Latest news

For consumers hoping to get their Apple iPhone 4 early, watch out, you may be in for a multiple week wait.

Apple's official store is now showing that iPhone 4 pre-orders will ship by July 14th, a big-time delay from the expected July 2nd ship date.

Yesterday the company said they sold 600,000 of the device on June 15th, the first day of pre-orders, with the demand so high that the AT&T web site had to take down the pre-order form and call in specialists.

Apple apologized for the lack of supply yesterday: "Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock."

If you want your device closer to launch date on June 24th, Radio Shack, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy should have a limited number of devices in-store.

While it is expected to become a huge market in just a few small years, 3D HDTVs are having a modest early adopter period in Europe, says retail analyst GfK.

Consumers in Europe have purchased 25,000 3D-capable TVs as of May 31st 2010, with sales expect to grow significantly with the release of a number of new devices this month.

Overall, 252 million TVs are expected to be sold, globally, in 2010.

GfK says "every notable manufacturer" either currently offers, or will offer within months, a 3D-capable HDTV, and that interest is growing from the consuming public.

A recent study has shown that the majority of consumers interested in buying a 3D TV are avid gamers, with 27 percent saying they plan to purchase one within the next year.

Sony recently revealed the first 3D games available for the PS3, the console which has had the capability to playback 3D content for a few months.

Nokia has revealed that all smartphones it releases from 2011 on will feature near-field communication (NFC) technology, a welcomed announced as NFC-backers feared Nokia was backing off on its long-term support plans for NFC. Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive VP for markets, made today's announcement at the Mobey Forum's 10th anniversary meeting in Helsinki.

Vanjoki was unable to give specific details about the new smartphone models, but delegates were informed that information would be made available "in due course." Vanjoki said that the handsets will support "all open business models," suggesting that they will support both the Single Wire Protocol (SWP) and other secure element formats such as MicroSD cards, or possibly an embedded security element.

Using NFC technology, users can avail of a proximity payment system to carry out transactions, such as paying for public transport. Besides having the NFC to facilitate wireless communications, the handset would also need a lot of various elements to be stored safely that control the system securely. Operators have lobbied for the SWP standard which would store all of this important data in the SIM and facilitate such features.

On Monday, Microsoft officially launched Kinect, the motion control system that had been formerly dubbed "Project Natal."

The software giant, however, would not set an official price for the product at E3 this year.

On Tuesday, GameStop put the system on sale for $150 USD while also offering up a bundle with an Arcade console and Kinect for $299.99 and an Elite console with Kinect for $399.99.

Today, more retailers have followed suit, with Amazon, Best Buy and Wal-Mart all offering the system for $150, as well.

With four major retailers now offering the device for the same price, it seems the pre-order price is Microsoft's MSRP on the system.

The Kinect is compatible with all current Xbox 360 models as well as the unreleased Slim console.

At E3, Sony also unveiled its Move motion control system, pricing the two-part controller at $80 USD.

Lenovo announced its first 3D laptop on Thursday. The Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d features the TriDef 3D technology solution which includes a 3D screen, 3D glasses and of course software. "Fun is a notebook that brings multimedia to life—and the IdeaPad Y560d does this in a dramatic fashion with a truly unique 3D viewing experience," said Dion Weisler, vice president, business operations, Lenovo.

"While 3D technology has been around for ages, it has not been readily accessible to consumers within the home. Lenovo is helping bridge this gap by delivering consumers a 3D experience on a familiar PC platform that can be viewed and enjoyed when and where they want."

The Y560d features a 15.6-inch 16:9 high-definition screen. The TriDef 3D technology (TriDef Media Player) software can transform a standard movie into a 3D experience (the software does not support transforming Blu-ray or HD DVD content though), while TriDef Photo Transformer can turn standard photos into 3D as well.

The Y560d also features Lenovo's new innovative Enhanced Experience RapidDrive technology which combined traditional HDD and SSD storage solutions to deliver a fast boot of the installed Windows 7 operating system (this functionality is optional). The RapidDrive technology can boost Windows 7 boot by 66 percent and open applications twice as fast.

Toshiba Corp. announced on Thursday that it will launch a 128-gigabyte embedded NAND flash memory module designed for application in a wide range of digital consumer products, including smartphones, tablet PCs and digital video cameras.

The new 128GB embedded device integrates sixteen 64Gbit (8GB) NAND chips manufactured with Toshiba's 32-nanometer process technology. Along with the dedicated controller, the product measures just 17 x 22 x 1.4mm. The module is fully compatible with the latest eMMC standard.

It makes Toshiba the first company to successfully combine 16 64Gbit chips, using applied advanced chip thinning and layering technologies to produce individual chips just 30 micrometers thick.

Toshiba offers a line-up of NAND flash memory packages in densities now ranging from 2GB to 128GB. They integrate a controller to manage basic control functions for NAND applications, and are compatible with JEDEC eMMC Version 4.4 and its features.

Indonesian communications minister Tifatul Sembiring, chief of the Islamic Prosperous Justice Party, is calling for an Internet blacklist to be enforced in the country to "save the young." Sembiring highlights the recent shockwaves through Indonesia caused by the distribution of homemade sex videos involving three popular celebrities in the country.

Sembiring has vowed to draft a new decree with lawmakers after an earlier proposal of a blacklist was shelved due to opposition. "The porn video 'allegedly' consisting of three artists ... has insulted the nation's constitution and Pancasila," he said, referring to the founding national philosophy that enshrines belief in the "one and only God."

"Our teachings have been tainted by the release of these videos," he added. The minister cited a survey conducted in 2007 which claimed 97 percent of Indonesian high school students had watched pornographic content online.

Now Sembiring wants a special task force to maintain a blacklist for the electronic filtering of the web of offensive material. "There will be a team to observe whether a website contains points from the blacklist. The team will assess whether such websites truly contain pornographic material," Sembiring said. "If it does, we'll ask the website to delete the points included in the list, but we won't ban the whole website."

Swype, the speed record breaking texting alternative for Android phones has gone open beta (with limited functionality) to anyone who signs up for a limited time.

The app was formerly only available to a very limited amount of users who got lucky to sign up for the beta in the past, or natively on smartphones like the MyTouch 3G Slide.

Swype allows for extremely fast typing, as users do not type letter by letter with their fingers, but instead slide their fingers from letter to letter, with Swype "magically" knowing what word you are trying to write.

For the next few days, Swype beta is available at beta.swype.com, with users submitting an email and getting sent a download link for their respective phone.

Swype does note, however, that the beta will be open to the public for a very limited time, will be available in only Spanish, English and Italian, and will have "limited functionality," although it is unclear what will be missing.

Industry research group NPD revealed earlier this year that U.S. consumers had spent $19.66 billion on games products in 2009, including hardware, software and accessories. This was a significant drop from $21.4 billion take in 2008 for the industry. Of the $19.66 billion, NPD had estimated from its research that $10.5 billion was spent on software.

The NPD stats however only account for the sale of new software titles at retail, and leave out the sale of used games, subscription fees, downloadable content and more. NPD has carried out research that allows it to factor in these sources of revenue and also game rentals and mobile game applications (but not social network games).

With the extra sources of revenue for the wide industry added in, NPD reports that the software take jumps between $4.5 - $4.75 billion for 2009, bringing the total to between $15 - $15.25 billion. "Our expanded estimate of consumer spending reflects the growing number of options to purchase, acquire and interact with video games ranging from GameFly rentals to iPod Touch game apps," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

Twitter has apologized, again, for the month's worth of outages, bugs and system instabilities that have hobbled the site.

Citing a huge usage spike due to the World Cup, and the uncovering of a number of bugs, Twitter says the problems have led to the "worst month since last October" for the micro-blogging site.

Says the site via its official blog: "As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users."

Twitter's updates will fine tune load balancing and double the network's capacity.

According to the web monitoring company Pingdom, Twitter's home page has been down for 5 hours and 22 minutes so far in June, its worst month in almost a year.

Following a huge victory for record companies over LimeWire, eight music publishers have filed their own lawsuit against the software company, seeking relief and damages for the facilitation of rampant copyright infringement. Many of the publishers are owned by the parent companies of the record labels that won the the case against LimeWire.

David Israelite, chief executive of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), said that songwriters and publishers were also hurt as well as performers, by the music sharing facilitated by LimeWire software. Publishers are paid royalties for songwriters, while record companies work with the performers.

"The pervasive online infringement facilitated by LimeWire and others like them has consequences for everyone in the music chain," Israelite said in a statement. A U.S. District Court judge in New York ruled that LimeWire is liable for inducing copyright infringement.

Record companies sought a preliminary injunction last week that would freeze the assets of Mike Gorton, chairman of LimeWire, accusing him of attempting to shield LimeWire assets and proceeds from the court. LimeWire is attempting to relaunch itself as a legal music service.

IsoHunt attorney Ira Rothken said the search engine has asked a federal appeals court to block a lower court's injunction that could force the site down. The takedown order was given by a U.S. District Court in May. Judge Stephen Wilson said that IsoHunt is an unlawful avenue to free, copyrighted movies and television shows. Wilson said he would not stay enforcement of the injunction unless ordered to do so by a federal appeals court.

IsoHunt, which gets 30 million unique monthly visitors, asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to block the takedown order. It accuses the District Court's injunction of being too broad. One issue of concern is a mandated removal of "searches" from the site. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sent a list of keywords for the block, which include the number 10, and the word Dracula, for example.

"One person's copyrighted Wizard of Oz is another person's public domain work," Rothken said to Wired. "The motion picture studios do not have a monopoly on names on things. That is where the injunction is violating the First Amendment." Rothken said the MPAA should instead provide URLS or hashes which can positively identify an infringing link.

Microsoft's UK boss Neil Thompson has responded to Sony's E3 press conference by saying that 3D gaming is too expensive for consumers for now. Sony have attendees 3D glasses to view 3D content at the conference while revealing titles that will support 3D for the PS3.

PS3 users will need a 3D television for the effect to work. Thompson feels that the price involved with 3D gaming puts it a while off being mass market.

"If you look at the costs of entry into the living room and when that's going to become mass-market, we think the offering with Kinect and the natural user-interface we're bringing, that's a more compelling proposition for consumers over the coming years than maybe looking at 3D at this point."

Of course, Nintendo also promoted the 3D effect of its new 3DS handheld console, and that doesn't require an investment in 3D glasses, but for living room gaming, maybe Thompson has a point on price for now. As for Microsoft's Kinect, Thompson resisted providing any pricing information to Eurogamer.net.

All mobile handsets in stores in San Francisco may be labeled with information about their radiative output. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance which would make it a reality by a 10-1 majority. Following a 10-day consultation on the issue, the Mayor can sign it into legislation.

The ordinance would require outlets selling phones in the city to provide information on the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) for each handset stocked.

The information can already be retrieved from the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) website. Critics of the board's decision say that the move may indicate to consumers that using mobile phones is a health risk.

The potential of mobile phones to cause harm to users has been the subject of plenty of scientific studies for the past couple of decades. The chief sponsor claims that the ordinance is there to "help people make informed decisions."

Opera has released a beta of the next release of its popular web browser, v10.6. The beta features support for the royalty-free WebM video format being pushed by Google. It also features new HTML 5 offline applications. The company claims that the Javascript engine in the newer version is 75 percent faster than the previous version.

The v10.6 release is the next major version for Linux and BSD users also after Opera decided to skip 10.5 releases on either of those platforms. Opera pushed out v10.5 of the browser in time for Microsoft's distribution of the web browser selection screen that allows users to download and install a browser of their choice as part of a settlement agreement with the European Union.

The new WebM video format is being pushed by Google as a royalty-free alternative to H.264, which is only royalty free to use until the end of 2015, according to MPEG LA. A WebM video file consists of VP8 video (Google acquired the VP8 technology in its $106.5 million deal with On2 Technologies last year) and OGG Vorbis audio packed in a Matroska (MKV) container.