GBOT

Apple officially announced the 3G iPhone on Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote. The iphone is 3G capable which is 2.8 times faster than EDGE.

In the 2G iPhone users cannot browse the internet when they make a call but in the 3G version users can browse the internet and make a call at the same time. The 3G version would have built in GPS. It has a better battery life – 300 hours of standby, Talk-time 10 hours (as opposed to 5) on 2G networks, 5 hours of 3G talk-time (competition is 3 hour 3G talk time), 5 to 6 hours of high-speed browsing, 7 hours of video, 24 hours of audio.

The iPhone 3G will be available on July 11th in 22 countries for $199 for 8 GB and $299 for 16 GB. The 16 GB model also comes in white.

More updates will be given on this topic

Yahoo let Microsoft’s deadline for a response to its $40 billion-plus offer for the Sunnyvale Internet company pass without a word on Saturday, putting the ball back in Microsoft’s court.
Now, the stage is set for what could be a dramatic week.

Most analysts expect Microsoft to take its offer directly to shareholders at Yahoo’s annual meeting by proposing its own slate of directors for Yahoo’s board and letting stock owners decide then whether they want to accept Microsoft’s offer.

But there are other possibilities: Microsoft could withdraw its offer, at least for the time being, figuring it could always come back at Yahoo later. Or it could extend the deadline hoping to still hammer out a deal. And finally, Yahoo could announce it has a deal with another partner.

“We’ll see what next week brings,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Christopher Lidell said Friday.

If there’s no move from Yahoo, Lidell said, the company can either go directly to Yahoo shareholders or “walk away.”

The passing of the deadline prolongs a standoff that began Feb. 1 with Microsoft’s offer of $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, and Yahoo insisting it was worth far more. But the value of the half-cash, half-stock deal has actually fallen since it was first announced, as shares of both companies have declined. Yahoo shares closed Friday at $26.80; Microsoft’s at $29.83, down from $30.50 the day the deal was announced.

Yahoo has been scrambling without much success to find alternatives to a Microsoft deal, after postponing its annual meeting to give itself more time to weigh its options.

It has not set a date for the annual meeting and has until mid-July to hold one under the law in Delaware, where the company is incorporated. The deadline for nominating outside directors is now an unspecified date sometime later this year but before the meeting.
At this point, the issue is largely price. Yahoo is holding out for considerably more, and Microsoft has been holding firm at $31 a share.

Industry observers expect a deal to be struck, possibly for as much as $34 a share, but it’s possible that the issue won’t be resolved until the summer and Yahoo’s annual meeting.

Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay predicted in a note Friday that the acquisition would be over before the end of July at a “slightly improved price.”

“It will be a good, old-fashioned proxy fight,” Lindsay said in an interview, using the term for a battle for control of a corporate board. “At any time up to then, Yahoo can throw in the towel and negotiate.”

Microsoft has been growing impatient. The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, complained in a letter to Yahoo’s board April 5 that despite “some limited interaction” between the companies, “there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement.”

And Lidell said Thursday that Yahoo appeared to have “unrealistic expectations of value.”

As the next step, Microsoft would file to nominate its slate of directors. Yahoo will accept nominations up to 10 days after it announces its next annual meeting.

Yahoo spent weeks after Microsoft’s offer trying to come up with alternatives to the deal with Microsoft. Though its board and top executives explored possible deals with Google, America Online and Time Warner and News Corp., little concrete came of it. Yahoo did announce a test in which Google would handle Yahoo’s search advertising on a limited basis, but otherwise no other options have panned out.

Meanwhile, many Yahoo shareholders favored a sale at $31 or more.

Each company has been showing signs of age as the newer, nimbler Google dominates the lucrative business for Internet search advertising and begins to move into the area where Yahoo is strong: Internet display ads.

After years in denial, insiders say, Microsoft realized it had to catch up with Google before Google became the next Microsoft — so entrenched that no competitor could dislodge it.

The Internet advertising market “is increasingly dominated by one player,” Ballmer observed when he announced the offer for Yahoo on Feb. 1.

Both companies have been overtaken by Google, which had a better way of reaping revenue from ads placed on its search results pages. It rapidly outstripped Yahoo in online search advertising.

Yahoo has slumped badly in the past couple years. The day before Microsoft announced its offer, Yahoo closed at $19.18 a share — half what it sold for two years earlier.

Microsoft has projected $1 billion in cost savings from combining the companies’ two Internet operations. Analyst Sandeep Aggarwal of Collins Stewart in San Francisco, assigning a 90 percent probability that Microsoft will acquire Yahoo, said he thinks Microsoft will absorb “a large portion” of Yahoo’s employees.

In any case, such a deal would remove a storied corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley and end an entrepreneurial saga that began in 1994 when two Stanford University graduate students created the search and Web directory technology that made Yahoo an Internet giant.

The students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, soon were attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. They incorporated the following year and began charging for advertising on Yahoo’s Web site.

Source

Software giant, Microsoft Corp., is not planning to launch a device to compete with Apple’s iPhone, according to the company’s Chairman and co-founder, Bill Gates.

“No, we won’t do that,” Gates said in an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung yesterday. “In the so-called smart phone business we will concentrate solely on software with our Windows Mobile Program.”

“We have partnerships with a lot of device manufacturers from Samsung to Motorola and this variety brings us significantly more than if we would make our own mobile phone,” Gates explained.

Apple, which is one of Microsoft’s main competitors in the computer software market, launched its long-anticipated iPhone handset in the U.S. last June. The high-end music- and web-enabled cell phone was a big hit in America and parts of Europe this holiday shopping season.

Forget the solar bags that only charge your phone, handheld or laptop a bit, because Voltaic launches a bag that can charge your laptop in just one day, if the bag is kept in sunlight. Unfortunately, it still isn’t really useful, because one day it’s quite long to charge your laptop and this if you can keep it into sunlight.

The solar bag can produce 14.7 watts from one solar panel in one sunny day and it also comes with adapters, so you can charge your USB devices, phones and also it includes a battery.

It’s other bad part is the price of $599, that doesn’t really seem to make it affordable, because you would probably better buy more batteries and don’t need to wait that much to use your laptop again. But this is good if you don’t want to carry many batteries with you and you need to stay away from electricity for at least a few days.

Microsoft has finally announced the Xbox 360 Arcade and it will go on sale October 23 for $279. XBox 360 Arcade comes with a 256MB Memory Unit, a wireless controller, HDMI port, and a disc that includes five full Xbox Live Arcade trial games: Boom Boom Rocket, Feeding Frenzy, Luxor 2, Pac-Man Championship, and Uno.

Off hand, we can’t think of how we’d truly utilize the horsepower generated by a 72-processor cluster shoved into a “whisper-quiet, low-power deskside cabinet,” but we’d happily draw up a plan if forced. SiCortex — the same folks who delivered the bicycle-powered supercomputer — has introduced its new SO072 Catapult, which features a standard Linux environment, 48GB of RAM and a trio of (optional) PCIExpress slots. This aptly categorized high performance computer (HPC) sucks down less than 200-watts of power, sports a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports and has room for six internal hard drives. Reportedly, each of the 12 SC072 nodes is a multi-core chip with six CPU cores, and while $15,000 may seem steep for your average tower, we’d say this is a pretty good value considering the hardware.

[Via Gadgetopia]

Turn your wall into a theaterquality projection screen with this reflective paint. Tailor brightness and contrast to your room’s lighting by adding more or less gray tint before rolling it on.

Many people still project straight on to an untreated white wall, but this produces a poor quality image. Until now, the only other option was buying an projection screen that can sometimes cost almost as much as the projector itself.

 With a separate screen comes the hassle of setting it up and finding a place to store it, or even worse, installing a permanent bulky tube in your ceiling. Plus, there’s a good chance that the screen will stretch out of shape over time. Mighty Brighty Projection Screen Paint is a much better way to go. You just paint it onto your wall and you always get the perfect picture.

Vogel Mighty Brighty — $150

Always exactly the right screen surface for your situation
Crystal Clear & High Contrast. Richer Colours & Enormous Fun
For Living Rooms, Home Cinemas, Cafés, Offices and more
Magnetic dark border to create the ultimate contrast effect
Simply remove the border and all you see is a normal wall