After one of the worst starts in the history of PCs two years ago, Dell's XPS desktop series has come crawling back, but not without scrapes and bruises along the way. Yesterday it revealed a new 730 model it hopes can recapture Dell's glory.
There are two schools of thought in the consumer PC industry: One believes that the global economy is in such poor shape this year that computer purchases will end up being heavily curtailed, and that the discretionary segment of the market -- the high end -- will absorb the brunt of the blow. The other believes that since the bad economy will impact lower wage earners hardest, higher wage earners will continue spending as they have before, and thus the high end of the market will be an oasis in the desert.
Qmotions, the peripheral manufacturing subsidiary of the Actiga Corp. and a maker of controllers unique to individual sports games, will soon be releasing fully Microsoft-endorsed Xbox 360 wireless controllers.
One of these is called the Big Air, a wireless full-sized skateboard deck controller for skate- and snowboarding games. The Big Air will be an updated version of its X-board, which was a PS2 and Xbox peripheral that retailed for $99.99. Its availability is currently only listed as "Spring 2008," but updates are pending.
Despite his company racking up a $34 million loss this last quarter due entirely to its $1 billion buyout of MySQL, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz voiced optimism yesterday that its ownership of the open source database will start paying off.
During a fiscal third quarter that cost Sun's stockholders four cents per share, Sun closed the acquisitions of both MySQL and Innotek, maker of desktop virtualization products used mainly by crossplatform software developers.
Last week, MySpace opened its Application gallery to the public, allowing third-party developers' apps to be discovered and embedded in users' profiles. Those now highlighted as "featured applications" have reportedly earned that position by paying for it.
The most downloaded applications typically enjoy a place on the first page of MySpace's applications gallery, which premiered last week. Now, however, the gallery has a "featured applications" section that encompasses the top half of the splash page, the prime real estate formerly showing off the most popular gadgets.
Yahoo's social news service Yahoo Buzz, which launched in beta in February, has upgraded its service, adding a widget and expaned RSS feeds.
Principal among the updates is the "Top Buzz" embeddable widget. The 240-700 pixel window can display between one and ten Buzz stories from a chosen subject and be placed in Web sites or blogs.
Two leading Democrats in the US House, who both chair committees overseeing the FCC, are asking for the Commission to place conditions upon its final approval of any merger between the nation's only two satellite radio providers.
Rep. John Dingell (D - Mich.) chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce, while Rep. Edward Markey (D - Mass.) chairs the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, part of the Commerce Committee.
Research firm iSuppli says the high stakes game of "chicken" between memory chip manufacturers is continuing the sharp decline in revenues overall.
While revenues only dropped 7.4 percent sequentially, year-over-year they plummeted 39 percent. Top DRAM producer Samsung padded its market share lead during the quarter, ending at 30.6 percent of the market, but it came at the expense of making a profit.
It could be the very thing the Web has lacked all these years, even with its wealth of intermingled hyperlinks: a markup language for conclusively identifying context. Now, Digg is making the bold attempt to be its biggest "beta tester."
One of the principal deficiencies all these years about HTML or XHTML as a markup language has been the absence of any genuine, built-in feature for explaining to indexing services or even to browsers with intelligent features, just exactly what a page contains at a granular level. Metadata could conceivably help categorize data, assuming everything on a page had the same category; but with more Web pages these days constituting whole blogs, whole-page metadata is rapidly becoming useless.
Microsoft says anecdotal evidence indicates its version of Grand Theft Auto IV is doing much better than Sony's, although Sony seems to dispute that claim.
So far, there are no hard numbers available, so Microsoft's claims cannot be verified. To its defense Sony is disputing the claims as inconsistent with its own reports, although it will not provide more data until further reports are received.
At the Interop show in Las Vegas this week, Netgear continued its focus on SMB customers with its rollout of a new 802.11n wireless access point, a ReadyNAS storage solution, and three gigabit Smart Switches.
"We see strong growth in market demand for our SMB products, especially our ReadyNAS [storage] and Smart Switches," contended Netgear CEO and Chairman Patrick Lo, during a recent financial call with analysts.
Several pieces of evidence were found this week pointing to T-Mobile's launch of a 3G network in select markets today. However, it appears today's launch is only an early step toward a complete UMTS network.
TMO news posted a leaked internal T-Mobile document from April 29, announcing the launch as a part of the company's "Big 5 goal to Deepen Coverage and Begin High-Speed Service Rollout." It clarifies that this phase of 3G only affects the voice channel; all data transmission will still rely on T-Mobile's EDGE network.
Microsoft has hired Mark Hamburg, a 17-year-veteran of Adobe's Photoshop product and most recently its new Lightroom product.
Although Microsoft did not confirm independently to BetaNews at press time, news reports indicate that Hamburg's likely new job is the "Future of OS User Experience" group at the company.
According to analysts Screen Digest, advertising will account for more than 20 percent of all mobile TV revenues on a worldwide basis by 2012. So get ready for the ad-funded games, especially after mobile TV becomes universally available.
Four years from now, more than 60 million ad-funded mobile games will be downloaded each year worldwide, according to results of of a new survey by analyst group Screen Digest.
Microsoft's principal challenge to Adobe's creative suite now officially enters the second stage of its life cycle, with the release this afternoon of Expression Studio 2.
On the one hand, Microsoft is moving its Expression suite for Web developers towards more generally adopted Web standards with a more genuine embrace of PHP in addition to ASP.NET, with the final release today of version 2. On the other hand, it adds complete support for its Silverlight platform, showing it still has intentions to build a platform for the Web -- just not the same one it was building before.
Creative becomes the second company behind Seagate to settle with consumers over exaggerated drive capacity.
Creative was accused of misrepresenting the number of files and hours of songs that players could hold, as well as inflating capacities by as much as seven percent.