July 03 - 01:30pm 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 03 - 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 03 - 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 03 - 08:15am EDT   Only Windows PCs may be required to carry China's controversial Green Dam Youth Escort content filtering app, computer makers said on Friday. Although the government officially requires every computer sold in the country to have the software included, any system that can't install Green Dam, including any of Apple's computers or Linux PCs, doesn't have to bundle it. The exemption also applies to any computer that doesn't meet the "technical requirements" for an install, according to one anonymous PC vendor. [full story]

July 02 - 04:05pm 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 02 - 03:25pm EDT   Sony's PlayStation product planning head Naoya Matsui today told Japanese publication GameBusiness that the company had always planned a version of the PSP without the UMD drive. He claims that the company had wanted downloadable games from the handheld's launch in 2004 but that it wasn't feasible until the PSP Go due to infrastructure. It was necessary to have not just simple download to the system itself but a means of getting games from a PS3 to the PSP as well as an easier sync process for loading games, movies and music. [full story]

July 02 - 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 02 - 09:45am 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 02 - 09:05am 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 02 - 07:50am 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]