MS Zune to get Universal music

Microsoft has agreed to pay a percentage of the sales of its new portable media player to the Universal Music Group in exchange for licensing its recordings for Microsoft's new digital music service, reports News.com.

Under the deal, Universal will receive a percentage of both download revenue and digital player sales when the Zune and its related music service are introduced next week. In turn, Universal will pay half of what it receives on the Zune player to its artists.

The report says the deal represents a big departure from the approach used by Apple Computer, which pays record companies for songs sold through its iTunes music service, but does not give them a cut of the sales of its iPod.

In line with a promise by Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth to do a lot of business in the coming months, the companies have announced that Java EE 5 application server is certified to run on the server edition of Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Linux distribution.

eWeek says the open source JEE5, specifically, the GlassFish Community reference implementation, is the first Java application server to be bundled with Ubuntu, a Debian-based distribution of GNU Linux.

Sun says for developers building a Web portal with interactive applications on NetBeans, adding the Ubuntu server will now be as easy as selecting the option on a drop-down list. The application will then automatically find all the components needed to make it work.

Samsung has unveiled a three-way WiMax, CDMA and 3G compatible device that is a phone, media player and mini PC all in one.

Silicon.com says the Samsung SPH-P9000 will use optimised CDMA or evolution data only for mobile voice communications and WiMax for Internet applications.

Along with traditional mobile functionality and a 1.3MP camera, the SPH-P9000 has a foldout qwerty keyboard and a 30GB hard drive. It runs Windows XP as its operating system.

Apple has refreshed its line of MacBooks to all new Intel Core 2 Duo processors in the latest update of products and is ready to ship, reports DailyTech.

The report says specifications for the new Core 2 Duo MacBooks remain virtually identical to the previous Core Duo MacBooks. The entry-level MacBook receives a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo processor while the high-end black unit receives a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo.

Memory capacity remains the same at 512MB of RAM for the base model and 1GB for the other two. The only other major difference is hard drive capacity.

Although a defective resistor has been discovered in the first batch of its GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards, shipments should remain on schedule, says Nvidia.

DigiTimes says the DirectX 10 supporting GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards experienced overheating problems resulting in blank screens when executing 3D processes. About 20 000 GeForce 8800 GTX units have been recalled for repair.

Sources at Nvidia say the first batch of GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS were both manufactured for testing purposes and were not final volume products for the retail market.