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Blizzard has released some new Starcraft II screens to the delight of rabid fanboys and fangirls everywhere. The new screens deliver the blend of realism with a bright cartoon qualities that one would expect from Blizzard. Still no word on a release date as yet (although Gamestop is estimating early December) but these screens show a lot of polish and indicate that the game is nearing completion.

The new screenshots can be seen at Blizzard’s Starcraft II website.

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

If they mirror the Open Social approach, third parties will be free to change the Facebook Platform components for their own use and deploy them on their own sites. To have those changes be incorporated into the official versions of Facebook Platform, however, would require Facebook’s approval.

This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run by the Open Social Foundation. Facebook has been looking more and more like a walled garden of late, and they are being regularly out maneuvered by competitors. Time to fight back.

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Last June, Mr. Jobs began selling what has become one of the most talked-about consumer products in history. Now he faces a new challenge as Apple prepares to introduce an updated version of the phone next month.

After almost a year of strong sales that have made it one of the dominant smartphones in the United States, the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., had shipped about 5.5 million phones by the end of March, the most recent figures it has released. It sold just 1.7 million phones in the first three months of this year, meaning it must sell more than 8 million phones to reach Mr. Jobs’s publicly stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.

“They’re going to have a difficult time” hitting that number, said Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research. He said that Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone’s introduction.

So what could Apple’s impresario have up his sleeve to pick up the pace — and to keep the second-generation iPhone from being a letdown?

Although the company will not publicly confirm the arrival of a second iPhone, Apple watchers have concluded that a new version will be introduced June 9, the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Apparently in preparation for the event, stocks of the existing iPhone have been dwindling in the last month.

Although AT&T stores still have phones in stock, according to a company spokesman, the supply has largely dried up in Apple’s retail outlets, and the phones are no longer available through the company’s online store.

Apple may be trying to avoid the anger it faced last September when it cut the iPhone’s price by $200 just two months after it went on sale, making early buyers feel cheated. Mr. Jobs offered those customers a $100 store credit.

Cutting down on supply means fewer angry buyers when their new phone is suddenly obsolete.

“You can say what you want about Steve Jobs, but he’s learning from his mistakes,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Nielsen, a market research firm. “They are cleaning out the supply channel.”

Even as supplies shrink, Apple has been signing a series of deals with cellphone network providers around the world. On Tuesday the cellular operator TeliaSonera said it would offer the iPhone in seven countries, including Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

The only major countries without an iPhone distribution agreement are Japan, Russia and China.

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Asus will finally launch the desktop version of its elfin Eee PC early next month. Once dubbed the E-DT, the unit is set to retail as the Ebox, we understand.

The rather Wii-style Eee will incorporate a 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive, we hear, but for now Asus is keeping the full spec to itself.

The Ebox will certainly run the Eee PC’s Xandros version of Linux, and come bundled with the same line-up of applications.

The look of the Ebox is at odds with the design of a slimline home desktop PC that Asus demo’d at the CeBit show in March this year. That model, the “Digital Home System EP20″, was, however, said to run the Eee PC’s Linux OS.

It also sported a slot-loading optical drive, something that’s not visible on the Ebox shots.
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Samsung has unveiled the 1 TB version of its eco-friendly line of hard drives carrying the name EcoGreen F1. The new drive boasts a 15% reduction in power usage over other 1 TB eco-friendly drives and as much as a 50% reduction over standard 1 TB drives.

The new drive also incorporates Samsung’s range of existing technologies to offer reduced operating noise through SilentSeek and NoiseGuard. The data integrity also has added protection through the use of advanced dynamic flying on demand (FOD) technology that prevents the head from ever touching the disk surface. As for the specification of the EcoGreen F1, it manages to fit the available storage on to three 334 GB platters spinning at 5400 rpm and has a 32 MB cache and SATA 3.0 Gbps interface.

T.J. Lee, vice president of sales and marketing for Samsung’s Storage Division commented:

Since 2003, Samsung’s hard disk drives have complied with the (RoHS) restriction of hazardous substances directive as well as the (TBBP-A) brominated flame retardant restriction … The EcoGreen product line is designed to meet consumer demand for eco-friendly, high-performance devices with an optimized cost of ownership advantage.

The EcoGreen F1 1 TB model is expected before the end of June and will carry a price tag of US$199.

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Back in September 2006 BioShock was still in development, but publisher 2K Games confirmed that the game would not be getting a release on the PlayStation 3.

Soon after that rumors appeared that a PS3 version of the game was in development, but they were snubbed by everyone involved with the game. It now seems those rumors were true, however, as the July issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly has a big feature on BioShock with 2K Games confirming the title is heading to PS3 for the holiday season 2008.

The only additions to the game seem to be graphical tweaks, but you never know, there may be a bit more content in there due to the added development time.

This is actually good news on 2 counts. First of all Sony finally manage to get the game on the PS3 and secondly, BioShock gets a second wave of marketing and sales, which it thoroughly deserves.

The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the Web, is about to get some fancy new window dressing.

Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently took the wraps off the first public test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by about 75 percent of all computer owners, according to Net Applications, a market share tracking firm. The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional features.

Even Apple, which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto the computers of people who use Windows PCs.

In other words, the browser war — the skirmish that landed Microsoft in antitrust trouble in the ’90s — is heating up again.

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