Texas Instruments announced recently that, even though it reported better than expected chip sales during the fourth quarter of 2011, the company will shut down its plants in Texas and in Japan. Texas Instruments has seen an increased demand for its mobile chips but will close the two factories during the next 18 months while increasing its employee numbers at different plants. The move is an effort to cut costs, Reuters said. The company reported a fourth-quarter profit of $298 million, down from $942 milli...

At the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday, Texas Instruments showed off the company’s OMAP 5 chipset in a reference platform running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The 28nm system on a chip (SOC) features a dual-core ARM Cortex A15 CPU, 2MB L2 cache, a PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU and a dual-channel LPDDR2-533 memory interface. The OMAP 5 supports 24 and 20-megapixel cameras for front and rear 3D HD video recording. It also supports up to 8GB of dual channel DDR3 memory, and includes 3 USB 2.0 ports ...

Brookstone announced a new device Monday morning that allows you to project images up to 50 inches diagonally onto any surface using your iPhone. It is called the Brookstone Pocket Projector for iPhone 4/4S by Texas Instruments DLP and I’ve spent the last week using it. I’m definitely impressed by the product, which slides onto an iPhone much like any other case, but is it worth the hefty $230 price Brookstone is asking? Read on for my review. (more…)

Non-Apple tablet shipments are expected to grow as much as 134% year-on-year in 2012, DigiTimes reported on Monday. That’s larger than the 55% shipment boost Apple’s iPad is expected to see next year. Android will be the catalyst for the growth; analysts predict that 19-20 million Android tablets will ship this year and that a far greater 44-45 million will ship during 2012 thanks to the introduction of Ice Cream Sandwich. The tablets will likely be powered by new chips from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and ...

According to DigiTimes, Amazon’s rumored Android tablets could launch as soon as this August or September. The online retail giant has a global sales target of 4 million units, with 700,000-800,000 units shipping monthly, and it hopes to get its products in customer hands during the peak sales period of the year — just before Thanksgiving and the holidays. We’ve reported exclusively that Amazon will launch the dual-core “Coyote” and quad-core “Hollywood” tablets sometime ...

Earlier today, Texas Instruments took the time to give us a comprehensive overview of some of its OMAP 4 projects. The OMAP 4 platform is incredibly powerful, with immense hardware acceleration providing a haven for offloading graphics and other traditionally CPU-intensive tasks off the actual processor. The company walked us through a number of development prototypes, and we got a chance to see some truly incredible innovation in the video conferencing and 3D-use arenas. Far from simply proof-of-concept craz...

The fine folks iFixit have once again teamed up with Chipworks to tear down one of the greatest latest gadgets to hit the scene in the KIN TWO. Before you tune out and keep on scrolling, we should let you know that a lot of impressive stuff was uncovered after cracking the thing wide open. So without further ado, here’s a summary of what was found. The brains of the phone, a NVIDIA Tegra APX2600, are sandwiched together with memory in a four die, chip-on-chip package. The 8 megapixel IMX046 image senso...

Are you one of those annoying people who constantly have a Bluetooth earpiece in your ear? Does it make you sad inside that the battery on your mobile device runs out so quickly? Well it looks like Texas Instrument may be looking to change things. TI recentley demoed its “Bluetooth low energy open standard” in Munich, and when they say “low powered” they mean low powered. The technology, based on the CC2540 single-mode system-on-chip, can operate a Bluetooth radio for “over a yea...