Google will launch a $199 tablet this week at its developers conference co-branded with Asus, Bloomberg is reporting.

This follows a series of reports that have been trickling out for months about a 7-inch Nexus tablet being developed with Asus. The tablet is slated to debut at the Google I/O conference that starts Wednesday.

The one feature garnering the most attention is price. At $199, the Google tablet is $200 less than Apple's $399 iPad 2.

Previous reports have claimed the Nexus device will sport the Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" operating system, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 … Read more

Parts of Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage on Thursday that led to a spread of high-profile sites clocking off the Web for the evening.

Amazon was quick to update its cloud status -- its first update at 8:50 p.m. PT -- stating the problems were due to a power outage in a Virginia data center.

At 3:26 a.m. PT Friday, the company said that the problem had been resolved and that service was again operating normally. It also advised: "Customers with impaired volumes may still need to follow the instructions above to recover … Read more

Microsoft will announce its own tablet next week at an event in Los Angeles, according to reports, taking a page from Apple's playbook.

If true, this is not the typical Microsoft business model; usually it leaves device announcements to device makers. The PC industry is the classic example of this.

And, so far, that has been the case for Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets. Companies like Acer and Asus demonstrated Windows 8 tablets and hybrids at Computex last week, for instance.

But a report at The Wrap and another at AllThingsD say Microsoft has other plans.

Microsoft reportedly … Read more

IDC has updated its tablet forecast, raising Apple's iOS share at the expense of Android, while RIM's Blackberry fades to irrelevance.

IDC now expects iOS to grab 62.5 percent of the tablet market in 2012, up from 58.2 percent in 2011. Meanwhile, Android's share will slip to 36.5 percent from 38.7 percent in 2011.

And where does that leave BlackBerry? Virtually nowhere. RIM's tablet platform fades to 1 percent of the market in 2012, down from an already-tiny 1.7 percent share in 2011.

The market researcher is not currently forecasting Windows 8 or Windows RT tablets … Read more

NEW YORK--Industry consortia are pervasive. But they often don't amount to much -- a spate of press releases, a series of progressively less energetic meetings making little progress, and the eventual fade to black. And even most successful consortia tend to be about vendors cooperating on specific standards and technologies. Important, but very limited in scope.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has been an exception. It announced in October of 2010 with a membership including more than 70 global IT leaders, representing $50 billion dollars in annual IT spend. Intel has been the organizing force and is the … Read more

Intel will not join a chip-related alliance aimed at making it easier for software developers to take advantage of the compute power locked up in graphics silicon.

Advanced Micro Devices, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., and Texas Instruments announced the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation on Tuesday.

Here's how Lisa Su, an AMD senior vice president, described it in a phone interview with CNET.

"The point is, even if you put a really powerful CPU next to a really powerful GPU, if these [chips] don't interact and the applications don't know when it's better to … Read more

Amazon's Jeff Barr noted this morning that its S3 online storage service reached 1 trillion objects, or files, last week, impressive growth for a service that launched in 2006.

Barr writes on the company's Amazon Web Services blog:

That's 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.

He added that the object count has been growing by up to 3.5 billion objects in a single day, or … Read more

Tablet or tweener? Does the Microsoft camp's convergence argument win the day?

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been clear about tablet-laptop convergence: not interested.

But Microsoft, Intel, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and a long list of PC makers are. Very.

That would be due to Windows 8 and its touch-centric Metro interface, of course. This is driving PC makers to come up with novel hybrid (i.e., tweener) designs that function as both a tablet and laptop, as was amply demonstrated at Computex this week.

There will basically be two choices offered.

--Products like the Acer Aspire S7 that are … Read more

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.--Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled his company's entrance into the public cloud space on Wednesday afternoon, simply titled Oracle Cloud.

"It's been a long time coming," Ellison said. "We made a decision to rebuild all of our applications for the cloud almost seven years ago."

Ellison explained that the venture was previously dubbed "Project Fusion," but Ellison acknowledged that one of Oracle's competitors referred to it as "Project Confusion."

Also calling out the competition without naming any company in particular, Ellison asserted that Oracle Cloud is … Read more