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The Commodore Amiga 1000 (or A1000) was released on July 23, 1985, and is still considered to have been years ahead of its time.

It stood out from the crowd for several reasons. Firstly, it sported a color graphical user interface (4096 colors) at a time when Apple's Macintosh cost considerably more (~$1000 more or so) with a black and white display. Most Amiga 1000 units were sold with an RGB monitor, but it did feature a built-in composite video output to support other monitors.

AmigaOS was a truly multitask operating system too.

Under the hood, it packed a Motorola 68000 CPU (7.16MHz NTSC, 7.09MHz PAL) upgradable officially to a 68010 and to other CPUs via third party route. While the 68000 was common in 1985, the Amiga 1000 features three additional co-processors for multimedia operations.

The Amiga 1000 had 256 KB of Amiga Chip RAM, which was officially upgradable to 512 KB and further with third party upgrades. Further hardware upgrades were possible through the included 86-pin expansion port.

When the Amiga 500 model launched a couple of years after for a cut price of $700, it established Amiga as a popular gaming system, with sales of around 6 million units.

AT&T has confirmed that it will be the first wireless carrier to offer the Microsoft Surface 3 tablet with 4G LTE support in the U.S.

The device will go on sale this week on Friday.

Of course, there are confusing pricing tiers but thankfully AT&T kind of broke it down:

"Beginning on Friday, July 24, you can purchase the Surface 3 for $0 down and $30 per month with an AT&T Tablet Installment plan. In addition, for a limited time, you can purchase a Surface 3 for $399.99 with any Lumia smartphone purchased on AT&T Next. Additionally, a commercial version of the Surface 3 will be available to business customers in the coming weeks."

The installment plan is for 20 months and has 0% APR.

After months of small leaks, we finally have a complete leak of the upcoming OnePlus 2 flagship including specs and pictures.

The handset will be officially unveiled on July 27th during a special VR event but for now we can thank Chinese regulator TENAA for publishing the details.

According to the post, the OnePlus 2 will feature a 5.5-inch display with QHD 2560 x 1440 resolution, a custom Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, a 13MP main camera, an 8MP front-facing camera and a 3,300 mAh battery. The phone's design is metal and will feature a USB Type-C port.

Additionally, there appears to be a real home button on the front of the phone, which could suggest the rumored fingerprint sensor.

OnePlus's founder confirmed the price tag would be under $450, but with specs like that we can't expect it to be much lower than $450.

Microsoft has revealed the life cycle for its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, hoping to clear up some confusion regarding support and updates.

The software giant says that as long as you have a legit Windows 10 build installed, you will get free updates for 10 years, ensuring you stay patched and updated for the next decade.

As with past operating systems, the original "mainstream" support is five years followed by "extended" support for five years after that.

The U.S. FCC has greenlighted AT&T's proposed acquisition of DirecTV, the $48.5 billion merger that will now create the U.S.' largest pay-TV company.

For the deal to pass, it still needs approval from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) but the DOJ has already said the deal does not pose risks of an anti-competitive nature, suggesting the deal should be able to close soon. The FCC's approval will be put into writing within weeks.

The approval will require conditions. AT&T must build out broadband Internet connections for 12.5 million new customers and it must also share all "traffic exchange agreements it strikes with content and web transit companies" with the FCC.

AT&T also agreed to offer Internet in more rural areas and offer at least 6Mbit speed Internet for its customers.

FCC boss Tom Wheeler is also looking to set up an independent office to ensure AT&T complies with the conditions, a first for the consumer protection group.

Google has officially killed the Chrome browser extension Streamus, leaving its 300,000 users in the dark.

Streamus first launched two years ago and allowed users to stream music, for free, right from their Chrome browser. The service used YouTube as its catalog but didn't display any of the actual videos (or their ads).

"We encourage people to leverage the power of our open API to embed YouTube videos in creative and innovative ways that comply with our terms of service," said YouTube in a statement, suggesting that Streamus was in violation.

Of course, Streamus was in violation as it split the audio from YouTube videos from its video, which is not allowed. Google has removed the app from its Chrome Web Store, as well.

Google has been testing their own service for those that like music through YouTube, with beta users having access to YouTube Music Key since earlier this year. The service costs $10 a month, has less ads, higher quality audio and allows for background playback on mobile apps.

Source:
Variety

According to a new report, Nokia is expected to unveil their first virtual reality (VR) project at an event next week in LA.

So far there is very little known about the device although we know it is coming from Nokia Technologies, the advanced product division left behind after Nokia sold its consumer handset division to Microsoft.

Nokia Technologies has been behind the Nokia N1 tablet and the Z Launcher software but otherwise has been quiet since 2013. The division did also confirm earlier this year that they will be getting back into the handset business, sort of, via licensing agreements with OEMs.

Nokia's decision to try VR follows decisions from HTC, Sony and of course, Facebook to try the new frontier of gaming and immersive experiences.

We will know more next week.

Major German automakers Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen have all agreed in principle to purchase Nokia's HERE digital mapping service, beating out a handful of bidders that included Uber.

The car makers will pay $2.7 billion for the service and sources say the companies will invite other car makers like GM, Toyota, Ford and others to invest in HERE.

Despite the nice buyout on paper for HERE, the price is a far cry from the $8.1 billion Nokia bought mapping service Navteq for in 2008. Navteq served as the foundation for HERE maps.

For the auto industry, purchasing HERE was a make or break proposition. All the other bidders were from the tech world and the automakers feared that a company like Google or Apple could then own all the information systems inside their cars as well as the future of cars: self-driving autos.

Self-driving cars will need the most accurate maps possible to avoid potential mishaps, and we are still in the early innings of mapping software and self-driving tech.

Toshiba president Hisao Tanaka, Vice Chairman Norio Sasaki and adviser Atsutoshi Nishida have all resigned this week after it was discovered that Toshiba fraudulently inflated their earnings by $1.2 billion over the last 6 years.

An independent investigation found that the Toshiba executives set profit targets that were impossible to reach, which led to the inflated accounting. The investigators say the accounting scam was "skillfully hidden" from investors and others.

"I was shocked by the fact that one of the leading companies organizationally conducted such a thing," said Koichi Ueda, who led the investigating committee. Ueda was a former investigator with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office.

Since Toshiba announced the investigation in May, shares have fallen 18 percent and the company suspended its dividend and all quarterly forecasts.

According to a new report, Qualcomm is expected to layoff a tenth of their workforce as the chipmaker continues to struggle.

The report states that Qualcomm could layoff around 3000 of its existing 30,000-strong workforce.

Over the past year, Qualcomm's profits and growth have stagnated, thanks mainly to the botched Snapdragon 810 processor launch. The processor, which was slated to be a flagship, had overheating issues and was dropped from "one major customer" (Samsung), causing a huge drop in sales for Qualcomm. Perhaps more importantly, the follow up Snapdragon 820 is rumored to have some overheating issues, as well.

Besides their own internal struggles, rival chipmakers are beginning to bridge the gap and some like Chinese OEM MediaTek have just completely priced out Qualcomm in places like India and China.

Qualcomm recently stated that it expects its revenue to fall sequentially in the Q2 and Q3.

Source:
Reuters

Microsoft struggled this quarter following a massive write-off of its Nokia acquisition and the corresponding layoffs.

The company reported revenue of $22.2 billion, better than expected, but overall the company had a net loss of $2.1 billion, by far its largest ever. Writing down Nokia cost the company $7.6 billion and the restructuring costs of laying off 7800 employees added to the loss.

Adding to the bad news was the sale of Windows PCs, which fell 13 percent year-over-year for consumers and 8 percent for business customers. Microsoft Office revenue was also down 4 percent year-over-year. These figures were not unexpected as Windows 10 is on its way, and consumers always like waiting for deals that come with new operating systems.

Outside of the aforementioned, Microsoft's other reported numbers were rather good:

-Surface revenue grew 117% to $888 million, driven by Surface Pro 3 and launch of the Surface 3

-Total Xbox revenue grew 27% based on strong growth in consoles, Xbox Live transactions and first party games

-Search advertising revenue grew 21% with Bing U.S. market share at 20.3%, up 110 basis points over the prior year

-Office 365 Consumer subscribers increased to 15.2 million, with nearly 3 million subscribers added in the quarter
Commercial revenue increased slightly (up 4% in constant currency) to $13.5 billion

Although the company had already confirmed it would not be releasing exact sales figures for the Apple Watch, the company did leave industry watchers some tidbits during their quarterly earnings.

The company says that "sales in its first nine weeks exceeded those of the iPhone and iPad in their first nine weeks of availability." When the iPad launched, it sold 3 million units in its first 11 weeks, so we can assume that Apple Watch sold at least 2 million units for the quarter.

Additionally, we know that Apple added the Watch to its "Other" sales category, which houses the iPod and also includes accessories like the Apple TV and Beats headphones. That category totaled $1.7 billion in revenue for the Q1 and jumped to $2.64 billion this quarter. Apple was nice enough to confirm that the Watch made up the difference in revenue and then some as iPod sales fell again.

Tim Cook, during the earnings call, had a few things to add:

Apple shares are down a whopping 7 percent today following an earnings report that disappointed investors.

Overall revenue was up 33 percent year-over-year to $49.6 billion and profits increased 45 percent year-over-year to $10.7 billion.

Surprisingly, iPhone sales were a bit soft, at 47.5 million compared to analyst expectations of 48.8-50 million, which is part of the reason why the stock is getting killed. iPads continued their decline, down 18 percent year-over-year to 10.9 million units sold. Macs were slightly lower than expectations, as well, at 4.8 million units sold compared to 4.9 million analyst expectations.

The big hit came when Apple had to forecast their revenue for next quarter. Analysts were expecting $51 billion or higher but Apple guided a range of $49 billion to $51 billion, a rare pessimistic forecast for the tech giant.

Pebble's latest update to their Pebble smartwatch line is finally available via a major retailer.

Until today, the device was available directly only from Pebble but is now available online and in-store from Best Buy in all three colors (red, white and black). For the time being, Best Buy is shipping only to U.S. buyers.

The company also confirmed that Target will begin selling the smartwatch on August 17th.

Launched on Kickstarter earlier this year, the Pebble Time offers improved battery life (up to 7 days), a color e-paper display, a newly remade Pebble operating system and 30m water resistance.

Just a few months after the streaming music site settled with the record labels and officially shut down, one of its young founders has passed away.

Josh Greenberg was 28 and was found dead in his bed at home last night. The police said they found no evidence of foul play, suicide or drugs.

Greenberg and Sam Tarantino founded the service in 2006 as college freshman and at its peak the site had 40 million users. The major record labels all sued Grooveshark over copyright violations. Grooveshark allowed users to upload their own digital audio files which could then be streamed or turned into playlists. Grooveshark offered a powerful music discovery engine as well as a search engine.

On April 30th, Grooveshark and the major labels settled the long-standing lawsuit, and Grooveshark was officially shut down for good. According to Greenberg's mother, the settlement was a 'relief' more than anything and that he was excited to move forward.

Since creating Grooveshark, Greenberg became a mentor to programmers in Gainesville, Florida and also created internship programs and classes for would-be entrepreneurs and programmers.