Archos unveils 10-Inch Tablet for $349

Faster, better, cheaper: Pick any two. Archos seems to have chosen better and cheaper for its upcoming "G9" Android tablets, where "better" means "more powerful" and "more storage space." But will that make either of them a better choice than the iPad 2?

The Archos G9 will come in two flavors, the 8-inch and the 10.1-inch. Both will have a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, which may make them more powerful than similarly-priced PC laptops. These are Android tablets, though, so you're not going to be running PC apps on them.

Archos' pedigree involves making media players, and the G9 tablets are designed for heavy-duty HD video watching. Both can supposedly play 1080p video without breaking a sweat, unlike the iPad 2, and will be able to output it through their HDMI ports without needing a special adapter.

A 16 GB iPad 2 can hold about half a dozen 720p HD movies, depending on filesize, and that's if you don't put any music on it or take any pictures with it. The Archos G9 Android tablets will have 250 GB hard drives, letting them hold up to 40 movies in full 1080p.

Downsides:
The G9s' biggest downside may be in the apps department. First off, the Android Market doesn't have nearly as many tablet-specific apps as the App Store does. And no, the G9s won't be able to run the 65,000 iPad apps; only an iPad can do that.

Second, app loading times. Think of how long it takes for an app or game to load on your smartphone. Well, the bottleneck isn't processor speed; it's how fast it can load the data off of whatever it's stored on. And the flash memory used by the iPad and most smartphones and memory cards is a heck of a lot faster than your laptop's hard drive.

The Archos G9s will be using hard drives instead of flash memory. So while it may be too early to tell, it's probably a safe bet that games and apps will take longer to load than on other tablets.

More downsides to the tablet:
Another thing to consider is that Archos has never been known for its devices' quality. They're harder to quantify, but they can be the difference between a tablet you love and a cheap piece of junk that won't do what you want it to.

Archos' previous devices had their fans, but they didn't have Android Market access and tended to have resistive touch screens; Nintendo DS-style single-touch screens that you used with a fingernail or a stylus. Neither of these design decisions screamed "quality."

With prices as low as $349 for the 10-inch tablet, and $279 for the 8-inch model, one has to wonder what design tradeoffs were made.

Neither tablet will ship with 3G capability, but 3G wireless Internet access can be added via a $49 adapter and a pay-as-you-go plan. The tablets will be available at the end of September.

Laptops could be powered simply by typing

Battery life can be a deal maker or a deal breaker when shopping for a new electronic gadget, and laptops are especially notorious for over-promising and under-delivering when it comes to how long they can last between charges. A new twist on an old technological advancement might change all that by turning your keystrokes into power. Using a thin film that exhibits piezoelectric properties, the pressure of your fingers hitting each key could potentially generate enough energy to keep a notebook battery charged.

Piezoelectric materials, many of which are man-made ceramics, actually generate electric current when impacted. The science behind it has been used for many years in things like mechanical actuators and sensors, but has seen limited application in consumer electronics. Australian researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have been testing a piezoelectric film that could, in theory, be applied underneath a notebook keyboard. It would absorb the impact of each keystroke and use the electric current generated to charge the device's battery.

There are currently no plans for a consumer-level device that would employ the technology, but the research is promising. According to the scientists, other applications for piezoelectric material might also be on the horizon, including running shoes that could charge your cell phone and pacemakers that are powered by blood pressure alone.

Best Buy announces own Music Cloud service

It seems like everyone has their heads in the clouds these days. With a growing emphasis on synchronizing media purchases and applications on multiple mobile devices and computers, retailer Best Buy is launching Music Cloud.

The service is available for devices powered by Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry operating systems and requires downloading software that enables music streaming.

The desktop app copies libraries and playlists from iTunes on a home computer and puts them in an account to be accessed on multiple mobile devices. It's powered by Catch Media's Play Anywhere service.

"With Best Buy Music Cloud, your digital music lives in one place but you access it from wherever you are," according to the Best Buy web site. "Enjoy all your music when you're at a friend's house, in the car, on the bus, walking to work ... virtually anywhere."

"You can store your favorite songs and playlists for when you're offline," it adds. "You can select just a single song, a playlist, or even an artist, allowing you to continue listening when you don't have coverage."

The premium version is available for $3.99 and, a demo version is available with 30-second playbacks of your songs.

Best Buy's Music Cloud comes on the heels of Apple rolling out iCloud to synchronize media purchases across computers and its mobile devices. iCloud was the major announcement by CEO Steve Jobs at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month. Google and Amazon.com have also launched cloud music services.

Earlier this month, at the E3 conference, Best Buy announced a Reward Zone Gamers Club that offers points toward purchases.

Sony Ericsson eyes Android market, launches two new phones

Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson has unveiled two new Android models in a bid to grab more of the burgeoning smartphone market.

The company, a joint venture between L.M. Ericsson and Sony Corp., plans to launch the Xperia ray and Xperia active models during the third quarter, said Chief Marketing Officer Steve Walker in Singapore.

The new models should help the company expand its 11 percent market share of the Android segment, Walker said.

"Android smartphones is a rapidly growing part of the market, and we see our share within that market growing," added Walker.

London-based Sony Ericsson, which saw its phone unit sales drop 23 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, is moving away from cheaper phone models and seeking to take on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry and Nokia Corp.'s N9 in the higher-priced smartphone market.

By 2015, about 60 percent of mobile phones sold in the Asia-Pacific region will likely be smartphones, up from 20 percent in 2010, Walker said.

"We made quite a fundamental shift in strategy and decided to focus a large part of our efforts into smartphones, to focus on the mid- and high-end part of the business," Walker said. "In many markets, we see a dramatic shift from feature phones to smartphones."

The company said in April that smartphones accounted for more than 60 percent of its sales during the first quarter.

Sony Ericsson's latest models that run on Goggle Inc.'s Android platform, the Xperia ray and active, will likely be priced below the high-end Xperia arc.

Xperia active is water resistant and works if fingers are wet or sweaty, while the Xperia ray seeks to combine a sleek design with a device that is 9.4 millimeters thick.

Sony Ericsson also plans to introduce a less expensive model that highlights texting service and is aimed at teenagers.

Arnova 7 Android tablet coming for $99

It is expected that the broad availability of Android tablets would eventually trigger a race for the lowest price point in the market, and newcomer Arnova seems to be getting a jump on the competition with the Archos-designed Arnova 7, a 7-inch Android tablet running Android 2.2 Froyo that the company plans to offer for $99. The Arnova 7 lacks some features in higher-end tablets, but if you’re looking for a basic tablet that won’t give you a heart attack when it falls out of your bag into a puddle, it’s hard to argue with a $99 price tag.

The Arnova 7 features an 800 by 480-pixel 7-inch touch screen display with a virtual keyboard for basic messaging and text-entry needs -the Arnova 7 is 12mm thick and weighs about 340 grams. The tablet runs Android 2.2 Froyo on an unspecified processor, and can handle 720p high-definition MPEG-4 and Realvideo video playback at 30fps. The tablet offers 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity, microSDHC removable storage, USB 2.0 connectivity, and a built-in speaker and microphone. Folks looking to take pictures or video chat will lament the lack of cameras, but remember the key feature here: a $99 price tag.

The Arnova 7 also doesn’t connect to the Android Market, opting instead for getting apps through the AppsLib application store.

Arnova hasn’t yet announced availability dates or retail partners for the Arnova 7; however, the systems launched at European retailers last month.

Nokia unveils new smartphone N9

Finnish cellphone maker Nokia has unveiled its N9 smartphone in Singapore, its only bet on the MeeGo platform.

The commercial launch will be later this year, said CEO Stephen Elop. Nokia dumped plans to use MeeGo in its future smartphones when in February it picked Microsoft's Windows Phone as its future software choice, but it decided to unveil one of the models it was working on before closing the business line.

The N9 model, Nokia's first and last to use MeeGo, comes with a large touch screen and is available in black, cyan and magenta. The MeeGo platform - a newcomer in the market dominated by Google and Apple - was born in February 2010 when Nokia and Intel unveiled a merger of Nokia's Linux Maemo software platform with Intel's Moblin, which is also based on Linux open-source software.

After Nokia pulled back from the project four months ago other vendors have become more interested in the technology as Nokia's dominant role in the project had held back others from adopting it.

Your social networking slipups to be stored for 7 years

In a world where potential employers will almost certainly toss your name into a search engine before considering you for a job, we should all be very careful about what we put online. However, sometimes we slip up, leaving a nasty smear on an otherwise pristine social networking persona. Now, thanks to a ruling by the FTC, background checking services can store those unfortunate moments for up to 7 years after you've deleted them from the web.

A company called Social Intelligence - which provides background checks for companies during the hiring process - recently drew ire from would-be employees due to its practice of building detailed files on applicants. The company keeps these records, which can contain embarrassing pictures or comments that have long since been deleted, in case they are requested by other potential employers in the future. The FTC, after taking a microscope to Social Intelligence's information gathering methods, declared that the company fell within the guidelines of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Individuals who believe their social record is tarnished through no fault of their own are welcome to dispute the firm's findings. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people affected have no idea what information Social Intelligence has on them until they are denied a job. So before you update your Facebook, Twitter or other social networking status, remember that the information you put forth can come back to haunt you, years after you've wiped your web slate clean.

ICANN approves Corporate Web Suffixes

The Internet's global coordinator has approved the creation of website addresses ending in corporate names, triggering one of the biggest ever shakeups in how the web operates.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted overwhelmingly in favour of the proposal at a meeting in Singapore despite fears the shift would cause some confusion and favour large companies.

"This is the biggest change to domain names since the creation of '.com' 26 years ago," said Theo Hnarakis, chief executive of Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services, a California-based company that provides online branding advice.

Under the changes, businesses will no longer be restricted to the list of generic top level domains (gTLDs) that include .com, .net and .org when they apply to register a website address.

Industry observers say global giants such as Apple, Toyota and BMW could be in the vanguard of launching websites with their own domain names, ending in ".apple", ".toyota" and ".bmw", as could a city or a trademark.

ICANN chairman Peter Thrush said at a news conference the new naming system will be a "tremendous opportunity for people to take control of this aspect of their branding and develop it in their own way."

The ICANN board voted 13-1 in favour of the change with two abstentions, a spokesman said.
George Sadowsky, the lone board member who voted against the move, said "I believe that it is not ICANN's job to influence the choice of winners and losers in such competitions, and that is implicitly what we will be doing."

ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said applications for the new web suffixes will open on January 12 next year and close 90 days later.

"The first possible time at which some of the applications could be approved would be late in 2012," said Beckstrom. He said about 120 parties have publicly expressed their interest in the programme.

"If you scroll through one of those lists, you'll probably see some major brand owners, some major companies in the world, some major brands, cities, regions and other different types of communities," Beckstrom said.

Adrian Kinderis, chief executive of domain name registry services provider AusRegistry International, said the new system will allow companies to protect their trademarks in cyberspace. "It will be an exciting period ahead," he said.

ICANN board member Sebastien Bachollet, who was in favour of the change, said "some people feel that the new gTLDs will cause confusion." "I trust we have the tools to ensure the phase of stress will be brief," he added.

ICANN, a non-profit body managing the Domain Name System and Internet Protocol addresses that form the technical backbone of the Web, is holding a global meeting in Singapore this week to discuss a range of matters.

The corporate domain names won't come cheap. It will cost a company $185,000 just to apply and there are a number of criteria that must be met before ICANN will give the nod for a firm to own the domain name of its choice.

The fee is needed to recoup the costs associated with the new gTLD programme and to ensure that it is fully funded.

It would also weed out opportunistic applicants seeking to resell domain names for a profit after buying them cheaply, a problem in the earlier days of the Internet.

Only "established corporations, organisations, or institutions in good standing" may apply for a new gTLD, according to ICANN guidelines. ICANN will not consider applications from individuals or sole proprietorships.

Huawei unveils MediaPad to take on Apple, Samsung

China's Huawei Technologies unveiled a new tablet computer called the MediaPad that it hopes could take on market leaders Apple and Samsung Electronics.

The launch would be part of an aggressive push by Huawei, the world's second-biggest supplier of telecommunications equipment behind Ericsson, into the consumer space.

"With the Huawei MediaPad, we are demonstrating yet again that design, functionality and performance is within anyone's reach," said Victor Xu, chief marketing officer of Huawei Device.

Huawei Device is a division of Huawei Technologies that makes cellphones, smartphones and tablet PCs.

Huawei said the 7-inch MediaPad will run on the Android operating system from Google Inc and use a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor from Qualcomm. It will also come with pre-installed applications such as Facebook and Twitter.

The global tablet PC market is now dominated by Apple's iPad with about 80 percent of market share.

In China, apart from Apple, Huawei's tablet PCs also compete with Lenovo and ZTE.

Oracle wants a share of Android’s ad revenue

Oracle is known for some epic lawsuits, often throwing its weight around in California courtrooms over software licensing and patents. Coming off a recent victory against SAP, Oracle’s throwdown against Google is just getting warmed up, as the software maker seeks billions in damages over claims that Android software uses technology related to the Java programming language. It’s a drama that’s been building its plot since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, and Java along with it. The full extent of Oracle’s claims were finally disclosed in a San Francisco federal court, when the company sought to prevent Google from filing under seal documents in the case stating Oracle’s monetary claims.

Google’s fighting back, especially since Oracle’s looking to get royalty payments from Android-related ad revenue. The mobile platform owner has called out Oracle’s expert testimony as inflated, saying that “Oracle’s ‘methodology’ for calculating damages is based on fundamental legal errors and improperly inflates their estimates.”

100 years of IBM, 100 years of Think

Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology - saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line - that's all IBM.

International Business Machines turned 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.

After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?

IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.

With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the new business also made cheese slicers and - significantly for its future - machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.

These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call "data flow." "It was very sophisticated," Mindell says.

The force behind IBM's early growth was Thomas J. Watson Sr., a demanding boss with exacting standards for everything from office wear (white shirts, ties) to creativity (his slogan: "Think").

Watson, and later his son, Thomas Watson Jr., guided IBM into the computer age. Its machines were used to calculate everything from banking transactions to space shots. As the company swelled after World War II, IBM threw its considerable resources at research to maintain its dominance in the market for mainframes, the hulking computers that power whole offices.

"When we did semiconductors, we had thousands and thousands of people," says Donald Seraphim, who worked at IBM from 1957 until 1986 and was named a fellow, the company's highest honor for technical achievement. "They just know how to put the force behind the entrepreneurial things."

By the late '60s, IBM was consistently the only high-tech company in the Fortune 500's top 10. IBM famously spent $5 billion during the decade to develop a family of computers designed so growing businesses could easily upgrade.

It introduced the magnetic hard drive in 1956 and the floppy disk in 1971. In the 1960s, IBM developed the first bar code, paving the way for automated supermarket checkouts. IBM introduced a high-speed processing system that allowed ATM transactions. It created magnetic strip technology for credit cards.

For much of the 20th century, IBM was the model of a dominant, paternalistic corporation. It was among the first to give workers paid holidays and life insurance. It ran country clubs for employees generations before Google offered subsidized massages and free meals.

"The model really was you joined IBM and you built your career for life there," says David Finegold, dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. Transfers to other cities were still common enough that employees joked IBM really stood for "I've Been Moved."

The origins of the company's nickname, Big Blue, are something of a mystery. It may simply derive from IBM's global size and the color of its logo.

IBM's gold-plated reputation was based in part on ubiquity and reliability, as well as a relentless sales force. But its fortunes began to change as bureaucracy stifled innovation. Information-technology managers used to joke that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. But by the 1980s, Big Blue found itself adrift in a changing technology environment.

IBM had slipped with the rise of cheap microprocessors and rapid changes in the industry. In an infamous blunder, IBM introduced its influential personal computer in 1981, but it passed on buying the rights to the software that ran it - made by a startup called Microsoft.

IBM helped make the PC a mainstream product, but it quickly found itself outmatched in a market it helped create. It relied on Intel for chips and Microsoft for software, leaving it vulnerable when the PC industry took off and rivals began using the same technology.

The PC's casing wasn't as important as the technology inside it, and IBM didn't own the intellectual property inside its own machines. In addition, the rise of smaller computers that performed some of the same functions as mainframes threw IBM's main moneymaking business into disarray.

With its legacy and very survival at stake, the company was forced to embark on a wrenching restructuring.

One of its major achievements turned out to be re-engineering itself during the upheavals of the 1990s. Viewed as too bureaucratic to compete in fast-changing times, IBM tapped an outsider as CEO in 1993 to help with a turnaround.

Louis Gerstner, a former executive with American Express and RJR Nabisco, had little knowledge of technology or IBM culture. In his first meeting with top IBM executives, he was the only one in the room with a blue shirt.

But he broke up old fiefdoms, slashed prices and eliminated jobs. IBM, which had peaked at 406,000 employees in 1985, shed more than 150,000 in the 1990s as the company lost nearly $16 billion over five years.

Gerstner resisted pressure to break up the company and instead focused on services, such as data storage and technical support. Services could be sold as an add-on to companies that had already bought IBM computers. Even barely profitable pieces of hardware were used to open the door to more profitable deals.

The shift allowed IBM to ride out two recessions: When times are tough, businesses pay IBM to help them find ways to cut costs and handle technology chores that would be more expensive to perform in-house.

The change in strategy was risky for a company that helped create the PC industry, yet IBM rose to become the world's biggest technology services provider.

With around $100 billion in annual revenue today, IBM is ranked 18th in the Fortune 500. It's three times the size of Google and almost twice as big as Apple. Its market capitalization of around $200 billion beats Google and allowed IBM last month to briefly surpass its old nemesis, Microsoft.

Though transformed, IBM remains a pioneer, the envy of the technology industry. Hewlett-Packard Co.'s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, says one of his primary goals is to strengthen the company's software and services businesses to compete better with IBM.

Some things haven't changed. The company still spends heavily on research, about $6 billion a year. It still comes up with flashy feats of computing prowess, most recently when its Watson computer system handily defeated the world's best "Jeopardy!" players.

And, just as in 1911, it's still in the business of finding data solutions.

While IBM's Watson attracted buzz by beating two human "Jeopardy!" champions, the company wants to put it to real-world use as a medical diagnostic tool that can understand plain language and analyze mountains of information. That's in line with IBM's focus on other big data projects, such as analyzing traffic patterns citywide to predict and stave off traffic jams.

The company that built its success making sense of millions of punch card records sees future innovations in the analysis of the billions and billions of bits of data being transmitted in the 21st century.

"The scale of that enables you to do discovery, whether it's in the case of drugs, medicine, crime - you name it," says Bernard Meyerson, IBM's vice president for innovation.

Apple selling unlocked GSM iPhone 4 at online store

Apple has began selling a GSM version of the iPhone 4 that doesn't require a contract with AT&T, making the handset available for the first time to T-Mobile users or those who travel internationally, where GSM is more common. The phone is currently available only on Apple's online store.

The unlocked device cannot easily be used on Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel or other CDMA-based carriers, since that requires a different chipset. Hacking the phone to use those networks, known as jailbreaking, voids Apple's warranty.

Without a subsidy from AT&T - worthwhile for the carrier since voice and data plans more than recoup the difference - the unlocked iPhone, available in black or white, costs $649 for the 16-gigabyte version and $749 for the 32GB version.

That's more than the cost of buying the subsidized phone at $199, jailbreaking it and paying AT&T's $325 termination fee to switch to another carrier, something the majority of customers won't do.

The iPhone isn't compatible with T-Mobile's standard data network. And switching from AT&T to T-Mobile could be irrelevant if regulators approve a merger that would make the combined company the nation's largest wireless provider.

There's no indication whether Apple will release an unlocked CDMA iPhone or a version that can switch between networks. The CDMA iPhone for Verizon began shipping in February.

The iPhone 5 is expected to be available this fall.