electronics

Despite intense competition, price cuts and a shaky economy, it's going to be another good year for the electronics industry, predicts Sony's Stan Glasgow.

Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics, said that orders from retailers are strong once again this year. Consumers are snapping up high-definition TVs, but also digital cameras and video cameras. Sony's gaining ground in notebooks too: shipments are up by double digits, he said. Sony lost seven days of production out of its San Diego area factory because of the fires in the region (some right near the factory); the company, however, has already … Read more

It's happening again.

If you thought one minute past midnight the day after Thanksgiving was too early to choke out your fellow shoppers in the name of a great deal, you were wrong.

Following last year's decision to offer a $398 laptop several weeks ahead of the traditional Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart is planning on slashing prices on five items--in its stores, not online--beginning at 8 a.m. this Friday. One of them will be a $348 Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM. The other four items and their prices will be kept secret until … Read more

Thanks to my good friends over at GameSpot, I can now finally let out my breath: Spore is going to come out next spring.

For nearly two years, Spore, the next title from The Sims mastermind Will Wright, was all people in the video games industry could talk about. Well, OK, maybe not the only thing, but one of the major ones.

Then, suddenly, people stopped talking about it as its launch date slipped and slipped and no one knew when, or even if, it would come out.

But according to GameSpot, Wright went on BBC Radio Five Live yesterday … Read more

Finally, here's a phone plan that allows you to switch from the U.S. government's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network to the Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol Router Network with a single keystroke.

The National Security Agency has authorized military and government personnel to order up a bunch of General Dynamics' Sectera Edge secure, wireless smartphones, which will not only allow them to make secure calls but also to e-mail and Web-browse in either classified or unclassified mode.

The phones will still operate right along with everyone else on the existing high-speed Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), … Read more

Peace and happiness are all well and good, but apparently not as enticing as a new Vaio.

In a just -released survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, computers topped respondents' holiday wish lists of top-five gifts--followed by peace and happiness, big-screen televisions, clothes and money.

Notably, the big-screen TV moved up in the 2007 survey to No. 3 from 11th in 2006. The teen wish list remained unchanged: clothes, MP3 players, video games, computers and cell phones (with international human rights way down the lineup, just under skateboards).

In its "14th Annual CE Holiday Purchase Patterns" study, the … Read more

Investors put in $16 million more into E-Ink in the latest effort to get the e-book ball rolling.

That brings the total that the small company has raised to $150 million, according to VentureWire. The market, however, has yet to take flight. Everyone loves the idea. E-books don't consume trees and you can carry several books at once. Some believe that college textbooks will go this way.

Still, no one seems to be buying them yet. The most prominent product to use the company's technology is the Sony Reader, an electronic book from the Japanese giant. Sony has … Read more

This story has been updated from its original version.

In order to get back on top of the video games market, Electronic Arts is willing to pay a hefty price. Namely, $860 million.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based publisher announced on Thursday afternoon that it had agreed to acquire VG Holdings, the parent company of two game development companies, BioWare and Pandemic Studios, from private equity firm Elevation Partners.

This deal, expected to close in January and originally reported by the Wall Street Journal, is the largest in EA's 25-year history.

For more coverage from CNET News.com's … Read more

Whether or not you're one of the few global warming skeptics left, there's no denying that the northeast has been experiencing an unseasonably--up to 85 degrees--warm October.

Now, even when you're playing escapist video games, you'll have to deal with the guilt that your habits have made it too warm to wear autumn tweed.

SimCity Societies (review from CNET Networks' GameSpot), the next generation of the SimCity computer game series that releases November 15, is going to simulate the environmental impact of different types of building and energy choices.

Players who choose inexpensive and "readily-available&… Read more