Business Tech

Dell has stopped selling 8.9-inch Netbooks, focusing instead on ones with slightly larger screens.

Visitors to Dell's U.K. Web site earlier on Monday found the Mini Netbook page displaying the phrase "Available in 8.9" but no actual options for buying the Mini 9 model. The site focused instead on Dell's Mini 10 and 10v Netbooks.

U.S.-based tech site Engadget noted that a customer service representative in the U.S. had confirmed the "end of life" of the Mini 9.

Dell is the latest Netbook manufacturer to move away from … Read more

Watching the Google Wave demo last week and reading Tim O'Reilly's enthusiastic review, it struck me how amazingly cool Wave promises to be...and just how paltry most enterprise software remains.

Sure, you think: it's easy for Google to innovate. It has thousands of engineers!

Maybe. But I don't remember Microsoft coming up with Wave, and it has even more engineers. Neither did IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc.

Google did, and it started Wave with a small core team of two brothers, a core team that appears to have done much of the work gestating Wave to … Read more

I've been getting a fair number of questions about multi-threading the past couple of weeks. The reason is that Intel has been previewing its "Nehalem EX" Xeon processor in advance of Advanced Micro Device's six-core "Istanbul" CPU launch. Intel's Nehalem generation has simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)--which Intel calls Hyper-Threading (HT)--while Istanbul does not.

I wrote about this topic in depth a couple of years back in "Gradations of Threading," but it's worth reviewing in the context of these new server processors.

First, a little terminology.

A thread is a … Read more

Psion and Intel have settled their legal battle over the use of the word "Netbook."

Since early 2008, chipmaker Intel has been using the term to refer to small, cheap, low-powered sub-notebooks, and its Atom chipset has become by far the most popular engine for such machines.

However, British PDA maker Psion registered a trademark for "Netbook" in a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1996. The company, which is now called Psion Teklogix and is based in Canada, introduced a handheld device called the NetBook Pro earlier this decade but … Read more

Adobe Systems released on Monday beta versions of three programming projects for producing online applications that run in its Flash Player, software that's widely used but also under competitive threat from other Web technologies.

First is a beta version of Flash Catalyst, a programming tool that's meant for the designer crowd rather than the coding crowd. Catalyst lets designers create a Flash application's user interface in Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator applications, import the files, attach a variety of actions to user interface elements, then produce the Flash application for production or for handing off to more … Read more

This was originally posted at Between the Lines.

Global chip sales rose to $15.6 billion in April, up 6.4 percent from March. That's the good news. The bad: chip sales are still down 25 percent from April sales of $20.9 billion a year ago, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

The SIA provides the following color (statement):

• PC demand is better than expected as inventory is replenished;

• PC sales in 2009 are expected to fall 6 percent better than estimates that expected a decline of 12 percent;

• Cell phone sales also aren't as bad as … Read more

Qualcomm said Sunday that it is adding new Snapdragon silicon to its series of chips for Netbooks and other small devices while it showcases devices at the Computex conference in Taipei.

The San Diego-based company announced that it is expanding the Snapdragon chip platform with a next-generation chipset that uses the 45-nanometer process technology to provide faster processing, significant battery life improvements, and other enhancements.

The chips are targeted at smartphones and so-called smartbooks. The latter is a category of small devices that, in some cases, will be similar in appearance to Netbooks but will emphasize 3G connectivity and be … Read more

Nvidia has its own grand scheme for Netbooks, the tiny laptops that have gained wide acceptance running on software and hardware from Microsoft and Intel, respectively.

At the giant Computex conference starting Tuesday in Taiwan, Nvidia will be showing hardware running on its Tegra processor and Windows CE, the version of Windows used most prominently to date in business-use handheld computers. And, down the road, Nvidia has high hopes for devices based on Google's Android.

Tegra is a system-on-a-chip that integrates a processor based on a design from U.K.-based ARM and Nvidia's GeForce graphics silicon, among other functions. The goal is to bring robust PC-like graphics to small devices such as Netbooks and handheld devices--the latter also referred to as mobile Internet devices.

In a break from Computex tradition, Nvidia will have phone companies in tow. "We're bringing the carriers in. I've got 100 people showing up from carriers at Computex," Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile business unit, said in a phone interview Friday.

Tegra will be shown at the trade show in devices that manufacturers "are about ready to release into production," Rayfield said.

"The Internet is all about (Adobe) flash and HD (high-definition) now so we've built a platform that can do that," he said. "There are two operating systems we support. Microsoft Windows CE and, as it becomes more interesting for large screens, (Google) Android," Rayfield said.

"We do Android for smartphones and we're working to do hardware acceleration on Android as it goes to larger displays," Rayfield said. In February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nvidia announced that it is working with Google and the Open Handset Alliance to get its Tegra processor into phones based on Google's Android operating system.

Android will likely appear commercially in larger devices, such as Netbooks, by the middle of next year, Rayfield said. "Android, as it stands now, does not do hardware acceleration," he said, referring to graphics-based acceleration of video and other multimedia applications. "We've already got 720p acceleration on Android internally," he said. 720p is a lower-resolution standard for high-definition video.

Rayfield continued. "Android has got a roar ahead of it but I think it's three of four quarters from a large-screen device. And the market wants something interesting before that." … Read more

Mozilla is close to releasing of its near-final version of Firefox 3.5, but the updated browser wasn't quite ready in time for a planned day of widespread testing.

Earlier this month, Mozilla set Friday to be Firefox 3.5 RC1 Test Day. But RC1, the first release candidate designed to be more stable than the earlier Firefox beta versions, wasn't finished for the occasion.

"Even though RC1 hasn't been released yet, the test day will still go on with the latest nightlies (nightly builds of Firefox based on the latest source code) which are practically … Read more