THE TWO MOBILE keynotes by Dadi Perlmuller and and Anand Chandrasekar were mostly rehashes of older news, but they presented devices as well as slides. In between the lines, there were some nice new bits.

The first hard bit of news was from Dadi, and they confirmed a few details about the Intel SSDs. The disks will come in 32-160GB versions both in 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factors. Speeds were not released, but expect them to basically be in a class by themselves. It was hinted that there was some special interactions between the Intel chipsets and Intel SSDs, but what that is was not discussed.

Then it was on to Montevina and the claims that it is an adequate gaming system, they said that the new chipset doubles GPU performance in 3DMark and a few games. What they don't say is that it just takes them from really really slow to double that, aka really slow. Don't give up the discrete GPU yet people.

Then it was on to a new feature called Intel Anti-Theft Technology, or AT-AT for short. AT-AT has three major functions, Asset Defense, Data Defense and Data Access Disable. Asset Defense is composed of Platform Disable, Proactive Policies and Recovery Support. Data Defense is defined as Embedded Disk Protection while Data Access Disable is just that.

This could be a major boon if it is not simply tied to the Broken OS, but somehow I think it will be. If these technologies catch on and become easily user manageable, it could prevent a lot of headaches. Keep a close watch on where this goes.

On the new hardware side, there is now a 25W Intel Mobile SKU, but that has been unofficial for a long time. More interesting is the mobile Nehalem, is it called Calpella, note the extra L. This one could be a very interesting chip, especially in light of the new power features they are not talking about yet.

Moving on to radios, there was an cool demo of streaming video over wireless. With a new more efficient radio, you can vastly decrease the power draw required to send bits across the ether. Intel demoed it with YouTube, and in theory, you can get about about 30 minutes of extra battery life out of it. I'll bet Dadi didn't even know he was RickRolled twice at once.

Last was a pretty interesting marketing agreement. Moblin, the mobile Linux consortium for Intel MIDs has signed on with Real. On the up side, it provides a very consistent platform for MID media devices on Linux. On the other, it brings a massive DRM infection to an otherwise solid platform, and the less said about the damnable Real crapware the better. This could be good, but will probably end up being an unremovable conduit for popups.