ARM unveils Cortex-A17 processor, aimed at £150 smartphones & tablets

ARM has announced yet another addition to its bulging porfolio. After the Cortex-A12 late last year, the British company has just unveiled the Cortex-A17, which is set to replace the former in 2015 and is pitched as the "enhanced mid-range mobile and consumer solution" for next year, targeting $200 (around £150) devices.

TechRadar Pro spoke to James Bruce, mobile marketing lead at ARM, prior to the announcement and he confirmed that the IP attached to the product will be released by the end of Q1 2014 with the first products likely to appear this time next year, possibly to coincide with MWC 2015.

This shortened time-to-market approach is in stark contrast with the multi-year process that characterised the development of other previous solutions such as the Cortex-A8 or the six-year old Cortex-A9.

Bruce said that this "is a reflection of the mobile market with silicon partners and OEMs were cutting time to market in order to get products out as quickly as possible". As such, the go-to-market window for the A17 is shorter than a year although one might suspect that the first designs will be based on ARM's standard packages.

Better performance, more power efficient

The A17 is likely to perform on the same level as the A15 (60 per cent faster than the A9 is the official line) while consuming 20 per cent less power compared to the A9, all things equal; it means that the A17 will be better suited for mobile phones compared to the high performance but power hungry Cortex-A15.

It will run at up to 2GHz initially (with higher clock speeds available in subsequent iterations) and can work as designs of up to eight cores (two quad-cores).

Technically, the new part is similar to its immediate predecessor, the A12 and improves on it thanks with the addition of memory subsystem improvements, support for big.LITTLE and up to 8MB L2 ECC cache.

Together with the Mali-T720 GPU, the Mali-V500 VPU and the Mali-DP500 DPU, the Cortex-A17 completes ARM's mid-range multimedia solution.

ARM's mobile marketing lead also confirmed that 28nm will be the standard node for the A17 for a foreseeable future (at least until 2016) and that this part is likely to be the last high performance 32-bit part from ARM, hinting at the fact that 64-bit mainstream parts are likely to be announced between now and 2015.

32-bit will not go away overnight though with ARM expecting it to play a significant part in its portfolio until at least 2017.

• Check out our interview of Dennis Laudick, video president of partner marketing at ARM, about ARM's recent acquisition of Geomerics.

If Motorola returns to tablets, it will be with customization

The Moto Maker helped Motorola remake a name for itself in the smartphone world with individually customized devices and now it may be hoping to do the same for tablets.

During an interview with Pocket-lint, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside let slip that tablets are still very much in consideration by Motorola and the company hopes to offer customization as something other competing products don't.

"We are looking at tablets," Woodside told Pocket-lint. "A lot of people have asked us to build a tablet using Moto Maker, to customize their tablet. There might be a day we do that, but the bigger opportunity for us is the five billion people without smartphones."

The key take away here is that Motorola is hearing the demand and looking into developing a tablet version of the Moto Maker. But it isn't quite ready to let users slap on a wood siding to the next 10.1-inch Xoom 3 tablet or whatever comes next.

Jokingly, Woodside added, "... You need to focus. Or we could go next door and start building refrigerators too."

What can you Moto make

Thus far, the Google owned company's Moto Maker has allowed its customers to customize elements on the Moto X down to the accented color of the side buttons. In a similar personalization oriented product, Motorola introduced the Moto G with a variety of colorful back covers to choose from.

After releasing its last set of tablets, the Xoom 2 and XYBoard 10.1, more than two years ago, Motorola fell out of the tablet space. If Motorola ever gets back into the tablet world it seems likely that it will also come with some form of customization - at least on high-end devices.

• The inevitable follow up to Activity Trackers, a sleep tracking device.

BT internet filter to protect all devices including smartphones and tablets

BT has announced today that its new parental controls for filtering adult material will apply to all devices including smartphones and tablets.

New subscribers will automatically have the controls implemented and they will be given a choice to opt-out at sign up. According to BT, existing customers will be contacted throughout 2014 and asked if they want to set up the controls.

Although parental controls are nothing new, they usually apply to the home desktop PC. The move to extend them to all devices is new territory.

"Strict, moderate and light" filter levels will be available to the account holder alongisde the option to turn the filter off at particular times to act as a "watershed".

Wise up

To prepare customers for the changes, BT has been quietly testing the new controls with customers and "interested groups", including Mumsnet, the UK's biggest network for parents.

BT is also working with other ISPs to "increase awareness and education around online safety for children." In a pan-ISP marketing campaign called 'Internet Matters: Learn about it. Talk about it. Deal with it' BT has dedicated £1.5 million to a joint marketing fund, although it's not clear who the other ISPs are and how much they've contributed.

• David Cameron has a porn problem

PC sales see biggest drop this year as nation opts for tasty tablets

The UK PC market's outlook went from bad to worse during the third quarter after sales in the region plummeted 21.2% year-on-year. PC shipments to businesses slid 8.3%, while the consumer PC market's decline was sharper at 17.1%.

HP took home the top vendor award for the month with 18.5% market share, and that's not counting sales of its impressive Chromebook 11 (Gartner only includes desktop-based PCs and x86 Windows 8 tablets in its figures).

It was followed by Dell, which snared 11.8% of the market. Acer, the CEO of which recently stepped down after disappointing financial results for the quarter, captured the third-highest market share with 9.3%. With 7.9% market share, Apple is now officially the UK's fourth biggest PC vendor, ahead of Lenovo (7.7%).

The UK PC market had a significantly worse time than France and Germany, which saw its PC markets decline 10.4% and 14.4% respectively.

Long decline

The decline was felt across Western Europe, where shipments fell 12.8% compared with 12 months ago. HP once again led the pack with 18.5% market share, followed by Dell (11.8%), Acer (9.3%), Apple (7.9%) and Lenovo (7.7%).

Gartner analyst Meike Escherich said that the Western Europe PC market's performance declined "faster than expected" during the quarter as consumers opted for tablets.

She said: "The transition from PCs to tablets continued to reduce PC sales. In addition, product transitions to 'Haswell' and 'Bay Trail' processors, and preparations for the launch of Windows 8.1 and associated new products, meant that vendors were careful about managing inventory and focused on clearing out stock in the distribution channel."

• The PC's not dead. It's just gone high end