Latest news

Following years of bickering between the companies, U.S. prosecutors have opened a criminal case to investigate into whether eBay stole confidential information from Craigslist in an effort to start their own classifieds site.

In 2006, eBay bought a stake in Craigslist, and the company claims then used that stake to misappropriate confidential information before building its own rival classifieds site, Kijiji, in 2007.

The new subpoena is seeking info on eBay employees including founder Pierre Omidyar and former Skype CEO Joshua Silverman.

Says eBay (via reuters):

EBay believes that Craigslist's allegations against eBay are without merit. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves, and we will aggressively pursue our claims against Craigslist.

eBay still has a 29 percent stake in the company and Board seats.

HTC has announced their new "multimedia superphone," the Sensation XE.

The smartphone has a 4.3-inch qHD S-LCD display, runs on a 1.5GHz dual-core processor (the most powerful we've seen yet for a phone), has integrated Beats Audio and Sense 3.5.

Additionally, the phone has 768 MB RAM and will run on Android 2.3.6, upgradeable to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the future.

The Sensation XE is the first device with Beats Audio, the "high-end audio" company purchased by HTC in August. The device will ship with special Beats headphones.

Rounding out the specs, the XE has dual cameras, dual LED flash, quad-band GSM, dual-band 3G with HSPA support, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, FM radio, a standard 3.5mm audio jack, an MHL-enabled microUSB port and a microSD card slot if you need more storage.

Sony has said today that their highly-anticipated PlayStation Vita handheld will hit Japan on December 17th.

For 3G connectivity, Sony has selected NTT DoCoMo, and prices will be 980 yen ($13 USD) for 20 hours of prepaid time or 4,980 yen ($64 USD) for 100 hours.

Sony has also revealed the battery life of the console, which is horrendous, at just 3-5 hours (depending on usage) and recharge time takes a full 2:40 from 0% to 100%.

The Vita will run on an ARM Cortex A9 quad-core processor and be powered by a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU.

Featuring a 5-inch capacitive multitouch OLED screen (with 16 million colors), the device will be 7.16 by 0.73 by 3.28 inches.

Despite rumors that Sony would skimp out on RAM, the Vita has 512MB memory and 128MB VRAM in its graphics processor.

Wes DeSoto, a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) member, has pleaded guilty to leaking a handful of DVD Screeners such as "Black Swan."

The actor has pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright-infringement and could now face up to 16 months in prison. The government prosecutors however, are seeking three years of probation and monetary restitution. The judge has also ruled that DeSoto can appeal if given over 10 months.

DeSoto's house was raided earlier this year after a number of high-quality DVD screeners were leaked online following their limited release to SAG members via iTunes. Thanks to digital watermarks, DeSoto was identified pretty quickly, say authorities.

While the MPAA and authorities believe DeSoto was responsible for the leaks The Fighter, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours and Rabbit Hole, the guilty count is for his release of Black Swan only.

Apparently Google only outbid itself in its frantic effort to purchase Motorola Mobility.

Last month the company shocked the world by purchasing Motorola Mobility (MMI) for $12.5 billion, in an effort to secure thousands of patents to protect itself on the Android front.

The news today, with the release of the acquisition proxy is that Google was ultimately forced to pay $10 more per share to acquire the company than its initial bid of $30/share.

Motorola, advised by Qatalyst Partners, rejected the offer despite their not being any other bidders or even word of anyone interested. Eventually the two parties settled on $40 per share.

Qatalyst may be the reason behind the huge bump in asking price, as they have, on 3 occasions in the last 12 months, forced buyers to pay up for the company they want. In one such case, Dell and HP began a bidding war for 3Par that led to a 91 percent premium over the initial bid.

CyanogenMod 7, the top custom ROM for Android devices, has now made its way to the popular HTC Sensation and Evo 3D smartphones.

The open source project, released just yesterday in alpha, can be installed now two both devices.

As both are still very early ROMs, CM notes that there are still many bugs to be worked out and it should be stable for daily use.

There is one notable catch, and that is you cannot use HTC's official unlocking tools to root your device. It must be rooted with S-Off.

More info here: For Sensation and for Evo 3D

Major Nelson confirms Xbox Live on Microsoft's upcoming operating system.

"We are confirming that we will be bringing Xbox LIVE to the PC with Xbox LIVE on Windows. We are very excited about Xbox LIVE coming to Windows 8. Xbox LIVE brings your games, music, movies, and TV shows to your favorite Microsoft and Windows devices," a blog entry read.

"Bringing Xbox LIVE to Windows 8 is part of our vision to bring you all the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, made easy. At BUILD we are showing that it is easy for developers to create games for Windows 8 that take advantage of the power of Xbox LIVE. We have much more detail to share about the capabilities of Xbox LIVE on Windows and look forward to the opportunity to do so in the near future."

Microsoft showed an early development build of Windows 8 at the BUILD keynote earlier today.

Intel gets a boost in its efforts to break into the tablet and smartphone markets.

Google has announced today that upcoming versions of Android will be compatible with Intel processors. Currently Intel processors, as part of "Wintel," have only been compatible with Windows devices.

Says Intel of the big move:

We want to make Intel architecture the platform of choice for smartphones. Every time we have collaborated with Google, good things have come out of it.

With the news, Intel will finally become part of the smartphone mania that is currently dominated by Nvidia, Qualcomm and TI and designed by ARM.

Microsoft has announced today that they have now sold 450 million Windows 7 licenses since launch in October 2009.

The software giant is averaging 650,000 licenses per day over the lifetime of the OS.

Windows 7 is now the "fastest selling version of Windows ever" beating out Vista.

For comparison, Windows XP sold 210 million licenses in 2.5 years while Windows 7 sold 240 million within one year.

Windows 8 is set for launch next year, on desktops and tablets.

The Symbian OS accounted for less than 40% of smartphones in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK in July of this year. That would be good news for other vendors, but represents a major drop for the market leader.

Symbian was running on more than half of all smartphones in those countries just a year earlier.

That's not good news for Nokia, whose CEO recently told an interviewer his company expects to convert the company's existing Symbian customers to Windows Phone. If Android's ascension in the market continues, that won't be much of a feat.

Nokia has put nearly all their eggs in Microsoft's basket, betting on Windows Phone to put them back on top in the smartphone industry. Even after the iPhone's introduction, their Symbian phones continued to sell well.

The addition of even more serious competition from Android phones, particularly from Samsung and HTC, combined with missteps in Symbian development led to the freefall they have experienced in recent months.

Samsung has gone on the offensive in their ongoing patent war with Apple over smartphones and tablets. They are suing Apple in France over the iPhone and iPad.

The new suit revolves around three Samsung patents related to 3G technology.

Perhaps taking a shot at Apple, a Samsung spokesman told Agence France-Presse, "The complaint focuses on three technology patents, and not on the design of the tablets."

Apple's suit against Samsung in Germany, which has resulted in a ban on sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 by their subsidiary in that country, is based on alleged violations of a Community Design Patent which appears to cover all thin tablets with rounded corners sold in the EU.

In addition to the new lawsuit in France, Samsung has appealed the German ruling.

As rival broadcast networks Fox and ABC continue to fight online viewing in order to prop up relationships with their traditional partners, NBC appears to be moving in the opposite direct. Late last week they updated their iPad app to offer live access to their programs as they air.

Vivi Zigler, President, NBCUniversal Digital Entertainment said:

We are thrilled to offer our fans full episodes via our NBC.com app. Now the app truly reflects the deep fan experience that we have created online at NBC.com. And our fans are going to love the latest update to the NBC Live app which now offers them more content, better access and a unique social television experience.

This seems like a welcome admission by NBC that viewers aren't just requesting equal access online. They are demanding it.

No doubt it is related to the acquisition of NBC's corporate parent, NBCUniversal, by Comcast early this year. Such forward thinking seems unusual for either a broadcast network or a US cable TV provider, but perhaps it's not as odd as it seems.

Microsoft just showed off an early development build of Windows 8 at the Windows BUILD keynote.

Steve Sinofsky took to the stage to boast some stats on the success of Windows 7, but that's not what we wanted to hear/see (we'll talk about that later.) What we wanted to see is how is Microsoft going to revamp Windows so much to justify the comparisons to the changes made when Windows 95 was first unveiled?

Sinofsky first wants to calm any fears that Microsoft is simply building all of these new features as layers atop its Windows operating system. He takes out a first-generation netbook from Lenovo that runs Windows 8, and then shows us just how it manages it.

Windows 8, today, in its early development stage, uses less memory and runs less processes under normal use, compared to Windows 7. At its Preview release stage, Windows 7 required 540MB of RAM, running 34 processes. That dropped to 404MB and 32 processes in Windows 7 SP1. Windows 8 blows it out of the water, running on about 208MB with 29 processes.

A picture of the Samsung Windows 8 tablet rumored to be unveiled at Microsoft's BUILD conference later today has appeared online.

Stories about the tablet surfaced last week. It's an obvious move considering Microsoft's focus on promoting Windows 8 as a legitimate tablet OS.

The picture was posted by by a Chinese blogger to her Weibo page. Analysis from MobileTechWorld suggests it may be the recently introduced Samsung Slate PC Series 7, which is powered by an Intel i5 processor.

Alternatively, the article suggests, it could be an nVidia powered variant of that design using the Kel-El quad-core CPU.

In the aftermath of Google's announcement they will be buying Motorola Mobility, the Android patent situation has received the lion's share of attention. But could the set-top box business they get in the deal end up being the real prize?

While Android may be Google's highest profile project right now, in recent years they have increasingly focused on video.

Since the beginning of 2010 they have introduced Google TV, purchased a DRM company specifically for video distribution, acquired HTPC software vendor SageTV, and even started renting movies via YouTube, leading to a companion service available through the Android Market.

But if you want to be a major player in online video distribution, it takes more than a bunch of services. You need a direct pipeline to your customers' TVs.

Smart TVs, game consoles, and dedicated internet set-top boxes are part of the equation, but a large segment of the population either doesn't want or can't afford those devices. Many of those people are already using one or more Motorola cable boxes, or something similar from another company.