Nokia E71 reaches US with hopes to take on BlackBerry, iPhone
Nokia has made its E71 smartphone available to North American consumers, in the company's latest attempt to successfully crack into the smartphone market outside of Europe.
The E71 has a full QWERTY keyboard, 2.4-inch LCD display, built-in 3.2-megapixel camera, microSD memory card slot, and a multimedia player. It connects both to HSDPA and GSM networks, and has WiFi and GPS connectivity. Most notably, the E71 is only 0.39-inches thick, which makes it the thinnest full-QWERTY device available to consumers in North America.
Norton answers McAfee's SiteAdvisor with Safe Web beta
Symantec is beta testing a new product called Safe Web, built on top Norton Internet Security 2009, which performs many of the same functions as competitor McAffee's SiteAdvisor.
Safe Web requires Norton Internet Security 2009 to run on the user's computer. This differs from McAfee's SiteAdvisor offering, which is a standalone plug-in for Internet Explorer, and a Firefox extension that is also compatible with the Macintosh according to BetaNews tests.
HP announces BIOS update, repairs for faulty Nvidia GPUs
HP has announced a "Limited Warranty Service Enhancement" for many of its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia Geforce GPUs, including a wide range of HP Pavillion and Compaq Presario notebooks.
Like Dell's recent BIOS upgrade to correct overheating GPUs, HP announced a similar fix for its HP Pavilion dv2000, HP Pavilion dv6000, HP Pavilion dv9000, Compaq Presario V3000, and Compaq Presario V6000 series notebooks which contain contain 7-series Nvidia GPUs. This defies previous assumptions that the 8-series of Nvidia products were the faulty GPUs the company did not name in the SEC filing describing the problem.
Yahoo, Intel and HP join to create distributed computer 'cloud' for research
Calling it the Cloud Computing Test Bed, HP, Intel and Yahoo today announced a multi-datacenter testing environment to promote internet-scale open source collaboration.
Building upon the success of Yahoo and the Apache Software Foundation's M45 project with Carnegie Mellon University, this collaboration will go several steps further and include six test beds, with each facility offering between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores.
Sprint takes Airave femtocell service nationwide
9:00pm ET July 29, 2008 - It turns out Airave is not yet available nationwide. Sprint contacted BetaNews Tuesday evening to clarify that its writing, "You will be able to use your Airave at this location" actually means customers can use it at some undetermined time in the future, but not now. Sprint says it has not announced a launch date for the Airave service.
While Sprint has been testing Airave in select markets for months, the company has now begun to sell the service nationwide.
Continuing mini-PC trend, Dell rolls out Studio Hybrid 'ultracompact'
Dell today officially introduced two budget-oriented desktop PCs: the ergonomic and "ultracompact" Studio Hybrid, touted as 80 percent smaller than a typical desktop, and the Inspiron 518, a quad-core processor model featuring an optional removable hard drive.
Although both new products might be described as tower PCs, the Hybrid is a very small tower. Measuring only about 196.5mm by 71.5mm, the Studio Hybrid sports the same kinds of ports and connectors as a more conventional PC despite its size.
MSN Direct to connect Web sites with GPS devices over the air
Microsoft is releasing an API that allows third-party Web sites to send location information to MSN Direct-enabled GPS devices wirelessly, a first for such services that previously required a USB sync to work.
One difficulty of using GPS devices is the hassle of typing in a location, or selecting one while driving. Microsoft says the API would make entering destinations easier, as the process could be done on the computer and automatically then transferred to the device.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 brings 64-bit compatibility
Adobe has officially released Photoshop Lightroom 2, following three months of beta testing for the photo management software. It is Adobe's first product supporting 64-bit Windows Vista and OS X.
Lightroom 2 is available now for $299 USD, or $99 USD as an upgrade from the previous release. This workflow enhancing software is billed as "the professional photographer's essential toolbox," and is geared toward users working with large volumes of photos.
Yahoo says DRM issue overblown by media, but will offer refunds
Yahoo told BetaNews that the media was hyping the expiration of the company's DRM certificates and didn't expect a user backlash, but said it has decided to offer refunds to those affected anyway.
Last Week, Yahoo announced in an e-mail to customers that it would remove its DRM keys for authorizing song playback on October 1. This means that although purchased music would continue playing, it cannot be reauthorized, essentially locking it to the current computer. If a user buys a new PC or reinstalls the operating system, the purchased music would no longer be playable.
eBay and software group butt heads over stopping piracy
The SIIA wants eBay to squelch short-term software auctions. Since the start of its anti-counterfeiting initiative, eBay seems to be practicing some other curbs on software banditry, to various degrees. If the two sides can't see eye to eye, will the battle actually land in court?
Although a lawsuit against eBay isn't "pending or on the immediate horizon," the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) has sued other Web sites before, and Keith Kupferschmidt, senior VP of the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA), is very unhappy over what he views as eBay's failure to take real action against software piracy.
Jobs talks about health off the record, but questions remain
Apple CEO Steve Jobs called a reporter at the New York Times to explain his health situation, but his insistence on only talking off the record has done little to assuage the fears of investors.
To many, Steve Jobs is the driving force behind Apple, and his presence across all areas of the company is undeniable. But Jobs' recent health scares, including a previous bout with cancer, have caused many on Wall Street to question the company's insistence on staying secretive.
Microsoft posts videos of users who liked Vista after thinking it was new OS
9:00am ET July 29, 2008 - The videos are now live on the Mojave Experiment Web site.
Microsoft has posted actual videos from its "Mojave Experiment," an effort to dispel negative stereotypes about Vista by making Windows users think they were running a newer operating system that was actually Vista.
Dell cures some Nvidia GPU woes with BIOS update
Dell has issued a BIOS update to prevent its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia graphics cards from overheating.
Notebooks equipped with certain Nvidia GPUs were reportedly failing at abnormally high rates by the graphics company itself in an SEC regulatory filing. At the time, however, the company did not list which configurations were failing, saying only that it was one sold in significant quantities.
Usernames and passwords to San Francisco network exposed in court docs
San Francisco again has control of its own FiberWAN network, but as it compiles evidence to keep distraught network administrator Terry Childs in jail, the city could have opened itself up to a slew of new security problems.
The San Francisco District Attorney's office entered up to 150 usernames and passwords into Exhibit A of the ongoing legal case against Childs. Each account is said to be sensitive and private, and the city has gone through a lot of work to get the accounts back, only to enter them into the public domain through the courtroom filings.
AT&T complains to FCC about Sprint-Clearwire 4G wireless pact
In a bid to quash a proposed merger between Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire around WiMAX, AT&T has now submitted a petition to the FCC.
Sprint announced in May that it would renew its efforts to partner with Clearwire to bring together both companies' WiMAX holdings to build a nationwide broadband wireless network. Valued at about $14.5 billion, the proposed network has financial backing from Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, and Bright House Networks.
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