000 reported computer security incidents in 27 countries and territories. Verizon has been gathering the data for nine years, and now has records encompassing 2,500 data breaches and 1.2 billion compromised records.

Attacks by outside entities accounted for the majority of breaches, while only 14 percent were attributed to insiders and 1 percent to business partners; 71 percent of breaches targeted user devices and 54 percent were aimed at servers. Perhaps most troubling: Two thirds of the breaches reported required a month or more to discover.

The benefit of a study like this is that it happens at all. Since most large companies and organizations aren’t usually willing to disclose when they’ve been attacked — most have — and suffered a breach that actually cost them some money, it’s rare to see this sort of trend data gathered up in one place.

One interesting thing I noted as I scanned the report. For all the security-related anxiety that seems to have arisen during the two years or so around the “bring your own device” trend in the enterprise — where employers let workers use their personal smartphones or tablets or notebooks to access corporate networks — there seem to have been practically no BYOD-related security incidents. As one sidebar in the report put it:

“The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is a current topic of debate and planning in many organizations. Unfortunately, we don’t have much hard evidence to offer from our breach data. We saw only one breach involving personally-owned devices in 2011 and a couple more in 2012. We’ll keep watching.”

It’s a fact that Nancy Lublin puts to good use. As the head of the nonprofit activism organization DoSomething.org, she reaches out to teens via text messages, hoping to get them to — as the name suggests — do something.

It may be donating protein-rich peanut butter as part of the Peanut Butter Jam Slam. It’s a competition with two teams — Team Crunchy and Team Smooth — and the benefactors are local food banks. Or it may be an educational campaign to fight teen pregnancy using a game that involves a virtual “baby” that wakes up at 6:30 am and requires frequent care. The lesson being, “If you can’t take care of a pretend baby on your phone, you might want to keep your zipper closed,” Lublin said in an interview with Ina Fried at D: Dive Into Mobile in New York.

The organization announced today that it had reached one million teens via weekly text messages that are proving remarkably effective: More than 2.4 million U.S. teens participated in Do Something campaigns in 2011. About 97 percent of messages sent are opened. Take that, direct mail.

Another new initiative is a teen crisis line that works via text message. If a teen girl sent messages seeking help about being sexually abused by her father, there wasn’t much to do but direct her to call existing crisis centers. “She had nowhere to go,” Lublin said. Soon, girls like her will, and so will teens facing other kinds of crises, whether it’s sexual abuse, bullying or eating disorders.

The organization’s text-based teen crisis line will launch Aug. 1. And getting teens the help they need is only one benefit. The other is the gathering of valuable data about the occurrences of these problems. “No one knows how often this stuff happens,” Lublin said. “We’ll finally be able to get preventative data to help prevent this shit from happening in the first place.”

Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

I just got off the phone with Bill Veghte, executive VP for software and solutions at HP, and Dr. Skott Ahn, president and CEO of LG Electronics’ mobile operations.

Veghte told me that the acquisition grew out of a series of discussions that HP and LG held around a potential partnership. It wasn’t long before LG simply offered to acquire webOS outright. The deal, Veghte said, will include the source code, documentation, a license to all the associated patents (HP won’t be letting those go) and the remaining user experience team. People associated with the cloud services infrastructure that had been part of the webOS operations will stay with HP. Veghte wouldn’t comment on exactly how many people will be moving from HP to LG. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed.

Ahn told me that webOS will become a “core technology of LG,” and that “we would like to incorporate it first into our Smart TV platform, and then in the future in other devices.”

What other devices? Probably not phones and tablets. LG is pretty firmly in the Android camp there. But there are other appliances that might benefit from webOS, Ahn said, like refrigerators and other appliances and also smart signage.

So there you have it: webOS will appear first in TVs, and then perhaps later in other household appliances from LG.

LG has a technology called Smart ThinQ that it embeds in some models of refrigerators, laundry machines and kitchen ranges. I found a video from CES demonstrating what Smart ThinQ is like now. So maybe down the road you’ll see the legacy of webOS there.

Update: The official press release just moved. Here it is:

LG Electronics Acquires webOS from HP to Enhance Smart TV

LG to License HP IP, Integrate webOS Technology into Next-Generation Devices

SEOUL, Korea, and PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 25, 2013 – LG Electronics Inc. has acquired the webOS operating system technology from HP, the companies announced today.

To support its next-generation Smart TV technology, LG has entered into a definitive agreement with HP to acquire the source code, associated documentation, engineering talent and related websites associated with webOS. As part of the transaction, LG also will receive licenses under HP’s intellectual property (IP) for use with its webOS products, including patents acquired from Palm covering fundamental operating system and user interface technologies now in broad use across the industry.

Today’s announcement paves the way for continued innovation on the webOS platform and on LG’s roadmap of innovative solutions for many years to come, while allowing HP to focus its resources on strategic business opportunities such as cloud computing.

“This groundbreaking development demonstrates LG’s commitment to investing in talent and research in Silicon Valley, one of the world’s innovation hotbeds. It creates a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices,” said Skott Ahn, president and chief technology officer, LG Electronics Inc. “The open and transparent webOS technology offers a compelling user experience that, when combined with our own technology, will pave the way for future innovations using the latest Web technologies.”

Ahn explained that LG Electronics’ investment in webOS technology and its acquisition of the innovation team’s R&D capabilities are expected to extend LG’s leadership in bringing Internet services directly to consumer electronics devices. “Integrated with LG, this team will be the heart and soul of the new LG Silicon Valley Lab, focused on bringing innovative technology solutions to market through the most popular platforms for sharing and consuming content and experiences,” he said. With the transaction, LG will add the Sunnyvale and San Francisco sites to its global R&D locations, in addition to its existing U.S. sites in San Jose and Chicago.

Also under the agreement:

LG will assume stewardship of the open source projects of Open WebOS and Enyo. HP will retain ownership of all of Palm’s cloud computing assets, including source code, talent, infrastructure and contracts.

HP will continue to support Palm users.

“WebOS and its associated community deliver market leading platforms for the next generation of connected devices. We are constantly looking for opportunities to accelerate the delivery of this platform from the community,” said Bill Veghte, HP’s chief operating officer. “LG’s track record of innovation and broad distribution provides this opportunity, while enabling HP to accelerate our Cloud efforts. In particular, with the cloud assets that will remain with HP, we will focus on delivering innovative solutions that will enable our enterprise customers to mobilize their workforce.”

HP and LG do not expect this transaction to have a material impact on either company’s financial statements. Terms were not disclosed.

The company’s conference call with analysts is about to begin. Expect some questions from the gallery that test Intel’s assumptions about the state of the PC and server markets and its assumptions about its intentions in the mobile business. And while Intel execs on the call probably won’t say much about any of this, there will be some pressing questions about the state of the search — such as it is — for the next CEO who will take over after current CEO Paul Otellini leaves later this year.

Earlier:
2:11 pm: Joining the conference call in progress. CFO Stacy Smith is reading from his prepared remarks, looking back on the year.

Smith: Spending as percent of revenue was 34 percent. Fourth quarter revenue finished in line with expectations. Worldwide inventory levels reduced as customers reduced their inventory of older PCs.

2:13 pm: Smith: In 2013 we’re expecting revenue growth in the low single digits. Expecting $18.9 billion in spending.

2:14 pm: Smith: As a result of the significant progress we’ve made, I’m optimistic about our long-term prospects. In 2013 we will rev our next-generation tablet chip, Bay Trail for Windows and Android.

Smith: We will start production on the 14-nanometer process this year. This will put us significantly ahead of the competition.

2:16 pm: Moving on to the Q&A session with analysts.

Question from Deutsche Bank: It seems like your Capex and Opex are outgrowing revenues. It looks like investors are dubious about when they’ll see returns on investments. What are the mile markers?

CEO Paul Otellini: You’re seeing our first investments for the 450-millimeter transition for later this decade. (Bigger silicon wafers.) That is more of an extraordinary event that isn’t related to volume in 2014-16. Other than that, it’s about the same as last year. As we finish up the use of the 14-nanometer processes and move to 10-nanometer process, we’re going to need those factories. Regardless of what you think the size of the market is, the fabs (factories) are the most important assets we have.

Smith answering another question on Capex. It’s for building to the peak of 14-nanometer, and starting the early bits of 10-nanometer. Its really for the peak of 2014 and 15. With regard to equipment, the facility-related spend is coming back and it’s for equipment.

2:21 pm: Question on guidance for 2013 revenue, can you walk through underlying assumptions?

Smith: We expect data center group to return to double-digit growth. Cloud data centers and portions of the market like storage and networking. And then for core PC market, we have pretty modest expectations in units. We think growth comes from the devices that sit in the middle. Plus we start to participate in the tablet market.

Is the spending for 450-mm wafers ongoing?

Smith: What changed is, the industry consortium set expectations for the shift, we want to start the construction of a development facility. I expect there’s some spending related, but we won’t get into real capital spending on it until the back half of this decade.

Q: The 10-nanometer spending, does that assume EUV or immersion lithography?

Smith: I’ll save that for the technologists. We’re close to the vest with those details.

2:24 pm: Question: There are some reports about Intel manufacturing some chips for Cisco Systems. Trying to drill down on Intel becoming a specialized foundry, which builds chips under contract.

Otellini: We are very interested in being a selective foundry for certain customers. We don’t expect to be a general purpose foundry. We would not take business that would strengthen a competitor. We have done some announcements in programmable logic, and those companies need a company like Intel to help them. We have been building that capability and we’re now going into production.

Smith: To the extent that we engage with these customers, we want to get paid for it.

Questions about ARM.

Otellini: We’ve looked at the A15, and we’re comfortable that we can maintain a performance lead.

2:27 pm: Another question on the foundry business. Have you earmarked any money for it?

Smith: Other than the three small customers you have heard of, the foundry business is not driving our Capex spending.

Question on PC market guidance. You seem to be guiding them down and making a big bet on 2014. How much do you need to take of tablet share, or how much needs to be eaten by your convertible PCs to make that bet worthwhile?

Smith: I’d take issue with the characterization of PCs guiding down a ton. For the company I said low single digits, data center up in double digits, and you still end up with client (PC) growth in that. The lines are blurring and we are expecting some unit growth. When we get into the back half of the year it’s a fairly reasonable assumption. We expect normal growth, just across a wider range of devices.

2:32 pm: Question on Q4, seems PC client units were down 4 percent. Was this mainly an inventory drain?

Smith: We think there was an inventory drain in the worldwide supply chain for PCs in the first quarter. Our channel checks suggest older Windows 7 systems were burned off in the quarter. When we look at inventory levels, we think it’s a healthy level of inventory. Plus we reduced our own inventory levels.

Q: Any particular dynamic at work regarding average selling prices in the data center group?

Otellini: The big drive was Romley. That helped drive the overall richness. On PCs, we saw strength in the core product line, and more weakness than we thought in the lower end of the market.

Question on potential for hybrids. We’re seeing small tablets. 10-inch tablets are not selling as well. Does that give you an opportunity?

Otellini: Yes. Phones are getting bigger. And the shift to tablets from 10 to seven inches, and that is what you’re going to see. The market will bifurcate between 4- and 6-inch and then 5- and 7-inch products. They only get thinner as Haswell and Broadwell come online.

Question on cash balance. What is the level of cash. Will you have to raise debt again?

Smith: We would certainly look opportunistically as we have been. We generated $6 billion of cash flow from operations, so we’re generating plenty of cash to run the business, to pay the dividend and protect the dividend. I’m comfortable with the cash we have now, and I could live with a little less as well.

Question on an update acquisition of Infineon wireless. Where are you with 4G LTE and an integrated Atom chip? Progress with handsets?

Otellini: Infineon is well on its way to LTE. Dual data and voice mode. First phones early next year. Very competitive solution. The Infineon team is known not for being first to market, but very good, and cost effective. In terms of integrated solutions, expect higher levels of integration next year.

Smith: I’m struck by how hungry the customers (phone makers) are to work with us on this.

2:40 pm: Question on price elasticity in the PC market. Wondering how price drops drive unit growth.

Otellini: I don’t think there’s much elasticity in the classic form factors. What we saw earlier was similar elasticity in desktop in 80s and 90s. It dropped until it reached a point where there was a minimum margin left for all the players.

People will buy based upon their need in those price points. Difficult to see them go from $299 to $99. What we’re likely to see is people willing to spend a little more for a more capable product. We’ve seen it in the Apple model. There is a model of paying for innovation.

2:42 pm: Do you have a view on EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography)?

Smith: Not prepared to talk about it.

Question: You’re expecting a better than seasonal 2H13.

Smith: That is consistent with our view. The consensus GDP estimates, there is a consistent strengthening of GDP later this year. Haswell gains traction, touch gains traction. We become more represented across Windows tablet and Android across 2013, and that gives us a better than seasonal second half of the year.

Question on regional performance.

Otellini: In China, there were some tablets that impacted some low-end PC sales. Brazil saw some inflation and that affected some PCs sales. China had a regime change, and that affected some sales. China is still outgrowing any large economy in the world. We have been pleasantly surprised by the data center growth in China.

Question on gross margins. They were a little better. Can you share with us your utilization rates in Q4 and what you expect the trajectory to be in Q1 and beyond?

Smith: We came in with gross margins a little better than we expected in Q4. We brought the loadings down in the factories a bit. We redirected some equipment, and brought inventories down by $600 million. We think gross margins are roughly flat. We see continued improvement in excess capacity, and increases in startup costs. Add in some other puts and takes it’s about flat. When we get to Q2 we see further reduction in excess capacity charges, but that is when we will peak in terms of startup costs. So I think Gross margin in Q2 will be flat to down. But we think gross margins later in the year to be closer to low 60s because we’ve guided to 60 percent for the year. Our costs come down over the back half of the year.

2:52 pm: That’s it. Thanks for tuning in! See you in 90 days!

At the International CES in Las Vegas, Cisco just announced its collaboration with AT&T in a new home-security product. Dubbed AT&T Digital Life, it’s essentially an in-home security and control service that will give its customers control of in-home security cameras, window and door sensors, locks, thermostats, lighting and other things, from a smartphone, tablet or PC. It also sort of fits with that “Internet of Everything” marketing message Cisco uncorked late last year.

Cisco’s role is building the hardware and providing some back-office provisioning for the applications. AT&T plans to roll out the service in eight markets in the U.S. by March, with as many as 50 more markets to follow this year.

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Having overtaken Google’s Android on a market-share basis in the U.S. last month, the iPhone now accounts for more than 53 percent of all smartphones sold in the States, as of the 12 weeks ended Nov. 25, the firm reports. It amounts to the highest point for iPhone market share since the debut of the first iPhone in 2007.

Share of Windows devices grew slightly in the U.S. year over year, with a little help from Nokia’s latest phones. Research In Motion’s BlackBerry saw — you guessed it — market share declines year on year.

Here’s a screen grab from the report showing the year-on-year increases in the U.S. from the same period a year ago versus Android, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.

It’s not the same picture elsewhere in the world. In Europe, Samsung continues to hold sway with its Android devices, commanding a share of more than 44 percent — to Apple’s 25 percent — across five countries (Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain).

The occasion was the TEDx Silicon Alley conference held here in New York, and for various reasons, I was asked at the last minute to stand in as moderator.

Kurzweil’s talk, which took place before our “Fireside Chat” that was announced as a surprise final event of the day’s proceedings, amounted to his first public appearance in connection with the publication of his new book, “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” Naturally, it builds a bit on his previous book, “The Singularity Is Near,” in which he argues that in time — about the year 2030 or so — the exponential increase in computing power will lead humanity to enhance itself with machines. In the new book, he talks about the latest thinking in how the brain works and how it’s organized, and where its limitations are. Eventually, he argues, we’ll be enhancing our brains with computing power in some way as well.

Juan Enriquez is an investor and a founder of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard University’s Business School, and in 2008 he wrote a book called “Homo Evolutis,” in which he explored the nature of human evolution and the question of whether or not humanity is finished evolving. Short answer: Probably not. His talk yesterday had more to do with tying together tattoos, social media and the idea of immortality.

Anyway, my job yesterday was to sit between them for an hour and to mostly stay out of the way while at the same time gently steering a conversation between them and relaying questions from Twitter.

The video below is long because it includes first Enriquez’s talk and then Kurzweil’s and then our fireside chat. But if you’ve got an hour and change to spare, the conversation sure was interesting. It was one of those moments in life when one feels dumb compared to the people with whom you’re sharing a stage, and yet you know you’re walking away smarter. If that doesn’t make sense, just watch and you’ll understand what I mean.

(A few people have since asked me where I got the reference to “three deaths” that I referred to in my first question. It was in the second segment of this episode of Radiolab, the documentary program on Public Radio, and yes, I remembered it a little bit wrong.)

Power is flickering on and off in some parts of New York City, where, as of late afternoon local time, 16,000 had lost power. Power has failed entirely in numerous places around New Jersey and Long Island, too, making Internet connections spotty. So a few general principles about communications during a crisis bear repeating.

If the power goes out, and if you haven’t done away completely with your old-school landline telephone, now would be the time to make sure you have an old-school corded phone around the house. If your home loses power, the phone lines will, in most cases, continue operating. The phone networks’ central offices and switching stations have backup power to keep the dial tone on. However, if you have a cordless phone, you’re out of luck, because cordless phones need power. Best to spring for an old-style corded phone if you don’t have one lying around.

Also: If you’re someplace where there’s a fax machine, remember that these usually require old-style landlines that will still be functional, so you can probably use the lines connected to them with a corded phone, if necessary; many still have a handset receiver on them, anyway.

If you’re wireless-only, you have a pretty good chance of being able to make calls, though texting is probably a better bet. Texts are more efficient, generally, and I’ve been getting intermittent reports of “fast busy” signals indicating that networks are overloaded. When you do make voice calls, keep them short.

It’s probably a good idea to remember how to use Twitter via text message, in case your standard Internet access crashes. This will come in handy for certain Twitter accounts like, say, that of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, that broadcast useful information about the status of the storm.

Twitter, which has posted a page of Sandy-related info, can also be used as a good way to relay information to family members outside the storm area to let them know you’re okay. But if the power is off, you might need a way to access it without your computer.

As the Washington Post summarized earlier, tweets from weather and emergency services can be forwarded to your phone as text messages that will get through to you as long as your wireless phone has power.

Now, about that. If the power goes down, the issue of preserving battery life on your wireless phone takes on some added urgency. With smartphones, a few good rules of thumb come to mind. Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Turn down the screen’s brightness as low as it will go and still be visible. For iPhone owners, now might also be a good time to go through the preferences on your apps and turn off any unnecessary push notifications, because they eat battery power, too.

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Earnings per share were 60 cents on sales of $13.5 billion, both of which were better than what analysts had expected: 50 cents on sales of $13.2 billion. But that’s after Intel disclosed that sales were looking a lot slower than it and analysts had expected.

Expect Intel to give its clearest view yet on what it sees ahead for the markets it controls — chips for PCs and servers — and to attack the markets where its inroads as yet are minimal: Smartphones and tablets. Also expect some color on whether or not Microsoft’s Windows 8 will be much of a catalyst for PCs. As yet, the expectations are pretty low.

Update: The call is now over. Much of the discussion focused on Intel’s decision to slow down product at its many factories, or fabs, for the time being until demand for PCs and the chips inside them picks up.

It’s not a small thing. Chip fabs are expensive to build and expensive to operate, so generally speaking you want them to be running as close to full capacity as possible. But when demand is so slack that your inventory of chips begins to pile up, you have to choose when to slow down and wait for demand to pick back up again.

Also, Intel is using the slowdown as an opportunity to get under way with the transition to 14-nanometer manufacturing technology. This is one of those moments where Moore’s Law is made real, when the elements on a chip get smaller, the chips get smaller, so more of them can be made for every silicon wafer, and they consume less power. Or you can cram more transistors into the same space, and thus get more computing work done for the same cost as before.

That is sort of Intel’s ace in the hole during periods when demand drops off. Eventually it picks up if only because the PC makers need to refresh their products with the latest stuff, especially after a process shrink. It virtually guarantees that demand will pick up again eventually.

Earlier:
2:05 pm: CEO Paul Otellini is speaking. He says to expect PC sales to grow at half the rate seen historically.

Now he’s talking about Ultrabooks and says many will be $699 or less. Also 20 tablets running Clovertail, the latest version of the Atom processor.

Otellini: Talking about Haswell, the next generation of processor. He says previously it had been expected to come in at a power envelope of 15 watts. Some advances have allowed Intel to expect it to run at 10 watts. That’s good news because the lower the wattage, the better the shot Intel has at getting into handsets and tablets.

2:08 pm: Now CFO Stacy Smith is speaking.

Smith: As a result of weaker than expected demand environment, factory loadings have been cut. Factory utilization rates have been taken down. This will reduce operating costs by $500 million. Also capital spending has been cut to $11.3 billion in Q4.

Smith: Gross margin in Q4 57 percent, which is lower than typical for Intel. Ouch. A lot of that is from the cut in capex and utilization.

Smith: We are taking aggressive actions to reduce inventories.

Smith: We continue to expect a benefit from the build out of the cloud.

And now begins the Q&A:

2:13 pm: Question from RBC Capital: Stacy, you gave a number at the analyst day for FY 13 gross margin?

Smith: We’ll provide it in Janurary. Premature to provide that. We need to fight through Q4 first. There’s a few things for 2013. We’re starting up 14 nanometer so that’s worth a few points of gross margin. No excess capacity charges after Q2 in 2013. Beyond that I’ll wait until January.

2:16 pm: Question for Otellini: Assess the PC market? Is it all macroeconomy or Windows 8 pent-up demand?

Otellini: It’s both. China has turned weaker on us. However we do believer that PC consumption did grow at about half the normal seasonal rate. How much that is is TBD, we’ll know a lot more 90 days from now after the Windows 8 launch. We’ll try to quantify that for you in 90 days, but right now it’s a bit of each.

Question for Smith: Is this cut in capex going to save you what you saved in 2009?

Smith: You can see capex in 2012 is down $1.2 billion from what we thought before. We’ll talk about 2013 in January.

Question: Are you seeing any Ivy Bridge tablet designs? Any Haswell tablets?

Otellini: A handful, five to eight on Ivy Bridge. Haswell, it’s too soon to tell.

Otellini: Those tablets tend to skew toward the enterprise. That is where you will see the Ivy Bridge ones migrate. Clover Trail will be more consumer focused.

2:21 pm: Question from Chris Danely of J.P. Morgan: What will it take to pull the PC industry out of this funk? Is this a permanent state?

Otellini: Since we don’t know how much is flatness because of which condition, it’s hard not to know if we’ll return to normal growth in a good economy. That tablet is not the end state of computing. What I can’t predict is which form factor is going to win. These things that have the best of both worlds are likely to be the things that are the most high volume runners.

2:24 pm: Smith speaking about inventory: We’re too high today. That’s why we’re bringing the utilization down. (What this means is that Intel’s factories won’t be running at full tilt pace, and some production lines will be running slower or idled for the time being until demand comes back. It’s kind of a big deal for Intel to do this because letting a factory sit idle is sort of an expensive proposition.)

Wow. Smith just said that utilization rate has been taken down to below 50 percent. Part of that will make room for the new technology, 14 nanometers. But some of it will be idle. Again, ouch.

Question about utilization again: Are you mothballing one building?

Smith: We’re trying to match our capacity that is in place. We were putting in capacity for the second half that is bigger than we got. Our planning model is we’re always looking to have the ability to respond to upsides. We call that “white space.” The risk of being caught short is greater than being caught long. If you’re short it can take two years to get caught back up. If you get caught long, it’s six months.

2:29 pm: Question about inventory again. Does pricing come into play on the PC side? Is that helping? Is there anything else that Intel can be doing to spur demand? Microsoft is taking things into its own hands.

Otellini: The short answer is no on pricing. We think it was priced aggressively. In the PC group, Average Selling Prices were flat. That was us going after some incremental market share at the bottom of the market. That is more the driver.

In terms of demand stimulation: A lot of what we’re doing right now is consistent with where the market was. We’re up to 40 machines that are touch enabled. We’re working with the glass manufacturers to bring the cost of the touch enabled glass down.

Question about competitor AMD. Are you seeing lower pricing from AMD and is that affecting you?

Smith: Ask them. Last quarter and this quarter we believe we have won some share at the lower end of the market.

Question from Goldman Sachs: About profit margins. Is there anything you see to make the profit margin decline worse than you usually see during a demand downturn?

Smith: Historically, the time it took to get things realigned has taken longer than two quarters. Compare now to 2009, when we were in the mid to high 40s on gross margins, now we’re in the high 50s. It’s faster and our margins are higher than in 2009.

Question about ARM-based server players. Are you seeing any competition from ARM chips in servers?

Otellini: They need to add features to be considered like 64 bits. You can look at some of the workloads like Hadoop. They can be handled by micro-servers, and those can be served by Atom.

2:35 pm: Question about mix of demand geographically. Give us more color on demand for PCs from consumers and businesses.

Otellini: The inventory thing is straight. Our OEMs are running very lean. Any kind of demand blip could cause us to reduce even more. In terms of mix, U.S. and Western Europe are soft for consumers. The enterprise PC has gone flat, and that’s a reflection of large corporations making hard decisions.

Otellini: We’ll see how that sorts out over the next quarter. In China, the slowdown there was in consumer notebooks.

Smith: We saw PC units up 1 percent in the quarter. PC ASPs (average selling price per chip) were down 1 percent and server ASPs were down 7 percent.

Question about China: Question about demand from data center customers.

Otellini: Data center ASPs were down a bit year on year. The mix is quite good. Two-way machines versus four-way machines. One of the fastest growing segments is high performance computing (supercomputers). I see the current mix being an anomaly as the result of the soft market for corporate data centers.

2:41 pm: As you think about manufacturing capacity for 2013, what kind of PC environment are you expecting?

Smith: I’m going to hold off on a unit growth or capital forecast. Capital forecast will depend a lot on Q4.

Final question: Inventories are lean and you expect less than half of normal growth. Why are customers choosing to take inventories down further?

Smith: It’s caution. Our customers are being cautious.

And that’s it. A nice short conference call.

There are three new members of the Droid family of Android-running smartphones, all of them carrying the long-established Motorola brand name Razr. The name was one of many bits of the Motorola legacy in sight today as CEO Dennis Woodside, introduced first by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, declared that today was the “first day of the new Motorola.”

In its newness, it seems to be looking to draw strength from the old Motorola. Example one: Martin Cooper, the inventor for Motorola of the original handheld cellular phone — the same guy who in 1973 became famous for a PR stunt in which he wirelessly called rivals at Bell Labs in front of reporters assembled outside the New York Hilton — sat in the front row. Example two: Jim Wicks, the legendary head of Motorola’s design shop and the man who led the team that designed the original Razr that sold more than 130 million units and became the best-selling clamshell phone in history was also on hand. So no matter how you slice it, the new Motorola looks a lot like the old Motorola.

AllThingsD’s Lauren Goode and I sat down with Woodside after Motorola’s announcements today at New York’s Gotham Hall to talk about how the news fit into his longer-term vision for the company. My first question was about his reaction to today’s other downtown mobile event.

AllThingsD: I spent the earlier part of the day at Nokia’s big Lumia launch event with Microsoft. Nokia says its big differentiating factor is going to be photography. What will be Motorola’s?

Well, I think you saw the story today. We think speed and the focus on it really does matter. And getting LTE right is really hard. We’ve been at it for a while. There are lots of things you do with a device to make it run in a power-efficient manner that are not trivial. The last generation of the Maxx we’ve shown that we know how to do that. Another point is the design element, and the screens in particular. The edge-to-edge screen is also hard to get right. If you do it wrong the glass can break. A lot of people don’t want to compromise on the screen size. But they don’t want to haul around a large device.

So technically how did you fit a larger battery into something that slim with an enhanced display?

That is a strength of Motorola’s. We’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time. Jim Wicks, our senior vice president in charge of design, is here, and his team has been working getting as much as you can into as thin a device as possible. If you took these phones apart, there are hundreds of pieces that fit together like an incredible jigsaw puzzle. So it’s actually really hard, but something we do really well.

A lot of people were wondering if we might see a tablet from you today …

Not today, but we have some tablets in the market that have done reasonably well, but clearly we have aspirations to be a bigger player in that part of the market. I don’t have anything to say today, but stay tuned. It’s certainly an area we’ll be investing in.

If you could change something about, say, the Xoom tablet, what would it be? What would you focus on first?

A couple things. When the Xoom first came out, the state of Android was very different from what it is today. The content wasn’t the same. The function of Google Play. Going forward, the content story has to be very strong, and I think Google is focused on that. I think also price makes a huge different. One of the reasons we brought in Mark Randall from Amazon’s Lab126 is that price matters to consumers, especially in the tablet space.

Talk about the broader vision for Motorola now that it’s part of Google. What is it?

Motorola is going to be an innovator in Android hardware. And we’re starting with the devices that you see today. But these have been in the pipeline well before Google acquired the company. We were able to make some tweaks, but the teams are working on the next generation of devices.

What does Google bring to the table for you at Motorola?

First, a long-term mindset and a conviction. Look at past acquisitions. Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube in 2005, and a lot of people thought that wasn’t a good acquisition. And we spent a lot of time helping that business scale and build the business relationships it needed to survive. And now it’s an integral part of so many things. All the presidential election speeches are on it. It forms a fundamental part of how people engage with video around the world. That makes it a huge value. What’s it worth? It’s hard to know. But the point is that Google took a long-term perspective with it. It’s about having a long-term plan and then driving against a long-term technical vision that benefits consumers. For Motorola it’s that long-term mindset, and the long-term bet on mobility. That’s hugely valuable.

Does that long-term strategy include set-top boxes?

It’s a completely different business. It’s called the home division and it reports to me, but that is a radically different business. The mobile device business is inherently a consumer business with carriers as our partners. The set-top box business has a very different set of partners and consumers don’t usually choose their set-top boxes in those markets. It’s a completely different business and we run it separately.

Are you going to keep it?

We haven’t talked about any of our plans long-term for that business.

Five years out, do you see Motorola as a broad-based handset maker or do you think people will look at it as Google’s hardware division?

You have to look at how consumers are going to behave in five years. Look back five years ago. The iPhone had just come out and a lot of people had feature phones or maybe a BlackBerry. Five years from now the form factors are going to change radically. And the consumer is going to be thinking about wearables and tablets. They’ll still make phone calls, but I don’t know if the phone is going to look like it does now. But the device, the hardware that allows you to communicate and get on the Web in a mobile way is something that Motorola really does well.

But there no reason that the ability to collaborate and give quick feedback on a project can’t apply to specialized industries, and actually make a difference within specialized applications. Case in point: Autodesk is set to announce a batch of new features in its AutoCAD WS software that bring a Facebook-like activity feed into the arcane world of computer-assisted design software.

About a year ago I noted the release of AutoCAD for devices running Google’s Android mobile operating systems, which came after a successful launch on Apple’s iOS. Today, the company says its AutoCAD 1.5 allows CAD designs to be seen and shared both in a regular Web browser and on those mobile devices. And a new feature it calls Design Feed makes it easy for people working on a project to comment on its different aspects and have that feedback show up in a Facebook-Timeline-style feed.

One interesting trick: If you’re trying to make a point clear, you can snap a photo of what you mean — say, different options for a door handle on the design drawings for a car — and “pin” them to specific areas within the drawings, just as you might do on Pinterest.

Another application has some added social features, too: Autodesk 360 Mobile is getting its own social feed, making a collaborative design review process easier.

And while it all sounds kind of arcane, make no mistake: This is some widely used software. AutoCAD has 10 million users, and the mobile applications on iOS and Android have been downloaded more than eight million times. And for that matter, Autodesk apps don’t do so badly on the Mac, either. I’m not a designer or architect, but numbers like that make me wonder what I’m missing.

(Image from this Autodesk site showing AutoCAD WS in action on an iPad.)

RIM was at that point at the zenith of its power. Its share price earlier that summer had hit a historic peak of $144.56 — or about 19 times the price it was trading at today — that it would never see again. Apple’s iPhone had been on the market for a little more than a year, and Google’s Android was barely on the scene. RIM’s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, both of whom I interviewed, seemed in utter denial to the threat the iPhone and Android so clearly represented, even then.

With the shares trading at $7.39 as of the close of market today, the devastating slide in RIM’s share price has done incredible damage to the personal fortunes of the two founders: As of April, Lazaridis and Balsillie together still owned nearly 11 percent of the outstanding shares of RIM. As of today’s closing share price, the paper fortunes of RIM’s two founders, once about $4 billion each, has declined to $219.2 million for Lazaridis and $198.8 million for Balsillie, according to Canadian regulatory filings.

So it goes. RIM’s survival as a going concern is now officially in doubt. Investors now value the company as being worth less than $4 billion, and of that more than half is its $2.2 billion in cash. With operating expenses at their current level running at about $307 million per month, RIM has enough cash on hand to fund operations for another seven months or so.

The company will be firing people and restructuring its operations to lower those costs and buy time. But time is not on its side. Its options are dwindling, and it will either end up in the hands of another company, be chopped up into pieces in a bankruptcy proceeding, or cease to exist.

But time is on the side of the two nonprofit foundations that the two RIM co-founders started when they were at the height of their wealth. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that they will outlive the company that generated the wealth that funded their creation.

By far the most well-known nonprofit linked to RIM is the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an institution founded in 1999 primarily with $170 million in donations from Lazaridis’s personal fortune. Its mission is to provide a place where some of the world’s smartest people come together to try to unlock the secrets of the nature of the universe.

I toured its impressive facility (pictured) in 2008, and while I was in Waterloo, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University. He’s the author of “The Elegant Universe,” which was adapted into a PBS TV series of the same name. What surprised me most was that on a hot August evening, there wasn’t a single open seat at the local high school’s stuffy auditorium. (I wrote about the lecture, and published an audio recording of it on my rarely-updated personal blog.)

Greene is not the only superstar lecturer who has given talks in Waterloo under the auspices of the Perimeter Institute. In 2008, Stephen Hawking was named the institute’s distinguished research chair, and has regularly visited to give lectures like this one in 2010.

In short, the Perimeter Institute has, in its brief life, become a heavy hitter in the field of theoretical physics. It’s also living well within its means. According to its annual report for the 2011 fiscal year, the institute exited the year with nearly $272 million on its books, and reported $18.6 million in operating expenses, more than half of which was spent on research.

Aside from the gift from Lazaridis, the institute has secured $50 million in grants from the federal government of Canada through 2017, and another $50 million from the provincial government of Ontario through 2021. It raised an additional $5 million in private donations. Its spokesman, John Matlock, told me that its fortunes aren’t directly linked with those of its founding benefactor: “Perimeter was founded through the vision and personal philanthropy of Mike Lazaridis, and the institute continues to grow its research, training and outreach activities via a successful public-private partnership involving a wide variety of members who equally value the importance of theoretical physics,” he told me via email.

It’s a similar situation at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a global policy think tank founded by Balsillie in 2001. Its mission is to suss out through research the complicated questions about how world governments can do their jobs better, and it aims to have some influence over actual policies that get enacted. One bit of credit it claims is the research that led to the creation of the G20 group of major economies.

It appears to be similarly well-funded; it exited the year with about $203 million in its endowment, according its 2011 annual report, and reported operating expenses of $38.4 million. CIGI began with a combined $30 million gift from Balsillie, who gave $20 million; and Lazaridis, who gave $10 million. Another $30 million in matching funds came from Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Its $69 million campus was built with $50 million in federal and provincial aid, and sits on land leased for 99 years rent-free from the City of Waterloo.

Regardless of how they’re funded, these institutions will, by all appearances, live on long after RIM as we know it today becomes a memory.

Of the two, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s last CEO, spent the most time on the witness stand. Called by lawyers for Google, he bolstered Google’s argument that it was free to use parts of Java as it assembled its Android mobile operating system.

Scott McNealy, called by Oracle, said it was Sun’s practice to let other companies use Java, but only with a commercial license, the primary requirement of which was that the licensee ensure that Java remain compatible.

While numerous other phones from the likes of Nokia, Research In Motion and Motorola were compatible with Java applications, those on Android weren’t. Compatibility is one of the main points over which Oracle has been arguing with Google. Oracle contends that not only did Google violate its patents and copyrights, but it then went on to build its own incompatible version of Java, fracturing one of the oldest premises of Java’s existence: Write once, run anywhere.

Schwartz said he had hoped that Google would take out a commercial license, but in the end, he said, according to a report on CNet News, Sun opted “to grit our teeth” and support it as part of the Java community. He said that he opted not to sue Google over the issue.

Oracle also presented as evidence an email from Schwartz, describing Google as having taken Java “without attribution or contribution,” and then went on: “This is why I love scroogle,” referring to a now-defunct Web-search service that served up Google-like search results anonymously. See it below.

Sales of iPhones led the overall increase in smartphones running on AT&T’s network to 41.2 million, up by nearly 10 million over the year-ago quarter. Wireless-data revenue increased to $6.1 billion in the quarter, up from $5.1 billion a year ago; the average revenue per user (ARPU), a key metric indicating how heavily smartphone owners use their devices, rose 15 percent.

De la Vega said AT&T is on track to report $24 billion in wireless revenue this year. “Strong smartphone sales drive strong data sales, and data drives this business,” he said.

It’s also a profitable business. De la Vega said that wireless margins, on an EBITDA basis, were 41.6 percent, up from 39 percent a year ago. Wireless operating income was $4.4 billion, up 11.3 percent year over year.

The parties are the software giant Oracle and the Internet concern Google. At issue is Java, the software platform Oracle became owner of when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. And the witness list will be interesting: Both Google CEO Larry Page and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison are expected to take the witness stand during the trial; as will former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Andy Rubin, the Google senior vice president who runs its Android and mobile operations.

The allegations are fairly simple, but the case could have some significant impact if Oracle prevails in some of its arguments. Oracle sued Google in the summer of 2010, alleging that the Android mobile operating system violated seven different Java patents.

Five of those patents have since been tossed out since they were reexamined, leaving two. That reduces the potential amount of damages that Oracle might be entitled to, should it prevail. Google even went so far as to offer to cut Oracle in on Android and $2.8 million in damages, in the event that it prevails. Oracle declined.

The other issue, and the one that has the potential for more lasting impact, is over copyright. Oracle will argue in court that Google violated copyrights on Java. Specifically, Oracle alleges that when Google was creating Android, it copied a lot of material — more than 37 Java application programming interfaces (APIs), and 11 lines of Java source code — and that these are subject to copyright protection like other intellectual property.

This is a new and controversial legal argument that has software developers watching the trial closely. Google has argued that APIs shouldn’t be subject to copyright protection, because they’re more akin to tools and techniques that programmers use to build software. I may be simplifying it a little too much here, but one way of thinking might be to ask if it’s possible to copyright the technique and instructions for hammering a nail or fitting a door.

Google has argued that APIs and programming languages aren’t entitled to copyright protection, for exactly that reason: You can copyright a given program because it’s unique, but you can’t copyright the language it’s written in. Perhaps I’m straining my skills at analogy here, but the way I understand Google’s argument, as put forth in an April 12 brief, is that you can copyright “So What?” but you can’t copyright “jazz.”

As Google puts it in that brief, which is the first two of two legal filings I’ve embedded below:

“That is a classic attempt to improperly assert copyright over an idea rather than expression.” And earlier in the brief, it argues: “Without a computer programming language, the set of statements or instructions cannot be understood by the computer. As such, a computer language is inherently a utilitarian, nonprotectable means by which computers operate. … The protectable material is the computer program (the set of statements or instructions); the unprotectable material is the method or system (the language). So understood, original computer programs may be protected, but the medium for expression in which they are created is not.”

For its part, Oracle outlined its position on the issue in a trial brief filed on April 5, which is the second of the two documents embedded below. Here’s a meaty paragraph summing it up:

“Allowing copyright protection for computer interfaces makes sense because original expressions in software are innovations of an incremental sort that Congress meant to encourage. Trade secrecy law cannot achieve this goal because interfaces can be reverse-engineered. Patent law, because of its novelty and non-obviousness requirements and examination process, protects those substantial innovations, claimed as broadly and generically as possible, and in return gives strong protection against even those who independently develop the same technology. Copyright law protects innovations at a much finer level of detail (where original expression can be found) than patents ever could, but only offers protection against the copyist.”

Obviously, it’s going to be an interesting trial, provided the parties don’t find some way to settle before it’s all over. They tried settlement talks once. It didn’t work.

Google Brief

Oracle Brief

So far, the launch hasn’t gone quite so well. First there was a lackluster review. Then, days after going on sale on Easter Sunday, the company has admitted to a software glitch and is offering people who bought one a $100 credit in addition to a software patch. The credit makes the phone free to buyers willing to take a two-year service contract.

Now the market research firm IHS iSuppli has taken a Lumia 900 apart and, in a report shared with AllThingsD that will be released later today, has determined that it costs Nokia about $209 to build. And, judging from the parts being used, it’s not exactly built like the most cutting-edge phone on the market.

In fact, it seems like Microsoft and wireless chipmaker Qualcomm are both making an effort to showcase how efficient Windows Phone 7 for mobile can be; at the same time, they seem to be aiming to entice other hardware manufacturers by demonstrating that a full-featured smartphone can be built using components that are about a generation behind the current high end, and therefore cheaper, says Andrew Rassweiler, the iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown.

For example, the teardown found that the Lumia 900 uses a single-core Qualcomm chip that costs $17 as its main applications processor; a phone with similar features running Google’s Android OS, such as Samsung’s Galaxy SII Skyrocket, uses a higher-end dual-core processor that costs $22.

“It appears what Microsoft and Qualcomm and Nokia are trying to do here — and this is being driven by Microsoft more than anyone else — is streamline the OS so it can run on a lighter processing platform,” Rassweiler told me. “The point being is to undercut the higher end phones.”

The choices don’t end with the processor. The phone contains only 512 megabytes of DRAM memory, where most phones would use one gigabyte. And the trend is expected to continue, as the next generation of Microsoft’s mobile OS will require even less memory.

Another example: The Bluetooth chip. Nokia is using a slightly older chip from Broadcom, and not the latest, greatest Bluetooth part. The difference between them is only $2.50, but it serves as another example showing that Nokia is aiming to compete on price.

For Nokia, the strategy seems to be one of aiming to compete against other phones on price, while offering similar features. The Lumia is thought to sell for $450 at retail without a subsidy, or about $200 lower than Apple’s iPhone 4S, which starts at $649 without a contract, depending on model, and costs between $188 and $245 to build.

Microsoft is also thought to be helping Nokia out, says iSuppli’s Wayne Lam, who also participated in the teardown analysis. While software costs are not considered in a teardown analysis, he says Microsoft is thought to be making less than $5 per phone in licensing fees on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, far lower than the $15 per device it is said to want. That would be in line with the $3 per phone price that Nokia is thought to have paid in licensing fees for the Symbian OS it used previously, and of which it was a partial owner. “Nokia is getting a fantastic discount,” Lam told me.

One place where Nokia didn’t skimp? The gyroscope chip, which determines how the phone is being moved. It contains the same gyroscope chip from STMicroelectronics that goes into the iPhone 4S. There are, apparently, some things on which you simply can’t compromise.

I just received an email statement on the subject from an HP spokesman: “Sam Greenblatt is moving from webOS to a new role at HP and will continue to assist the team during the transition. The Open webOS project is on schedule and HP remains committed to the roadmap announced in January.”

Naturally, when a senior executive leaves a position for an undefined “new role,” it’s often seen as a signal that he or she is on the way out, and simply remains on the payroll to handle the details of a smooth transition. I’m told that this is not one of those cases, and we’ll see what Greenblatt’s role is soon enough.

This, of course, comes in the wake of HP’s downgrading of its webOS business into an open-source software project last last year, and the departure of several executives from within the group, chief among them Jon Rubinstein, the onetime CEO of Palm, which HP acquired in 2010 for $1.2 billion. Others have included Richard Kerris, former VP of Worldwide Developer Relations, who fled to Nokia; and Brian Hernacki, chief architect of webOS, who left in January.

The webOS unit is certainly a lot smaller than it was a year ago. In February, HP cut 275 people from the group, on top of the 500 or so it fired in September.

Greenblatt’s job change was first reported by the enthusiast site webOS Nation.

In an interview with Reuters, Krzanich says he has fine-tuned the company’s supply chain in order to meet an anticipated demand for tablets. “We will start to see more and more of our capacity and our output go to things that are mobile, like phones and tablets and other devices,” he tells the global newswire.

Indeed, when the man responsible for Intel’s massive global chip-manufacturing operation speaks, he does so with the authority of a company that tracks the pulse of demand for chips obsessively, so he doesn’t make so public a statement lightly.

Yet the basic competitive problem remains. While Intel still dominates the roughly 300-million-unit-per-year market for PC microprocessors, it has struggled to compete against chips based on designs from the British chip designer ARM, which power most of the world’s smartphones and tablets — including, not insignificantly, the iPad. And while Intel’s lower-power Medfield-generation chip has landed in designs from Lenovo and Motorola Mobility, the wins are seen as progress in a race in which it was already well behind the leader.

Perhaps more interesting is how Reuters casually refers to Krzanich as a candidate to succeed CEO Paul Otellini. Intel shook up its management ranks in January, and promoted Krzanich to COO. Covering Intel includes paying attention to a constant drumbeat of speculation about who the next boss is going to be. Otellini is 61, and the company’s mandatory retirement age is 65, so the succession race, and the perennial handicapping chatter that goes with it, will be something of a marathon.

Krzanich would be a logical successor, mainly because most Intel CEOs become COO first, including both Otellini and his predecessor Craig Barrett. Yet there’s still one rival who bears continued attention: Sean Maloney, the English-born current head of Intel China, had been widely seen as the leading contender before suffering a stroke two years ago. However, people who know him say his recovery is remarkable.

I noted Maloney’s return to competitive rowing last year. A September profile of Maloney in Fortune had more to say on that subject. While he has largely recovered physically, the main lingering effect of the stroke has been on his speech. If he can get close to sounding as he did before the stroke, we may have a real horse race on our hands.

That’s the finding of a new research report from the networking concern Juniper Networks. Its 2011 Mobile Threats Report found that the amount of malware created for mobile devices across all operating systems more than doubled in 2011 over the previous year. Juniper said it found nearly 28,500 samples of malware, up from a little more than 11,000 in 2010. Most of them — more than 46 percent, in excess of 13,000 samples — targeted Google’s Android operating system, Juniper said. Another 41 percent targeted the older Java ME operating system.

And what kind of malware was it? Spyware, mostly — stuff designed to capture information and send it on to someone else. More than 63 percent of the malware found could track a phone’s location, collect financial information, and other stuff you’d probably rather your phone didn’t do without you knowing about it. Another 36 percent were Trojans sent via text message. These Trojans run in the background and send text messages to premium-rate numbers the attacker owns, then collect the fees generated for sending the message.

And what about Apple’s iOS? Apple’s tight control on the application ecosystem — the iTunes App store, where all applications have to be approved — has so far given it a pretty good record on security. That doesn’t mean it’s completely out of the woods, Juniper says. Apple doesn’t provide developers with the information they need to create security screening programs that run on the phone itself. That means that if, for some reason, its application-vetting process fails — let’s say some app contains an evil feature that no one notices before it’s too late — there’s no competitive set of third-party security companies providing software to help clean up the mess afterward.

In one example during 2011, a security researcher found a way to upload an unapproved app to iTunes by faking the code-signing process used for approved applications. It proved the point that a chink in Apple’s armor did exist, and Apple later issued a fix.

Juniper predicts that it’s going to get more complicated this year. While Google has started to actively scan applications on its Android Marketplace for malicious code, that only means that third-party app stores will become more attractive targets. And as certain apps become popular across many platforms — think office applications — attackers will go after those in much the same way they did popular applications on the PC. That smartphone you have in your hand may soon be a digital battlefield.