From DailyTech: Palm had one of the most interesting product announcements at CES in January with the unveiling of its webOS-based Pre smartphone. It has been only a few short weeks since the Pre debuted on the Sprint network as an exclusive handset for at least six months.

Sprint has already said that the Pre has set sales records for the company and Palm has been mum on exactly how many Pres it has shipped. The glory for Sprint and Palm could be short-lived with the iPhone 3G S coming this week and the new Blackberry Tour announced for Sprint and Verizon yesterday.

Palm may be holding back on shipment data, but analysts are using their own numbers to predict how many handsets Palm has shipped. Analyst James Faucette from Pacific Crest Securities told Reuters, "We believe that between 90,000 units and 100,000 units were sold in the first week. Given the high number of people still on waiting lists ... the company appears to be on track to exceed our previous August quarter unit shipment estimate of 500,000."

Another Analyst, David Eller of JRPG, said that Palm sold 84,000 Pre handsets in the first weekend with 35% of that number going to new Sprint customers. Palm appears to be playing a wait and see game before it launches more webOS devices. The company needs to be sure the demand for the Pre and its new OS keeps up before launching another device.

Palm has an earnings report scheduled for June 25 reports Reuters and new CEO Jon Rubinstein is expected to talk about the Pre and new webOS devices. Sprint has announced that the Pre set records for sales already and has said that it is restocking the Pre as fast as Palm can make them.

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From DailyTech: NVIDIA has announced five new GPUs for the lucrative notebook PC market. The GTS 260M, GTS 250M, GT 240M, GT 230M and G210M are built on TSMC's 40nm process, leading to lower power consumption and heat produced. Lower production costs are also possible once the manufacturing line has matured and yields improve.

Archrival ATI announced the Radeon HD 4860 and 4830 in March, making them the first 40nm mobile GPU chips. The firm also launched Radeon HD 4770 video cards at the end of April. Those cards use ATI's RV740 GPU, making them the first desktop chips to be built on a 40nm process by TSMC.

In a bid to catch up to its competitor, NVIDIA has designed the new chips based on the GT200 architecture to support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. DirectX 10.1 is an important feature going forward as it is the foundation for DirectX 11, which was designed as a superset of DirectX 10.1. DirectX 11 support will be very important, as many game developers are looking to support it due to the huge public demand for Windows 7.

The new chips are also notable for being the first from NVIDIA to support GDDR5, which are almost twice as efficient as the older GDDR3 at the same memory bit width. ATI has been using GDDR5 since the introduction of the Radeon 4870 in the summer, and has plans to expand its use to lower cost products as well.

Interestingly, the chips are packaged as MXM 3 modules, using the standardized interconnect to the PCI Express bus. The standard length, width, and electrical pinout of MXM 3 means that notebooks using these chips may be removable, and can be upgraded when higher performing GPUs are available. However, this will be up to the individual OEMs.

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From CNET News.com: It's still awfully early in the game, but Microsoft's Bing had a second good week, according to market share numbers released Wednesday by ComScore.

The search engine is up about 3 percentage points from where Microsoft was at pre-Bing in terms of both number of searchers and total query share. That represents another nearly 1 percentage point of share gain in both categories compared to its first week.

For the week of June 8 to 12, Microsoft's search engines were used by 16.7 percent of those doing searches and accounted for 12.1 percent of all queries, both up 3 percentage points from where Microsoft was at before Bing's launch.

"It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week," ComScore Senior VP Mike Hurt said in a statement. "These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch."

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From CNET News.com: IBM thinks it can improve the state of mobile communications, and it's investing millions of dollars toward that effort.

Big Blue announced on Tuesday that it will spend $100 million over the next five years on a major research project to advance mobile technology for both consumers and businesses. With an increasing dependence on cell phones and portable devices worldwide, IBM's goal is to make mobile communications more efficient and easier to use.

"Mobile devices are gradually becoming ubiquitous and helping us transcend many boundaries--geographical, economic, and social, among others," says Dr. Guruduth Banavar, global leader of the mobile communications focus for IBM Research and director of IBM Research-India. "With high penetration, simple user interface, and significant cost advantage for end users, mobile telephony holds the future of communication and exchange of information for the enterprise."

The company plans to focus its research on three key areas: mobile enterprise enablement; emerging market mobility; and enterprise to end-user mobile experience.

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From DailyTech: OLED technology has been hailed for a couple years now as the future of digital display. OLED and its various derivatives have managed to live up to some of this hype in the mobile electronics market, but in the TV and display market they remain a rare and seldom seen species. In fact, to date only one manufacturer -- Sony -- has launched an OLED TV. And Sony's 11-inch XEL1 was a wallet-breaker priced at $2,500.

Now LG is set to also jump into the nascent OLED market. It may also manage to steal the size crown from Sony, unleashing a 15" OLED set onto the market. The set will begin shipping in December, according to an interview with Won Kim, LG's VP of OLED sales and marketing.

The set is expected to match the capabilities of the prototype unit, first unveiled in January. The prototype sported a fancy 1,000,000:1 contrast (same as XEL1), a 1,366 x 768 pixel resolution (better than XEL1), and a 30,000-hour shelf life (much better than XEL1, which degrades after 1,000 hours). It is also expected to be ultra-thin (the XEL1 is just 3mm thin).

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From CNET News.com: Intel has spelled out its branding for the upcoming Core series of processors including the "Lynnfield" and "Clarksfield" chips. The chipmaker also said that "Centrino" will be phased out as a PC brand.

In a post Wednesday on Intel's Web site, spokesman Bill Calder wrote that the branding will be "simplified into entry-level (Intel Core i3), mid-level (Intel Core i5), and high-level (Intel Core i7)."

Calder added that it is "important to note that these are not brands but modifiers to the Intel Core brand that signal different features and benefits."
The upcoming Lynnfield chip (desktop) will be available as either Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 depending upon the feature set and capability, Calder wrote. Clarksfield (mobile) will have the Intel Core i7 name.

Deborah Conrad, vice president and director of corporate marketing at Intel, talks about new branding strategy via video on Intel Web site
Arrandale (32-nanometer mobile) will appear as the Core i3 but will ultimately span the Core brand to include Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7. Clarkdale (32-nanometer desktop) will be available under the Core i3 and Intel Core i5 brands, Calder said.

The widely-used Centrino moniker will be phased out as PC brand, according to Calder. Centrino "will be used as a name for Wi-Fi and WiMAX products" and "still be in market on mobile PCs into next year," he said. But eventually will be discontinued.

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From Tom's Hardware: The rumors have been flying around for hours and PC Perspective claims to have known since speaking with Nvidia back in June, at Computex but was unaware that people might actually want to know that Tegra has its first major design win.

The Zune HD packs a 3.3-inch (16:9) OLED, HD Radio, HDMI out supporting up to 720p, WiFi (with Microsof’s Internet Explorer, of course) and the all important accelorometer. We keep saying if Microsoft were to add a phone to this device we'd be all over it and now that its got Tegra under the hood, we're even more disappointed it's just a regular old PMP.

That said, coupled with Nvidia’s graphics, we’d say the Zune HD is going to be a huge step up from some of the older Zunes. Anyone (besides us) interested?

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