This is Bill, he is my virtual friend. See Bill on his virtual Cell Phone? Boy when I was a kid they kept telling me to live in the real world. But I guess no one gave the gang over at VMWare that talk.

VMWare (an EMC Company) have added another platform to their virtual list. Now they are going to virtualize the mobile phone platform. That is right, you will be able to run multiple OSes on your smart phone now. The new technology is called MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform).

MVP information here

The Inquirer has some interesting news up about the possibility of Google opening up its development platform. It seems they listened to a speech given by Dave Girouard a Google Big Wig at the Web 2.0 conference and came away all bubbly and warm inside.

The wax on enthusiastically about how this move (if real) will change the world of the web. Although I am not convinced that they (Google) will truly ever completely open up the development stack to outside developers it will be interesting to see what they do now that this comment is on the table.

Read more here

EA is being sued again for its use of SecuROM, that oppressive copy protection device used on many of its newer game titles. According to Gamepolitics,two new class action suits have been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that cover Sims2, and Spore.

EA has come under considerable fire for its DRM practices and in particular the use of SecuROM. SecuROM has been accused of causing damage to the usability of a system once installed and is one of the more invasive protection software available.

Read the full story here

Late on Friday some of the first Shanghai benchmarks were found on the internet and spread around and called into question by the Inquirer. The benchmarks in question are SPEC Power tests. These tests would seem to put Shanghai bellow the results for Harperton by a large margin.

Looking at the results right off of the SPEC website it seems that AMD's Shanghai receives a score of 860 at 2.7GHz and 731 at 2.5GHz. These are far below the Intel scores of 1064 for a Xeon X3360 2.8GHz and 1010 for a Xeon L5420 2.5GHz. To further confuse the issue AMD released its own results for the L5420 which are a little more than half what is shown on the SPEC site (561). The Inq calls shenanigans with numbers.

On Saturday, AMD sent a rebuttal to the Inq explaining the numbers and the configurations used.

Expreview has gotten hold of some photos and details of another Quantum Force series motherboard almost ready to be unleashed from Foxconn. As it's based off Intel's P45 chipset for Core 2, it's a bit of a shame Foxconn couldn't get this particular board to market much sooner, what with Nehalem now stealing much of the enthusiast light.

Dubbed the 'Avenger', this isn't just your run of the mill P45 offering; it's quite a special board and can do something no other P45 chipset board out there is capable of. If you look between the two residing x16 PCI-E slots you will see a lone chip nestled in there. This is in fact a PLX chip; the same chip used on the ATI HD 4870 X2 graphics cards. What it does for this board is provide dual x16 Crossfire across both slots, where standard P45 boards are limited to x8/x8.

AMD's much anticipated follow up to its RV7xx GPU, known as the RV870, will not be a MCM, according to this report from Fudzilla.

Whilst there has been a great deal of speculation about whether or not the Sunnyvale, CA based company would make its RV870 GPU, a multi chip module, it is claimed that the company will go down the path of making it a single chip instead.

We've spoken about Palit and Gainward's, non reference, Revolution 700 HD 4870 X2 offerings already. Yet, as this report from TechConnect Magazine, with images courtesy of Expreview states, there is a third iteration in the offing.

Gainward is readying its Rampage 700 Golden Sample Goes Like Hell Edition and, this is expected to be the flagship of the line-up. Still adopting a tri-slot cooling solution, expect clock speeds of 790 MHz for the dual GPUs and, 950 MHz (3800 MHz QDR) for the memory.

Toshiba is looking to drop a high performance laptop on the market soon.

To make sure they capture the enthusiast and gamers out there they are going stuff three nVidian GPUs under the hood for the world's first three GPU notebook.

The new Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 and X305-Q706 will feature two discreet GeForce 9800M GTS GPUs with NVIDIA SLI® technology, and a GeForce 9400M GPU. For maximum power the two 9800M GTS GPUs will run in SLI for great gaming while for maximum power savings they can be powered down and allow the 9400 to take over.

Sharkoon has just launched a new series of full-tower chassis' dubbed the Seraphim, available in either Value or Economy models.

The Value is the better equipped of the two, housing a 140mm intake fan at the front and 250mm on the side panel, whilst the Economy leaves a space for the front intake and two 80mm side panel fans, should the owner want to make use of them.

If you're in the market for a new LCD and love your screen real estate, you will likely fall in love with this newly released 23" monitor from Samsung; the SyncMaster 2342BWX. As well as looking the part in typical Samsung style with a thin shiny black bezel, sporting a 5ms response time and 20000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, there's one other main aspect of this monitor that should be the deal clincher for many.

This 16:9 monitor boasts an ultra high QWXGA resolution of 2048 x 1152, enough real estate to allow for two A4-sized sheets side by side along with room for Vista's sidebar. I guess this is why Samsung are marketing it as a monitor mainly suited to office work.