Lenovo to challenge Dell, HP

Lenovo has announced a series of low-cost PCs aimed at the $400 billion US market for small and medium businesses now dominated by Dell and HP, reports PC World.

According to the report, Lenovo will attempt to win market share with its Lenovo 3000 product family that features a desktop PC priced at the equivalent of R2 130 and a laptop priced at around R3 656.

The new line includes the C series of notebook PCs running on Intel processors and the J series of desktops running on either Intel or Advanced Micro Devices processors. However, industry analysts say Lenovo faces a marketing challenge because these are the first self-branded products launched by the Chinese company since it acquired IBM`s PC division in 2005.

Apple Computer`s iTunes music store has notched up the sale of its billionth song since its launch less than three years ago.

The Bangkok Post says the iTunes site, which is closely integrated with Apple`s popular iPod music players, has transformed the market for downloadable music by offering single tracks for about a dollar each.

According to Apple, iTunes holds 83% of the market for sales of online music, which jumped 190% to $1.1 billion in 2005, representing 6% of all music sold worldwide.

Page Creator, Google`s latest free application that allows for the simple creation and publishing of Web pages for users with only basic Web knowledge, has run into problems on its first day, reports eWeek.

The report says Google is dealing with an embarrassing capacity problem that forced it to stop letting people sign up for Page Creator temporarily yesterday on the same day of its release.

According to a message on the site, an "extremely strong demand" forced Page Creator to share the same fate as Google Reader and Google Analytics, two of Google`s other applications that also went down on their first days.

Google and EarthLink are leading the race for the deal to create a municipal WiFi Internet network that will cover the city of San Francisco, ahead of a collaborative bid by SeaKay, Cisco and IBM, and several other smaller companies.

The San Francisco Chronicle says the EarthLink-Google bid includes free download speeds of about 300Kbps that will include local advertising. The premium service will feature a download speed of 1Mbps for about $20 a month.

Analysts say the Google-EarthLink team is the one to beat based on EarthLink`s experience and Google`s reserves. The line-up of Cisco, IBM and SeaKay is also a strong contender because it plans to use equipment donated and leased from Cisco to provide free service with a minimum of 1Mbps with sponsored ads. IBM will help with customer service and support.