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The United States Department of Justice filled an antitrust lawsuit Aug. 31 that seeks to prevent the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, a division of Deutsche Telekom. The proposed $39 billion merger would reduce competition for mobile wireless communications services across the United States, according to a DOJ statement.
Axiomtek is shipping a full-size PICMG 1.0 single board computer (SBC) designed to accept Intel's “Sandy Bridge” generation Core i7/ i5/ i3 processors. The SBC81210 supports up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and offers PCI expansion, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB 2.0 ports, dual serial ports, and four SATA ports, including one 6Gbps port.
Sony is taking orders for a 9.4-inch, Android 3.1-based “Sony Tablet S” it will release next month, and says a folding, dual 5.5-inch display “Sony Tablet P” model (with Android 3.2) will follow later this year. Both models are equipped with 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processors, and the Sony Tablet S costs $499 with 16GB of storage or $599 with 32GB, according to the company.
To meet the high demand for its discontinued, but steeply discounted $99 TouchPad tablet, HP says it will do one more production run before finally killing the project for good. Meanwhile, an alpha Android port to the WebOS-based TouchPad has been demonstrated, and a bounty for a full Android hack has increased to $2,300.
Axiomtek announced a fanless, industrial “shoebox” PC with two expansion slots, offering four different combinations of PCI or PCI Express cards. The IPC922-212-FL includes single- or dual-core Atom processors, up to 4GB of DDR3 memory, multiple ports, plus both hard disk and CompactFlash storage, according to the company.
NetGear announced the availability of a dual-channel 802.11n router claimed to be the first home Wi-Fi router that can automatically switch to another channel when the first gets overcrowded. The N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router Premium Edition (WNDR3800) runs Linux on a 680MHz MIPS CPU, offers five gigabit Ethernet ports, plus a USB port that supports private cloud file sharing says the company.
Linaro has released a new version of its Linaro open source Linux tools, kernel, and middleware stack for ARM Cortex-based consumer electronics. Based on the Linux 3.0.3 kernel and GCC 4.6 toolchain, Linaro 11.08 offers Android and Ubuntu images for the BeagleBoard-xM, Pandaboard, Snowball, and Samsung Origen development boards, plus a new build for the Freescale i.MX53 board.
Amidst steadily growing smartphone usage, Google's Android has garnered a record 41.8 percent of the U.S. market, according to comScore. Meanwhile, the needle hasn't budged much for Microsoft — now at 5.7 percent — as customers apparently wait for the “Mango” update to Windows Phone 7.
Motorola Mobility announced an enhanced version of its QWERTY-enabled Motorola Pro phone destined for Europe and Asia. The Motorola Pro+ moves up to Android 2.3, is considerably lighter, and offers improved 640 x 480 resolution and Corning Gorilla glass for its 3.1-inch screen, but carries over a 1GHz processor, a five-megapixel camera, and business-oriented features.
Wyse announced that its “fastest thin clients ever” are now shipping and added two new Linux versions. All are powered by AMD's single-core T52R clocked at 1.5GHz or dual-core T56N clocked at 1.6GHz, but the Z90D7 and Z90DW run Windows Embedded Standard 7 and Windows Embedded Standard 2009, respectively, while the Z50S and Z50D run SUSE Linux Enterprise, according to the company.
Fujitsu and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo will next month release an Android tablet you could use in the bathtub, featuring a 10.1 inch touchscreen and dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor, according to the Datacider.com website. Meanwhile, Toshiba's poised to release a slimmer followup to its chunky Thrive, according to a Notebook Italia report.
Samsung announced LTE (long-term evolution) editions of its Galaxy S II smartphone and Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet computers, claiming potential download speeds of up to 100Mbps, and uploads of 50Mbps. The phone also upgrades to a 4.5 display and eight megapixel camera, while the slate weighs only a pound and is just over a third of inch thick, the company says.
An Alaskan company says it will soon ship a laptop computer that sports dual 17-inch displays, each with 1920 x 1080 pixels. Available in November, gScreen's “SpaceBook” comes with a Nvidia GTS 250M discrete graphics processing unit, a 500GB hard disk drive, a DVD drive, and a choice of Intel Core i5 or i7 processors.
August is typically regarded as one of the slower months, at least when it comes to tech news. But this August? Not so much.
Norco unveiled a computing module that complies with Intel's Open Pluggable Specification (OPS) for digital signs and sports an Intel Core i7-2665LE processor. Designed to slot into the back of a signage display, the BIS-6330 accepts up to 4GB of memory, has a gigabit Ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports, and includes a Mini PCI Express slot, the company says.