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Will Thrive survive?
While much of the world was focused on Amazon’s Kindle Fire launch, Toshiba also announced its foray into the market with a 7–inch Thrive tablet. To go on sale in the US and Japan in 2011, the Thrive has a 1280×800 display and Micro HDMI port, weighs less than a pound and is under half an inch thick.
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Ellison’s still got Sparc
Oracle’s Larry Ellison launched the company’s Sparc T4 processor, along with new hardware that it hopes will turn up the heat on server rivals Hewlett–Packard and IBM. The T4 is the latest addition to the Sparc processor family developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. It has eight processor cores, down from 16 in the T3, but each core runs at up to 3GHz, compared to the T3’s 1.65Ghz
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Code red!
A Russian hacker calling himself sourcec0de has offered to sell root access to the MySQL.com website for $3,000. MySQL.com was hacked and used to infect PCs on Monday. Screenshot courtesy Trend Micro.
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Who would steal Nokia stuff?
A recent Nokia anti–counterfeit campaign netted 11,000 items, including 2071 counterfeit Nokia handsets, 330 separate earpieces and 9084 pieces of batteries. This has been the biggest and most successful raid for Nokia and anti–counterfeit officials. Accompanied by police officers, officials from the Anti-Counterfeit Agency and the Kenya Bureau of Standards, Nokia raided the Sky Building on Luthuli Avenue, which houses several handset traders. A Chinese national was also arrested at his home, where he allegedly assembles Nokia products.
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T-Mobile opens up the Galaxy
T–Mobile USA Chief Marketing Officer Cole Brodman introduces the Samsung Galaxy S II and the HTC Amaze 4G at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco last week. The HTC Amaze 4G and the Samsung Galaxy S II will be the first from T–Mobile capable of download speeds around 8 Mbps (bits per second) or as fast as 20 Mbps depending on availability and network load.
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No more cookies for you!
Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican is one of two U.S. lawmakers who have called on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate the use of so–called supercookies on many Web sites, suggesting that use of the hard–to–remove tracking tools may be an unfair business practice. The use of supercookies, which can be installed without a computer user’s knowledge, raises “serious privacy concerns and is unacceptable,” the lawmakers said in their letter.
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Look ma, no glasses!
Sony said it will sell a screen attachment for its Vaio laptops that allows users to view 3D movies and images without glasses. The clear panel comes in two models for its S and C series Vaios that went on sale earlier this year, and works with Blu-ray movies as well as digital images in the MPO, or multi–picture, format. No immediate release plans for Canada yet, unfortunately.
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4G hits Japan
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son talks on stage during the announcement of his company’s new high–speed network with Japanese actress Aya Ueto and Ultraman. Softbank, Japan’s third–largest mobile carrier and exclusive purveyor of the Apple iPhone in the country, said last week it would launch in November a new data network allowing downloads of up to 110 Mbps (megabits per second), faster than many wired connections provide today. The new “Softbank 4G” network will initially be available via portable modems that create small wireless networks for computers and other devices, with the company aiming to have the country’s main populations centers covered by April 2013.
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Is that a Kindle in your pocket, or …
While most of the attention was focused on its Kindle Fire tablet launch, Amazon also released a number of updated Kindle e–readers, which promised to be cheaper and lighter than their predecessor. Storage unit shown in this photo is not included with the product.
