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SOFTWARE OUTFIT Microsoft has predicted that the Thai floods have affected its fourth quarter PC software sales.

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft said at an investment conference on Tuesday that PC sales will be lower than analysts expected during the fourth quarter.

Analysts estimated that PC shipments fell about one per cent last quarter. However, Tami Reller, CFO of Microsoft’s Windows unit, said sales figures will be lower. Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations Bill Koefoed backed up her comments at a separate event.

Koefoed said at a JP Morgan Chase conference, “As the numbers come out, you’ll likely see that number decline further as the impact has been felt faster than people had anticipated.”

Reller told the audience at a Nomura Holdings event that there potentially could be more downward adjustments. Both conferences were held in Las Vegas, where CES is being held this week.

Software sales at Microsoft’s Windows unit have missed estimates in three of the past four quarters. µ

CHIPMAKER Intel has hinted that touchscreen enabled Ultrabook laptops will tip up next year with the introduction of Windows 8.

Next year’s Ultrabook selection will offer Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor and will also feature touchscreen control, according to Tom’s Hardware. This makes some sense, considering that the Windows 8 user interface has a tile system similar to that of the Windows Phone operating system.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini said at the Intel Capital Global Summit, “Starting with Windows 8, you [will] have a mainstream operating system incorporating touch.”

“Our view is that in the ultrabook lines, touch is a pretty critical enabler. When users see that new Windows interface, they’re going to want to touch it. If the screen does nothing, you [will] have disappointed [the] consumer.”

We saw an Ultrabook running Windows 8 at this year’s Intel Developer Forum in September. However, it did not have a touchscreen and was demonstrated using just the keyboard and mouse. The demonstrator was keen to point out the fact that it worked fine without touchscreen support.

The Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks we saw at IDF didn’t have Windows 8 or touchscreen support either, but apparently they were just on stage to look pretty.

Otellini said that to achieve this, “we have to get touch to a lower cost. This is particularly important, as we move to the launch of Windows 8. The iPad and the iPhone have made touch a paradigm.” He also said that Chipzilla will invest in this area with the Ultrabook Fund. µ

Flash Player 11, the next major version of Adobe's near-ubiquitous browser plug-in, is now officially set for release in early October, the company said in a press release today. Adobe AIR (the runtime which allows Flash and other code to be run as desktop apps) will also be updated to version 3.

The press release details a few of Flash 11's new features, but there are two that are of particular interest to you, the discerning AnandTech reader: the first is GPU acceleration for 2D and 3D graphics, which is specifically designed to make Flash games run better (Flash's GPU acceleration was previously limited mostly to video). The second is 64-bit support under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, long a sticking point for users of 64-bit operating systems. As one of the modern Internet's most-used plug-ins, Flash carries a lot of weight, and I don't think I'm the first to link the absence of 64-bit Flash with the slow pace of 64-bit browser development and adoption.

Flash 11 promises to be an improvement over Flash 10.3 in many ways, but its competition is still stiff: the Unity Web Player is already driving 3D games in browser windows today, while the Silverlight plug-in also enables rich web content. Its most direct competition in the long run remains HTML5, which Apple (and soon, Microsoft) and others are pushing to enable rich content without the use of plug-ins

Source: Adobe

Responding to this week's rumors that Samsung might be looking to acquire MeeGo, the Linux-based mobile operating system introduced by Intel and Nokia, Intel's Systems Software Division manager Doug Fisher stated that the company remains "committed" to the OS, though he followed that by saying that he could "only comment on what's happening today."

MeeGo, which has user interfaces for netbooks, tablets, and smartphones among other things, was originally introduced in February of 2010 by Intel and Nokia, and was intended to be a merging of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo operating systems. However, since Nokia struck up a partnership with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 on its handsets, the OS has stuggled to find a home. 

Rumors stated that Samsung was looking to buy MeeGo for a variety of reasons – to integrate with its existing Bada operating system, to compete against Android and Windows Phone 7, or just to shore up the company's patent portfolio. Fisher's statement refutes these rumors, at least for now.

Of course, there is often a disconnect between what companies say and what they later do. If Intel continues to have trouble getting MeeGo adopted by its partners, you can bet that the OS could yet be discontinued or sold.

Source: PCWorld

Last Thursday, Eric Schmidt sat down for a keynote interview at Dreamforce '11, Salesforce.com's cloud computing conference held in San Francisco. The keynote covered a lot of history, several patent issues, the Motorola acquisition and some broad stroke descriptions for what we can expect from Google in the future. One thing slipped through earlier coverage, though. During a brief discussion on Android (at 30:25 in the link below), Eric Schmidt revealed that Ice Cream Sandwich would be introduced in the October/November timeframe. This plays out with the rumors that the Nexus/Droid Prime would premiere in the November/December time frame. Big news? No, but it does tell us that an SDK might be just a few weeks away. Like we said, this is going to be a busy fall. 

Source: Youtube via Android and Me

MOBILE DEVICES will support multi-player online gaming and 3D gesture input just like Microsoft’s Kinect technology for the Xbox, chip designer ARM has predicted.

ARM reckons that mobile devices based on its chips will be on a par with PCs within a few years, offering similar processor and graphics performance capabilities.

The details can be seen in an interview over at our sister IT news web site V3.co.uk. µ

CANADIAN PHONE MAKER Research in Motion (RIM) has announced that Blackberry devices running its Blackberry 7 operating system (OS) are coming.

Using the micro-blogging site Twitter, RIM has confirmed that Blackberry smartphones running the latest version of it OS will be tipping up. The firm tweeted yesterday, “Pop quiz #teamblackberry: What’s shiny and new and social all over? ^CH”

Today’s answer read, “You got it! New #BlackBerry devices are coming w/ our new OS, BlackBerry 7! Check back tmrw 4 deets on #BB7FanNight. ^CH”

Unfortunately there is no confirmation of any handset models so we’ll have to check back to find out. At least we know it will be more than one model though, and it’s likely that the line-up will include the Bold 9900 and 9930.

RIM announced these two handsets in May and said they would be available at the beginning of the Summer worldwide.The Bold 9900 is currently sitting on Three’s coming soon page with no date. Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM said the upcoming Bold smartphone will “jump a generation” with its technology.

Jim Balsillie, the other co-CEO of RIM, said there are seven devices coming in the next few months with the new OS. He made this announcement at the company’s annual shareholders meeting where a delay to the firm’s Blackberry 7 OS was confirmed.

At the meeting the company mentioned its ‘biggest launch’ which might refer to the number of devices it’s going to reveal. Among the line-up we could see a successor to the Torch, which has been around for a fair while.

At the beginning of this week the firm announced job cuts of around 2,000 employees in a “cost optimization program”. µ

HARDWARE TEARDOWN OUTFIT Ifixit has taken apart Apple’s Thunderbolt cable to see if the price tag is worth it for the lightning fast speeds of 10Gbits/s.

Ifixit said, “The cable may actually have chips containing firmware in it, making it more expensive to produce than your garden-variety HDMI cable – thus justifying the hefty price tag.”

So the guys over at Ifixit got their scalpel out and sliced open the cable to see what was under the glossy white casing. The plastic sleeve is suspiciously long, so it seemed there must have been something more than just wires hidden underneath.

After some cutting and unsoldering some hardware was revealed, including chips. Two ‘Gennum GN2033′ low power transceiver chips were found, one on each side.

Furthermore, two smaller chips were found next to each of the larger ones. Two on one side labeled ‘S6A 1JG’, whilst on the opposite side one is labelled ’1102F SS8370′ and the other ’131 3S’.

Ifixit said, “Of course, there were tons of little resistors (providing impedance as needed) all around the larger chips.”

Sony has come up with its own version, or rather Intel’s original version apparently, codenamed ‘Light Peak’, which Sony features on its recently announced Vaio Z laptop.

The connector at the other end of the cable is identical, so all in all there are 12 chips and lots of smaller components in the Thunderbolt cable. So it’s not a complete rip-off, but the price tag is still pretty high, in our opinion. µ

TABLETS are a ‘fad’ and not the big game changer that so many industry observers believe them to be, according to Dell.

Bryan Jones, Dell’s marketing director for public and large enterprise in EMEA told V3.co.uk that PCs and laptops will not be displaced by tablets, despite all the hysteria generated by products like the Ipad.

“We’re seeing the tablet as a fad right now, like netbooks were three years ago. I expect it will find its space in the corporate infrastructure, but it’s not sounding the death knell of the corporate laptop or the workstation, or any number of those devices,” Jones said.

“When we talk with corporate customers, a lot of people say they want a tablet form factor, but that’s as an additional device, not their only device.”

We can’t possibly comment on whether Jones would be saying this if the Dell Streak had managed to achieve the same level of success as the Ipad.

You can read the full Dell interview at V3.co.uk. µ

NVIDIA CHIEF Jen-Hsun Huang has told Reuters that he expects Android-based tablet devices to overtake the Apple Ipad in terms of popularity.

Huang, who is the CEO of chip designer Nvidia, said that improved versions of the Android operating system and an increase in the number of applications will help propel Google-based systems above the Apple alternative.

“The Android phone took only two and a half years to achieve the momentum that we’re talking about. I would expect the same thing on Honeycomb tablets,” said Huang to Reuters.

Huang also took time to discuss Superman’s son, or perhaps he was referring to Nvidia’s next-generation mobile processor when he mentioned Kal-El.

Kal-El, said Huang, has already been accepted into devices from major PC and phone firms, however he was vague about how many.

“It’s got to be at least 10. We have five major phone companies and we have five major PC [manufacturers],” he said. µ