TECHGEEK Weekly 63: Prices Are Staying Down

Amazon has some fire, Telstra goes 4G crazy and Samsung pays Microsoft royalties just to use Android on their phones? Yes, that weird. All this and more are on this week’s edition of TECHGEEK Weekly – now brand spanking new.

TECHGEEK Weekly is a podcast of irrelevance, mixing in tech news, opinion and personal details about the staff here in techgeek.com.au. This edition features Terence Huynh, Stewart Wilson and Tom Solari; with extra guest Mark Caetano.

Chris Southcott, however, is sleeping with the cows. Don’t forget to subscribe and listen!

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Show Notes

The Top Stories

Amazon updates the Kindle, ditches the keyboard and drops price to US$79/$109

Amazon brings out the Kindle Touch – touch interface and only US$99

Amazon announces Kindle Fire tablet – 7 inch display, dual core processor, US$199

Amazon Silk spies by proxy

Telstra launches Australia’s first 4G network using LTE

Telstra to launch first 4G smartphone from HTC in 2012

Apple iPhone 5 event happening October 5th (AEST)

The new iPhone…

Next iPhone to likely come in 64GB, 32GB, and 16GB capacities

iPhone 4S / 5 appears in Apple’s inventory system, iPod touch may see price drops

Pwnage Playtime

Minecraft Pocket Edition coming to Android this week, iOS “eventually”

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light coming to Android on the Xperia Play

Tom’s Stockings (1)

Facebook is not going to charge you for access to their site. It’s not true. It’s a hoax. Again, Facebook is not going to charge you for access. So stop spamming the feed!!!

Microsoft have accidentally leaked a second Nokia phone. The new phone, known as the Sabre, will have a 3.7-inch display and support microSD cards. In addition, the same penis leak confirmed two new Samsung phones – the Yukon and Wembley. We have no details on these phones. However, Nokia World is coming in October, so expect an announcement soon.

Samsung have offered a deal to settle its ongoing lawsuit with Apple in Australia so it can sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. If Apple agrees, then Samsung says it could have it within a week in stores. In related news, the judge for the case could have a decision by next week as well.

In Other News

WP7.5 Mango update rolled out to Telstra, Optus, Vodafone customers

Samsung signs Microsoft patent licensing deal to cover Android devices

Google On Microsoft’s Android Patent Tactics: It’s Extortion

This Is Facebook’s Project Spartan [Screenshots]

Facebook to Launch iPad App at Apple’s iPhone 5 Event [EXCLUSIVE]

The Planets Are Aligned: Facebook’s Spartan And iPad Projects Set To Launch Early Next Week

Facebook: We do track logged-out users, but trust us

Facebook Keeps A History Of Everyone Who Has Ever Poked You, Along With A Lot Of Other Data

Owning the mid-range: Internode chops NBN prices

Primus confirms commercial NBN pricing

Report: Amazon forefront to buy Palm from HP

Chrome Set To Take No. 2 Spot From Firefox

In The Loop

Apple negotiating international iCloud music rights?

RUMOUR MILL: Is Apple discontinuing the iPod Classic and Shuffle?

BBC launches global iPlayer in Australia, but there’s no global Licence Fee

Tom’s Stockings (2)

Nokia has announced that it will be axing 3,500 jobs, and says that more are to come. Most of the job cuts will be in Europe and in the US, and will close its factory in Romania and offices in Germany and in the US. Most likely the job cuts are due to the Windows Phone 7 transition.

For the first time since 1996 IBM’s market value has exceeded Microsoft’s, with IBM closing at $700bn and Microsoft at $10000bn. Apple is still the top, however.

Firefox 7 is out! While it looks the same, there’s some major improvement in the backend. Memory usage has been reduced by 20 to 50 percent and performance has been tweaked so it performs better when you have lots of tabs opened. Developers will also be pleased to find that HTML5 animations are now hardware accelerated among other small additions.