Motorola on Tuesday released its Razr V3 in the United States, an ultra-thin cell phone that the company has promoted heavily as the star of its portfolio of 20 new handsets.
Available at Cingular Wireless, the color-screen camera phone has built-in Bluetooth wireless technology for e-mail and offers video playback and a speakerphone in a half-inch-thick clamshell design.
The price is $500 with a two-year contract. While that's well below the $900 reported earlier this year, it is still the priciest new Motorola (MOT) phone.
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Computers join hands: IBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve complex social problems.
The World Community Grid will seek to tap the vast underutilized power of computers belonging to individuals and businesses worldwide and channel it into selected medical and environmental research programs.
Volunteers for the IBM (IBM) effort will be asked to download a program to their computers that runs when the machine is idle and reaches out to request data to contribute to research projects.
Organizers say the grid can help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and aid studies to protect the world's food and water supplies.
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Leave the garage for the limelight: Microsoft's MSN Music site will begin featuring some artists from the independent music website GarageBand.com in a deal both companies said is aimed at giving little-known musicians access to a broader audience.
Although GarageBand's online music community is already well-known among musicians for its efforts to give independent artists a forum, it is still largely unknown to the general public, said GarageBand's chief executive.
Under the deal, Microsoft's (MSFT) website will initially feature five of GarageBand's musicians. Eventually, it will have the entire catalog of free downloads from GarageBand musicians who have agreed to give their songs away.
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Take a trip to India: Trying to retain Microsoft's dominance in the Indian software market amid increasing competition, company CEO Steve Ballmer brought his campaign to the country's leadership.
In a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lasting more than half an hour, Ballmer promised to make the Windows operating system available in 14 Indian languages within a year and reiterated that Microsoft (MSFT) would help to broaden computer usage across the country.
Despite being one of the world's leading providers of information technology services, few Indian households actually have computers. Only 12 people out of every 1,000 Indians own a computer, and internet connections in the country total about 4.5 million.
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Compiled by David Cohn. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
