Michelle Maisto

Samsung will launch a new line of consumer notebooks at Best Buy stores March 7.The R80 series comes in 14-, 15.6- and 17.3-inch models running Windows 7 Home Premium and a variety of Intel processors and featuring 4GB of DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory and, in the two larger models, Nvidia GeForce graphics cards.Ethernet, […]

Gartner expects worldwide shipments of PCs in 2010 to grow 20 percent over last year, driven by rising interest in mobile PCs, including Apple’s iPad tablet, the IT research firm wrote in a March 4 report.In 2009, netbooks – or mini-notebooks, as Gartner refers to them – helped to boost flagging desktop numbers through the […]

Touch-screen smartphone sales are expected to almost double in 2010, though not everyone is happy with their devices, according to two separate reports. IT research firm Gartner expects the worldwide touch-screen mobile device market to top 362.7 million units in 2010, an increase of 96.8 percent over 2009 sales of 184.3 million units. “Touch screens […]

A pile of new netbooks were introduced at the CeBIT tech show in Hannover, Germany, including models from Acer and Asustek Computer, as well as lesser-known manufacturers such as Coby Electronics, BYD and Sapphire. In 2009, swift netbook sales helped steady an otherwise ailing PC market. While analysts expect that the netbook category will continue […]

AT&T is the latest carrier to warn that the days of all-you-can-eat data plans are coming to an end. At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference March 2, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the carrier was considering different pricing plans for different platforms, charging the heaviest users the highest fees.“For the industry, we’ll […]

Apple’s lawsuit against competitor HTC may not hurt the smartphone maker in the short term, but could have long-term consequences, straining its relationships with partners in the U.S. market, The New York Times reported March 3.The Times quoted analyst Jeff Pu, with Fubon Securities in Taipei, as saying, “From a long-term perspective, many carriers in […]

Nokia is the latest company to promote the availability of Skype voice over IP services, announcing on its blog March 3 that the application can now be downloaded free from its Ovi Store and is compatible with the latest version of Symbian. The application enables users to make free Skype-to-Skype calls, receive calls to an […]

Nvidia’s out to make a better netbook, it announced March 2, with the introduction of the Nvidia Ion graphics processor. Said to “supercharge” netbooks, it reportedly offers 10 times the graphics performance of average netbooks and up to 10 hours of battery life.A discrete GPU (graphics processing unit) with dedicated memory, Ion works with the […]

Nokia introduced a new phone – the C5, which it describes as a smartphone in a feature phone body – and a new phone-naming convention on March 2.The C5 runs the S60 3rd Edition OS and features a 2.2-inch display, a 3.2-megapixel camera and an evolved phone book, which ties friends to their Facebook status […]

Mean and green may be the best way to describe two new PC offerings from Dell, which is unveiling the OptiPlex 980 desktop – which the PC maker is calling the most powerful and energy efficient commercial desktop it has ever offered – and the Dell FX100 zero client solution, a fan-less, driver-less, OS-free computing […]