Content and news by Matt Serrano

While AMD seems to be having bad luck as of late, Intel shows off the company’s growing health. In its quarterly report, the company announced that profits rose 25%, beating previous expectations. Only Intel’s gross margin report was slightly disappointing, which only managed to land within the company’s target range. With everything said and done, everyone seems to agree that things are going well for the chip maker.

A major concern for a while was the impact on profit of the low-end PC market, which is one of the reasons why this news is somewhat surprising. Ashok Kumar, a CRT Capital Group analyst, held the concern that demand may have topped and the higher sales of inexpensive, low-end processors could have damaged their success, which clearly wasn’t the case overall.

I believe that more than anything, the earnings report shows that the technology industry is showing growth even in the recessive economy. With the other big name companies ready to release their quarterly reports within the next week, including Google, Microsoft, and Apple, we’re sure to see other signs of profit.

Intel Corp. had a quarter of ups and downs.  It was shocked when the Federal Trade Commission announced that it would be formally investigating whether the company, which controls roughly 80 to 90 percent of the worldwide microprocessor market, abused its dominant position in an illegal fashion.  

Despite this down, there were numerous ups.  Amidst a war of words with NVIDIA, Intel forged ahead with its upcoming discrete graphics offerings, set to take on NVIDIA and subsidiary ATI, owned by its chief microprocessor competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).  Intel also was pleased to see a strong Centrino 2 launch with many partner products, after concerns stemming from some initial glitches and delays.

Things have certainly been rough for AMD as of late. Today, AMD’s CEO, Hector Ruiz, stepped down from his position at the company. There is no way of knowing whether or not his departure is a result of the company’s performance, but after Jerry Sanders’ and Phil Hester’s leave, you have to wonder what the plan is for the future at the company.

With all of that said, I, as well as many others want to see AMD truly step up in the consumer CPU industry. While AMD probably won’t leave us any time soon, with Intel all but dominating the space, the migration back over to Intel CPUs will leave the company in a hard position to compete with.

The CEO of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is stepping down.

Hector Ruiz had been just the second person to lead AMD after company founder Jerry Sanders. He’ll be replaced by the chip maker’s No. 2 executive, Dirk Meyer.

In an interview with Microsoft’s Don Mattrick, MTV was able to squeeze out conformation that Bungie is indeed developing a new Halo game that is separate from the previously announced Halo Wars real time strategy game, and Peter Jackson’s mysterious project. Foregoing rumors seem to agree that this new game will not involve the Mater Chief as the main protagonist, but nothing is concrete yet.

It is not certain whether or not this Halo game is the secret reveal which was prevented from being disclosed by Microsoft, so it remains possible that Bungie fans could see two games from the eminent development studio.

Here’s something to add to all the E3 drama this week about Bungie Studios‘ canceled/postponed/hyped debut of a new game…

In an interview shot for MTV News on Tuesday, Microsoft’s head of Xbox business Don Mattrick, confirmed to me that Bungie is indeed working on a new “Halo” game of some sort for Microsoft.

In an attempt to respond to customers upset about the initial MobileMe outages and services that were left offline until they were finally fixed, Apple emailed an apology to current MobileMe and .Mac customers. In the email. Apple said, “the .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped but everything is now up and running,” and mentioned how they misused the term “push” in respect to the 15-minute wait time for changes to email, calendars and contact to sync to the “cloud.”

Subsequently, the company has offered a 30-day extension to the subscription period for current customers, no doubt to make up for the weekend-long instability. However, there was no mention of incorporated real push functionality at a later date in the email, but it is theoretically possible right now at the cost of system resources, because both Windows and OS X don’t have the core push functionality built in.

Apple’s launch of MobileMe last Friday was bumpy with many users not being to login at all, while others had difficulty getting anything to sync properly. Apple on Wednesday recognized those problems and is offering an olive branch to all MobileMe subscribers.

At Sony’s E3 press conference today, the company released new information for the entire PlayStation product line, with news about the PS3, PSP and PS2. First, the PS3 will be sold in a new SKU, which some outlets consider replace all of the existing PS3 consoles, an 80GB model which will sell at $399. The PlayStation store now features movie downloads from Sony Pictures, Fox, MGM, Lions Gate, Warner, Disney, Paramount, Turner, Funimation. Content can be bought online from a PC, and synced to the PSP.

New information about Home, which will offer “game-themed rooms,” and what Sony calls “SSO” – single sign-on for the PlayStation Network, were also released. Infamous, MAG, DC Universe Online, and God of War III (in the form of a pre-rendered trailer) were also shown off.

Finally, a new PSP bundle will be released in the form of a new “Entertainment Pack.” The package will include a silver PSP slim, 1GB Memory Stick, National Treasure 2, Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, and a voucher for Echochrome. The bundle will retail for $199 and go on sale this October.

Though Nintendo’s E3 conference may have not held as much flare as Microsoft’s, the company did unveil three new games for the Wii: Animal Crossing, Wii Sports Resort, and Wii Music. Clearly in an attempt to create more demand in the casual market, Wii Sports Resort and Wii Music focus on bringing your Miis in new situations, which including jet skiing, and, well.. playing the drums.

New peripherals were showed off as well, the previously announced WiiMotion Plus, which adds 1:1 movement sensing to the Wii remote, and WiiSpeak, which is a speaker for voice communication that sits atop the Wii’s sensor bar.

A lot of hardcore Nintendo fans were left disappointed at the company’s ignorance to their own dedicated fan base, and the lack of an impressive or surprising showing. Even games that were heavily rumored to make a showing, such as New Super Mario Bros. 2, Nintendogs 2, and Kid Icarus for the Wii, were suspiciously absent.

When the Open Handset Alliance debuted, Google made the promise that the platform would be open source and free to developers. The community assumed at the time, and rightfully so, that the SDK would be available to everyone, without bias. However, at time went on and the dated beta development kit made more onlookers question the overall tangibility of the endeavour, many were left wondering what fate was left to the still unreleased mobile operating system. Unfortunately for those left to question, news broke today that will surely break some developers’ hearts.

For whatever reason, Google has been giving out newer versions of the SDK to 50 developers who were finalists in the Android Developer Challenge under NDA. The dealing, which had been unearthed by accident as a Google employee mistakenly sent out a message about build 84853 of the SDK to a pubic mailing list, was awknowledged, but ultimately ignored by both Google and the developers involved.

I believe what most outraged developers are seeking is an explanation. The simple fact that no one was publicly notified of the existence of the newer builds, as Ars Technica points out, did a lot to crush developers’ trust, and perhaps faith, in the platform.

Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.

Microsoft’s E3 conference just ended, and the company dished out a lot of new information. First and foremost, they showed off new footage of Gears of War 2, Fable II, Fallout 3, Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero On Tour, Resident Evil 5 and, in a much more surprising note, Final Fantasy XIII (!), which was unveiled at the end of the event.

Along with the major games, partners also showed off Geometry Wars 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Portal: Still Alive, Galaga Legion (a sequel to the famous arcade game), as well as others. Microsoft also announced their plans to include NBC, Universal, MGM and Constantin’s content in their HD video marketpalce (which is available now) and integrate Netflix’s Instant Queue feature to the new version of the dashboard.

Finally, the redesigned dashboard features Avatars, a digital replication of yourself, and “Primetime,” featuring a virtual gameshow which will offer real prizes. All of this thrown into a new user interface. Games will finally be allowed to run off the hard drive, and the Xbox 360 will add support for 16:10 resolutions over HDMI and VGA.

In a case of “we all saw that coming,” Microsoft officially announced their plans to drop the price of their Premium ( or “Pro”) console to $299 and release a new 60GB version at the old 20GB’s price point. What we weren’t so sure about was their intention to discontinue the 20GB model altogether, so this price cut is really a clearance sale in disguise. The remaining SKUs were left unaltered.

Even though the Xbox 360 Elite is sticking to it’s original price of $449, Amazon.com is offering a seemingly limited-time discount, which brings the price down to $399, presumably to better fit with Microsoft’s other offerings. Hopefully this price will follow the Elite to other outlets as well.

It seems that with the growing sales of the PS3, Microsoft is looking for a way to increase adoption of its console in an already saturated market, as well as increase its ground with more casual gamers. With prices this low and many of the quality control problems stamped out, its hard to resist.

Redmond, Washington—Microsoft is giving consumers more gigabytes for their buck. The company today announced an Xbox 360® console with triple the storage space of the original console, but for the same price of $349 (U.S.) estimated retail price.

Available in retail stores in the U.S. and Canada starting in early August, the upgraded Xbox 360 will include a 60GB hard drive for storing the growing wealth of digital entertainment available for the console, including music, movies, television shows, and game content. In addition, Microsoft today dropped the price of its 20GB Xbox 360 console in the U.S. and Canada to just $299 (U.S.) (ERP) while supplies last, a savings of $50.

The massive global iPhone launch has left many unfortunate customers without a phone a phone at all. Soon after the iPhone launch in the USA and Canada, Apple’s iTunes activation servers failed, and stumbling AT&T, Rogers and Apple employees were left in confusion. Some people were reportedly sent home with their phones to activate on their own, while others were kept in the store in hopes that the problems would be resolved. General reports around the major news sites indicate that activation from iTunes seems to be a hit or miss. As you may remember, Apple and AT&T had similar problems last year, and the issues were eventually resolved.

Also, for some reason, the new iPhone 2.0 software upgrade automatically pushed through iTunes seems to be rendering some units unusable. The scale of the totally amount of people having problems is not clear, but the interesting thing is that the leaked update found yesterday doesn’t seem to be the cause of the issues other than possible instability, because it is a different build.

Finally, as if things couldn’t get any worse, Apple had a tough time rolling out the MobileMe update, with the site going up and down throughout the day. At the time of writing, the site is up, but new users aren’t allowed to register, and the service is slow for those able to log in. Apple’s online services have been noted for their uptime, but the launch is just underway and there are bound to be problems with the amount of curious users wanting to try out the new features.

Overall, I think Apple was ill prepared tried to do too much in such a short time frame. Since they are partnered so closely with other companies for the iPhone, there is obviously a weak link somewhere along the chain. Still, I’m confident the issues will be resolved eventually, with the question of when being the only one remaining.

Update: According to Engadget, the iTunes activation servers are back online, and the major stores seem to have more phones in stock.

Source: Gizmodo , Source: CNet , Source: Engadget

Intel’s newest mobile platform, Centrino 2, will launch on Monday, July 11. Among the improvements, the new platform will include support for 802.11n, WiMAX and DDR3 RAM, as well as faster 45nm processors which reach speeds of up to 2.8GHz.

One thing to note is that the first available chipsets will only include nVidia and ATI’s dedicated graphics, not Intel’s integrated systems. The new platform should increase performance and battery life across the board compared to the older generation of notebooks.

As notebook shipments have begun to significantly outpace the sales of desktop computers, each new notebook platform launched by Intel becomes more important to the company. This Monday July 14 marks the launch of Intel’s Centrino 2 platform, previously known by the code-name Montevina. The launch comes weeks after Intel had planned due to a problem with Intel’s own integrated graphics for the platform.

If you had any doubt whatsoever that the Xbox 360 wasn’t in fact going to drop in price, you’ll have some hard arguments to make. Joystiq has compiled a photo gallery of all of the previous $299 rumor sources that almost make you wonder why Microsoft hasn’t admitted to the decrease in price already.

The new price-point puts the premium Xbox 360 in an interesting place between the Wii and the PS3. Consumers faced with the option of a $250 Wii and a $300 Xbox 360 with a hard drive, component cables and wireless controllers make the Wii and even harder option to consider, especially with the growing popularity of Xbox Live Arcade. The PS3 still has its advantage of being a Blu-Ray player, but the extra $100 can still serve to dissuade potential buyers.

Although there isn’t any news of the Arcade model decreasing in price, I would have to imagine that it will soon be continued in favor of the hard drive-equiped model. We may get more information from Microsoft during the week of E3.

As we patiently wait for Microsoft to acknowledge the $299 Xbox 360 price drop, we’d like to thank everyone who helped by sending us information. We’ve put together the gallery below to store all the (non-duplicate) images we’ve received about the markdown.

If you had any doubt whatsoever that the Xbox 360 wasn’t in fact going to drop in price, you’ll have some hard arguments to make. Joystiq has compiled a photo gallery of all of the previous $299 rumor sources that almost make you wonder why Microsoft hasn’t admitted to the decrease in price already.

The new price-point puts the premium Xbox 360 in an interesting place between the Wii and the PS3. Consumers faced with the option of a $250 Wii and a $300 Xbox 360 with a hard drive, component cables and wireless controllers make the Wii and even harder option to consider, especially with the growing popularity of Xbox Live Arcade. The PS3 still has its advantage of being a Blu-Ray player, but the extra $100 can still serve to dissuade potential buyers.

Although there isn’t any news of the Arcade model decreasing in price, I would have to imagine that it will soon be continued in favor of the hard drive-equiped model. We may get more information from Microsoft during the week of E3.

As we patiently wait for Microsoft to acknowledge the $299 Xbox 360 price drop, we’d like to thank everyone who helped by sending us information. We’ve put together the gallery below to store all the (non-duplicate) images we’ve received about the markdown.

A group of Australian scientists at the University of Sydney have developed a new technology that could hopefully one day speed the Internet up without costing a dime. They use photonic integrated circuit boosts instead of fiber optic cables which can guide data in one picosecond, which the researchers describe as “a small scratch on a piece of glass.”

The main issue with the claim of hoping to speed up existing networks is the fact that ISPs have a much slower data backbone, and there is a cost investment to replacing existing equipment. Realistically, the future is there, it’s just a matter of getting to it, which takes more time and money initially conceived.

As of right now, the technology has been proven to achieve speeds of up to 60x faster than Australia’s Telstra network. If it continues to improve, hopefully we’ll hear more good news about it.

University of Sydney scientists say they have developed a new technology that could speed up the internet – and not cost users an extra cent.

The first batch of iPhone reviews started to come out late last night from the big three Apple reviewers: Walt Mossberg, David Pogue and Edward Baig. The verdict? It’s what we all expected. The hardware and software have been long revealed to us all, which leaves little surprise when the on-hand experiences hit.

Walt takes jabs at the new phone’s battery life and AT&T’s spotty 3G service. Pogue takes aim at the iPhone’s GPS antenna being “too small” (wait, what?) and the fact that there is no turn-by-turn navigation, and the lack of “voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio [and] phone-to-phone photo sending (MMS).” Finally, Baig wishes for Flash, Windows Media and Java support.

Overall, the three reviews complement the iPhone for having faster speeds, improved audio quality and GPS. The fact remains though, if you want one, you probably know whether or not it’s going to be in your pocket in a few week’s time.

Source: All Things Digital , Source: The New York Times , Source: USA Today

In a way, I’m speechless. Maybe, just maybe those thousands of unhappy Canadian voices finally got through to the folks at Rogers. Or, I’m seriously hallucinating. I’ll take it as the former until someone pinches me.

According to a press release from Rogers, the company will offer a promotional deal that will include 6GB of data for $30 a month that can be tacked on to any voice plan. This promotion is only going to last until August 31, so this is definitely a bid to try to pursuade people already on the fence about buying an iPhone.

Granted, it isn’t the best deal around, but it’s way better than the company’s previous offering. 6GB of data should be enough for anyone, especially since there is no tethering option (unless you plan to watch tons of videos over the air on the device, but even that’s a stretch). Hopefully the demand will encourage Rogers to keep the deal around for the long haul, but time will tell.

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan. For example, with 6GB of data, iPhone 3G users can visit 35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes of YouTube videos each and every month.

It’s been a long road for Blu-Ray. But now that the format war and the need for a completive edge is long over, one might have guessed the members of the Blu-ray Disc Association would have given up on creating a means for higher capacity discs. It looks like we were wrong.

Today, Pioneer put out a press release touting their newest and greatest achievement in optical media yet. Their “wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element” enabled them to produce a 16-layer read-only Blu-Ray disc, complete with the standard 25GB capacity per layer. Naturally, while this technology is only available for testing purposes for the time being, we will undoubtedly see a similar solution headed for retail when the technology is more mature.

Pioneer plans to release more details at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage on July 13.

July 7, 2008, Tokyo, Japan – Pioneer Corporation has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes for the first time in the world*1. Its per-layer capacity is 25 gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc (BD). This multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs. This development has bolstered Pioneer’s confidence in the feasibility of a large-capacity optical disc, which is expected to become necessary in the near future.

A group of pretentious customers have lined up a week early and the flagship 5th Avenue Apple store to ensure they get their hands on Apple’s newest product. It’s not clear whether or not this is just a grab for attention or media stunt, but the camping chairs, blankets and food are all laid out. These people are definitely in it until the end.

Apple’s 3G iPhone will be released July 11, and feature an in-store activation process that will surely slow things down for would-be customers standing in long lines. One thing’s for sure: If I decide to get one, I’m sure as heck not standing in line.

So we heard some really over-eager folks have decided to get a jump on the iPhone 3G line — a really, really big jump. Obviously, we had to head down and see if it was true… and it is. Right now, about ten people have started a line outside of Apple’s flagship store on 5th Avenue in New York.

The Japanese company announced plans to have a 5TB hard drive by 2010. The technology used, which they call "current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance" will allow 3.5" drives to push their data density over 1TB per square inch.

It’s not clear whether or not these drives will be a simple proof of concept, or be available to consumers for purchase, but we’ll no doubt be able to purchase a similar capacity drive sometime in the future. Even if a technology like SSD may be the future, NAND chips will have a hard time catching up.

Solid-state disks may be eating into the territory of traditional hard drives, particularly in laptops, but that doesn’t mean spinning platters are on their last legs – particularly not at Hitachi.

The Japan-based company has stated that it plans to have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB by 2010. It aims to achieve this with write heads that use something called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR).

A New York judge on Wednesday supported Viacom’s request for Google to hand over data on their users, including their names and their viewing history on YouTube. Initially, their request demanded Google give up the source code for the popular video sharing site, but that particular clause was denied.

The information will be used as evidence against Google to prove that copyrighted content on the web is more popular than original material, which would lead to Viacom to ask for a settlement fee. Google’s argued against the ruling, saying that revealing the data would "invade its users’ privacy," but the judge responded by saying any concerns were purely "speculative."

As one might expect, the judge’s decision has been taken under fire by the Internet community on the whole, who have no say whether or not their data can be used by a third party. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already taken a stance to support Google and fight the stance because it violates the Video Privacy Protection Act, and word has recently come out that the personal data will not be viewable by Viacom, but by "outside ad visors."

My major problem with Viacom’s request is the fact that the very data they’re searching for, anonymous video views, are already available on YouTube’s own site. It’s really a painful process to determine what the most popular videos on the site are, so forcing Google to give away users’ names and IP addresses is a blatant attempt to garner evidence to attack their users.

It’s hard to disagree that the judge’s comment about privacy concerns being "speculative," and not tangible, can only serve to highlight his incompetence. Clearly, if anyone in the equation had any regard for privacy, the whole deal would have been swiftly rejected.

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.