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T3: ARM may be best known for its mobile phone processors, but the chip maker has started dipping its toe in the TV market and has just announced a big licensing deal with LG, which wants to use ARM technology to power its next generation of digital TVs.

Using the multicore ARM11 processor and ARM Mali-200 Mali-400 graphics processors, LG believes it “will be able to offer a future-proofed premium-quality digital TV experience for today’s connected home,” said Seung-Jong Choi, research fellow of Digital TV Lab, LG Electronics.

“The connected home relies on technology that is fully functional and that guarantees a high-quality, energy efficient multimedia experience.”

Or if you prefer plain English, that means widgets, and lots of them. Widgets that give you full 1080p high definition video on demand – one of the main features of the ARM Mali-400 graphics chip.

Widgets that give you enhanced web content, social networking and online shopping. And widgets that even enable high definition gaming, direct from your TV. That’s not to say that LG is setting its sights on the wildly competitive console market quite yet, but it does mean that the number and range of additional service available to your TV, all without a set-top box, is about to take a very big step forward.

Hell, if LG manages to work in a BBC iPlayer app and YouTube, it could probably stand to lose the digital TV antenna. That would save a bit of space.

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HD News: Manufacturers have long recognized the value of some form of integration between the internet and TV. Among a number of different approaches to achieving this integration is ‘Widget’ technology, which Samsung plans to introduce as an integral part of their high end LCD panels this year.

Intel and Yahoo are the driving force behind the new technology, confirming their intention to co-develop the Yahoo Widget Channel in August 2008. The technology enables TVs to connect to the Internet through “widgets,” bits of software that provided elements of web based content. Samsung and Yahoo! are hoping that the widget concept will attract the interest of third-party developers, opening up the HDTVs for more interactive content.

Samsung have already dipped a toe into the world of web TV integration with the introduction of InfoLive. InfoLive streams up-to-date information through RSS feeds, working in partnership with Yahoo!. The InfoLive service is operated direct from the TV’s remote control and has been designed so as not to ‘swamp’ the screen with content.

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Macworld: One of the biggest questions surrounding the iPhone since its January preview was whether developers outside of Apple would be able to create software that would run on the phone.

And just 18 days before the iPhone’s June 29 release, Steve Jobs stood on stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference and told software makers that Apple had found an answer: a “sweet” way to support outside iPhone development.

Unfortunately, if you’re thinking that Apple really addressed third-party development in Steve Jobs’s keynote, you’d be wrong. While many people have clamored for support for widgets and applications, Monday’s announcement actually did nothing at all to address either issue. Instead, it told developers that since Safari on the iPhone is a full-fledged web browser, they can use Ajax and CSS to make nice, pretty Web-based applications.

Now, don’t get me wrong, you can do quite a bit with Ajax and CSS, as the demo of an Apple-created address book lookup tool showed. However, tools created using this solution are not true applications.

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