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Virgin back-track on Xbox 360 price hike
A Virgin store was forced into an ever so slightly embarrassing U-turn today over its sales tactics for the highly-prized, hard-to-find Xbox 360.
With so many people hoping to buy one in time for Christmas, Virgin in Piccadilly Circus had a number on offer, but would only sell it to you if you also bought five Xbox games.
The Xbox 360 Premium Pack itself costs £280, plus you then had to stump up approaching another £250 if you wanted to walk out the store owning one of this year's most prized Christmas gifts. That's a whopping £530!
Unfortunately for the store, it tried to sell the 360 plus games package to the editor of our sister title Active Home, who got straight on the phone to Virgin and Microsoft to ask if this was official policy.
By lunchtime the situation had been resolved, and Virgin were keen to point out that this wasn't company policy but overzealous sales staff in one store.
Unfortunately, although the price is back to £279.99, they've now all sold out, but if you are quick, you might find it in another store.
Seagate to aquire Maxtor
Seagate and Maxtor today jointly announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Seagate will acquire Maxtor in an all stock transaction. Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, Maxtor shareholders will receive .37 shares of Seagate common stock for each Maxtor share they own. When the transaction is completed Seagate shareholders will own approximately 84% and Maxtor shareholders will own approximately 16% of the combined company. The value of the transaction is approximately $1.9 billion.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of calendar 2006, subject to obtaining shareholder approvals and customary regulatory approvals.
GeCube announce first X1000 AGP series
Gecube have annouced details of the world's first AGP cards based on ATI X1000 series of GPUs.
The GC-RX1600PGA2-D3, the X1600 card uses the RV530Pro core with 500/800MHz core/memory speeds while the X1300 card, the GC-RX1300GA2-D3 uses the RV515LE core with 450/500MHz core memory speeds. Both cards have 256MB of DDR2 memory.
Sapphire release more GTO²'s
Good news from Sapphire, they have just announced that they are releasing more of the much sort after X800GTO² graphics cards.
The X800GTO² is a real wolf in sheep’s clothing as despite its X800 name it has an X850 core, albeit with reduced pipelines. With a BIOS tweak to release the closed pipelines and a large helping of overclocking (with the standard cooling) it becomes an X850XT and some people have managed to get it to run as fast as a Platinum Edition and beyond.
Bodcasts are bootiful
It had to happen. Playboy magazine has decided that podcasts are the way forward, so it's launched its own free 'bodcasting' service, available 5 days a week to subscribers. It features such audio treats as 'Joke of the Day', 'Ask Hef Anything' and <cough> 'From the Mouths of Babes'.
Premium bodcasts are apparently on the way, so you'd better stock up on batteries for your MP3 player.
UK company shows 10in e-paper
Cambridge-based Plastic Logic has made what it says is the largest-yet flexible organic active-matrix display – and what looks like the nearest we have yet come to the dream of a display that combines the advantages of a interactive screen and paper.
The company, a spin-off from research done at Cambridge University, uses special inkjets to print organic circuitry on to the backplane of displays. The latest 10in product drives an electronic-paper plane from the US company E-Ink.
It will be will be shown in public tomorrow at the 12th International Displays Workshop in Takamatsu, Japan. It boasts a resolution of 600 by 800 pixels (SVGA) at 100 pixels per inch, and can show up to four greyscale levels.
It was made on Plastic Logic's new 350mm by 350mm prototype line; Plastic Logic will partner with manufacturers to bring the process to mass production.
UWB hits 1Gbits/sec
A new chipset enables Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless links at up to 1GBits/sec using specification approved by the WiMedia organization.
The products from WiQuest Communications are the WQST110 logic chip and the WQST101 radio-frequency transceiver chip. UWB is being promoted as an easy, scalable way to link home electronic devices wirelessly.
However the industry has been unable to agree on a standard and has spilt roughly into two camps; the WiQuest chipset is part of one backed by Intel; another grouping is led by Freescale, which already had silicon using a rival UWB spec.
NTL speeds up for Virgin courtship
NTL followed up news of a projected merger with Virgin Mobile today with an announcement that it has begun to upgrade all its broadband customers to 10Mbits/sec.
First to get the upgrade will be 3Mbits/sec customers, with others following in the new year. Services will be differentiated by capping levels: 75GB for £34.99 a month (up from the 30GB on current 3Mbits/sec users); 30GB for £24.99, and 2GB for £17.99 a month.
An NTL spokesman said there will also be offers of unlimited usage at the same price points, but at lower speeds. 'They will probably be annoced early in the new year.'
The moves are yet another sign of the cable industry reforming itself to meet the challenge from ADSL2+, which has boosted broadband speeds on phone lines by a factor of ten. Deployment of ADSL2+ has been accelerated by the opening up of BT exchanges to rival operators in the process known as local-loop unbundling..
NTL is also in the process of merging with Britain's second cable operator, Telewest, which has different franchise areas and so is not in direct competition. If all the mergers go ahead it will create a single £5b combine that will apparently use the Virgin brand.
Cable cannot match DSL for countrywide coverage but it has more headroom on the amount of bandwidth it can offer customers. The 10Mbit/sec is deceptive because users who also have cable TV in effect have far more.
If you download a TV programme or video on DSL you are using up your allotted bandwidth. But Telewest, for instance, is phasing in a time-shift TV service which will allow you to download a selection of programmes from the past seven days using your TV link, which will not affect your broadband bandwidth.
Zap Internet Explorer's cache
Microsoft has just released a neat little utility that will delete all Internet Explorer's cookies, temporary Internet files and history files - great for using if some of these files have become corrupted, or you just want to do a bit of housekeeping. It's a free download.
Microsoft Xbox 360 not for sale
If you're planning to buy an Xbox 360, and haven't pre-ordered, queuing outside HMV or Game is likely to leave you disappointed.
We called HMV on Oxford Street and were told there was no midnight launch, as they didn't expect to have spare stock on the shelves, having already sold out. In fact, HMV added, they were unlikely to have stock on display until January.
Game on Oxford Street is doing a midnight launch, but likely to have only a handful of units.
If you are lucky enough to find a machine, it's more likely to be a Core system, which doesn't have a hard disk or wireless controller. We'd recommend you go for the Delux model.
We've managed to get our hands on an Xbox 360, and were pretty impressed. You can read the review here.
$1b threat to Blackberry services
Blackberry email-on-the-move addicts in the US could be suffering severe withdrawal symptoms soon following a ruling that a $450m patent settlement is invalid, Silicon Valley.com reports.
The deal was between Blackberry's Canadian developer Research in Motion and a small US company called NTP, which claimed it was never finalized. There is now a chance that a judge may reissue an injunction forcing the famously addictive Blackberry services to close down.
Oddly, the US Patent and Trademark Office is reported to have re-examined the patents involved and rejected them. But some lawyers reckon it could still cost RIM $1b to be rid of the problem and the case has led to calls for patent-law reform. Meanwhile wags are saying Research in Motion should be renamed Research in Stasis.
RIP Exchange 5.5
Microsoft held a wake in London last night to mark the passing of Exchange 5.5, support for which ends on December 31. An estimated 10 percent of Exchange installations still run 5.5 and they can still get support in the new year, but only at a price. Naturally Microsoft argues that an upgrade is preferable, but it has a point in saying that later versions are better able to cope with viruses and spam and of course they include many more features, such as mobile connectivity.
The company says 5.5, launched in 1997, was the first version to have a real impact, helping to establish Microsoft as a serious player in back-end systems as well as on the desktop. Few Microsoft products have successful first releases, leading to accusations that it uses early adopters as bug spotters.
The most irritating aspect of the advent of Exchange was that you suddenly needed this expensive server software to share calendar and email files over a network using the new Outlook information manager. Outlook superseded Schedule 7, which let you share with no chance of conflicts. So offices that were too small to justify the purchase of Exchange either had to stay with the rickety old software or live without sharing. This problem has not gone away; in fact it has spread, because of the growth of home networking.
There was talk at the wake of putting the share functionality into a home media server. Alternatively people might drift to web-based email and calendar access.
