News to know: Apple patent suit, Intel, AMD, Google China woes
More patent lawsuits involving Apple, announcements from Intel, AMD and Dell, a peculiar Google outage in China and the slow start for JooJoo lead today’s themes. You can get the day’s rolling postsvia Twitter,RSS, oremail.
Here are the key themes for Wednesday, March 31, 2010:
In the latest episode of the Patent Lawsuit Blues, Apple - which made headlines earlier this month for slapping mobile phone maker HTC with about 20 different patent lawsuits - now finds itself on the defensive. Elan Technologies, a Taiwanese chipmaker, filed a complaint against Apple to the International Trade Commission for using its patented multitouch technology without authorization on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the forthcoming iPad.
On the enterprise hardware front, it was a busy day for Intel, AMD and Dell. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes highlights the three datacenter trends addressed with the launch of the new Opteron 6000 series server platform. Intel is looking to democratize high-performance computing with the rollout of high-end Xeon server processors that promise three times the performance over previous versions. Meanwhile, Dell has launched four new servers - three powered by Intel’s Nehalem EX processor and one by AMD’s latest Opteron.
When is an outage not an outage? When it's a blockage, of course. Google China, which now redirects to Google Hong Kong, went dark for a while yesterday. Some folks thought the government was behind it, until Google said it may have been a technical glitch on its part. But, nope. That wasn't it. Which leads us back to the original thought - government censors at work. For now, everything is up and running again - but Google is keeping a close watch.
Remember JooJoo, the tablet PC by Fusion Garage that was supposed to be TechCrunch's Crunchpad until the two companies got into a spat? Well, a peek inside court documents show that TechCrunch may have been better off being left out in the cold. It turns out there were only 90 pre-orders for the device. Yup, as in less than 100. Not a big jump start ahead of the release of the iPad later this week. And if the iPa
It may not be Patch Tuesday, but Microsoft is pushing an update to Internet Explorer 8 and Ed Bott says, regardless of the mixed messages you may be hearing, yes, you do need this update. Stat. The off-cycle issuing of a patch is rare, reserved to battle an exploit currently underway. If you haven't received the automatic update yet, you soon will.
And, finally, for your viewing pleasure: Some of the best phone recommendations don't come from guys like me or the salesfolks at the AT&T stores. CNET turned to the readers for their favorites, showcased in this gallery.