Toshiba will ship HD DVD drives in all of its laptops beginning in 2008, its senior vice president said Tuesday. While it is unclear what effect the decision will have on the prices of its laptops, typically bundling the high definition drives have resulted in higher retail costs.

Doing so, however, holds promise for the future of the format. According to data from IDC, the company sold 9.2 million notebooks last year, and is in the top five overall in shipments. The company is also planning to use flash memory in its laptops beginning this month, as prices on NAND chips have fallen far enough to make them feasible for such use, it said.

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HTC shot back at Apple on Tuesday, introducing the Touch mobile handset that boasts many of the innovative features of the iPhone in a similar package.

The Taiwanese phone maker, which typically sells its phones directly to carriers that are then branded as that company's own phones, is betting highly on the product. It believes the Touch could contribute significantly to the company's financial performance.

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In a blast from the past, the Netscape Browser, which was resurrected in 2005 by AOL, has become Netscape Navigator once again for version 9.0. The new release, currently in beta, brings a number of new features such as built-in news, URL correction, and link-sharing.

As expected, Netscape Navigator 9 (screenshots) closely integrates with AOL's new Netscape.com site, which lets users vote on stories and leave comments. A new Friends' Activity Sidebar and Tracker provides a quick view of recently posted news and comments on the site.

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Web log software company Six Apart said Tuesday it had released a beta of the newest version of its Movable Type software, as well as announcing the platform would go open source by the end of this quarter.

The release of Movable Type 4.0 returns the software "to its roots," with the company relying heavily on its users to shape the next version of the software. Although many have treated the software like it was open source, in reality it was not.

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The OpenOffice.org development team on Tuesday released the first alpha test version of OpenOffice Aqua, which is built specifically for Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The previous Mac port of OpenOffice required the use of the X11 system, making the software slow and difficult to run.

Although the release is six years in the making, developers warn that the early alpha is still very buggy, and "it may crash and destroy your data." A number of features are still not functional, including printing, PDF export, copy and paste, and multi-monitor support. In addition, OpenOffice Aqua will crash after quitting.

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In an effort to better compete with rival Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com said Tuesday that they would collaborate on several services aimed at small business. The first is a web advertising collaboration where Salesforce.com customers can order ads from the company's website. Other collaborations could include integration with other Google products as well, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Neither company will confirm that the moves are indeed aimed at taking on Microsoft head on, although Google's onine productivity applications could be combined with Salesforce.com's business applications to offer a comprehensive package for enterprise customers, some say.

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Acer is showing strength in the global PC industry, becoming the world's third largest PC maker in the first quarter of 2007, according to data from research firm iSuppli.

The Taiwanese company posted a 42.7 percent increase in shipments over the same quarter last year. That was enough for Acer to take the third spot from rival Lenovo. The Chinese PC manufacturer still leads in desktop PC shipments, but Acer's widening lead in notebooks gave it the number 3 spot overall.

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ORLANDO - Product managers at TechEd 2007 here gave BetaNews an early glimpse of Microsoft's next videoconferencing application, which will tie into both Office Communications Server (which we saw in detail at WinHEC three weeks ago) and Microsoft's own subscription-based conferencing services.

Office Live Meeting 2007 will give attendees of virtual meetings and conferences a single, simple frame from which to view conferences - an important advance, especially in view of the abundance of browser-based conference schemes where the video appears in a postage stamp.

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While Apple bills the iPhone as one of the only ways to get iTunes on your mobile phone, mobile multimedia company Melodeo is working on a way to change that. The company said Tuesday it will offer a service that allows users to use information stored in their iTunes playlists and then play songs on their phones. Since it is a streaming service, it will likely cost much less then downloading actual copies.

Melodeo has not decided on final prices for the offering, which is currently in beta. It is carefully considering the current copyright laws surrounding digital music to ensure any service would not run into legal troubles later. A final version of the service is expected within the next three months, possibly with the backing of a major wireless carrier, it told Reuters.

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ORLANDO - If you follow the crowd at TechEd, eventually they'll lead you to what's truly important. So in the wake of some schedule changes here this morning, we let the crowd lead us to what turned out to be one of the more significant demos here: Microsoft product manager Dan Harman showed off the new Server Manager that downloaders of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 are seeing for the first time.

Server Manager completely replaces the "Manage Your Server" Wizard, which we were surprised to hear (if not entirely surprised to learn) was among the least well-received enhancements to Windows Server 2003. As Harman freely admitted, this Wizard "didn't provide the functionality" that admins were looking for, was too lightweight, and tried to hold admins by the hand as though they were users.

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Ask.com on Tuesday launched its redesigned website, complete with new search technology, a three-panel design, and other new features aimed at differentiating itself from its competition.

Technology called 'Morph' provides the basis for most searches. Through algorithmic content-matching and ranking technology, Morph takes the results from several different sources and transforms the page layout to accommodate it.

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Apple updated its MacBook Pro line of laptops Tuesday, giving the computers slightly faster processors, more memory, and better graphics capabilities across the board.

The actual feature set of the MacBook Pro has not changed, and it still includes the 15 and 17-inch models with built in iSight, MagSafe Power Adapter, and 802.11 capabilities.

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ORLANDO - Enterprise-wide operating system customers purchase their licenses in bulk, and for them, the value of their subscriptions needs to be periodically refreshed. So Microsoft has been looking for ways to infuse Vista - which won't be upgraded substantially within the next 12 months, even though customers purchase annual licenses - with periodic value increases.

This is why one of this week's TechEd announcements is especially important: Software Assurance licensees will soon be receiving a Windows utility called System Center Desktop Error Monitoring as part of the Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) they receive with their licenses.

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Four new unpatched vulnerabilities have been published for Internet Explorer and Firefox, with two coming for each browser. The flaws were discovered by security researcher Michal Zalewski who published them to the Full Disclosure mailing list on Monday.

The most severe of the bugs is an issue in IE that could lead to cookie stealing and/or setting, page hijacking, and memory corruption. Zalewski referred to it as the "bait and switch vulnerability."

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ORLANDO - At TechEd 2007 this morning, Microsoft's senior vice president Bob Muglia generated the biggest applause of the day (not related to the Christopher Lloyd cameo) by announcing the new Server Core installation option in the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 will have as one of its ready-made "roles" the ability to rapidly appropriate Internet Information Services in a command-line-only environment.

This role should make it tremendously easier for admins to provision and deploy low-overhead Web services very rapidly, and could finally close the similarities gap between itself and the world's most deployed Web server software, Apache.

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