First look: HP's new shake-free business printers

HP has given PC Pro a hands-on demonstration of its new business inkjet range, including an innovation that promises to eliminate annoying printer vibration. The Officejet Pro K5400 colour printer forms the heart of the new line, coming in three flavours to suit home and small businesses. It prints at an impressive 36ppm mono and 35ppm colour in draft mode - hence HP's claims that it is faster than lasers - although for true laser quality output that drops to 12ppm and 10ppm respectively. ...more

Sony's robodog to talk

Sony has revealed that it will be endowing its robotic cyber-pup, Aibo, with a voice. Sony engineers want Aibo to be able to interact with its owner using words and, with time, develop its own language skills. At the moment the ?1,600 robomutt only beeps and burps acknowledgement while the new prototype will actually be able to learn about its environment. ...more

Cube lawsuit never was and never will be

Cobalt Networks has confirmed that it has no plans to sue Apple over use of the Cube trademark. Stephen DeWitt, VP and general manager for Sun Microsystems, which acquired Cobalt last year, announced at the company's developer conference last week that, "there never was a lawsuit, and there never will be a lawsuit," reports ZDnet.co. ...more

Palm settles Graffiti dispute with Xerox

The long-running legal battle between Palm and Xerox has been settled, with the two companies agreeing to end the patent dispute. Dating back to 1997, it involved the use of Graffiti handwriting recognition software, which translates particular strokes into alphabetic characters. Xerox alleged that the system infringed patents for its own Unistrokes handwriting software. ...more

And also today (08-August-2001), for the record...

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. Cisco Systems slides The bellwether stock for technology infrastructure, Cisco systems, rang a gloomy peal yesterday. While being in line with analyst's expectations, net income of $163m for the fourth quarter represented an 86 per cent drop against the $1. ...more