The Zone

Nokia has surprisingly hogged the online news limelight for the past couple of days with the uber-cool and radical modified phones by Mehmet Erkök and today, we find out that the humble 1100's sales figures has beaten the likes of the Nokia 3310, Sony Playstation 2 and Apple iPod with a whopping total of 200 million units sold! For sales comparisions, the 1100's closest competitor would be the the legendary 3310 itself, and while the Apple iPod broke the 100 million mark, it was only after five generations, and the Playstation 2 attained the 115 million units sold mark in six long years. That also means that the Nokia 1100 and its deriavtives (the 1110, 1110i, 11108 and 1112) moves across the globe at a tune of 1 million units per week! If you're selling a mobile phone that's below 150 dollars (USD), we're not surprised at how fast they sell out.

Viva le 1100?

If you haven't heard about this, you might want to now!

Microsoft, the maker of the recent Windows 6 (Vista) Operating System, wants to buy its online rival Yahoo, for a staggering USD$50billion!

This isn't the first time Microsoft has made an offer to Yahoo - they're refused before - but Microsoft is hoping the higher USD$50billion is going to change the yodelling online giant's mind.

In the online space where Google buys YouTube and Newscorp buys MySpace, the best method to eliminate your enemy is to just buy them over.

With Yahoo Messenger 8 being able to use MSN Messenger (or Windows Live Messenger since version 8) user names, the battle between the top IM (Instant Messengers) just got tougher for Microsoft.  Since Microsoft isn't the kind to allow you to use Windows Live Messenger for your Yahoo IM user name, people just might switch over to Yahoo's IM to use both Yahoo and Microsoft IM user names.

Taking over Yahoo would also increase Microsoft's Web search market share by 38%, putting them right behind Google - Microsoft's ultimate rival.

Yahoo's current value is around USD$30 to 40billion - so that's a cool USD$10billion extra to just say yes to Microsoft.  Will Yahoo accept it?

Source: The New York Post

Reference: Search Engine Ranking

Is this a sign that Yahoo might actually give in to the RM1trillion Microsoft giant?

Yahoo has finally made a decision regarding Yahoo Photos versus the Flickr battle, and  has decided to shutdown Yahoo Photos by the later half of the year. While Yahoo Photos maintains a higher share of Internet visits, Flickr's growth convinced Yahoo to maintain only a single photo site.

Source: USA Today

Pli, a wholesome furniture online store with more soul than your humble IKEA had debuted their first furniture model made out of recycled consoles (in other words, the PlayStation 2). Named the Reee chair, its an environmentally friendly chair that's "designed for disassembly and further recycling. The modular design means it's easily repaired or refurbished. Every chair makes a new home for 2.3kg of used plastic."

Even more outstanding is that "The seat and back are made from 100% recycled computer games console casings. That's it." Wow. The catch is that to park your bottom on one of these chairs is going to cost you a whopping 99UK Pounds, which costs more than a PS2 at its current price! Anyone up for a Xbox 360 chair? We heard that a couple of local boys have had the red rings of death.....

In a shocking revelation over the weekend, we found out that Dell is now planning to approach channel sales and distributors in an apparent move away from their regular (and often taken as religion) business model which cuts out the middleman entirely. While this means that you can now buy those tantalizing Dell monitors from your regular IT store, it might also mean that prices are going to be a little bit higher than usual, giving the cost of marketing and distribution and all.

If you've been using Google for searches with results that include sites which may have malware (malicious software), you may have noticed the note "This site may harm your computer" next to the result.

This is part of Google's attempt in trying to be an anti-virus BEFORE you even visit a site that can cause problems to your computer.  This is because the search giant found out that 1 in 10 sites (about 450,000 sites) are loaded with malware!

Therefore they're going the next step - identifying ALL Web pages on the Internet that could be malicious!  With Google's powerful Internet crawling abilities and data centers, Google is in an excellent position to do this.

Another company recently offered a solution like this to Business and Enteprise - Trend Micro.  Their Web-front office security basically keeps track of sites and notifies a user before they visit a site if that site is dangerous.  While some may see these approaches as censorship, the sheer problems of infected computers makes such solutions greatly welcomed in the modern Internet age.  Bring it on!

Business Week has released pictures of what it seems to be the world's thinnest notebook. Intel posed a challenge to its engineers to create a fashionable, and slim notebook that has the ability to connect to wireless networks - any wireless network.

While the lady isn't really a good scale in terms of slimness, rest assured, the gallery over at Business Week showed that a motorola RAZR looked fatter than the notebook which is touted to use only the latest Intel processing technologies. 

More at Business Week, including a photo slideshow

In celebrations to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars movie, which is NOT episode 1 to you generation z-ers, someone made a cool diorama of the Tatooine spaceport where the Millenium Falcon and the gang had a close shave with Imperial Stormtroopers - in LEGO!. Undoubtedly the coolest thing since LEGO Star Wars!

 More pictures after the break!

As part of our efforts to revamp the current Hardware Zone Malaysia forums, we'll be doing some major spring cleaning. In the coming weeks, several non-performing forums will be consolidated to a single forum, and really old threads will be deleted. If there's any particular thread of interest that you haven't read or saved yet, we suggest doing so now!

Was it ever even a suprise? Last Tuesday (29th May), a news posting on xboxscene.com announced that the much talked about iXtreme firmware for the Xbox 360 is now available. Barely two weeks after Microsoft decided to ban modded 360s from its Live service, the modders have struck back with a new firmware which reportedly enables modded 360s to log on to the service once again. But there is a catch though. Actually there are lot of catches.

First of all, the new firmware only works with Toshiba-Samsung drives. Hacked firmware for other drives are "in the works." Also, it only boots "Stealth Xtreme" backups. We're not really sure how this works but we understand that the media you burn your "backups" on must be done in a particular way.

The most important catch of all though is that banned 360s cannot be "unbanned" even with this updated firmware.

Full details here.

There's not much tech in this post really but here's something interesting that we want to point out. Spotted at engadget.com, one of the more popular tech blogs on the web today, is a post about Hitachi and Oracle teaming up to introduce anti-piracy tags in China.

The story is fairly interesting but thats not what we want to show you guys. Check out the photo accompanying that post. Looks familiar? Of course, its good old Petaling Street @ Malaysia's Chinatown. 

There can only be two explanation for this really. Either the dudes at Engadget went to sleep during geography classes or... the fake/pirated goods on offer in Petaling Street is world famous! 

In any case, Malaysia Boleh!

Original link here.   

Most of us would remember RealPlayer. It's that irritating Web-streaming media player which dumps all parts of itself onto your computer once it's installed.  Looks like RealPlayer will go away with nothing but bad memories then, even though in the past it was once a great Internet media player.  That might just return actually...

RealPlayer has recently announced that it will be coming up with a free version this month, which will allow video ripping of Web videos!  You can save Web videos as Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia, and even Windows Media!  What's more, it'll support sites such as YouTube and more. It won't rip videos which are protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management) though.  That's expected, or  lawyers will have a field day with RealMedia.

You can now get rid of the Safari skin you got on your IE or Firefox because Apple just released the public Beta of Safari 3. Like any decent web browser today, it sports features like tabbed browsing, pop-up blocker, RSS and tougher security features. But Apple being Apple, there has to something inherently better with Safari than any other web browsers out there. And Apple's salvo is that it claims that Safari is "blazing fast" with HTML and JavaScript pages. Firefox 2, Opera 9 and IE 7 can't be even close enough to smell the trail of dust it leaves behind (okay, we might be exagerrating a little but you get the idea).

Don't just take our word for it. Go download it now from here and take it for a test drive. We're downloading ours as we type.

DS Fanboy reader Dan has sucessfully quit smoking for 40 days now, thanks to Pokemon Pearl! While this is not due to the inherent addictiveness of the game itself, it gives you time to preoccupy your mind so that you'll not reach for that pack of pricey tobacco the next time you're lazing around. While the method varies with each individual gamer, you can also try playing Flow on the PSP - a relaxing method that will definitely soothe nerves at the same time. Then again, some gamers I know are able to play WoW and DOTA with a lit ciggie in their mouths, but that's another story for another day ;)

* If you've noticed the PG sticker on the box...........don't smoke, drink, or gamble kids! wait till you're mature in the head!