July 3 - 1:30pm EDT   Michael Arrington, the founder of tech blog TechCrunch, made good on his promise to create his own hardware company, with the launch of CrunchPad Inc. Based in Singapore, the firm will employ a total of 14 employees and its first and only product, the CrunchPad Internet tablet, is expected to be revealed at a press event scheduled for the end of July. [full story]

July 3 - 12:35pm EDT   EMTEC has recently showed off an upcoming nettop PC flying under the G-Box codename. The small form factor PC will be powered by the NVIDIA Ion platform that mates an Intel Atom CPU with the HD-capable graphics and system combo chipset. Despite this capability, there is a VGA output instead of HDMI, indicating the PC is aimed at a business environment, though a version with the video and sound signal port is expected to launch later on. [full story]

July 3 - 10:10am EDT   NVIDIA on Friday has purportedly denied recent claims of a conflict with Apple. Insiders believed close to NVIDIA claim that the two are still "just fine" and that the graphics company's chief Jen-Hsun Huang is personally happy with the current situation. Apple is still understood to be ordering chipsets as usual. [full story]

July 2 - 4:05pm EDT   Packard Bell has recently updated its imedia series of desktops with a 60 percent smaller footprint and a matte chassis and soft curves along with a glowing blue power button. Buyers can pick from a range of processors, including Intel Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core chips, and option up to 8GB of RAM. Storage space can be as large as 1TB, and there is an optional Blu-ray drive. [full story]

July 2 - 3:40pm EDT   Chinese electronics maker Inkia has recently launched a pair of nameless Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) powered by 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPUs, with both 7-inch and 5-inch versions. Each is equipped with an 800x480 resolution touchscreen, 1GB of RAM and solid state drive storage up to 32GB. The preloaded operating system is either Linux or Windows XP. Other features common to either system include 3G support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. [full story]

July 2 - 10:20am EDT   Archos on Thursday confirmed that it would port its Archos 9 PCtablet to the US. The ultra-mobile PC is due to arrive Stateside in the fall and is one of the first systems known to ship with Windows 7. Adding the OS both gives it reasonable performance with its 1.2GHz Atom chip as well as fuller support for the touchscreen features essential to the design. [full story]

July 2 - 9:45am EDT   AMD is developing an integrated graphics chipset for budget PCs that could take the performance crown in the category, a leaked roadmap shows. Codenamed RS880 but likely to be badged Radeon HD 4200 when it ships, the design will have a new graphics core that should run about 15 percent faster than "anything comparable" on the market, implying that NVIDIA's GeForce 9400 or 9400M may be the primary targets. The Inquirer adds that it should support AMD's Stream general-purpose computing technology and, by extension, would eventually support OpenCL. [full story]

July 2 - 9:05am EDT   Many of the Windows PC makers building ultraportable notebooks based on Intel's low-cost CULV platform are learning first-hand that their cheaper case designs aren't enough to sustain the systems, a research note from AmTech analyst Doug Freedman says. Many of the companies design the systems with plastic shells to keep their prices down but are discovering that the cases are cracking, often forcing major replacements. Which companies are affected aren't mentioned, but Lenovo and MSI are some of the first making systems in the category with the IdeaPad U350 and X-Slim line respectively. [full story]

July 2 - 7:50am EDT   MSI today rounded out the hardware specs for the last of the current wave of X-Slim ultraportables. The 14-inch X400 will be the more colorful model of the group with "personalized" color bezels around the lip of the frame and its trackpad. It's also billed as one of the thinnest, lightest systems at its screen size at under an inch thick and 3.3 pounds. [full story]

July 1 - 4:55pm EDT   Apple and NVIDIA may be engaged in a fierce dispute that could exclude NVIDIA graphics chips from future Macs, according to sources reportedly aware of the talks. They claim to SemiAccurate that Apple views NVIDIA's proposals for renewed deals as "arrogance" and that much of the argument centers on the overheating material that triggered widespread failures in all GeForce 8400M and 8600M mobile graphics chips. The Mac firm has had to extend MacBook Pro warranties for up to three years and may be skeptical of NVIDIA's insistence that newer models aren't at risk of the same problem. [full story]

July 1 - 3:20pm EDT   Wireless provider Cellular South on Wednesday announced it will soon sell its own subsidized 3G-capable netbook, the 10.1-inch Dell Inspiron Mini 10. Its version, like that for AT&T, holds an internal 3G modem that supplies long-range data access wherever the carrier has coverage. As a CDMA carrier, though, Cellular South will use EVDO instead of HSPA. [full story]

July 1 - 2:30pm EDT   The sequel to NVIDIA's Ion platform could be much faster than its predecessor when it ships, leaks today would show. While the current graphics and chipset combo is based on the GeForce 9400M and has just 16 visual effects cores, Fudzilla now hears that it will have 32 cores, potentially doubling the amount of simultaneous effects it can handle at once. The difference will have the most dramatic effect on 3D but could also impact general-purpose computing tasks that need CUDA or OpenCL. [full story]

July 1 - 9:05am EDT   eMachines today gave a new look to its least expensive ET series desktops along with hardware upgrades to match. Like the recent EL1300 slimline PC, the ET1300 and ET1810 shed the company's previous black-and-silver look for a sleeker, glossy white. They all also make NVIDIA's lower-end graphics standard for slightly faster than usual performance in the category. [full story]

July 1 - 8:45am EDT   HP today stepped up the power of its xw9400 workstations with the addition of AMD's six-core Opteron 2400 series to the mix. Also nicknamed Istanbul, the chips give a system as many as 12 cores. HP maintains AMD's view that the chips offer about 34 percent more performance per watt when compared to earlier quad-cores, which often use the same amount of energy. [full story]

June 30 - 4:45pm EDT   Intel is said to be working on a reference design guideline that would allow its hardware partners to develop an HD video decoder and integrate it into Intel's Pineview desktop platform alongside a new Atom D410 or D519 CPU, Fudzilla reported on Tuesday. The current desktop Pineview platforms are not capable of HD video playback, and thus far, only NVIDIA is offering such a capability via its Ion chipset. [full story]