Microsoft, impeccably timed bunch that they are, held two Windows 8 first-look events within hours of one another on different sides of the globe. First, Windows President Steven Sinofsky took the stage at the D9 conference in California to unveil the new OS, then just a few hours later Microsoft held a partner preview at Computex in Taipei.

Intel is considering buying Texas Instruments’ OMAP division according to a highly placed executive at another fabless semiconductor firm.

Journalists at ARM’s Computex press conference were in for a musical treat on Monday, in the form of a Taiwanese boy band using iPads as instruments.

Microsoft has hit back at allegations from Intel that the four versions of Windows ARM would not run existing PC programs and would offer a poor experience to users.

A few months ago Microsoft Corp. announced that they were building a version of Windows to run on ARM architecture, the kind found in system-on-a-chip silicon used by smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. Around a month ago Microsoft surprised attendees at their MIX developer conference in Las Vegas by demoing an apparently fully-functional version of Windows on ARM architecture.

The leaked video shows glimpses of a thin, stylish looking device complete with a nice looking camera, though the few peeks at the screen seem to show Symbian Anna rather than MeeGo or Windows phone 7.

Over at Microsoft Corp.’s MIX Developer Conference in sunny Las Vegas, Microsoft has demoed a new preview build of Internet Explorer 10, and also dropped a little premature Easter egg – the build of IE10, and the underlying Windows OS, were both running on a 1 GHz ARM chip. Sneaky.

Cor Blimey, the mobile chip space is heating up, as the various players carry out their own little ARM’s race to beef up on performance, mainly through the addition of more cores.

Building hardware shouldn’t have to be so darn hard, and thankfully, because of Bug Labs, now it’s really not. One of our favorite little startups, this small East Coast setup is changing the way developers think about devices, and with three major carriers singing its praises, Bug Labs must be doing something right.

New year, new employees for HP’s newly acquired Palm, it seems, with job postings a plenty from the firm which is looking to hire mainly software engineers for its upcoming webOS offerings.