Panasonic earlier in the week said it had begun a tender offer to take over rival Sanyo for an estimated $4.4 billion, which would create one of the world's largest electronics companies. But before that can happen, China is forcing Panasonic to sell off assets in Japan if its to approve the deal, the Financial Times reports.

The landmark ruling, which is based on anti-trust laws introduced in August of last year, has some concerned over the growing power of Beijing's competition authorities. Those who study competition law say the Chinese demands go further than those of the European Union and make international companies take greater notice of China when considering acquisitions.

Should the deal go through, Sanyo is expected to become Panasonic's subsidiary by mid-December, or a year after the two companies first announced the potential takeover.

For the most part, Klipsch bowed out of the multimedia computer speaker market a long time ago, leaving behind a rabid fan base hoping it would one day return. That day has come, sort of. Klipsch is back and has brought with it a new 2.1 speaker-set, or more accurately, a new twist on an existing 2.1 setup.

It's hard to believe Klipsch's original ProMedia 2.1 speakers have been around for almost a decade. The new ProMedia 2.1 Wireless purports to look and sound like the THX-certified original, only this time without the wires. Replacing them is a USB wireless transmitter that plugs into your notebook's USB port.

"Only a few simple steps are required to get the ProMedia Wireless up and running. Just plug, play, and enjoy the full sonic impact of your music, movies, and games without being tied down, "said Don Inmon, Klipsch director of product development for personal audio. "No router or installation software is needed."

Klipsch says the wireless range extends about 30 feet in a single room, making it deal for dorm rooms, offices, living rooms, or anywhere else you might tote your notebook.

The new speakers are only available direct from Klipsch for $199.

It seems like everywhere Intel turns it's being sued over alleged antitrust violations. The latest lawsuit comes from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who claims Intel threatened computer makers and made a series of illegal payments to coerce them into using its chips. In other words, the same accusations AMD has been harping about for a good many years now.

"Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market," Cuomo said in a statement. "Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitor, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices."

Intel has faced similar lawsuits earlier in the year, and in May, the European Commission hammered Intel with a record $1.45 billion fine for antitrust violations. Intel is currently appealing the ruling.

The latest lawsuit is significant because it's the first formal antitrust action against Intel by any government agency in the U.S. in more than a decade, the New York Times reports. Intel has been under investigation by the FTC since 2008, but that hasn't led to any formal proceedings.

"These are separate investigations, but it would be very surprising for New York Sate to go off on its own without being fairly confident the FTC would pursue Intel as well," a person familiar with the state's investigation told NYT.

Microsoft may have been a little conservative earlier this year when it said it would eliminate up to 5,000 jobs in response to falling sales and profits. Now in its third round of layoffs since Janary, the software company plans to cut 800 jobs, which would put the total number somewhere around 5,400 so far.

The first round of layoffs began in January when Microsoft handed out 1,400 pinks slips, and then thousands more in May. But the worst news coming from Redmond is that more layoffs are yet to come

"Today, we are eliminating around 800 positions spread across multiple businesses and locations and have completed our reduction plan sooner than we had anticipated 11 months ago," Microsoft said in a statement. "At the same time, we continue to hire in priority areas, but also understand that continuing to manage our businesses closely, as we always do, can mean additional headcount adjustments."

The "headcount adjustments" come just a little over a week since Microsoft reported declines in revenues and profits.

In the grand scheme of things, October might go down as a month to remember. That's the month Mozilla's Firefox browser was finally able to catch up to, and surpass, Microsoft's still popular Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer remains way out in front in market share, but it's becoming clear that Microsoft's lead isn't long for the world. From September to October, IE dropped 1.07 percentage points, settling in at 66.64 percent. At the same time, Firefox gained ground on its own accord by moving up 0.32 percentage points to end up at 24.07 percent. Those are significant numbers for such a short period of time. If the current pace were to keep up, it would take a little over 2 years for Firefox to completely catch up with IE, and could conceivably jump ahead by early 2012.

But it's not just about Firefox. Safari, Chrome, and Opera combined hold a little over 10 percent of the market. Throw Firefox into the fray and alternative browsers (non-IE) are being used by a third of all surfers. When looking at it from that angle, IE is on pace to give up its market share lead even before 2012, just not to a single browser.

Maybe then, Netscape can finally rest in peace.

We suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. In addition to your PC and smartphone, you can now tweet your witty 140-character epiphany using a dedicated Twitter device, courtesy of Peek.

The company has just launched its TwitterPeek, a $99 hand-held gadget (available exclusively at Amazon) with a QWERTY keyboard, color screen, and click scroll wheel. For a single C-note, Peek will give you six months of unlimited service, after which the monthly fee jumps to $7.95. Or drop $199 right from the get-go and receive unlimited Twitter service for as long as you own the device.

Other features include nationwide coverage, a one year manufacturer's warranty, and a 30-day money back guarantee, which will come in handy after you realize "Holy hell, I just dropped a hundred bucks on a Twitter gadget!" In fact, you may want to tweet that before getting your money back. Or keep it and prove us wrong in thinking there's no way this thing catches on.

TwitterPeek will face competition everywhere it turns. Twitter apps are available on just about every smartphone, and you can already update your status with a text message, But it's not just about smartphones and PCs. Digital e-book readers are gaining steam, some of which boast Internet access.

Does TwitterPeek have a chance? Hit the jump and tell us what you think!

"The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating."

What makes the feat even more impressive is that Apple was able to accumulate all these apps in just 16 months. There's definitely something to be said for being the first major player.

Of course, quality is just as important as quantity, and here too Apple has been making strides to improve its App Store. Features like Genius recommendations, App Store Essentials, and sub-category listings are all efforts to give quality apps their due.

There's a lot you can do with a jailbroken iPhone, and apparently, there's a lot others can do with your hacked smartphone as well. A hacker from the Netherlands made it his mission to alert modified iPhone owners via SMS that their security wasn't up to snuff.

The SMS contained a link to http://doiop.com/Hacked, which has since been eradicated from the Web. But before it was taken down, the site asked victims to send 5 euros (about $7.56 USD) to a Paypal account and then sit tight for email instructions on how to secure the hacked phone.

"If you don't pay, it's fine by me," the hacker's page said. "But remember, the way I got access to your iPhone can be used by thousands of others -- they can send text messages from your number (like I did), use it to call or record your calls, and actually whatever they want, even use it for their hacking activities! I can assure you, I have no intentions of harming you or whatever, but some hackers do! It's just my advice to secure your phone."

According to ArsTechnica, the hacker used port scanning to identify jailbroken iPhones on the T-Mobile network in the Netherlands with SSH running. The hack also relied on unchanged root passwords to gain access, which is where the real security risk came from.

So what can you do to secure your phone? The same hacker who tried to make a quick buck has apologized for his actions, promised to return what money he's made, and posted steps to secure your jailbroken iPhone, which you can find here.

Graphics chip maker Nvidia appears to be interested in talent from Transmeta, and that could mean only one thing: they're moving into the x86 market, says AmTech analyst Doug Freedman.

Freedman's theory is at least plausible. During a Q&A session at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, Nvidia acknowledged it would eventually try its hand at the x86 business, saying it was a matter of "when," not "if."

If Nvidia's looking for the right time, now might be it. The chip maker continues to be at odds with Intel over continued licensing disputes, the latest of which has bumped Nvidia out of contention with Nehalem. And because AMD owns ATI, the chip maker finds itself between rock and a hard place.

That's not good, considering over 30 percent of Nvidia's revenue comes from chipsets. Backing out, even if temporary, puts a lot of pressure on the company's graphics business to hold the fort while licensing disputes are worked out.

It's worth noting that Nvidia probably wouldn't go after the high performance sector, where Intel's Core i7 pretty much stands alone. But the market is wide open in the low performance segment. An Atom alternative combined with the chip maker's Ion platform could conceivably shake things up and give Intel's Atom platform some serious competition.

Sonos has released its new ZonePlayer S5 in the U.S., an all-in-one music sysetem with a built-in wireless receiver and amplified 5-driver speaker. The all-in-one can be controlled with an iPhone, iPod touch, or any Sonos Controller.

"This is the best time in history to love music," said John MacFarlane, CEO, Sonos. "The marriage of devices such the iPhone and the Sonos ZonePlayer S5 connects consumers to an entire world of music and gives them an easy way to control it all from the palm of their hand, in any and every room of their home."

Each of the five speakers comes with its own dedicated Class-D digital amplifier. The S5 also includes a 2-port Ethernet switch, auto-detecting headphone jack, analog audio inputs, support for several major music services, such as Last.fm, Napster, Pandora, Rhapsody, and SIRIUS, and the ability to download from any service offering DRM-free tracks, including iTunes and AmazonMP3.

On the social networking side, the Sonos Software v3.1 integrates Twitter into the Controller interface, allowing users to tweet the name and artist of whatever track they're rocking out to.

The ZonePlayer S5 is available now direct from Sonos for $399.

Dell on Tuesday announced the completion of its tender offer for Perot Systems. Under terms of the deal, Dell will accept Perot's stock at $30 per share, and in return own more than 90 percent of the company.

Completion of the acquisition forms a new business unit called Dell Services, which will provide IT services and business solutions to customers. Integrating Perot Systems also extends Dell's reach into hosting, consulting, applications and business-process outsourcing, and expands Dell's exiting managed and modular services.

"Dell Services will be a powerful organization with the extensive capabilities and global reach to address the needs of organizations of all types. The Dell and Perot Systems integration teams have been extremely productive in their planning, and we are ready to work on behalf of all our customers," Peter Altabel, the former CEO of Perot who will become president of Dell Services, said in a statement.

Oracle knows it's in for a fight with the European Union over the U.S. company's planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but appears ready to go the rounds, according to a Financial Times report.

The EU is mainly concerned about whay Oracle might end up doing with Sun's MySQL code base, such as killing it off or dropping support in order to push its own non-free database package. And according to FT.com, one person close to the process says the EU is ever-so-close to issuing an official statement of objection, which is step one in blocking the deal.

It's unlikely Oracle will back down, choosing instead to wait and see what the EU decides. Should the Commission object, Oracle could choose to offer concessions or take its fight to court.

The Sun acquisition has already been given the green light by the U.S. Department of Justice.

It's not been a very good year for Novell employees, who never know what the next day will bring. For 100 to 130 workers out of Novell's roughly 3,900 global employees, this week brought more pink slips, CNet reports.

CNet's sources are saying that the Workgroup division saw the most layoffs, but according to Ian Bruce, Novell's public-relations director, the cuts sliced "across the company, both geographically and productwise."

Ironically enough, Linux jobs in general are doing a smashing job and are up 6 percent ince January, according to data from Dice.com. So if there's a silver lining to all this, Novell employees that were let go might not have such a rough spot finding employment elsewhere. In the meantime, they'll have several months of severance pay to tide them over, which is based on the number of years they were with the company, plus other factors.

And what about those who still have employment at Novell? The company also announced it would suspending 401(k) matching contributions.

You spoke and Hulu listened - the online video streaming site has added a 'Coming Soon' section so you can keep up with your favorite shows without skipping a beat.

"Simply put, we've noticed that many of you are often wondering when new episodes will be available," Betna Chan-Martin, Product Manager, Hulu, wrote on  the company's blog. "After a lot of work with our content providers, our product and design team, and our content team, we decided to create a page that contains a schedule of what's to come for the week ahead."

To find the new page, you'll need to follow the 'Browse by Date' link at the top of Hulu and then click on the 'Coming Soon' tab. Once there, you'll see an episode guide outlining what ABC, Fox, and NBC have in store for the week. And if you're a registered user, you can sign up for email alerts for when a video has been added, or "on the rare occasion when that video is late in getting up on Hulu.com."

We can think of several reasons to invest in Windows 7. It's faster than Vista and more secure than XP. The new taskbar rocks. UAC is much less intrusive than it was in Vista. And did we mention it's fast? But if you're still not convinced Windows 7 should be your next OS, consider that you could be helping the economy rebound, according to research firm IDC.

Take this however you will, but according to a report in the Boston Globe, Microsoft hired the research firm to conduct a study of the ripple effect of the Windows 7 launch. During the course of its research, IDC found that U.S.-based companies could hire some 25,000 extra works to cope with the Windows 7 launch.

"There is a bounce effect based on the introduction of Windows 7," Said Amie White, vice president for global research at IDC.

In addition to creating jobs, IDC also estimates that technology companies across the nation stand to sell an extra $110 billion in Windows 7-related products and services through the end of 2010. This will have a trickle down effect as these same companies pump $41 billion to develop, sell, and support new products for Win 7 users, the Boston Globe reports.

Sounds Utopian.

Intel hopes to eventually make a thunderous entrance in the discrete graphics market with its upcoming GPGPU chip codenamed Larrabee, and to do that, the company needs to line up some chip partners willing to jump on board. Intel CEO Paul Otellini set out to do that recently, talking privately to several China-based videocard makers.

According to what un-named sources have been whispering in DigiTimes' ear, Intel plans to offer preferential pricing for just the GPU by itself, as well as when bundled with other Intel products. This is a similar strategy to what Intel has been doing with its Atom platform, and it remains to be seen how many graphics partners will warm to Larrabee in this manner.

As it stands, some first-tier graphics card vendors are a bit leary about Larrabee on fears that the first release may end up buggy. But within the next couple of years, vendors expect Larrabee will be able to hold its own against what AMD and Nvidia have to offer.

Watch out Atom, there's a new line of VIA Nano processors on the block, and they're after your lunch money. They just may have the muscle to take it, too.

The new VIA Nano 3000 series is based on the 64-bit superscalar "Isaiah' architecture and comes with a bevy of noteworthy features. Among them is the ability to support 1080p playback. Other notable traits include 64-bit support, SSE instructions, and encryption and security capabilities.

"With the VIA Nano 3000 Series, we are launching our fastest and most power-efficient processors yet," commented Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. "Coupled with our market-leading digital media chipsets, they enable the richest experience across a broad range of mobile and all-in-one system designs."

The new chips will ship in early 2010 at clockspeeds ranging from 1GHz to 2GHz and all run on an 800MHz frontside bus. The x86 parts are also compatible with both Windows and Linux.

Google's minimalistic Chrome browser continues to improve one feature at a time, and the latest release adds the ability to sync bookmarks across multiple machines. There's one caveat, however - it's a beta release, not a stable build.

If you're thinking to yourself that's not much of a caveat, then in your luck, because the new beta also purports to supercharge performance. According to the Chrome devs, you can expect the beta to run up to 30 percent faster than the current stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core tests, and about 400 percent faster than the very first stable Chrome build.

But let's get back to the bookmark syncing, because that's going to be the realy draw for most users. This essentially the same implementation as was previously available through Google's dev channel, which is geared for developers and "can be very unstable at times." And just like before, there's nothing complicated about the feature in the beta build. Just mosey over to the Wrench icon, select 'Synchronize my bookmarks...' and sign in to your Google account. All of your bookmarks will then be uploaded. When you do the same on another PC with a different set of bookmarks, Chrome will offer to merge your bookmarks. Pretty slick.

Check out the video walkthrough here.

Want to get in Mother Nature's good graces and maybe save a buck or two while doing so? Combine Samsung's memory chips with Microsoft's operating system. That's the message in a nutshell the two companies will work together to promote.

"There is not doubt that the combination of Windows 7 and 40nm DDR3 in new PCs will make users very happy," said Dong-Soo Jun, executive senior vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Electronics. "If you opt for 4GB of memory in a Windows 7-based system, over typical 2GB-based systems used today, you'll see an increase in performance, while using less power thanks to the efficiency of Samsung's 40nm DDR3 DRAM."

If this all sounds a little bit hokey, you may just have to get used to it. Depending on how this marketing campaign plays out, Samsung suggested it might further collaborate with Microsoft on more green IT efforts on a global scale.

Following up its first WiMax deployment in Baltimore in September of last year, Sprint on Monday launched WiMax service in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth. This in addition to the three markets being served in North Carolina.

And Sprint isn't even close to be finished. By the time 2009 comes to an end, the wireless provider says it will roll out WiMax in Honolulu, Seattle, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas.

"Sprint continues to lead the charge in rolling out wireless 4G in cities across America and the momentum continues to build," Todd Rowley, vice president of Sprint 4G, said in a statement. "Our aggressive expansion of Sprint 4G will include many new devices and capabilities that create increased performance and productivity while enhancing personal lifestyles on the go."

Looking ahead to next year, Sprint expects to launch service in several more markets, including Boston, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.