Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

We’re getting more details about that upcoming Asus Eee-book reader we told you about last month.

The company is looking at two versions: budget and premium, a spokesman for Asus in the U.K. told the Times of London.

But most intriguing is that at least one version of the reader, the higher-end one, would have a hinged spine, opening like a traditional book and closing into tablet form. This design would let users view the text of their book on one screen (turning its pages using the touch screen), while browsing a Web page on the other.

One screen could also act as a virtual keypad, according to the Times report, which would move the device into laptop territory.

The Asus e-reader would have a full color screen, and it may also feature speakers, a Webcam, and a mic for Skype, enabling cheap phone calls over the Internet, the Times reports.

As for price, we don’t have hard numbers for you yet, but Asus is known for low-cost products like the ultraportable Eee PC, and speculation has the budget e-reader going for around $163 (Sony’s Reader Pocket Edition, in comparison, runs from $200 to $300; Amazon’s Kindle 2 also goes for around $300).

Expect to meet the Eee-readers by the end of the year if all goes according to plan.

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Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cell phones, on Wednesday announced new phones loaded with more music features and better integration with Facebook, as well as pricing for its upcoming Netbook.

Nokia N97 Mini

(Credit: Nokia )

The company announced the new phones and services at its Nokia World Conference in Stuttgart, Germany.

Tops on the list of new phones is the N97 Mini, a slightly smaller version of Nokia’s existing flagship N97 smartphone. This new, smaller N97 has a shorter battery life than the earlier device and also less memory (8GB compared to 32GB), and a smaller touch-screen display. The device is expected to ship in October. Its list price at 450 euros, or about $639, is not much less than that of the full-fledged N97, which initially went on sale in the U.S. for $700.

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Control4 Energy Systems, one of a growing number of home energy display providers, said on Tuesday it will supply energy monitors in a planned smart-grid project in rural Texas.

The home energy monitor–a five-inch-wide monitor that resembles a car GPS unit–will display electricity usage in real time and provide consumers the ability to program a thermostat, according to Will Holford, the public affairs manager at Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative.

The system works by using Zigbee wireless networking within the home to connect the monitor to the thermostat, which communicates with the utility via a smart meter. Other providers in the project, which the utility hopes to begin work on in the second quarter next year, include smart meter provider eMeter and Silver Spring Networks which provides a networking card for the meter.

Control4, which is perhaps better known for its home media management systems, raised $17.3 million in July to expand into the energy monitoring business.

Control4′s display for managing home energy along with home media.

(Credit: Control4.)

Home energy monitors, or in-home displays, are a key piece of the more advanced smart-grid programs being pursued by utilities. By providing more data and ways to program appliances, utilities hope that consumers will be able to find ways to shave back on consumption.

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eBay is expected to announce Tuesday that it has reached a deal to sell its Internet telephone service, Skype, to a group of private investors, The New York Times reported late Monday.

The investment group will reportedly include Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital group launched in July by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and co-founder of Opsware, and Ben Horowitz, also co-founder of Opsware. A price was not revealed, but previous reports put eBay’s asking price for Skype at about $2 billion.

eBay representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Online auction giant eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 with the plans to offer customers the ability to discuss their transactions in real-time. But over the course of the four years, eBay apparently found that its acquisition failed to provide the synergies it sought.

In 2007, eBay said it would take a $900 million so-called impairment write-down against the value of Skype, meaning that eBay had been forced to reassess the value of the Internet telephony company relative to its overall business. By recording a charge, the company essentially announced it had taken a loss on its original investment.

When eBay announced John Donahoe as its new CEO in 2008, Donahoe indicated that the company would take a year to evaluate the future of its online phone and video-conferencing service.

In April, eBay announced plans to spin off Skype, with an IPO in the first half of next year.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were interested in repurchasing the company, with the aid of private equity firms KKR, Warburg Pincus, Elevation Partners, and Providence.

Source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10322833-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

HTC’s Touch Pro2 is among the new phones expected to ship with Windows Mobile 6.5.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is hoping that a new crop of phones this fall will help the company in its quest to stay relevant in the cell phone market.

The software maker said on Tuesday that the first phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 will launch worldwide on October 6 and will include phones running on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless.

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Best known for its ZoneAlarm firewall, Check Point Software has announced updates for ZoneAlarm’s more full-featured security suites. Available in two versions, ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2010 gives users a robust firewall, antivirus and antispyware, and parental control package for $50, while ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010 adds Web browsing protection, system tune-up tools, backup options, and anti-phishing technology for $70.

ZoneAlarm is still best known for its firewall, but it currently offers users much more than that. See what’s available in ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010, which is similar to but has more features than ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2010.

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel’s best Core i7?

Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel’s next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.

That’s IBM’s widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week’s Hot Chips conference. But if you’re interested, you’d better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn’t talking about pricing, but large Power servers can cost more than $10,000 per processor.

IBM’s forthcoming Power7 server processor has eight cores, manages 32 threads, and includes 32MB of on-chip embedded DRAM cache. Power7 also has the highest levels of off-chip bandwidth ever achieved by a microprocessor.

Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, released Friday, by default loads with a 32-bit kernel, despite running 64-bit applications.

While Mac OS X version 10.6 ships with a number of 64-bit native applications, the kernel itself defaults to 32-bit, unless the user holds down the “6″ and “4″ keys during boot time, at which point the 64-bit kernel is loaded. Only Apple’s X-Serve products, using Snow Leopard Server, boot into a 64-bit kernel by default.

“For the most part, everything that they experience on the Mac, from the 64-bit point of view, the applications, the operating system, is all going to be 64-bit,” Stuart Harris, software product marketing manager at Apple Australia said.

Harris said that at this stage there were very few things, such as device drivers, that required 64-bit mode at the kernel level but the option is available.

“But we’re trying to make it as smooth as possible, so people don’t end up finding that ‘oh, that doesn’t work’ because it’s not available yet,” he said.

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Android, iPhone and iPod Touch users are all highly engaged with applications and frequently download them to their devices, according to a new survey from AdMob.

However, Android has a much smaller base of devices and thus has more upside ahead.

AdMob, a company that tracks mobile Web and application usage, found that Android and iPhone users download nine to 10 apps a month and iPod Touch users download 18 a month. More than half of the Android and iPhone users spend more than 30 minutes a day using apps, according to the survey results released Thursday (PDF).

That’s some serious engagement and a lot of runway for Android. Why? Android-powered devices–T-Mobile’s MyTouch is the headliner–are hard to come by. However, that’s changing as Motorola will be taking Android handsets to large carriers like Verizon Wireless in the fourth quarter.

Source :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10319403-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20