Intel & iPhone

Intel distanced itself from criticism of Apple's iPhone made by executives at the company's Intel Developer Forum conference in Taipei, saying the comments were not appropriate. The chip maker also acknowledged its own products weren't yet suitable for such a product.Earlier this week, Intel executives Shane Wall and Pankaj Kedia described the iPhone as slow and said the popular handset wasn't able to run the "full Internet" because it uses an Arm processor, instead of an Intel chip. The executives comments -- which neglected to note that Intel doesn't make a low-power processor capable of powering a handset like the iPhone -- were reported by ZDNet Australia, causing consternation within Intel's PR ranks.

Intel's low-power Atom processor does not yet match the battery life characteristics of the Arm processor in a phone form factor; and, that while Intel does have plans on the books to get us to be competitive in the ultra low power domain -- we are not there as yet," the statement said.

The comments by Wall and Kedia are at odds with other statements by Intel executives, who generally lavish praise on the iPhone for its design and success in giving users easy access to the Internet. The remarks may have also put Intel in a difficult spot with Apple, since Intel is widely believed to be hopeful that Apple will use its low-power processors in future products.THIS WEEK CURRENT NEWS*Microsoft's chief financial officer outlined a three-part plan the company will undertake to weather the current economic crisis, which spurred Microsoft to lower its revenue and earnings expectations for fiscal 2009 on Thursday.

*Sun hasn't had much good news to report lately, so it wasn't surprising that it went into spin mode Thursday after startup company Arista Networks announced that it had snared Andreas Bechtolsheim, Sun's chief scientist and a highly regarded systems designer, to be its chief development officer.

*Microsoft at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next week will expand access to its Surface SDK for building applications for its surface computing platform.

*Amazon Thursday announced that after two years in beta mode, its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud computing service is now generally available. At the same time, the company said the hosted service is adding beta-level support for Microsoft Windows and SQL Server.

* Intel's upcoming Calpella platform, which is due next year, focuses primarily on energy efficiency and battery life.