The PC market shrunk during the first part of 2009, but not as badly as expected. Shipments of PCs during the first quarter were down 7.1 percent from a year ago, to 63.5 million units, according to IDC, which released its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker on Wednesday. That's an improvement from the 8.2 percent decline that IDC had projected.

And some regions are faring better than others. In the U.S., considered a saturated market for PCs, declines were kept to just 3 percent. Last month, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell told an audience during a speech in China that the worldwide demand for PCs was “steady,” and echoed IDC's assessment of U.S. consumers' continuing appetite. But of the top five PC vendors in the U.S., only Dell and Apple saw overall shipment declines when compared to the same quarter a year ago. Apple dipped slightly at 1.2 percent, but Dell's drop was more drastic at 16.2 percent.

Taiwan's flash memory device manufacturers as well as US-based Kingston Technology are expected to grab a slice of the US NAND flash market now that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled that certain flash memory products do not infringe SanDisk's US patents, according to industry sources. Many of them have already worked out plans for the US market, the sources added.

In October 2007, SanDisk asserted five patents in its complaint to the ITC against 25 companies making, selling or importing USB flash drives, CompactFlash cards, MultiMedia cards, MP3/media players and/or other removable flash storage products. The companies sued included A-Data Technology, Apacer Technology, Phison, PQI, Silicon Motion, Skymedi and Transcend Information.

We’ve had a chance to sift through all of the entries in our AMD Economic Stimulus Sweepstakes and have chosen our five lucky contestants!  Before we announce the lucky folks who’ll be battling it our for a bunch of AMD-based goodness, we want to take minute to thank everyone who participated.  Good to have you ALL with us — and THANK YOU!  Stay tuned for the announcement of our next contest in the weeks ahead!And now, the winners and lucky Unreal Tournament 3 contestants for our AMD Economic

MSI’s spent the bulk of its time of late pumping out new graphics cards and drool worthy notebooks. We have to say, it’s latest product is somewhat of a letdown in comparison to those other items, but it’s still interesting to say the least. The flagship StarCam Flip webcam handles all the typical webcam tasks — video chats, quick mugshots, etc. — but it also includes something that most rivals dont’t. Read for this? A business card reader.Believe it or not, the USB-enabled device not only includes a 2MP sensor,

We knew the first quarter of 2009 wouldn’t be fantastic for chip makers. Frankly, so did they. But somehow or another, Intel managed to escape the vicious first three months of the year with quite a few dollars in its pocket, which — in our opinion — deserves applause in its own right given the circumstances.The company’s Q1 2009 filings show that it ended the quarter with a net profit of $647 million — a figure that some outfits would do anything to reach during these tumultuous times. That said, it was

We’ve previously written about the so-called “Amazon Tax,” New York State’s move to expand the definition of a physical presence in a state so as to be able to force a retailer to charge sales tax. WEe also wrote that this was just the beginning, and as we expected, things are accelerating. As many states face budget crises, they are looking for as many ways to increase revenue that they can. The sales tax some states feel is lost on Internet sales, which, in the past, would not be taxable if the retailer did

The OCZ Vertex Series is the result of all the latest breakthroughs in SSD technology, including new Indilinix barefoot controller, 64MB of onboard cache and insane read and write speeds. Read on to see if we can hit the rated read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds of up to 180MB/s.

After images of Microsoft’s supposedly forthcoming Zune HD leaked out to the web this past weekend, many technology critics have spent the past few days debating whether or not the mythical device has the chops to knock Apple from its throne. Or to even give it a scare, really.Our very own Daniel Begun sat down with TechVi’s Randall Bennett and Macworld’s David Chartier to discuss this very topic, focusing on what software and hardware changes Microsoft would need to include in the Zune HD for it to be considered

Somewhere, someday, we’ll see OLEDs everywhere. You can pretty much bank on it. Unfortunately, you may be wearing inch-thick glasses and struggling to read your medicine labels before such a prophecy comes to fruition. That said, Sony’s slowly but surely working towards that goal by first introducing a mega-expensive OLED TV, and now, by shipping its OLED-equipped Walkman.The long awaited X Series device is gearing up to go on sale in Japan starting next week, and while the general design doesn’t look at that

Acer announced U.S. availability of the Aspire 3935-6504 and the Aspire 8935 today. The Aspire 3935-6504 is a thin-and-light notebook with a distinctive style. The Aspire 8935 is part of the next generation of large-screen Gemstone notebook PCs. The Aspire 3935-6504 features a 13.3-inch frameless, widescreen CineCrystal LED display with a resolution of 1366×768 pixels. This 16:9 aspect ratio screen also features edge-to-edge LED backlit technology for increased viewability in low-light situations. This notebook