Sprint Nextel is mulling over changing its 4G strategy, adding LTE to its existing WiMAX service and paving the way for a merger with T-Mobile, according to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, Sprint has sold over 300,000 of HTC's 4G-ready, Android-based Evo 4G phone, but is having trouble meeting demand due to shortages of 4.3-inch displays, says eWEEK.

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Avalue announced a panel PC it says is designed for home/factory automation, door security, and digital signage applications. The MPC-10W5 includes a 10.2-inch resistive touchscreen, a dual-core Intel Atom D510 processor, CompactFlash and hard disk storage, an optional webcam, and a special compartment for USB dongles, the company says.

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Investors might be jittery about the economy, but Intel doesn't appear to be, reporting glowing results for the second quarter of its 2010 financial year. “Strong demand … helped Intel achieve the best quarter in the company's 42-year history,” said Paul Otellini, the company's president and CEO.

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VXL announced two portable thin clients designed in conjunction with Lenovo. The 11.6-inch Itona TL100 includes a 1.0GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, while the 14.1-inch Itona TL412 has a dual-core, 1.86GHz Intel Celeron processor, the company says.

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NetGear announced a new family of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, touting faster performance and support for streaming to TiVo digital video recorders (DVRs) via Skifta technology. The ReadyNAS Ultras are available with four or six storage bays, offer single- or dual-core Intel Atom “Pineview” processors, and integrate Orb technology for transcoding content to remote devices, the company says.

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Team Tiny Core announced the first release candidate for version 3.0 of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distribution. Tiny Core 3.0 RC1 moves up to Linux 2.6.33.3, is available with an optional 64-bit kernel, includes the Ext4 file-system, and offers improvements to virtualization and the “compressed swap in RAM” feature, says the project.

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Spotify yesterday released a preview of its peer-to-peer (P2P) music application for desktop Linux, packaged as a Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package. The software shares most of its music sharing with the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Spotify, but currently lacks support for local audio files and is available only for Spotify Premium customers.

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Aaeon announced a four-port network appliance that supports Intel Pentium M and Celeron M processors plus a 2.5-inch internal hard disk drive. The FWS-2300 has four gigabit Ethernet ports with two-port LAN bypass, an RS232 console port, VGA output, two each of USB 2.0 and serial ports, plus both CompactFlash and Mini PCI expansion, the company says.

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Wind River announced the availability of an automated software testing solution for Android-based devices. Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android helps analyze a device's functionality, performance, and stability, and also checks compliance with the Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) standard, the company says.

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GamePark Holdings (GPH) is readying a new version of its GP2X handheld game console running open source Linux games. The “GP2X Caanoo” is equipped with a 533MHz ARM9 CPU and 3D-ready GPU, a 3.5-inch display, Wi-Fi, and an accelerometer with a vibration motor.

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Google Labs released a beta version of an education-focused, GUI-based software tool designed to let non-programmers develop Android applications. The App Inventor beta offers drag-and-drop visual programming tools for creating apps that can integrate social networking sites, make use of sensor data and speech interfaces, and grade quiz responses, says Google.

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Wind River announced that an upcoming, security-hardened version of its commercial embedded operating system, Wind River Linux Secure, is being evaluated by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) for Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification. In addition, Wind River Linux Secure has been accepted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a cryptographic module for evaluation to the FIPS 140-2 standard, says the company.

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E-con Systems has announced a five-megapixel camera add-on designed to work with Linux and the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP35x evaluation module (EVM). The e-CAM50_OMAP35x snaps onto the EVM board and connects to the OMAP35x's high-speed CMOS sensor interface, providing 720p video capture as well as stills, the company says.

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Blue Water Embedded announced a royalty-free graphical user interface (GUI) development framework for embedded devices, including those running Linux. The Prism Runtime Framework is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that incorporates Prism Micro, a GUI toolkit for constrained color-depth targets, and Prism Insight, a Linux-compatible desktop GUI design and resource editing tool, says the company.

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Emerson Network Power is shipping what it claims are the first COM Express modules based on Freescale Semiconductor's multicore, PowerPC-based QorIQ processors. The COMX-P2020 and COMX-P4080 employ dual-core QorIQ P2020 and eight-core QorIQ P4080 system-on-chips, respectively, offering both a wide variety of interfaces and Linux BSPs, says the company.

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