Palm planning the $100 handheld

Palm will be unveiling the first $100 handheld PDA this autumn, interim chief executive Eric Benhamou announced this week. Benhamou noted that, 'The $100 price point has proven significant for many products, like the Walkman and the DVD player.' Palm expects the low price to significantly increase its share of the PDA market by giving it four times as many consumers. ...more

Google geared for IPO

The FT has reported that Google executives met with investment bankers last week to discuss how to take the company public as early as March next year. Sources told the newspaper the meeting, led by Google CFO George Reyes, also picked the bankers' brains on the possibility of offering shares via electronic auction, which would give private investors the same rank as investment banks and fund managers in the bidding. It would also prune back underwriter fees paid to the investment banks who have in the past been accused of setting the prices low for favoured clients, allowing them to quickly sell them on again at a profit as the value rockets in the buying frenzy of the first issue. ...more

Intel Core 2 Duo, the technical lowdown

Finally, a desktop chip based on Intel's amazingly low power and fast Core micro-architecture is here. Not only that, but it's based on a new Core 2 design, which takes the same principle of high performance with low power and extends it even further. The good news is that desktop Core 2 comes in the same LGA775 package as Pentium D and Pentium 4 parts, meaning many existing boards will support it as a drop-in replacement after a BIOS update. ...more

Omnis Studio 3.0 shares the load

Omnis has launched version 3.0 of Omnis Studio, the visual database front-end builder. The latest release contains improvements for the faster creation of Web-based databases for e-commerce, and Omnis has added tools to make Omnis 3. ...more

Dell reports industry-record shipments of PCs

Dell has cemented its place as the world's largest PC manufacturer as earnings rose 28 per cent in the last financial quarter. However, the Texas company disappointed investors by failing to grow revenues as much as expected. CEO Kevin Rollins put the shortfall down to 'over-aggressive' price cuts, saying that it has offered customers too good a deal. ...more