A wireless exec from Disney was at the recent invite-only "brain drain," according to a tipster who was at the meeting on Intel's campus in Santa Clara, Calif. As was John Faith, the head of MySpace Mobile. Alan Kay, a famous computer scientist attended, along with a host of other graybeards. So what did Intel show all the geeks it gathered?

Executives shared secret plans to build a new mobile device based on Intel technology that the chipmaker hopes to have on the market this year. The inspiration: the runaway success of Apple's iPhone. And the fear: that this will be a rerun of Intel's past failed attempts, like the dead-on arrival "ultramobile portable computer" concepts it showed off last year.

Devices based on Intel's design — they probably won't carry the Intel brand, except in the "Intel Inside" sense — will run Google's Android operating system. The design displayed at the summit also featured a "shitload" of variable resistance sensors, our source told us — a simple technology found in dials, touchscreens, and other input sensors. Apple uses a more complex touchscreen technology in its iPhone, suggesting Intel's approach might lead to cheaper touch-sensitive phones, or even devices that respond to the way they're held.

The résumés of the people in attendance suggested a serious effort — just about every major tech company in Silicon Valley was represented. And Intel has reason to gun for Apple's iPhone. Apple has bought its own chip-design subsidiary, allowing it to bypass Intel's industry-standard processors. But that's all we know so far. Has anyone else heard about this top-secret Intel summit? Fill us in on what you know.

(Photo via Buylabcoat.com)

The word from a plugged-in Sunnyvale source: Bartz, who has been on the job less than three weeks, was instantly suspicious of Yahoo's attempt to ship its own branded cell phone. But she got the proof she needed, according to our source, when she saw her daughter play with a prototype of the smartphone preloaded with Yahoo services. Layne, now a junior at the University of Southern California, immediately put the One Phone away and switched back to her own cell phone.

The fallout, our source says: a top Yahoo mobile executive left, and others may have been fired.

A Yahoo flack issued a non-denial denial, flatly insisting the anecdote "has no basis in fact" and then declining to answer further questions about the phone project. As for the firings, she said she had no knowledge of any firings or staff departures. Motorola, and AT&T did not respond to inquiries on the matter.

But the mere fact that this anecdote is making the rounds, though, bodes well for Bartz. It may strike some detractors as an executive making flip decisions. Another way to look at it: Bartz is going by her gut and exercising a clear vision for what Yahoo will and won't do. When she was hired, many expressed doubts about Bartz's boring background in enterprise software sales. It may turn out, after all, that she is the product nazi Yahoo has long needed.

We haven't gotten anyone from Google or Yahoo to confirm this bit, but we're told cops interrupted a call Schmidt was making to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to discuss how to get a proposed advertising deal past government regulators. The deal was blocked. Schmidt, who endorsed Barack Obama late in the election cycle and got tapped to his board of economic advisors, could use his newfound political clout to get the pesky law overturned. The cell-phone rule, or the antitrust one — we're not sure which one is more bothersome to him. (Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

In theory, smartphones will detect when a wireless mic is in use in the area, and not interfere with it. In practice, who are they kidding? New York City's Broadway League is campaigning to keep that part of the radio spectrum free for roughly 450 wireless microphones used in Manhattan's theater district. Out here, I'll be furious if Journey's next show at Shoreline is ruined when 853 Google employees check their mail during "Wheel in the Sky." (Photo by Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

Update: AP's photo library actually gave us a photo of another Greg Brown altogether, taken for a story on voicemail etiquette. Having looked at all of the corporate headshots of Motorola's Brown, we're sticking with this guy — he'd probably do a better job running Motorola, too. (Photo by AP/Alan Diaz)

Like Apple, RIM offers not just the hardware but the software and services that run on top of it; RIM does Apple one better by also selling back-end servers that companies install to manage their workers' email. Microsoft is in that same business, but it's not as good as tying everything together as RIM is. The speculation is that RIM shares would have to drop to $40 or so, at which point Microsoft might bid $50 a share, or $28 billion for the company. This much is not speculation: RIM would be a better buy than Yahoo.

Where to even begin. First off, the concept of frequency "hopping" is total flawed. When the CDPD protocol tried to ride the airwaves in the analog cellular days by hopping it turned out that LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE CELLPHONES, and so there were insufficient "blank spaces" to hop from and to. So that brilliant, frequency hopping technology ended up taking a dedicated cellular frequency to run. The same problem is going to plague Larry's smoke-and-mirrors technology.

He is trying to get something for free here, use of EXTREMELY VALUABLE frequencies, by claiming that he will hop out of the way of the current users of these frequencies. Then when they test his product in a stadium full of current frequency users, he can't hop out of their way. Then he goes crying to the government that the test was not fair. Boo hoo, I'm rich and I want to get something for free, boo hoo.

His product, at scale, will directly interfere with the current users of those frequencies. There is no way around it. When you are at 100% capacity where do you hop to? The hopping promise is the kind of BS that hardware vendors have to push in order to get their product out into the market, and the FCC knows it is a false promise. When all those new products are jamming the airwaves and an existing user turns on his device what do you think is going to happen?

Just pray your kid's vitals are not being remotely monitored at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital with the old tech when a few hundred feet away on Sand Hill Road some VC turns on his Android phone to show his secretary. But then again, maybe the nurses will notice your kid's blue complexion in time. So sure Larry, go ahead and roll out that product that can't even pass a controlled test. Why not?

It’s funny - but the first time I heard about Android was about 2.5 years ago, when Eric Schmidt told me about the device at Stanford after I got a job offer from Google (yet before I accepted it!). Since then I have seen many iterations of the software. The software. Not the device itself, because sadly it hasn’t changed in many years. The reason many people see the phone as ugly and old-fashioned is simply… because it IS! It’s a design unchanged for at least two years, without iterations on it besides color schemas (it’s now available in Zune-brown along with white and black) and the silly ‘with Google’ description on the back. Don’t ask me what ‘with Google’ means. I didn’t understand it back then and still don’t understand it today.

"It is still just a phone running on a fourth-placed proprietary network," writes Blankenhorn. He says Google won't realize its full vision for Android — "a handheld Internet client running on a true broadband network" — until Clearwire finishes building a new wireless broadband network, backed in part by Google's money. That's supposed to happen by next year, but even Clearwire CEO Ben Wolf is skeptical: "They say the middle of next year. I'll believe it when I see it." Notice how no one's talking about whether the Dream is actually fun to use?