Intel released a statement to the media today saying that on Thursday in San Francisco it will “host a…press briefing to discuss a new technology that is about to appear on the market.”

I wonder who will have machines with it built-in first?

For what it’s worth, both companies have marketed the Xoom’s ability to play Flash content as one of its advantages over the Apple iPad.

Bet you all the review for battery life will be done sans-Flash. I wonder if this is an actual technology issue or a damage control measure by Moto.

After Motorola announced its iPad competitor will cost more than the iPad, a Verizon promo uncovered the fact that the Xoom won’t come with support for Adobe’s Flash technology until sometime this spring.

Flash doesn’t.

If anything, it’s likely to be even harder, because it’s based on the open web — and users are likely to notice that all around them is free content, while iPhone and iPad apps do a fairly good job of disguising that fact.

Also, then you have your info. being passed to the advertisers.

In order to participate in the creation of, and determine licensing terms for, a joint VP8 patent license, any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec specification is invited to submit them for a determination of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators.

Wow, that didn’t take long.

However, unlike the iPad home screen, which served as a larger version of the iPhone’s, Google has designated the home screen of Honeycomb tablets to serve as a dense array of widgets spanning multiple pages, more like a PC desktop, with a lower “System Bar” containing app switcher controls and a taskbar (called “notifications and system status”), an upper “Action Bar” with search and app launching controls, and a series of virtual desktops, each containing a configurable Dock-like strip of app icons below a series of floating panels that can present media playback controls, live inbox and calendar items, stacks of ebooks and youtube videos, and other user configurable mini-applets.

R.I.P. Chrome OS

The Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome is an extension that enables Chrome users to play H.264-encoded videos (aka MP4) on HTML5 pages by using the built-in capabilities found in Windows 7.

Microsoft: 1, Google 0

ITG Investment Research tracked point-of-sale data from nearly 6,000 wireless stores in the U.S. from the Galaxy Tab’s November debut through Jan. 15 and found the device to have an unusually high return rate. According to its estimates, cumulative return rates for the Galaxy Tab through December of 2010 were about 13 percent. Worse, that percentage is growing as holiday purchases are returned. ITG figures cumulative Galaxy Tab return rates through January 15 were 16 percent. Ugly, considering the return rate for the iPad at Verizon since its debut on the carrier is just 2 percent.

Want to bet that the Verizon iPhone return rate is much lower compared to the AT&T return rate?

According to Fowler, the challenge facing Mozilla’s proposal is that it requires both browsers and sites to implement it to be fully effective. The company recognizes “the chicken and the egg problem,” he wrote.

While I love the idea, this won’t really happen until the FTC or some other agency makes it mandatory. Even then, you expect every website to revamp their code to obey?

The Android Honeycomb tablet is set to launch on Feburary 17 for $700, according to messages the big box store sent to its employees, though conflicting Verizon documents say the price will be $800.

I shall wait for my iPad2.