Intel blasts iPhone; Apple honeymoon over

by Tom Krazit

Intel's romance with Apple appears to have gone sour.

Company executives have decided to start including the iPhone as one of their prime examples of smartphones that don't run "the full Internet" because they don't use an Intel chip, according to a report out of the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei from our friends down under at ZDNet Australia. This specious argument--that ARM-based chips aren't man enough to run the Internet--is nothing new from Intel, but the decision to highlight the iPhone as part of that argument is.

Intel has been trying to wedge its way into future mobile computers by taking on ARM, which designs cores that power more than 90 percent of all mobile phones in the world. Its argument is that since the PC-based Internet experience is run by Intel's x86 architecture, that's the only possible solution for future sophisticated mobile computers.

But as Engadget points out, say what you will about the iPhone, but few people complain about its inability to run "the full Internet." The most frequent criticism of the iPhone's Internet-running ability is probably that it can't play Flash content, but that has more to do with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' belief that Adobe's Flash Lite isn't good enough for the iPhone than any technical limitations on the part of the ARM processor. In fact, Adobe is believed to have a Flash player for the iPhone all ready to go if and when Apple decides to approve its inclusion on the iPhone.Continued...