Apple’s new version of the Mac OS X named Leopard which was targeted for early June has been delayed according to the company in order to focus its resources and efforts on the iPhone instead. The company announced on Thursday that they plan to “borrow some key software engineering and QA resources” from the Leopard OS team.

Apple does however plan to have some beta versions of the OS available in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference. The final release of Leopard has been delayed about 4 months and will now not be available until October. According to Jobs, Apple’s CEO, the new version will have a number of cool new features including a comprehensive backup system called the Time Machine and some “secret” stuff that would be shared closer to the production release.

This delay is a little …

Opera Software and Nintendo have finally launched the full version of the Opera web browser for the Internet Channel of the Wii game console. The download is free, but not for long.

This web browser allows Wii owners to browse the internet through the console on their television, provided the console is connected to the internet, of course. Some new features of the full version of the Opera browser revolve around usability with zoom and scrolling functions that were not present in the trial version that was launched in December.

The application allows you to choose from Google or Yahoo for a default search engine, but like any browser you can navigate to any web page and search engine. Navigation is handled through the Wii remote (please be careful), and two remotes can be …

Sony has confirmed rumors and officially announced that it will no longer be offering the 20GB version of the Playstation 3 to consumers in North America. The 20GB PS3 has similar functionality as the 60GB model aside from a few features including WiFi capabilities.

Apparently a very significant number of people have been willing to shell out the extra cash for the more expensive model of the PS3, and according to Sony, retailers have been requesting the 60GB version with WiFi over the 20GB console at a ratio of 10 to 1. This fact has prompted Sony Computer Entertainment America to just discontinue offering the model with the smaller drive all together and focus their production on the more expensive 60GB version.

“At launch, we offered two separate models of PLAYSTATION 3 to meet the diverse needs and interests of our PlayStation …

Today Intel announced a new addition to its quad-core processor family with the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800.

The Core 2 Extreme delivers the fastest clock speed ever reached for Intel in a quad-core desktop. While this is good news for really any type of processor intensive applications, where it really gets the most notice is from the gamers. Intel mentioned some games that are already built utilizing the quad-core functionality to improve gaming performance, such as Crysis, Supreme Commander and Hellgate London. Intel stated that these games have ‘undergone substantial joint engineering efforts with Intel to use more than two processing threads to their advantage,’.This new quad-core runs at 2.93 GHz with an 8MB cache and supporting 1066 MHz system bus.

This announcement from Intel follows a number of new releases from the chip-maker as it keeps up its …

We new it was coming soon, and now the Nokia N95 that was released in Europe a couple weeks ago is available in the US. An unlocked version can be purchased through Nokia’s site for the N Series mobile phones or through select wireless retailers, but it will cost you.

As with many situations “cool” comes at a price, and in the case of the N95 it comes at a price of $750. In order to try and justify the price for this gadget, keep in mind that this is the smartphone that slides both directions; one way to expose a keypad and the other to expose some multimedia buttons. It has GPS built-in with associated navigation software, a 5 megapixel camera, supports WiFi and Bluetooth but no 3G.

The Nokia N95 seems to have the right stuff, but its hard to …

Apple today announced the sale of the 100 millionth iPod since its inception over 5 years ago in November of 2001. Apple has introduced 10 different iPod models over the years, including the shuffle, the nano, the mini and 5 revisions of the standard iPod. The iPod music player along with iTunes have played a very large part in transforming how people obtain and listen to music.

The iPod has also sparked an industry of seemingly countless accessories for the iPod player; over 4000 accessories by Apples count which the Brick can attest to as well. Apple also states that over 70% of 2007 US autos support the iPod connectivity.

The popularity of the iPod seems to be continuing, but it will be interesting to see if the following continues as the iTunes DRM disappears.

Sony has officially announced a price drop in the US for its PlayStation Portable by $30 bringing the purchase price down to $170, as well as a 20% drop on the PSP Entertainment pack which now sells for $200. This price drop coincides with the second anniversary of the handheld game console.

Could this be because the game is getting old and just not selling, or maybe in anticipation of the PSP2? Maybe they just need to boost some sales to make up for the $443 million operating loss Sony recently reported, or possibly they are trying to be more competitive with the Nintendo Gameboy and DS?

No matter what the reason it’s good for those already considering the PSP as Sony just saved you some bucks, and as a little tip from The Brick, check out TigerDirect. They …

According to a Bloomberg report, sales of the Nintendo Wii Japan continue to dominate over its Playstation rival.

Back in January SlipperyBrick reported that Wii sales were already significantly ahead in Japan after its launch on December 2nd, even though the PS3 launched about 3 weeks earlier on November 11th.

As of March 25th, Nintendo has reportedly sold 1.95 million Wii game console units in Japan, which is more than twice as many compared to 812,000 PS3 consoles sold by Sony in Japan since each of their respective launch dates.

The PS3 is a little more pricey game console, however. Actually sales yen makes the difference not quite as great with the PS3 having 47.6 billion yen in sales versus Nintendo’s 48.7 billion yen during the same period.

[Image via BBC news]

Apple has uncovered the specs behind its two new Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro and they’re drool worthy. The company is offering two models, an 8-core or quad-core one, and at different processing speeds.

The higher end 8-core unit consists of two Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Clovertown” processors and has a processor clocking in at 3.0 GHz while the two Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors model comes in three processing speeds, 2.0 GHz, 2.66 GHz and 3.0 GHz. Apple claims that the latter speed demon runs up to two times faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad already on the market.

Customers have the option of selecting from three different graphics card options (NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500, a ATI Radeon X1900 XT or a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT). You can slide in up to four hard drives offering a healthy 3 TB of disc …

Today in London EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs held a press conference to announce that EMI will be offering their entire digital catalog of music to consumers DRM-free. That’s right, DRM-free.

If you’re not familiar with this topic, that does not mean that the music is free, in fact it will cost slightly more, but it does mean that there are no digital rights management rules associated with the songs when you download them, which restrict which devices or how many devices that the songs can reside on. This, according to Jobs, will be no different than buying a CD and ripping it yourself.

This is really big news in the digital music industry. For quite some time now music download services like Apple iTunes have been getting some heat due to the …

“Any day now” was right when the Brick reported a week ago that a press release would be coming soon from Microsoft announcing a release of the highly anticipated, upgraded Xbox 360. The new console will be called the Xbox 360 Elite and comes with some upgrades to both the feature set and the price.

In an attempt to further improve the overall appeal of the Xbox 360 Microsoft has upgraded the game console by increasing its hard drive capacity 6 fold bringing it to 120 gigabytes, as well as adding an HDMI video connection to send out high definition video content. The 360 Elite will also hold true to rumors by shipping with a black case, black wireless controllers and black Xbox Live headset.

The new 360 Elite will retail for $480 (up $80 from the 20 gigabyte version) and will …

Xbox 360 fans of last year’s tactical military shooter “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter” are celebrating the news that UbiSoft has shipped the sequel and it’s in stores now.

While the 360ers enjoy the game, the PC and PlayStation 3 crowds will have to wait until June when their versions ship to retail, but they’ll also get the added satisfaction of having some exclusive maps made solely for their consoles. Ubisoft will be calling for beta testers for one of the PC exclusive player maps shortly, and you can find out more by hitting the official game site.

The sequel picks up 24 hours after the ending of the first “GRAW” game. It’s 2013 and the Ghost Recon team has just successfully eliminated a threat to the lives of the Mexican and American Presidents. Now, in the aftermath of this first …

Steve Jobs’ latest effort to synergize entertainment with computers is now ready to come into your home theater room. Apple TV, the company’s newest piece of hardware, is now shipping to customers.

Say you want to download the latest episode of “Battlestar Galactica” or “Lost” to your iPod but this time there’s a bunch of you that want to watch it. Instead of crowding around the pod screen, when you hook up Apple TV to your computer (whether it’s a Mac or PC), you can now stream the broadcast straight to your television. You can also do the same for any other trailers, podcasts, photos or movies.

When you add new content to your iPod the Apple TV box changes its menu to accommodate the new material via the 802.11 wireless built-in to it. Connection to your TV is done through an HDMI or …

If you’re curious as to who’s winning the next generation gaming console war, look no further than the Wii. Nintendo’s successor to the GameCube continues to sell more units than its two chief rivals, the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. In February consumers purchased 335,000 Wiis compared to 228,000 Xbox 360s and 127,000 PS3s. Stats for January also favored the Wii with 436,000 systems being sold, more than 100K over the next best-selling system for that month.

Part of the Wiis success lies in it being the lowest priced next gen system but what seems to be a larger component is the system’s ability to attract non-traditional gamers to it. With the interactive, motion sensitive controller and a good selection of family oriented games to choose from (including Wii Sports, the bundled game that comes with the …

Two days ago Viacom dropped a $1 billion lawsuit on Google and YouTube stating that the video sharing giant had violated copyright laws by hosting videos created by some of Viacom’s programming brand.

In response, attorneys for Google feel that they have strong legal protections under current copyright law, according to Reuters. The legal team feels they have a very strong defense due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or… bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online … the ‘safe harbor’ we need in order to be able to do hosting online,” said Alexander Macgillivray, general counsel for Google. “We will never launch a product or acquire a company unless we are completely satisfied with its legal basis …