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15 Aug 2009 19:32:10 GMT

In just another confirmation of an upcoming, and highly anticipated price cut, a CAG user has taken a picture of an FYE poster that shows that the 80GB model of the PlayStation 3 will see a price drop to $299 USD and the 160GB model will drop to $399. Sony is expected to announce the price cut at the Gamecon event next week, along with the probable release of a Slim model PS3.

15 Aug 2009 20:02:37 GMT

In June we reported that small BitTorrent client uTorrent was far and away the most popular client and the numbers remain the same two months later, according to TorrentFreak. BitComet continues to lose market share, which is easily eaten up by front runners uTorrent and Vuze. The data comes from over 165,000 unique users and is collected by the Tribler team from Delft University of Technology. The "other" category holds 20 different clients that failed to reach the 1 percent plateau. "Unknown" clients were unidentifiable by libTorrent and thus get their own category. Transmission for Macs and Linux saw the biggest share gains, moving up 44 percent to almost 3 percent of total market share. Vuze saw strong gains as well. The full chart from TF:

15 Aug 2009 00:31:43 GMT

Earlier this month, China Unicom and Apple finally came to an agreement to bring the popular smartphone, the iPhone, to China, albeit with Wi-Fi missing. Today, showing they mean business, the Chinese carrier has ordered 5 million iPhone 3GS units, for about $1.46 billion USD. As a notable comparison, Apple sold just over 5 million iPhone units globally in the last quarter. Says China Unicom GM of Customer Development Yu Zaonan, via BGR, the 3GS will sell for ¥2,400/$352 (16GB model) or ¥4,800/$704 (32GB model). Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst from Sanford C Bernstein, expects Apple to make profit of ¥1100 for each unit sold.

15 Aug 2009 01:24:23 GMT

Apple and AT&T have been sued this week in Louisiana over alleged misrepresentation of MMS availability on the iPhone. The class action suit says, according to TGDaily, that "both companies aggressively promoted the MMS features of iPhone OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS using advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, direct mailers, and on the Internet," although it was not really available. There are so far over 10,000 people represented by the suit. AT&T is added in the suit because plaintiffs allege that the carrier does not have cell towers that support MMS. As proof they point to the WWDC 2009 keynote where an Apple created slide does not show AT&T as a vendor that supports MMS. It will be interesting to see where the suit goes, given that AT&T has noted that MMS support will be coming "by late summer."

15 Aug 2009 01:51:54 GMT

Last week we reported that Dell was set to release an Android-based phone in China, and today BoyGeniusReport has the specs and an early, blurry pic. The phone is "launch ready" and could launch as soon as next Monday. The specs: * Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE class 12 * Size: 68.6cc * 103g grams weight * Dimensions: 58 x 122 x 11.7mm * Display: 3.5″ nHD 640×360 LCD, 18-bit, 262K colors * OTA capable * Microsoft Exchange support * Google, AIM, Yahoo and MSN IM support * 3 megapixel auto-focus, flash, 8x digital zoom camera with 30fps video shooting mode, built in photo editor * USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR * A-GPS * On-screen QWERTY keyboard, hardwriting recognition, multi touch UI * MicroSD slot Pic via BGR:

15 Aug 2009 02:44:09 GMT

The UK retailer Argos has announced it has discontinued sales of the 60GB model of the Xbox 360, adding more fuel to the rumor that the model is being phased out and that the 120GB Elite model will be coming down in price to fill the price point at $299 USD or GBP 169. "We are very sorry but Microsoft have discontinued this line," says the retailer's site. Earlier this week, a leaked Meijer catalog revealed that in the United States at least, the Elite was coming down in price on August 30th. The much anticipated price cut should occur at the same time as Sony's long rumored PlayStation 3 price cut and possible release of a Slim PS3.

15 Aug 2009 03:33:29 GMT

According to video game market analyst Michael Pachter, PlayStation 3 stock is dwindling in the UK and Japan, implying a new model (Slim PS3) is in the works as well as possible price cuts. Speaking to VG247, Pachter noted that retail channels in both regions are "drying up" with orders being held until the end of the month. "The retail commentary I’ve seen has come out of the UK. We heard Japanese retail a few weeks ago say they weren’t going to be getting any more PS3s after August 8, and now we’re starting to hear UK retail say they cannot re-order PS3s until month-end," added Pachter. "And that suggests there will be a model change." Pachter also said the upcoming Gamecom should bring big news from Sony, the PS3 Slim, as well as a price cut on the current models. "If Sony’s practice is the same as it was in the past, and the Slim is more of a redesign of the components to drive down cost, then I think we will get a price cut."

14 Aug 2009 09:07:00 EST

Well, clandestinely is perhaps too strong -- and long -- a word for it, but the fact is that Intel's thoroughly roadmapped and unnecessarily delayed desktop refresh has already happened for folks in Taiwan. Our buddies at TweakTown even went to the trouble of putting together a video of Taipei's computer market, which didn't seem to suffer any shortages of Lynnfield parts. In US currency, the prices above are $204 for the Core i5-750, $296 for the i7-860 and $593 for the i7-870, which at least confirm earlier indications on the matter, but come on Intel, if you're not going to announce these things, at least start selling them on the sly over here too.Continue reading Video: Intel is clandestinely selling Core i5 and new i7 chips in Taiwan DesktopsVideo: Intel is clandestinely selling Core i5 and new i7 chips in Taiwan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

14 Aug 2009 12:07:00 EST

China's efforts to preload the Green Dam censorware on all PCs in the country have been going pretty poorly so far, with accusations of software piracy and manufacturer displeasure causing delays. Now the government is backing down from that stance, stating that the original regulation wasn't "expressed clearly, and gave everyone the impression that [Green Dam] was mandatory." For home computers, that means the internet filtering software will likely continue to be bundled as an optional (and inactive) extra -- something Acer, ASUS, Lenovo and Sony have been doing since early July -- but if you're at school, an internet cafe or some other public access point, expect to see Green Dam running, alive and well. Censorship is dead, long live censorship. [Via CNET] Desktops, LaptopsChina backtracks, makes Green Dam 'optional' originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

14 Aug 2009 00:03:22 GMT

The U.S. games industry has seen its fifth straight month of double-digital decline news from the NPD Group. Combining all hardware, software and accessories on the market, gaming sales dropped 29 percent from July 2008 during the month, raking in around $848.90 million compared to last July's $1.19 billion total. A dramatic drop was witnessed for hardware, with sales falling 37 percent. The Nintendo DS platform topped the charts having sold 538,900 units, but the Nintendo Wii had an uncharacteristic month, selling 252,500 units. While lower than usual for the Wii, it still beat the Xbox 360 by almost 50,000 units. Microsoft's console took third place with 202,900 units - 2,000 shy of its July 2008 total. In fourth place, Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) moved 122,800 units, followed by the PlayStation 3 (PS3) with 121,800 units and finally, the PlayStation 2 (PS2) at 108,000 units. Total hardware sales amounted to $280.94 million. Software sales dropped 26 percent in July compared to July 2008, bringing in $436.99 million. Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort topped the charts, selling 508,200 copies. The only other title to make it to the top 10 was Electronic Arts' NCAA Football. The game came in second place on the Xbox 360 platform with 376,500 copies sold, and third place with 237,400 copies sold for the PS3 (so you could give it the #1 title spot fairly). The sale of accessories dropped 12 percent to $130.97 million.

14 Aug 2009 00:13:12 GMT

AT&T Inc. has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against Cablevision Systems Corp, alleging anti-competitive practices. AT&T is seeking to gain access to HD programming from the Madison Square Garden (MSG) network, which is the same goal as Verizon Communications Inc, which filed a similar complaint with the FCC just last month. The content they seek to gain access to includes games played by the New York Knicks basketball team, New York Rangers, New York Islanders and the New Jersey Devils ice hockey teams. According to AT&T, in its complaint to the FCC, Cablevision engages in conduct that prevents other providers from offering a competing service to customers, which is claims is against FCC rules. AT&T providers the programming to customers in Connecticut but in standard definition. "Their customers already receive every single game offered on MSG and MSG Plus," Cablevision said. "Now they want the FCC to force MSG to hand over its HD programming, which is a product of many years of technological development and investment. The idea that a phone company more than 15 times our size needs a regulatory bailout is absurd."

14 Aug 2009 00:25:53 GMT

Google Inc.'s plan to acquire On2 Technologies in a deal worth around $106.5 million may not go as smoothly as both had hoped. Some On2 shareholders are unhappy with the deal, which they believe undervalues their stock, as well as other terms of the deal. They also point out that the deal was announced just one day before the company released its best quarterly results in 18 months. A lawsuit, seeking class-action status, was filed in Delaware Chancery Court on Monday. It requests a permanent injunction blocking the deal from going ahead, as well as calling the defendants to account for all damages caused. But does the deal really undervalue the stock, when the 60 cents a share deal represented a 57 percent premium from the closing price of On2's stock the day it was announced? Well, the lawsuit says that on May 13, On2 stock was traded at 65 cents and that in 2008, the price reached $1.16. According to Reuters, the stock started the second quarter at 30 cents and ended it above 40 cents. "Defendants rushed to announce the proposed transaction at $0.60 per share on August 5th ahead of the positive earnings results announced the next day, thereby placing a cap on the company's stock price," the suit reads. The acquisition will deliver Google valuable technology that could in time bring down its projected bandwidth costs for the YouTube service, which keeps on growing, by improving the video compression.

14 Aug 2009 00:40:43 GMT

A claim made that an Apple iPhone exploded in France is the first such report involving an iPhone, after several have been made about the company's iPod since it was released. Marie-Dominique Kolega says her 18 year old son was struck in the eye after his girlfriend's iPhone started hissing, and shattered. She has threatened to file a complaint against Apple over the incident. "My son was frightened but he did not lose an eye," Kolega, of Aix-en-Provence in southern France, told AFP. US television station KIRO recently did a report on a number of cases of exploding iPods that have led to injuries or property damage. The station claimed that Apple's lawyers had tried to prevent it from getting access to 800 pages of documents from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in California. In the pages were information about 15 burn and fire-related incidents that have been blamed on Apple's iPods. The documents put the blame on overheating lithium-ion batteries, and stated that reports dropped off when Apple changed the batteries in use. Electronics do bad things on occasion, but if you compare the number of reported iPod exploding cases, which would appear to be a low number, against the millions that have been sold, the chances of becoming victim to an exploding iPod - or iPhone - are probably extremely low, it just makes for good TV for a station like KIRO.

14 Aug 2009 00:53:50 GMT

In another challenge to Amazon's Kindle, Sony has decided to do away with its proprietary software and instead convert all of its e-book store into the ePub industry standard format. Sony made the move to "allows Sony to make its e-book store compatible with multiple devices and its Reader devices open to multiple sources for content," according to the Japanese consumer electronics giant. It said that converting its e-book store to ePub is an effort to take the confusion out of the digital book formats. Instead of using its proprietary copy protection software on the Sony Reader, it will use an anti-copying solution that has been developed by Adobe with multi-platform support. "Consumers should not have to worry about which device works with which store," Steve Haber, president of Sony's Digital Reading Business Division, said in a statement. "With a common format and common content protection solution they will be able to shop around for the content they want regardless of where they get it or what device they use." The International Digital Publishing Forum backs the ePub format, which was developed by a group of 60 companies and organizations.

14 Aug 2009 01:17:31 GMT

Following a number of complaints at the revelation that Sony imposed a block on Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) in some VAIO models - which is present in the Core 2 Duo chip that ships with affected VAIO notebooks - Sony has promised The Register that it will make an effort to clarify the policy more clearly on its websites. Customers were unhappy to learn about the limitation in the VAIO BIOS after buying a model which Sony recommends for the upcoming Windows 7, because it blocks Windows 7's XP-mode. It is a feature that has received considerable media attention and put some minds at ease about going with Windows 7, so it isn't inconceivable that customers who saw Sony advertise VAIO notebooks for Windows 7 assumed they could use this feature, even if they didn't know the VT technology is included in the CPU. If they did know, then they most likely would have been unaware that Sony has disabled it since its advertisements fail to declare the fact. "I'll take the action to be clearer on our site that VT will not be enabled," Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert promised The Register. He said the Vaio Z series would be "top of the list" for getting VT support in the US but said he could not comment on getting the BIOS of Sony VAIO's in Europe working with VT.

14 Aug 2009 01:24:15 GMT

Gartner has released their second quarter smartphone sales data this week, which shows Nokia clearly still in the lead, but slowly losing market share to RIM, Apple and HTC. The numbers are for worldwide sales and shows Nokia with 45 percent market share, down 2.4 percent year-on-year. Apple exploded to 13.3 percent from 2.8 percent and RIM and HTC made smaller gains at the expense of Nokia, Fujitsu and "other" companies. The chart, via AIS:

14 Aug 2009 05:33:28 GMT

A new study, conducted by Pear Analytics, has revealed that most of the Tweets written on Twitter are "pointless babble." The study placed Tweets into six categories, pointless babble, conversational, pass-along value, spam, news and self-promotion and found that most Tweets fell into the first category. "Mostly many people still perceive Twitter as just mindless babble of people telling you what they are doing minute-by-minute; as if you care they are eating a sandwich at the moment," said Ryan Kelly, a study researcher, via Channel Wire. The study used 2000 English-language Tweets from Americans, taking in Tweets for 6 hours a day, for two weeks period. The "pointless babble" category was over 44 percent, followed by "conversational" at 37.6 percent, "pass-along value" in third at 8.7 percent, "self-promotion" at 5.85 percent and finally "news" at 3.6 percent. "With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else," added Pear Analytics researchers. "We will be conducting this same study every quarter to identify other trends in usage."

13 Aug 2009 17:01:45 GMT

The creators of the PlayStaion 3 (PS3) and Wii consoles, and the iPhone, have been handed yet another patent dispute complaint, this time from a company called Bandspeed. The company filed a lawsuit in the Western District Court of Texas last week. It claims that the manner in which the said products handle wireless communication channels infringes on two of its patents. The first patent was issued in 2006 and details a method for a device to select a wireless channel to facilitate communication based on performance, which the second patent, issued on August 4, 2009, details managing the channels, again based on performance. Bandspeed describes itself as the "leader in next-generation Wi-Fi management." The company alleges that Apple, Nintendo and Sony's products are infringing its patents, and is seeking damages from the court and a permanent injunction to prevent continued violation.

13 Aug 2009 17:17:37 GMT

Microsoft has had a long-running campaign against businesses that use and/or sell pirated copies of its software, whether its actually sold as a counterfeit product on a disc, or a pre-installed on a HDD by a PC dealer. In the UK, it has taken action against more than 100 high street retailers in just the last 18 months or so. One of the companies that it caught, and is now working with, is PC Support in Worcester. Christine Throup of the company, told The Register, "We recognize that we weren’t installing Microsoft software correctly, and that’s something we take seriously. We’ll be working with Microsoft over the next few weeks to make sure what we do falls within their software rules from now on." Ten other companies also have reached a settlement with Microsoft having been caught in the act (list at source). Microsoft reminds consumers that PCs with pre-loaded Windows installations should also come with the appropriate documents to prove that it is genuine software. The company provides a discounted replacement service for consumers who unknowingly bought unlicensed copies of Microsoft's operating systems.

13 Aug 2009 17:37:03 GMT

On Wednesday, a California appeals court overturned a previous ruling that had declared Kaleidescape's DVD storage machine legal, siding with the film industry in the dispute. The decision mirrors a court decision the previous day that resulted in an injunction being placed on RealNetworks' RealDVD software and Facet prototype HDD-equipped DVD player. In March 2007, a District court judge agreed with Kaleidescape's position that nothing in the Content Scrambling System (CSS) license it obtained from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) forbade it from creating hardware that could copy and store digital content from movie DVDs. The appeals court disagreed. "We're obviously disappointed by the court's decision" said Michael Malcolm, Kaleidescape's CEO. "Our plan is to go to the Supreme Court of California. We're confident that were not in breach of our contract with the DVDCCA and until then our products remain fully legal and licensed." The film industry believes it has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on its side, which has provisions against technology that can be used to circumvent copy protection mechanisms and facilitate illegal copying. However, at issue is whether consumers are allowed to make copies for personal use - fair use, and none of the rulings of the past few days have answered that question. In fact, in the RealDVD decision, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel commented that it may in fact be technically legal to do. "It may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual's computer," Patel wrote, "a federal law (the DMCA) has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies."

13 Aug 2009 19:29:11 GMT

According to Cowan and Company analyst Doug Creutz, the upcoming expected price cuts on the Sony PS3, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii may not help spark sales in the United States as predicted. Creutz says the ongoing economic downturn has consumers still pressured and even large discounts may not help boost the lagging market. "We are concerned that, given pressures on the consumer, price cuts may not have the stimulative impact to hardware and software sales that they have had in the past," says Creutz. The analyst did note however that price cuts would benefit each console, if the Wii was cut to $199, PS3 160GB down $100, and the Xbox 360 Elite to $299. "We expect hardware price cuts on all platforms by September, with announcements possibly as early as next week’s Gamescom," Creutz noted, via GI.biz.

13 Aug 2009 20:12:27 GMT

The latest Apple rumor today from multiple Internet sources is that the company has scheduled an event for the week of September 7th, most likely to announce a new iPod Touch as well as iTunes 9 and "Cocktail". Apple normally holds an event after Labor Day, normally to launch updated iPods and iTunes software so the date does not seem to far out of the ordinary. The expected iPod Touch revision will add a camera and a mic, as well as video recording and editing software. The event would also put Steve Jobs back in the spotlight for a keynote address, his first since returning to work after a 2009 liver transplant.

13 Aug 2009 20:51:30 GMT

According to newly leaked emails, it appears that Microsoft knew about i4i's XML patent but decided to go ahead with Word anyways. "We saw [i4i's products] some time ago and met its creators. Word 11 will make it obsolete," said one email from Martin Sawicki, a member of Microsoft's XML for Word development team. "It looks great for XP though." The email was written before the release of Office 2003, when Word was in its 11th edition. Microsoft lost the case yesterday to i4i, and a judge ruled that the software giant must cease selling Word 2003 and 2007 in the United States in 60 days, cutting into a $3 billion revenue business. Microsoft has a plethora of options, but a few seem most likely if an appeal fails. The company can update Word to circumvent the infringing aspects, which IW explains is the "program's ability to open and read documents that contain custom XML—a form of the Extensible Markup Language format." The company could also settle with i4i for royalties. If anything, Microsoft can buy the patent or the company. Regardless, Word will still be on retail shelves in 60 days.