Sun Microsystems plans to eliminate up to 3,000 jobs, or 10% of its worldwide workforce, as it awaits a takeover by Oracle, a deal being held up by antitrust regulators in Europe. Sun said the job cuts will happen over 2010 and affect all of Sun's major regions, including North America, Europe, Asia and emerging markets.

Price is still a huge barrier for solid state disks (SSD) in the enterprise, but for some datacenters the math already makes sense.

27-inch iMacs! Mac minis as servers! New cheap MacBooks! A magical new mouse! Apple opened the floodgates this morning with a bushel of new hardware updates—which should set the company up for a blingin' holiday season.

Samsung SDI, the world's second largest maker of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, posted its biggest profit in five years, driven by record shipments and sales of the product and gains from its mobile-display unit. Third-quarter net income rose 48 percent to 87 billion won (US$75 million) from 58.8 billion won a year earlier.

Consumer electronics maker Panasonic Corp., which already has a big chunk of Japan's home appliance market, is accelerating its push into Europe and India by considering local production in those regions to take advantage of lower costs.

Uruguay has become the first country to provide a netbook (OLPC XO) for every child attending state primary school.

ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), Taiwan's largest and one of the world's leading high-tech research and development institutions, accepted the 2009 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in Consumer Electronics Tuesday evening in San Francisco for its FleXpeaker, paper-thin flexible speaker technology, besting more than 500 companies including HP, Livescribe and Motorola. This breakthrough will allow consumer electronic products of the future to become even lighter and slimmer.

Samsung's new SSD conforms to the new mini-SATA (mSATA) interface, and is about one-quarter the size of a 2.5-in SSD.

A better global economy and the launch of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system are expected to support demand for memory chips through the first half of 2010, the chief executive of Hynix Semicondcutor has commented.

Kingston Digital, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology, has announced it has partnered with Spyrus for hardware-based encryption, authentication, and digital content security products.

An encouraging set of results from Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer, helped set a positive tone for European markets.