Apple

This time around, AMD is ready with a major product launch on schedule, and is enjoying a bit of good fortune as well.

Notebook makers of all stripes are getting ready to launch systems based on AMD's Puma notebook technology, which consists of a new processor, a mobile chipset, and wireless chips from AMD's partners. The official announcement is expected to come later Wednesday at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, and notebooks with the chips will be arriving over the next several weeks from companies like Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, said Bahr Mahony, director of AMD'… Read more

The era of officially sanctioned iPhone applications should kick off on Monday.

That's the same day Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to take the stage at the Moscone Center to unveil the next-generation iPhone at the company's annual Worldwide Developers' Conference. A source at a software company that has been working on a native iPhone application tells us the company is getting ready to launch that application on Monday, which could also imply that Apple's App Store will be up and running that day.

The App Store is going to be the only way to get … Read more

Intel is ready to ship the latest edition of its Atom processor family, this time going after the emerging market for low-cost subnotebooks.

The N270 and N230 are processors designed for what Intel calls "netbooks" and "nettops," and the company plans to unveil them Tuesday at Computex in Taiwan. The new chips are basically the same chips as the earlier Atom processors released for mobile Internet devices, but they have been tweaked slightly for use with bigger Internet access devices, said Erik Reid, director of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, on a conference call.

While the … Read more

Apple experienced a bit of a setback in the U.S. smartphone market during the first quarter after coming out of nowhere last year to rank among the top companies.

According to data compiled by IDC, Apple's still the second-leading smartphone maker in the U.S. behind Research in Motion and the BlackBerry franchise. But it lost market share going from the fourth quarter to the first at the expense of RIM and Palm, according to the figures provided by IDC analyst Ramon Llamas.

RIM's market share went from 35.1 percent in the fourth quarter to 44.… Read more

Add another log on the iPhone rumor pile: it may be smaller.

The iPhone silly season is in full swing for the second consecutive year, as we get ready for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference one week from today. A next-generation iPhone is expected to be the centerpiece of CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address, and a new report from Wired is claiming that the revamped iPhone will be 22 percent smaller thinner than the original.

The report also says the iPhone will connect to 3G networks--which isn't exactly a shocker--and will come with a GPS chip. Two tidbits that … Read more

It's hard to believe that no one in the "Me Generation" beat them to it, but Apple has apparently registered Me.com as a possible replacement for its .Mac service.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has assembled a list of evidence that Apple is holding onto the domain, with the likely scenario that the company wants to launch a new Internet service. The domain is currently held by a company called MarkMonitor, but the administrator of Me.com bears an Apple e-mail address. Last month, Network World noticed that Apple had snapped up a bunch of Montenegro'… Read more

Motorola's Good Technology group hopes its latest update will eliminate the moment of terror experienced by a traveling salesperson who realizes the slide deck got left back at the office.

Good 6.0 will now allow Windows Mobile smartphone users to access corporate applications and their companies' shared network resources over the same secure connection that delivers their e-mail. This would eliminate the need for VPN (virtual private network) software on smartphones, said Dan Rudolph, director of product marketing for Good.

Good's software allows Windows Mobile and Palm users to get their corporate e-mail on their handhelds, as … Read more

Nvidia is doubling down on its budding processor business for the next generation of mobile computers.

This week at Computex, Nvidia plans to show off its new Tegra brand for mobile application processors. Earlier this year, the company unveiled its first processor for smartphones, the APX 2500. It's now adding two processors to its Tegra brand, with plans to target the emerging Mobile Internet Device category, according to Mike Rayfield, general manager of the company's mobile business.

Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors, of course, but has been taking steps toward a mobile future since its … Read more

It's pretty much a given that the next-generation iPhone will be faster, but it might be able to find its way home as well.

GigaOm is reporting that Broadcom is Apple's supplier for GPS chips that are inside the next iPhone, expected to arrive with a 3G cellular networking chip within a few weeks. GPS is an increasingly common feature inside smartphones, and is much more accurate than the cell-tower and Wi-Fi positioning system that Apple rolled out in January.

Rumors of GPS capabilities inside the forthcoming iPhone trickled out earlier this month, in the form of possible geotagging code … Read more