Nokia demos bendable cellphone

Nokia and the University of Cambridge are showing off a new stretchable and flexible mobile device of the future, called Morph, reports CNET News.com.

The new concept phone is part of an online display presented in conjunction with the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition, under way through 12 May at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City.

The device, which is made using nanotechnology, is intended to demonstrate how cellphones in the future could be stretched and bent into different shapes, allowing users to "morph" their devices into whatever shape they want.

Novell is acquiring PlateSpin, a four-year-old start-up in Toronto that has capitalised on the disaster recovery potential of virtualisation software. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the acquisition for $205 million, says InformationWeek.

Novell wants a bigger piece of the growing virtualisation pie and is entering the market as a supplier of management software for both virtual and physical machines. PlateSpin offers several cross-vendor products to achieve that goal, said Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, in a Monday Webcast explaining Novell's move.

"We can work with XenSource [supplier of open source Xen], VMware [ESX Server], and Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisors. We will continue to work with those companies," said Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin, who participated in the Webcast. PlateSpin's products can manage hardware running Windows, Linux, or Unix.

After months of deriding rival Advanced Micro Devices' strategy of cramming four cores onto one chip, Intel is set to take that concept a step further, says CNET News.com.

A leaked presentation, authored by Sun, has shed some light on Intel's plans for its Dunnington processor, which appears to be a six-core server chip where all six cores are part of a single chip.

Intel had previously hinted that Dunnington would have four cores or more, but it hadn't been clear whether the company would reuse its multi-chip module strategy of cramming several distinct chips into a single package.

Lenovo officially announced the arrival of its much-anticipated ThinkPad X300 notebook computer today, bringing to market the company's thinnest, lightest notebook to date and giving Apple's MacBook Air an ultra-thin competitor, reports CRN.com.

Weighing in as low as 1.3kg, the ThinkPad X300 is about three-quarters of an inch thick at its thinnest point and features a 13.3-inch LED backlit display, a removable battery and a built-in DVD burner. The X300 also has WiMax, WLAN and GB Ethernet connectivity, as well as GPS capabilities.

The notebook has a 64GB solid state drive and Intel's Centrino with vPro technology and up to 4GB of memory.