Latest Technology News

Mobile phone leader Nokia posted a countdown timer that ticked away the seconds until the company officially unveiled its newest mystery product. Early this morning, it was revealed to be the latest N-Series device, the N97.

As with the other N-series devices, Nokia calls the N97 a mobile computer rather than a handset. It runs S60 5th edition and offers 32 GB of on-board storage which is expandable as much as 16 GB via MicroSD. Communication protocols for the device are HSDPA, quad-band GSM, GPS and A-GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0.

Call it consolidation, call it the economy, call it what you like, but don't post your thoughts to Pownce. After the 15th, the social-networking site won't be there anymore.

Blogging juggernaut SixApart announced on Monday the asset acquisition (read: "purchase") of microblogging site Pownce -- and followed it immediately with an announcement of its shutdown, effective in two weeks. Pro-level (paid) subscribers to the site will receive further information later on the disposition of their accounts.

Banking on bleeding-edge users' willingness to turn their mobile phones into money managers, Alltel has announced that it's partnering with mFoundry to deliver a "mobile wallet" application to subscribers early next year.

Following Sprint -- and, in the case of the iPhone, AT&T -- into the arms of the Sausalito, Calif.-based mFoundry, Alltel will build the Alltel Wallet app. The Wallet, in turn, plugs into the telco's recently launched Alltel Mobile Banking service.

Two years after being embarrassed by charges that it wasn't handling its own documents properly during the discovery process, Intel is readily assembling an eerily similar case against AMD.

Almost two years ago, the Special Master appointed to handle the discovery and acquisition of documents in AMD's European antitrust case against Intel, found that Intel must turn over certain documents that AMD might be able to use in arguments against it, even if those documents are deemed inadmissible later. In the ensuing months, Intel had trouble finding everything AMD had asked for.

In what could be its last hope at survival, after the markets closed Monday evening, Palm announced it would implement a program to reduce its costs by another 20%, on top of a program that was already under way.

Last year at this time, Palm trimmed its workforce by about 100, and gambled the future of the company on the success of its low-end Centros. The plan worked, though it backfired in an odd way: Specifically, the success of, and high demand for Centro drove the company's margins lower, which made its expenses weigh more than they would have otherwise.

Blockbuster's MediaPoint set-top box which began selling for $99 last week, as a late and seemingly understocked competitor to Netflix's Roku set-top component. Now, Blockbuster's CEO suggests it will add downloadable content to more devices.

Netflix has already found its way onto a host of connected devices -- namely the Xbox 360, TiVo, Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung, and onto the elusive Mac. In an interview with E-Commerce Times, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes said that his company's streaming rental service will go everywhere that Netflix has gone.

PlaySavvy attempts to talk to parents -- or is it grandparents? -- about smart videogame shopping. It's a nice effort with some nifty features, but it's hard to see the need for PlaySavvy from here.

To its credit, AOL has a history of attempting to engage non-tech-ish parents in the process of vetting their kids' online activities. Those efforts include the company's free parental control software offering and the recently launched SafetyClicks site.

What's being absorbed as bad news -- a 2.0% overall decline in revenue for the entire semiconductor industry for 2008 -- could actually be blamed on just a few players, if you go behind iSuppli's recent numbers.

Sure, the barometer for growth in the global semiconductor industry turned south, especially since last September. But when looking at the world's top 20 producers collectively, as hardware analysis firm iSuppli is doing now, the news could be made to seem worse than it actually is.

Questions such as "What is 'Xohm?'" and "How is 'Xohm' pronounced?" will now slowly disappear into history, as Sprint Nextel's 4G WiMAX network comes to be known as "Clear."

"Xohm" -- that old, hard to pronounce name for Sprint Nextel's WiMAX network -- will start fading away in favor of Clearwire's "Clear" brand name, now that the two partners are merging their 4G wireless assets.

2:56pm PT: Geeks.com includes some less commonly seen devices in its holiday sale such as a cassette-to-MP3 convertor, and the Dell Axim PDA.

2:47pm PT: While not precisely a "Cyber Monday" deal, Amazon Web Services has announced a new free tier on its SimpleDB service today.

Today could be the day for some of the best online deals to be found all year. But will consumers bite? Internet market research firm comScore released its early holiday figures, showing a drop in online sales by 4%.

Here at the peak of the shopping season at what US government economists this morning officially proclaimed a "recession," the behavior of consumers is closely monitored. In the tech sector, groups such as comScore are paying strict attention to e-commerce traffic and consumer online spending. The group today has released its "Black Friday" sales data.

Like Sears and several other major retail sites, Microsoft Cashback became a temporary technical casualty on Black Friday, a time when generally hesitant consumers were actually trying hard to buy holiday gifts.

After touting the "positive traction" of its Live Search Cashback feature in a press release just two weeks before, Microsoft became one of several major online retailers to lose potential sales opportunities by letting its Web site glitch on Black Friday.

With surprising speed, a coalition of US broadcasting interests and Korean manufacturers has completed a "release candidate" for a mobile digital TV standard that could displace everything else tried in America thus far.

At this time last year, the buzz heading into CES was about which of the two competing cell phone video standards would make its way to American handsets first. The contenders being discussed were: MediaFLO, a delivery mechanism championed by Qualcomm, one of the world's major suppliers of handset equipment; and DVB-H, already decreed by law to be Europe's national mobile TV standard.

A week after the close of the four-year case of Julie Amero, the Connecticut substitute teacher accused of exposing middle-students to online smut, Sunbelt Software CEO Alex Eckelberry doesn't see any real win in the settlement.

"What can I say," he shrugged during a conversation with BetaNews earlier this week concerning the final decision. Ms. Amero, a substitute teacher prosecuted on felony charges after a malware-infected computer in her classroom began spewing ads for adult entertainment sites, agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, pay a $100 fine, and surrender her credentials to teach in the state of Connecticut. "I'm disappointed it ever got this far."

It was just too good to last: Researchers report that spam levels that dropped in the wake of a high-profile takedown are edging back up -- and that a particularly pernicious botnet made it back online Wednesday night.

When two upstream providers chose to pull the plug on McColo earlier this month, the net at large enjoyed an unusual and slightly eerie quiet, as spam levels dropped by as much as 65%. At the time, anti-malware researchers suggested that we enjoy the peace while it lasted...