Take, for example, the young man with a ticket which must be date-stamped by a machine on the platform.

BBC: Swiss love affair with rail turns sour

This protected area inside the smartphone is isolated from the Android platform, using a virtual machine.

ENGADGET: Panasonic and Red Bend Software announce Android security partnership at MWC

So Microsoft turned the Xbox 360 into the dominant games console, not by making a better gaming machine, but by giving people a platform for getting more out of their living room.

BBC: Viewpoint: How Sony slipped back

She said she would help me to buy materials and the sewing machine I needed (to) create a small platform for myself, which made me so grateful.

CNN: Grants help abused women start over

Inside the ultraminimalist exterior lies a miraculous machine: The chassis hangs from a floating seismic platform with four-point spring suspension using a single piece of milled solid aluminum subassembly as its foundation.

FORBES: Life

This may not be too terribly useful for the average home user, but for the tablet PC market doing all the buying right now (healthcare, manufacturing, and retail, of course) it drives down cost, ups reliability and security, and actually makes the generally ho-hum specs of the machine something a little more of a powerhouse on its new platform.

ENGADGET: Motion Computing's thin client M1400TC tablet PC

For starters, we're told that the 10.1-inch machine will be ARM-based, while NVIDIA's Tegra platform (likely the second generation) steers the graphical ship.

ENGADGET: Google's Chrome OS-based netbook specs leak out

You might remember Zipwhip from its SMS-enabled espresso machine, but the outfit's hoping a new feature added to its cloud-based text-messaging platform will catch your attention this time around.

ENGADGET