Electronic chip designer ARM has teamed up with five of its major partners to boost the use of free Linux software on cellphones, challenging Nokia's Symbian and Microsoft.

Microsoft and Intel are fighting for the affections of hardware makers as the PC industry tries to answer Apple's iPad. The world's biggest software company used the annual Computex show in Taiwan to release a preview of Windows Embedded Compact 7 — the latest rebranded version of Windows CE, which has been promised on tablets from Asus, LG, and MSI.

Processor manufacturer ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have teamed up to form a new software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source for the next generation of always-connected, always-on computing

One of the constants in my interactions with the Linux and open source communities is that they--all of them--are out there, in the big wide world, while I remain ensconced in my fortress of solitude here in Northern Indiana.

According to ABI Research, a market intelligence company that specializes in global connectivity and emerging technology, Linux-based smartphone shipments will outstrip growth of the entire smartphone market in 2010. By 2015, they anticipate that the market share of Linux-enabled smartphones will be at 33%.

The first and most frequent point of contact between the user and their computer is the Desktop Environment (DE), the aggregation of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, shortcuts and desktop widgets, themed and styled in a given way to create a distinctive graphical user interface (GUI).

Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and "could be an incredible iPad alternative," according to a hands-on Laptop story.