HTC's not standing pat with just one touch screen-controlled smart phone. Hot on the heels of the "Touch" release is news that there's a second one in the works, & it'll even be 3.5G this time around. Hear that iPhone? Yeah.

"The new smartphone is likely to be the P5500 (codenamed Nike) which the company unveiled in the first half of this year, indicated the sources, noting that the P5500 will be built using a CPU from Samsung Electronics and chipsets from Qualcomm, and supporting the WCDMA standard."

Rumors abound, & despite sliding 5% in its profits report, shares of Samsung Electronics have risen to their highest points in over a year. Will we see Samsung under new ownership?

"Reports here quote Samsung investor relations top manager Woosik Chu saying he has no knowledge of such a plan. He added the company had countermeasures in place to fend off such an attempt."

If what Charlie's saying here is true, & the gaming community gets their mitts on it long enough to confirm it.... I shudder to think at the backlash that MS is going to take. Actually, I think I'd rather relish in it...

"In any case, in doing this, MS removed the only impediment to backporting DX10 to XP, it is now, and has been for quite a while, completely possible. MS is screwing its customers to force an upgrade and you are a pawn in their revenue generation scheme."

Let's think about this a minute, because that last sentence certainly got my gears a-grindin'. Would nVidia really quit producing its motherboard chipsets altogether? Intel's licensing the SLi from nVidia, but AMD would be left in the lurch, to rely only on CrossFire... Would it make that much business sense? Interesting to think about...

"The engineers tell us that SLI drivers are in the final state of polishing with a few bugs left to quash, but plenty of time remains to finish things up."