Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 shattered sales records when it launched last November. The wildly popular first-person shooter sold an estimated 6.5 million copies and pulled in more than $400 million during its first 24 hours of availability, and more than 12 million copies were purchased over the game’s launch week, racking up about $740 million in revenue. But Activision isn’t done, of course, and the next major launch in the Call of Duty franchise is shaping up to be a big one. ”The next Call of Duty will bring meaningful innovation to the series,” Activision Publishing chief Eric Hirshberg told The Guardian. The executive wouldn’t elaborate on exactly how the next major CoD release — presumably Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 — might revolutionize the popular game, but he undoubtedly piqued the interest of millions of gamers around the world. Despite being released in mid-November last year, Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was still the best-selling video game in the U.S. last month according to recent data from market research firm The NPD Group.

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Former Research In Motion co-CEO and co-Chairman Mike Lazaridis said in a recent interview that he had been planning to step down from his role at the helm of the company for several years. While speaking with The Record, Lazaridis confessed that he had been planning to relinquish his co-CEO role for several years leading up to January 22nd when RIM announced that Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie were stepping down. Lazaridis said in the interview that he had been grooming new CEO Thorsten Heins for the CEO position since he was first hired in 2007, but the former chief did not explain why he waited so long to step down while RIM’s stock plummeted and investors clamored for new leadership. Though Lazaridis is no longer RIM’s top executive, he will continue to play an active role on the company’s board. He also said he plans to purchase an additional $50 million in RIM stock. ”This company has a strong balance sheet of $1.5 billion,” Lazaridis said. “It has strong sales of over $5 billion a quarter. This is a strong organization with a strong global brand, an iconic product and a strong future.”

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Investors had been clamoring for Research In Motion co-founders Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to relinquish their co-CEO and co-chairman roles, and the company finally announced this past Sunday that Balsillie and Lazaridis were out, replaced by new chairperson of the board Barbara Stymiest and new chief executive officer Thorsten Heins. RIM’s stock plunged more than 13% when Heins introduced himself as the company’s new CEO, due in large part to a video interview during which he essentially told the same story RIM’s former chiefs have been telling for more than a year. The new CEO has since backed away from the company’s old it’s OK, we’re OK message while speaking to the press and analysts, however, and it is no coincidence that RIM’s stock has recovered a bit as Heins assures investors that change is brewing. Read on for more.

Moving away from what seemed to be a string of PR-approved messages, Heins admitted in a recent interview with CNBC that RIM fell behind its competition in the key U.S. market. ”It hurts. It hurts me to see us losing market share in the U.S.,” Heins confessed. “There was a paradigm shift, and we did not shift with it. I know we’ve made mistakes, and I know I’m in for a fight.” Apple and Google owned a combined 75.6% of the U.S. smartphone market in the three month through November 2011 while RIM’s market share slid to 16.6% according to comScore.

The fighting spirit is what investors are looking for, and a new wave of panic swept over the Street when that spirit seemed almost completely absent in Heins’s ill-received introductory video. The new chief is changing his tune, however. “We want to stop the bleeding,” Heins told CNBC.

In a separate interview with CrackBerry.com, Heins emphasized that change is coming but stated that RIM will continue to focus on its strengths. “There is a lot of change,” the executive said. “There is a lot of structure change, there has been already a lot of change in terms of our software, our software platform, bringing QNX in. There is no standstill at any moment here at RIM. What I wanted to make clear to the market is that we believe in our own strength. We are BlackBerry, we are an integrated solution, hardware, software, services and network.”

Heins also made sure to point out that RIM is well aware of the positions its competition has taken. He explained that RIM has a team dedicated to testing competitors’ devices and he himself tests iPhones, Android handsets and other phones. RIM’s historical lack of movement when it comes to features and elements of the user experience that have driven success on competing platforms has not gone unnoticed, so Heins’s comments are refreshing if nothing else.

Where device launches are concerned, RIM has a slow year ahead. BGR exclusively revealed the company’s 2012 roadmap early this week, which is highlighted by a new 7-inch PlayBook tablet — the sequel to a slate that cost RIM $485 million last quarter — and a single BlackBerry 10 smartphone that won’t launch until late in the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter. Its new chief executive has at least begun to publicly exhibit an understanding of the new smartphone landscape that has left the company trailing its competition, however, which is something RIM has never truly done in the past.

We still have eight months or even longer to wait before RIM releases its first BlackBerry 10 smartphone but in the meantime, RIM might do well to let its new CEO speak candidly more often.

After months of investors unrest, Research In Motion on Sunday announced that Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were stepping down from their roles as co-CEO and co-Chairmen. Barbara Stymiest was named RIM’s new chairperson of the board, in line with rumors, and former Ericsson executive Thorsten Heins was named president and CEO. Heins and Stymiest hosted a conference call Monday morning, with Heins leading the show, and the company took its first steps in a long climb toward regaining shareholder confidence and customer confidence. Read on for more.

“I pledge to do everything possible to exceed the expectations of the company’s shareholders,” Heins said Monday morning on a conference call. Pointing to RIM’s customer base of more than 75 million users and its next-generation QNX-based platform, the new CEO seems intent on following RIM’s current path on a broad level. He feels that RIM is still innovating and its QNX-based platform and upcoming devices will carry the company into the future.

RIM’s new CEO also praised Mike Lazaridis for acquiring what he views as one of the company’s most important assets: QNX. Heins says QNX is an extremely flexible platform that will already well established in a number of industries. Moving forward, the powerful platform will allow RIM to quickly address new industries as opportunities arise but in the near-term, it will combine with RIM’s other software solutions to create what Heins believes will be a fantastic BlackBerry 10 experience.

Heins isn’t sitting still, however. He identified RIM’s marketing department as in need of an overhaul right away, and he sees marketing in the U.S. as a particular pain point. The company is actively seeking a new Chief Marketing Officer and it hopes to completely revamp its approach in several markets. Heins also wants to focus on resource planning, project and program management and execution in general as areas where RIM needs realignment if it hopes to succeed in the modern smartphone market.

RIM was up as much as 4% in pre-market trading on Monday morning, but the stock was down roughly 1% immediately following the conclusion of the company’s investor call. A video interview with Heins follows below.

Bad products, horrible software and no cohesive vision have seemingly turned Research In Motion into a company without motion at this point. Throw in a huge delay before BlackBerry 10 smartphones start shipping, and it’s clear why people are losing, or have lost, faith in a company that played a tremendous role in making the smartphone industry what it is today. Thanks to one of our most trusted sources, BGR now has new information on what’s going on inside Research In Motion, and the picture it paints isn’t a pretty one.

Our source has communicated to us in no uncertain terms that the PlayBook 2.0 OS developers have been testing is a crystal clear window into the current state of BlackBerry 10 on smartphones. No email, no BlackBerry Messenger — it’s almost identical. “Email and PIM [is better] on an 8700 than it is on BlackBerry 10,” our contact said while talking to us about RIM’s failure to make the company’s new OS work with the network infrastructure RIM is known for.

We also have some more background on why RIM’s BlackBerry 10 smartphones are delayed, and it has nothing to do with a new LTE chipset that RIM is waiting on. In what is something of a serious allegation, our source told us that Mike Lazaridis was lying when he said the company’s new lineup was delayed for that reason. ”RIM is simply pushing this out as long as they can for one reason, they don’t have a working product yet,” we were told.

At the end of our conversation, our source communicated something shocking for a high-level RIM employee to say. He told us that RIM is betting its business on a platform and ecosystem that isn’t even as good as iPhone OS 1.0 or Android 2.0. “There’s no room for a fourth ecosystem,” he stated, “and DingleBerry also works on BlackBerry 10.”

We recently sat down with Sony Ericsson President of North America Paul Hamnett to discuss the company’s future as a wholly-owned division of Sony Corporation, its upcoming smartphones and strategy pertaining to the U.S. market, Sony Electronics’ “four screen” opportunity, and much more. Check out the full video interview after the break.

We had a chance to sit down with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop a few weeks ago in New York City to get a the skinny on Nokia’s strategy straight from the top. We covered the company’s upcoming push (and hopefully valiant return) in the United States, Nokia’s latest smartphones, potential new Nokia tablets and of course the company’s new Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 Windows Phones. Catch the full video interview after the break.

We had a chance to spend some time with AT&T Vice President of Marketing, Mike Woodward, a little while back to talk about AT&T’s first 4G LTE smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket and HTC Vivid, in addition to 4G LTE in general, the company’s stance on Android, iOS, and more. Catch the interview after the break!

Verizon Wireless on Friday released a class-leading smartphone that combines two of the biggest cell phone brands of the past decade into a single device. Verizon’s DROID line of smartphones played a huge role in making Android the global juggernaut it is today, and Motorola’s RAZR turned the wireless industry on its head in 2004, showing consumers that a cell phone can be both beautiful and functional. The decision to merge these brands into one single powerhouse was not made lightly, we can assure you, and the DROID RAZR will undoubtedly find itself atop plenty of wish-lists this holiday season. We recently sat down with Alain Mutricy, Motorola Mobility’s senior vice president of Portfolio and Product Management, to discuss this iconic device and why it is worthy of carrying the RAZR brand into the future. The full text from our Q&A with Mutricy follows below.

Thanks so much for joining us today, Alain. Let’s get right to it: I have one of Verizon’s first LTE smartphones, built by a Motorola competitor, sitting in a desk drawer in my office right now. This phone is barely five months old, but it’s more than half an inch thick and the battery life is terrible. How was Motorola able to make the DROID RAZR just half as thick as my old 4G phone without compromising battery life or other areas of the user experience?

At just 7.1 mm thin, DROID RAZR by Motorola is impossibly thin. We were able to accomplish this feat through our design innovation – a combination of materials and strategic design choices. For one, the device has a stainless steel core and is made with KEVLAR fiber, an extremely lightweight, yet durable, material. We also fit the device with a Super AMOLED Advanced display, and embedded the 1780 mAH battery and enabled micro-SIM. But we couldn’t just make it thinner and stronger – the next generation had to be smarter as well. That’s where the innovation in the software and user interface experience comes into play. We have a quadruple threat with MotoCast, Smart Actions, webtop and our Business Ready promise.

Kevlar has a great look to it and there are marketing benefits as well, but why were Kevlar, aluminum and Corning’s Gorilla Glass the right build materials for the DROID RAZR?

We wanted to build a device that could live up to the RAZR brand and carry on its legacy. Like the original, DROID RAZR by Motorola is super thin, super light and super innovative. We kept various elements of the original design, such as aluminum accents, but added new ones that the smartphone market hasn’t seen, such as KEVLAR fiber. KEVLAR is beautiful, strong and widely recognized as an indestructible material by consumers. We also stuck with a few tried and true materials that our smartphone consumers love, including Corning Gorilla Glass. It’s incredibly thin, yet holds up well to the common mishaps smartphones often endure.

Consumers seem to be very focused on the hardware aspects of the DROID RAZR, for obvious reasons, but let’s talk about the phone as a complete package. How important to the RAZR and future smartphones are Motorola’s various unique software solutions, such as Motocast and Smart Actions?

The DROID RAZR software experience is exceptionally important. Clearly, we wanted to create a beautiful device that would shock the market with its innovative design. I think we did that. But more importantly, we wanted to create a number of software experiences that simply make people’s lives easier. Let me talk about four of these innovations.

MotoCast lets you stream music, pictures and documents from your home or work computers — virtually anytime, anywhere — so content is always within reach. No uploading to a third-party site and everything stays protected, right on your computer. So if you bump into an old friend at the coffee shop and want to show off the pictures you took on your last vacation, it’s easy. Simply go into your gallery, select MotoCast and you instantly have access to all those great photos that are stored on your home computer.

Smart Actions has really been a surprise delight for people. It’s a software solution that takes care of the things you don’t always remember to do and helps automate other tasks. Whether you want to maximize the last ounce of power in the device, or simply see the music app as soon as you plug in headphones, Smart Actions enables users to get the most out of their devices.

And of course there’s webtop. This is Motorola’s revolutionary software solution that allows you to view what’s on the device on a larger screen. We first announced webtop with Motorola ATRIX back in January, and are again releasing it with DROID RAZR by Motorola. When you connect the device with one of several accessory devices – such as the Lapdock 100, HD Station or Travel Adaptor – you get the power to edit documents on a larger screen and browse the Web with a full Firefox browser, all while powering the device. Or, when you plug it into the HD Dock or HD Station to connect to your HDTV, speakers and other peripherals, you unleash large-screen entertainment all powered by the device.

Last, but certainly not least,  we know people want to use their phone at work. We also know what IT departments need in terms of security features. That’s where our “Business Ready” features shine–government-grade encryption, remote wipe and password enforcement for the IT department. And then there’s the ability to access email, calendars and addresses, or edit documents, for you.

The media seems to be mixed when it comes to various value-added solutions like your webtop software and Lapdock package. Has this laptop-like accessory combo been well-received by consumers?

With webtop, Motorola Mobility designed a product that is truly innovative and enables consumers to do much more with their smartphones.  We first announced webtop and the Lapdock accessory at CES 2011 and since then, we’ve announced a variety of new webtop-enabled accessories. As a result, we’ve seen growing adoption of webtop-enabled smartphones and their accessories, all with positive feedback from consumers.

How important to Motorola is innovation outside the smartphone itself, beyond just as a means of differentiation? Can we expect to see more innovative solutions  from Motorola like the Lapdock and MOTOACTV that move beyond your smartphones?

Of course! Our brand aims to empower people’s lives. Our vision is that the smartphone becomes the hub of your digital life. We constantly strive to innovate in ways that create unique, powerful experiences for all types of consumers. Software innovation is a primary focus for us. We want to create devices and user experiences that are intuitive, connected and meet the growing needs of consumers whose lives intertwine with work, play, social life and entertainment.

MOTOBLUR has been a very polarizing piece of Motorola’s Android puzzle ever since it was first introduced. Has Motorola taken the various criticism to heart? What key changes and refinements have been made to Motorola’s Android UI as it lives today on the DROID RAZR?

We always take consumer feedback to heart. As far as our user-interface design, consumers and reviewers alike have commented on the improvements we’ve made to the experience this year. The DROID RAZR software experience is truly remarkable and we’ve been very pleased with the response so far. Everything from the homescreen to every day smartphone applications – such as calendar, email and connected media gallery – are taken above and beyond the basic Android platform to ensure a delightful consumer experience.

You have gone on record in stating that the DROID RAZR will receive an update to Android 4.0 in early 2012. What exciting new features can we expect from the RAZR once it is upgraded with Ice Cream Sandwich? Will Motorola keep most of the same custom UI elements found in the DROID RAZR’s Gingerbread OS, or can we expect some surprises?

As soon as the ICS software is released to us, we’ll be able to provide more details. Stay tuned.

One final question, Alain: Starting with the DROID that debuted in 2009, Motorola has produced several iconic smartphones that helped Google’s Android OS become the global success it is today. When it comes to being worthy of the label “iconic,” few phones if any are more deserving than the original Motorola RAZR first introduced in 2004. Why is this new handset the right phone to reinvent the RAZR brand, and why is it the right smartphone to headline Verizon Wireless’ lineup this holiday season?

The original Motorola RAZR was undeniably an icon. Not only was it the thinnest handset of its time, it was the highest-selling feature phone ever. The new DROID RAZR by Motorola is the RAZR of the future. It combines two iconic brands, but also combines the wildly successful characteristics of the original device – thin, innovative, sleek – with Motorola’s revolutionary smartphone features available today. It’s the right phone to headline Verizon Wireless’ lineup this holiday season because it’s a step ahead of the class. We’ve integrated the fastest network technologies, powerful chipset technologies, and a large battery enabling best-in-class performance all in a super-thin design. And from an industrial design perspective, DROID RAZR by Motorola sports unique materials with sculpted glass, KEVLAR fiber and diamond-cut aluminum accents. On top of all this, this next generation device offers users one of the most innovative interfaces and software experiences available, including MotoCast, Smart Actions, webtop and delivering on the Business Ready promise. This holiday season, there’s no device on the market that compares.

BGR recently caught up with Fred Maxik, Chief Technology Officer of Lighting Science Group, to talk about what the company is doing in the lighting industry. Not many consumers are familiar with Lighting Science Group yet, though some might remember the company from last year’s Google I/O conference as it was the first partner Google teamed up with for its Android @ Home initiative. What really interests me about Lighting Science Group is the company’s vision on the future of light, and what it is doing to change and reinvent lighting. A mesh network of lights that talk to each other, sense your presence, remember your preferences, and even image sensors built into light fixtures are some of the things that Lighting Science Group is working on. Check out our full interview with Fred Maxik after the break.

Microsoft’s Ben Rudolph sat down with Nokia product boss Jo Harlow during the Nokia World conference this week to get her take on the Finnish vendor’s first two Windows Phones, the Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800. Rudolph and Harlow had a great chat, but the meat of the interview certainly hits toward the end. When asked why a consumer would buy Nokia’s new high-end smartphone over the competition, Harlow didn’t mince words. “Yeah, the iPhone is simple to use. IPhone has a beautiful design. [The Nokia Lumia 800] is a gorgeous design, but the integration of the UI sets this apart. It is by far the best experience.” Read on for more.

Harlow continued, “And then, keeping in mind that the majority of us work, this is a great consumer smartphone but it’s a fabulous phone for business. The email application and the Office applications are better than the same applications implemented on Android, and certainly on iPhone. So, everything I want is there — it is easier, it is faster and it is a hell of a lot more fun.”

Nokia’s first two Windows Phones will launch in several markets beginning next month and continuing into December. Nokia confirmed that it will not launch either device in the U.S. this year, however.

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Apple co-Founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs vowed to devote his life and all of Apple’s cash to destroying Google’s Android operating system, which he believed to be an outright ripoff of Apple’s iPhone platform. Pulling quotes from an advance copy of Steve Jobs’s authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, The Associated Press reports that Jobs was furious in January 2010 when HTC launched a phone that appeared to copy many key features from the iPhone. Read on for more.

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said, according to Isaacson’s book. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Jobs would later meet with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt to discuss settling the lawsuit. That meeting, according to the book, did not go well. ”I don’t want your money,” Jobs is said to have told Schmidt. “If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”

Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook has made clear his intention to continue running Apple as Jobs did, and it appears a major part of his legacy is the fight against Google’s actions with Android, which Jabs said amount to “grand theft.”

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We recently caught up with George Martin, software product manager for Texas Instruments’ wireless business unit, to talk about the company’s recent big wins with Android, TI’s OMAP 5 platform, working with Microsoft on Windows 8 and more. As the mobile landscape continues to evolve at a much faster pace than the computer industry, there’s nothing more important than the processors that enable the amazing functionality in these devices. Where is one of the industry’s top chip makers planning to take us in the coming months and years? Read on for our full interview.

Texas Instruments is powering the newest flagship Android device from Google, the Galaxy Nexus. You also powered the original Motorola DROID, an iconic device that changed the Android landscape. How is TI’s working relationship with Google and its Android vendor partners?

The working relationship we hold with Google and the Android community is incredibly strong, and one that we take great pride in. More than four years ago, upon the initial unveiling of the Android operating system, we began a solid partnership with Google’s development team, resulting in the adoption of our OMAP processors on each popular Android flavor: Éclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and now Ice Cream Sandwich. This milestone with Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus not only represents the latest achievement in this partnership, but the strength of the OMAP processors in bringing extraordinary user experiences to life on Android-based devices. Our team is passionately committed to serving the bustling Android fan base with a full set of tools – from semiconductor technologies to development platforms, software solutions, support and more – to help lift designs from the drawing board to consumers’ hands, and being the lead processor for Ice Cream Sandwich is a huge step in that process.

Why was the OMAP4460 the right chip for Google’s upcoming flagship Android 4.0 phone, the Galaxy Nexus?

The OMAP4460 processor had what Google needed to make Ice Cream Sandwich do what they wanted it to do. There are a handful of reasons why the processor stood out as the right one for the Galaxy Nexus, including its ability to deliver hardware-integrated security, enhanced memory, advanced imaging and powerful video effects in more unique and efficient ways than competitors’ offerings. Remi El-Ouazzane, the VP and general manager of our OMAP processor division, put it well in his blog post about Ice Cream Sandwich: “So much energy and many efforts went into optimizing each use case to deliver the best possible user experience to the end user, always with low power in mind. This is where our OMAP smart multicore architecture makes a huge difference. At the end of the day, brute force (number of cores as instance) does not rival sophistication.” We are not in the business of marketing speeds and feeds – we are in the business of driving revolutionary user experiences, such as those featured on the Galaxy Nexus.

The first round of LTE-enabled smartphones launched by Verizon Wireless really highlighted how much of an issue battery life is in modern smartphones. As vendors pack more features into slimmer cases, how are TI chips like the OMAP4460 helping reduce the strain on batteries?

Great question. The balance of high performance and low power is one that’s been built into our OMAP processors’ smart multicore architecture for more than 10 years. In particular, the OMAP4460 processor leverages two Cortex-M3 cores to offload real-time control processing from the main Cortex-A9 CPUs. We were the very first company to develop with this innovative approach to off-loading, and this is now being re-emphasized with ARM’s launch this week of big.LITTLE processing. The OMAP4460 processor also includes the following components to help reduce battery strain: TI’s SmartReflex power management technology for enhanced battery life, superior dual-channel memory, providing bandwidth for multi-tasking, HD multimedia/displays, programmable imaging accelerators for fast deployment of computational photography algorithms, end-to-end security for advanced services such as premium content streaming and secured payments, programmable video engine that support the widest range of video codecs – 4X the support of competitive offerings

Based on my tests with numerous smartphones over the past year, it seems like devices powered by TI chips offer superior performance compared to many competitive offerings. What separates TI chips from the pack?

We love to hear that! Our heritage in the semiconductor space dates back to when I was in elementary school (not to date myself), when even a brick cell phone was a glimmer in engineers’ eyes. The things we learned as a company over the past decades – from DSP and IVA experience to programmable logic and more – have transcended into the mobile market, helping us create the best-in-class OMAP processors. They are separated from the pack for multiple reasons, above all the ability to deliver the highest-performance, compelling user experiences all at low power levels. The efficient performance + power balance that we’re able to achieve does not come overnight, and it’s something that makes OMAP processors the most attractive in the selection process. We design these offerings from the ground up, with the full system in mind – not just the processing. The integration of our wireless connectivity solutions, power management and other TI components gives us a distinct advantage in creating solutions that the demands of each unique customer device.

We are also always looking ahead to what’s next on the market, and designing those features onto the platform today. We work very hard to predict what consumers will want and need on devices – that’s what helps us run our processors in more efficient, successful ways than others on the market. Take stereoscopic-3D (S3D) and Web browsing as two examples. OMAP processors include a powerful image signal processor, which supports two cameras and provides a crystal-clear S3D images, along with a programmable display controller for local auto-stereoscopic displays and an external 3D TV connected over the HDMI cable. Match these with the programmable IVA supporting S3D record and playback up to HD quality, and you’ve got one amazing S3D experience on a mobile device. On the browsing side, we support for more than a dozen video codecs on OMAP processors, which is 4X what competitors provide. After all, users view content around the world and in various file formats, and shouldn’t be limited to what they can view on the go.

The smartphone landscape in 2012 is shaping up to be all about quad-core chips, 28nm, 3D, HD and so on. How confident is TI that its next-generation mobile chipsets will continue to lead in the smartphone and tablet markets?

We remain incredibly confident in our ability to lead the applications-processor charge in the smartphone and tablet markets, thanks to the OMAP differentiators I mentioned above. Each OMAP generation offers new processing cores to maximize performance and battery life, answering the world’s call for new features. Today, we see OMAP 4 processors driving Natural User Interface (NUI) capabilities into the smartphone world on devices like the Galaxy Nexus, with its face detection unlock and other visual-driven features. The OMAP4430 processor powers the LG Optimus 3D, the world’s first true stereoscopic-3D smartphone, and the Motorola Droid RAZR’s ability to stream high-definition Netflix content – in fact, we were the very first company to achieve this level of Netflix certification, thanks to the unmatched security mechanisms integrated on the OMAP platform. These are just three examples of many that keep us confident about the road ahead. Tomorrow, we’re also looking forward to ultra-thin computing devices that will be uniquely enabled by the OMAP4470 processor.

In a whitepaper titled, Going ‘beyond a faster horse’ to transform mobile devices, TI’s Brian Carlson wrote: “the TI OMAP™ 5 platform, one of the first applications processors based on ARM® Cortex™-A15 MPCore™ processors, not only brings a new level of performance, but more importantly, extends capabilities to enable new use cases that will truly transform mobile devices.” Can you elaborate on what type of new use cases we might expect the OMAP 5 to enable?

The OMAP 5 platform will redefine how consumers interact with their devices and the outside world. Because of the technologies we’re enabling, consumers will no longer be limited to the physical confines of a mobile device, but set free by the ability to make any physical environment the center of their mobile universe. We actually just completed a video series that explains the type of things the OMAP 5 processors will bring to life, including wireless display, cloud-based streaming, enhanced computational tasks, remote desktop features, advanced augmented reality and more for the mobile environment. Check out the OMAP 5 concept video for more.

TI is on record as being excited to work with Microsoft on products that will support its upcoming Windows 8 platform. Care to share any thoughts on the platform and the work you’re doing with Microsoft?

We are indeed honored to be working with Microsoft on the upcoming Windows 8 platform. While we can’t spoil any future details, I can share some of our perspectives about the move to Windows on ARM. One of the biggest challenges in moving from x86 to ARM in the Windows camp is moving into the “offloading” mindset I mentioned above. Everyone accelerates audio and video now a days, but it’s time to move past the “speeds-and-feeds” way of thinking and focus on offloading that makes products most efficient. It’s not about running fast all the time – it’s about running smart. That’s what our OMAP processors are all about, and we’re excited to bring that mindset to life on Windows 8-based products.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has never been one to mince words, and the executive shared a few choice thoughts on Google’s Android platform while speaking at the Web 2.0 conference on Tuesday. “You don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone, but I think you do to use an Android phone,” Ballmer told Federated Media founder John Battelle during an interview on stage. He continued, “It is very hard to be excited, for me, about the Android phones.” Despite the platform’s innovative user experience and its slick UI, sales of Windows Phone handsets have not been impressive thus far. Microsoft has been hesitant to share hard numbers and partners have followed suit, but recent estimates suggest Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market may have hit a new low in the second quarter of 2011. Nokia is expected by many to be the catalyst that helps establish Windows Phone as a major player, however, and Ballmer confirmed that Nokia is set to unveil “a bunch” of new Windows Phones at Nokia World next week.

Acer founder Stan Shih thinks Apple’s days at the top are numbered, and Google’s Android operating system will be the victor in the industry’s heated mobile platform wars. In an interview with Chinese-language Taiwan newspaper United Daily News as reported by Taiwan Economic News, Shih stated that Android is the world’s most popular mobile operating system by volume and it will “outdo” Apple’s iOS in the near future. In particular, Shih sees Google’s alliance with Intel as a union that will lead to great things. The pair will develop innovative solutions that optimize Android’s speed and performance, Shih said, speculating that Android-powered, Atom-based mobile devices will outsell Apple’s portable gear. Finally, Shih noted that Apple’s “post-PC era” doesn’t mark an end to traditional personal computers, but rather a diversification of form factors and capabilities that will complement media tablets and other emerging devices — a sentiment that echoes an earlier BGR feature.

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