Case maker M-Edge filed suit with a Maryland court last week accusing Amazon of “unlawful corporate bullying” and patent infringement relating to the company’s line of Kindle cases. According to M-Edge, the company signed a three-year agreement with Amazon in November 2009 for a 15-percent sales commission, only to have the retail giant demand a new contract with a 32-percent cut a mere two month later. A lawyer for M-Edge told The Wall Street Journal that Amazon punished the case maker over its refusal to play ball, after threats of burying the company’s products on its site. According to the filing, M-Edge finally caved and signed a new contract in July of last year, given the fact that Amazon apparently drives nearly 90-percent of the small company’s revenue. The suit also accuses Amazon of “knocking off” its reading light-packing covers with lighted jacket designs for the Kindle 3. Amazon, for its part, has refused to comment on the matter.

SOURCE via Wall Street Journal

We’ve already seen a few benchmarks and other hints that they’d soon be shipping, and Intel has now officially announced that its new Cedar Trail Atom processors are finally available, with the first systems using them set to roll out early next year. The two chips you’ll likely be seeing the most of are the Atom N2600 and N2800 — both dual-core, and both designed for use in netbooks, where they promise to allow for up to ten hours of battery life and “weeks of standby,” and offer support for 1080p video playback. Also rolling out today are the D2500 and D2700, which are designed for use in entry-level desktops and all-in-one computers, as well as more commercial systems. As for all those systems themselves, details remain a bit light, but Intel says you can expect to see some from Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba.

SOURCE via Anandtech

It looks as if facial scans for snack-dispensing purposes aren’t the only mind-blowing feature on the whiz-bang generation of vending machines. Japanese company Asahi has just unveiled an advanced dispenser that’s capable of doubling as a WiFi hotspot, so good luck getting through the mobs of leechers just to buy a soda. The machine sends out the internet waves free of charge and covers about 164 feet around it; of note, there’s a 30-minute limit on each session — but it’s nothing that a fresh login can’t solve. Asahi is planning on rolling out 1,000 of these in the upcoming year, but if you don’t call the Land of the Rising Sun your home, you won’t be able to experience the smart vendors anytime soon.

SOURCE via Asahi Inryo

Due to the tight supply of hard drives stemming from the Thailand flooding back in October and November, hard drive manufacturers have reportedly asked PC vendors to sign a one-year contract at specified prices and volumes to ensure their required number of units.

While hard drive manufacturers and component makers have largely resumed operations within the last month, they’re not at optimum level, and the pace of recovery varies from factory to factory, making it hard to determine if the worst-case supply scenario is over. As it stands now, hard drive makers expect the global unit output to decline 30-percent sequentially in 4Q11 and extend on into 1Q12, producing only 140 million units between January and the end of March.

Yet many PC vendors are reluctant to sign a one-year contract. According to industry insiders, the vendors fear that hard drive prices may drop sharply once the supply chain fully recovers from the impact of the floods, and the contract will be locking them in at the higher, inflated price. Currently many PC vendors are purchasing hard drives on a quarterly basis.

Meanwhile, Stellar Data Recovery reports that PC vendors will likely turn to the “grey market” to acquire the hard drives not supplied in the normal channels. The grey market is defined as “the trade of a commodity through distribution channels which, while legal, are unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended by the original manufacturer.”

“The lack of good quality HDDs means computer manufacturers will seek out other markets and procurement channels in order to meet demand,” the company reports. “The grey market is likely to appear in the guise of an attractive and easy alternative. Stellar Data Recovery is keeping a vigilant eye on this alarming development, for the simple reason that HDDs from grey sources are more likely to fail, as they are unlikely to have undergone all the necessary quality checks. Normally, Stellar Data Recovery is able to recover lost data, even from ‘grey’ HDDs. Nonetheless, the increase in data loss and downtime due to the reduced quality of HDDs will have unwanted knock-on effects for many businesses in the future. “

Using HDDs supplied by the grey market means the quality of many products, PCs, laptops and cheaper servers could be compromised, the company said.

If you’re looking to quell your inner storage enthusiast after the holidays, RunCore may have something to satisfy your appetite. The company announced that it has two products intended for launch at CES. The Falcon series is a Marvell-based storage solution that boasts R / W IOPS speeds that best the outfit’s Pro V SATA 6Gb/s SSDs. Speaking of the Pro V series, RunCore is looking to set up shop in Ultrabooks with a 7mm model of its 2.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s SSD with 540 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write speeds.

Back in November, unnamed sources from the “upstream supply chain” said that Acer, Asus, and other big-name PC vendors will gradually phase out of the tablet sector in 2012. This assumption was based on poor sales of current tablet offerings, a lack of strong content support, and highly competitive price points offered by Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others.

But Acer founder Stan Shih is denying any kind of “phase out,” reporting that the company will release new Android-based models in 2012. He acknowledged that both Acer’s tablet and smartphone businesses haven’t performed well, but he also said it wasn’t time to throw in the towel. He compared the company’s struggling entry into both sectors to the troubles it encountered when first entering the notebook market.

On Monday Shih indicated that Acer’s board of directors had agreed to limit its upcoming smartphone and tablet offerings down to just a few niche, competitive products rather than a wide array of models. There’s also indication that Acer will simplify production by merging the tablet and smartphone divisions, thus increasing operation efficiency, consolidating resources and reducing conflicts in product development.

According to Shih, this consolidation of tablet and smartphone manufacturing doesn’t mean the company will lay off employees, but merely fewer product models on the market. If all goes according to plan, Acer will expand its tablet and smartphone business operations at a later date when needed.

Google’s SVP of Mobile just provided us with another glimpse inside the horse’s mouth, claiming that Android scored 3.7 million new device activations over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. To put that in context, Flurry reported that total Android and iOS activations on Christmas Day alone totaled 6.8 million. If we can accept a very high margin of error, and if we assume that the vast majority of Rubin’s activations were on the 25th, we might extrapolate a roughly even split between the two rival platforms. Considering where Android was just a couple of Christmas’s ago, it’s no wonder that Mr Rubin is in the tweeting mood.

SOURCE via BGR