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It was a long time coming, but Google is finally ready to bring Gmail to the desktop. The search giant has unveiled a new and much anticipated gadget that allows Google Desktop users to check their Gmail accounts without running a full-blown email client or even having to fire up the browser.

The new gadget will allow users to read, star, search and send Gmail messages while in Google Desktop, according to the company, while supporting other useful features like keyboard shortcuts and multiple accounts. The app is currently Windows-only and requires Google Desktop version 5 or higher, leaving Mac and Linux users out in the cold for now.

Nintendo is currently the undisputed leader in the gaming console market and it's a well-known fact that, unlike Sony and Microsoft, the company has been turning a profit on every Wii sold since the very beginning. But just how much profit are they making exactly?

According to new analyst estimates, Nintendo currently makes about $6 in profit on each Wii console it sells. It may not sound like a lot, but when you actually consider almost 35 million Wiis have been snapped up to date, one can imagine the high profit Nintendo is making with its popular motion sensing console.

In addition, Forbes points out that Nintendo first-party publishes roughly 60 percent of all Wii games itself – compared to 30 percent for Microsoft and 15 percent for Sony – and enjoys a gross margin on game software sales of 65 percent. Put it all together along with the wildly successful DS handheld and the bottom line is Nintendo is doing very well financially.

The WiMAX joint venture between Sprint and Clearwire is finally a done deal, despite a few setbacks along the way, as is the $3.2 billion cash infusion from Comcast, Intel, Google and others. The transaction, announced back in July, brings together both companies’ WiMAX assets under a new company valued at $14.5 billion that will retain the Clearwire name.

The WiMAX network will be branded Clear and should initially deliver average download speeds of 2 to 4 megabits per second. Sprint's WiMAX service in Baltimore, which currently runs under the XOHM brand name, will transition to the Clear name in the coming months as Clearwire converts most of its existing pre-WiMAX networks in 46 markets to standard mobile WiMAX. The new service will be an open standards-based network that will enable customers to use any WiMAX device.

Nvidia is said to be planning an assault on AMD’s high-end Radeon graphics cards, with the launch of its 55nm GT200 graphics chips next month, and Expreview has posted one of the first pictures to prove it. Specifically the picture shows the model number etched on the metal as “G200-103-B2,” with the “B” supposedly indicating a 55nm shrink, whereas another code reads “0833B2” to indicate that the chip was manufactured in the 33rd week of this year (or mid-August).

In line with rumors that have been doing the rounds for some time now, Expreview claims a 55nm GeForce GTX 260 with the same specifications as the current “reloaded” card (the one with 216 shaders) will make its debut this January along with a 55nm variant of the GTX 280, and a dual-GPU GeForce GTX 260 GX2. The chip should have drastically lower power consumption and overclock better as well – hopefully we won’t have to wait much more to find that out.

Safari is growing in popularity, according to recent figures, with estimates putting the browser as breaking a 7% share. That may seem like a small figure, but it truly wasn't that long ago when even Firefox was below that mark. As the biggest “alternative” browser, Firefox is continuing to grow as well. Safari's growth is coming primarily at the expense of Internet Explorer, which has now dipped below 70% for the first time in many years, falling far from the peak of 95% it held in 2002.

Safari goes hand in hand with Mac OS X, so watching growth of that browser is a good indicator of Mac growth as well. It's not entirely accurate, as you certainly aren't forced to use Safari on a Mac and Safari is available on Windows as well. The small discrepancy between the amount of Mac OS X users and Safari users can likely be attributed to people using other browsers on the Mac, but it still goes to show that the browser is doing well.

The next generation of Asus' Eee Box units won't be featuring an Atom processor, with the company now making a switch to Celerons. Starting with the Celeron 220, Asus' next lineup of Eee Box desktop units will feature the more traditional desktop CPU in an attempt to increase sales, on top of a reduction in sticker price.

Celeron may not be as power-friendly as the Atom, but definitely has a performance advantage, even when dealing with slower clock speeds. As the Eee Box is a desktop box, power consumption may not be as big of an issue – but then again, you lose the “cool” factor of using an Atom in a desktop with this switch. With Asus expecting to sell over a million of the devices next year, though, a small drop in price and a boost in performance may be much more important than other factors.

Pioneer has been working on its 400GB Blu-ray disc for a while so it is no surprise that it showed up at the IT Month Fair in Taipei. The key to the storage boost beyond the current Blu-ray 50GB limit is an increase in the number of layers to 16 on each side and most importantly they’ve managed to do this while retaining backwards compatibility with existing Blu-ray players.

Not only did the company showed off the format for the first time since it announcement back in July, they also produced a road map for its introduction to the market. According to Pioneer, read-only versions of these so-called super multi-layer optical discs will arrive before the end of 2010, with a rewritable version set for a release before the end of 2012. After that, we’ll see 1TB discs in 2013.

The implications of such massive storage capacities are very interesting to say the least. Essentially, if Pioneer can make good on its word, in the next two years developers could use that 400GB of space to include full high-def audio and video with no compression, publishers could release entire series of games or TV series on a single disc, and the PS3 long-term appeal could be enhanced as well.

For many years anti-virus suites have primarily been found and endorsed on Windows platforms only. While they certainly existed on Linux, Mac OS X and even cell phones, it was rare to see them in action and even rarer to see a virus that threatened people enough to warrant such suites in the first place. The increased popularity of OS X is changing that, and for the first time since its release Apple has recommended that Mac users install anti-virus software.

Rattling off a list of anti-virus suites available on the Mac, Apple has encouraged “widespread” use of the programs, claiming it'll make virus writing a more difficult process. Realistically, though, what we see here is a change in the perception that Apple has about their own software in the world today. Typically, they work hard to avoid saying anything negative about Mac OS X, but admitting that users might need an anti-virus suite to stay safe is admitting that the OS is vulnerable after all – something numerous security researchers have been saying for a while.

This year has seen a number of viruses for Mac OS X find time in the public eye. While still not on the monumental level of viruses found on Windows, even Apple is now admitting that the OS alone is not enough to protect a user.

The Xbox 360 experienced “record-breaking console sales” over the busy shopping period known in the United States as the Black Friday weekend. According to Microsoft, the 360 outsold PlayStation 3 consoles three-to-one, noting that it's 2008 Black Friday sales were also 25 percent higher than the same period a year ago.

It seems the combination of low prices along with the New Xbox Experience and Netflix support is making the Xbox 360 a very hot buy. What’s more, this success is not exclusive to the United States, with Microsoft claiming Xbox 360 sales have surged worldwide since the September price drop, where it says console sales “are up as much as 400 percent.” Of course, data regarding the Nintendo Wii's sales on Black Friday was notably absent from the announcement, so we’ll just have to wait for the NPD report.

Nokia takes on rivals with N97 touch-screen phone @ Reuters
TechSpot Holiday Gift Guide 2008 @ TechSpot
Five-figure bonuses stun Chicago plant workers @ MSNBC
Apple quietly recommends using antivirus software @ InfoWorld
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Five years ago in TechSpot:
Sony ships blue laser optical drives

Intel is teaming up with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) to collaborate on the development and production of a new generation of solid state drives designed for use in servers, workstations and storage systems that require “extremely high” input/output operations per second (IOPS) and power efficiency.

The agreement will see Hitachi incorporate Intel’s NAND flash drive technology in its Serial Attached SCSI and Fiber Channel drives, with the first batch expected to roll out in early 2010. The drives will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi GST, marking a strategic shift for the world’s third-largest hard drive maker, which until now had not made a solid commitment to SSD technology.

Hitachi said the new solid state drives would complement its existing enterprise-class hard disk drives, rather than replace them, while Intel stressed that it will continue to develop and sell its product lines of high-performance SATA SSDs.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system last month took its biggest market share dive in years, according to some new Net Applications statistics, with the number of Windows users surfing the web falling below 90 percent. Specifically, Windows secured 89.6% of the global PC market in November, down from 92.4% a year before, 94.2% in November 2006, and 96.4% in October 2004.

This is still quite an enviable position for any company, but it’s believed to be the first time Windows market share has dipped below 90 percent since the mid-1990s, when Windows 3.1 ruled the Microsoft roost. Apple’s Mac OS X, meanwhile, posted its biggest gain in a two-year period, growing by 0.66 percentage point to end the month at 8.9%. Linux also gained ground but Net Applications’ numbers still pin it under the 1% threshold at 0.83%.

Earlier this year, AMD faced a nasty CPU bug that required them to hold off their processors until new ones with some necessary workarounds became available months later. As you know already, this hit AMD pretty badly.

It was hinted Monday that they weren't alone in this situation and that Intel's Nehalem core had also been identified to be suffering from a TLB bug. The news widespread quickly but within the same 24 hours Intel came to respond and clarify that none of the shipping Core i7 processors suffer from any troublesome errata.

According to Intel's version, they did discover some issues before Nehalem's release, all of which were resolved via BIOS updates before launch. In fact, related issues were also found in Core 2 Duo processors back in the day, but we never heard anything about this because, again, it was all sorted ahead of release.

Recently BitTorrent has toyed with the idea of switching to a UDP-based transmission method as opposed to the current TCP-based method. The new protocol was designed to combat network congestion, but it almost immediately came under fire with reports claiming it would destroy network traffic. Claims were made that the UDP-based protocol would make P2P traffic more unmanageable than ever, bringing services like VoIP to their knees and rendering networks dead in the water or slowed to a fraction of their normal speed.

In response to these, BitTorrent who created the new protocol has said that such claims are absolute falsehoods. They add that the report is inaccurate in how it describes or interprets their new protocol. To the contrary, BitTorrent says the new protocol will actually make torrent traffic more neutral and fairer, becoming more sensitive to high latency.

In this instance I'm inclined to agree with BitTorrent developers. The report made many generalizations regarding torrent traffic, and makes some pretty bold claims as to what this new protocol will do. I certainly don't foresee VoIP traffic being “destroyed” by torrents.

Microsoft is recovering from a bit of an embarrassment recently, as they have now admitted that a botched update for the Xbox 360 is what caused some people to completely lose audio on their systems. The update included a change to HDCP, which has been identified as the source of the problem.

Some workarounds included using analog audio temporarily, which was a workable solution for those who had devices capable of taking analog input. A more crude workaround was to pull the hard drive from the system, preventing the updated software from loading, which is certainly an unacceptable solution to a problem caused by an update to HDCP. Microsoft hasn't mentioned anything about how many users were affected only that it was a "very small number."