With the frenzy over Apple's latest iPhone finally subsiding, Sprint has rolled out the Palm Treo 800w, a new Treo phone that uses Windows Mobile 6.1 as its operating environment.
As previously reported in BetaNews, Palm has seemed to be focusing more on its newer and lower-end Centro lately, in efforts to bounce back from the huge dent the iPhone is making in mobile handheld market shares.
Mumbai-based Valuable Group acquired the video-on-demand service last week for what could be considered pennies on the dollar, according to reports.
MovieBeam promised a push video-on-demand service which delivered ten movies per week to customers using a special set-top box that receives content wirelessly. As it was not an Internet service and required an antenna to receive content, Moviebeam was only available in 31 markets.
Today, Apple announced the iPhone's opening weekend figures, claiming it had passed the one million sales mark on Sunday, and that 10 million apps were downloaded in the same three-day period.
One by one on Friday, not individual AT&T stores, but entire cities, reported selling out of the device. By mid-morning, Chicago AT&T stores reported total liquidation. By noon, all of New York City's had sold out.
Taking advantage of the way iTunes sorts applications alphabetically, some developers have found loopholes to put their apps at the top of the list.
Spaces, symbols, and numbers are treated alphabetically before letter A in ASCII code. Thus by using these characters, a developer can ensure his or her application a high placement when iTunes sorts the titles alphabetically.
Why won't Yahoo part with its search business when Microsoft would be offering a rich amount for it, asks Carl Icahn this morning? The answer could lie in the component of the deal that justifies being offered more than triple its value.
In an open letter to Yahoo shareholders this morning (entire press release available here), Icahn Partners chief Carl Icahn revealed that a deal he attempted to broker over the weekend between Microsoft and Yahoo would have resulted in Microsoft owning more than just Yahoo's search business. The most valuable item on Icahn's list of transferrable assets was not the search division -- that was #2 -- but rather a line-item described as "$12.5B in Asian Assets," valued at $9 per share.
On Sunday, Microsoft officially announced the $50 price reduction to the 20 GB Xbox 360 for the US, as well as the introduction of a 60 GB model at the $349 price position.
Employees of several consumer electronics retailers provided corroborative leaks last week, showing sales circulars advertising the Microsoft console's price reduction.
BetaNews has learned that, on Monday, NEC will roll out plans to include remotely manageable anti-virus technology in PC notebooks, running outside of the Windows OS in Linux-based HyperSpace firmware from Phoenix Technologies.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Shauli Chaudhuri, vice president of marketing at Phoenix Technologies, told BetaNews this week that NEC will be among the first PC manufacturers to use its HyperSpace technology.
The next in Activision's popular line of rhythm-based music simulation games is scheduled for release in Fall 2008, and is single-handedly changing the style of the game with the addition of many new features.
World Tour will follow in the footsteps of Rock Band, offering a drum kit and vocal microphone in addition to the expected guitar controllers, which have reportedly also been upgraded. An eight-player "Battle of the Bands" mode, extended character customization, and online career mode, as well as "the largest on-disc set list in a music-rhythm game to date," have been added. A complete set list, however, has not yet been released.
Livescribe's microprocessor-embedded, audio-enabled digital Pulse Smartpen -- an upcoming gadget that made its first bow at Demo earlier this year -- is now expanding its reach, with an Apple SDK already in the works.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - The fancy new pen uses the same dot-laden paper as the Fly pentop computer produced by LeapFrog, a company where Livescribe founder Jim Marggraff used to be a top exec. The higher-end Pulse Smartpen also comes with two microphones, along with an application called Paper Replay which records what it hears while you're writing on the school-ruled digitized notebook paper.
In my three plus years of covering Apple, its MobileMe product is probably the most exciting concept, in my opinion.
I've often longed for a viable "push" solution that wouldn't break the bank, and would operate much like Exchange does. In concept, MobileMe does everything I need it to do, pushing information from my PC and Mac to my phone and vice versa.
While the upgrade to the company's set-top box was advertised as adding support for remote control of iTunes and MobileMe, it also fixed some potentially serious flaws.
All six of the issues addressed with this last batch of patches deal with the potential for arbitrary code execution, with all but one also possibly leading to crashes of the device. Three of the flaws can be exploited through movie files, two through QuickTime, and the last through PICT images.
Just a few blocks away from the Moscone Center, where Steve Jobs and company host Macworld and WWDC every year, the enthusiasm for Apple's latest product launch was apparent.
SAN FRANCISCO (BetaNews) - Purchasing products in the Apple Store here typically can be an interesting experience, as it's quite common to exit a Jobs keynote and head to the store just a few blocks away, with Apple employees still unaware of what was announced.
Surveillance specialist Lorex now plans to release two new wireless camera systems for home security, BetaNews has learned, including a night vision-enabled system coming this fall that can stream over the Internet.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Lorex' LW20022 wireless video security system -- list priced at $249 -- is expected to ship in two weeks. And also at this week's Digital Life press preview, Lorex demo'd an Internet-enabled, high-resolution Easy Connect Network camera.
BetaNews correspondents in Maryland and Michigan are seeing first-hand problems as a result of significant system outages affecting both AT&T and iTunes. Many buyers still can't activate their phones hours later.
2:30 pm EDT July 11, 2008 - Six and a half hours after the launch of the iPhone 3G, Apple and AT&T continue to struggle with activation problems, leaving many without any sort of working phone. Although they may be able to get their new AT&T service active, iPhone 3G buyers must still activate the device via iTunes, and Apple's servers can't seem to handle the load.
BetaNews has confirmed through testing that CheckPoint's latest build of ZoneAlarm, issued yesterday in response to a problem arising from a Microsoft patch to a major DNS security problem, fixes a major problem with Internet access.
When Microsoft issued a major fix on Tuesday, to the way it handles the Domain Name System, that fix was necessary in order to avert a possible severe exploit of the entire Internet. Microsoft was cooperating in a joint effort, which also involved Linux distributions, to upgrade the world's DNS servers.