There is no automatic switching, Apple just assumes you'll leave 3G on, and that the iPhone has the juice to support that usage.

ENGADGET: iPhone 3G hands-on Hands-on

There aren't many more details to share beyond what the company mentioned at CES, but that doesn't diminish what could be a best-of-all-worlds processor: the automatic switching between four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores should give it a performance edge over many of its peers while reducing power consumption by up to 70 percent.

ENGADGET

What's more, the automatic graphics switching in MSI's GPU Boost technology kicks them over to discrete graphics card mode to kick graphics processing up a notch or two.

ENGADGET: MSI formally unveils 14-inch CX480 laptop, stops short of naming a price

While we told you earlier this week that the Ion 2-powered ASUS Eee PC 1201PN wouldn't be arriving until late May, a number of European sites have gotten early review samples of the 12-inch "netbook" -- if you choose to call it that -- and have discovered that it doesn't use NVIDIA's Optimus automatic graphics switching technology.

ENGADGET: First wave of Ion 2 ASUS Eee PC 1201PNs lack NVIDIA Optimus

But, he says, switching to automatic mode would be a bad idea and illegal to boot.

ECONOMIST: Robots go to war