AMD Makes Gains

Worldwide processor shipments grew during the third quarter this year and Advanced Micro Devices gained market share from Intel over last year despite being plagued by manufacturing problems, according to a study released by Mercury Research on Tuesday.

Shipments of processors during the third quarter went up by just 5% compared to the same quarter last year, according to Mercury Research. Chip shipments have grown despite flat-to-slow growth in PC shipments worldwide over the past year, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at the research firm.

Intel held an 80.3% market share, a small drop from 80.6% market share during the third quarter last year. AMD’s market share was 18.8%, growing from 18.3% market share last year.

Mercury Research’s numbers cover all x86 systems including laptops, desktops and servers. The company did not provide full microprocessor shipment numbers.

AMD’s Fusion mobile chips for netbooks and laptops are doing much better this year compared to last year, which helped the company gain year-over-year market share over Intel, McCarron said.

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30% Of BlackBerry Users Want Out

The BlackBerry smartphone and its maker, Research in Motion, were in serious trouble even before last week’s global service disruption.

More than 30% of BlackBerry users in large companies said in September, a month before the outage, that they were looking to use a different smartphone device in 2012, according to a survey of 243 smartphone users in companies with more than 10,000 workers by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

“With last week’s outage, I suspect the 30% number is even higher,” said Steven Brasen, the EMA analyst who conducted the survey. “User satisfaction with BlackBerry is by far the lowest of smartphones. A huge number are dissatisfied.”

Brasen said the survey found that 11% of BlackBerry users in large companies are “completely dissastisfied” with the device, while only 2% of iPhone users and 0% of Android users are completely dissatisfied with their smartphones.

Brasen said the opinions of end users are becoming very important to IT executives.

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Apple Scores A Victory

A court imposed a temporary ban on the sale of Samsung Electronics’ latest computer tablet in Australia on Thursday, delivering rival Apple another legal victory in the two firms’ global patent war.

Resolution of the case could take months — unless Samsung takes the potentially risky option of an expedited hearing — which, in the fast-moving industry, could mean the new Galaxy tablet is never launched in Australia. The Galaxy is the hottest competitor to Apple’s iPad, which dominates global tablet sales.

“The ruling could further extend Apple’s dominance in the tablet market as it widens a sales ban of Samsung’s latest product,” said Lee Seung-woo, an analyst at Shinyoung Securities in Seoul.

Whilst the ruling is a blow for Samsung, the Australian market is not large. A more important legal battle starts later on Thursday, when a Californian court begins hearing Apple’s bid to ban sales of Galaxy products in the United States.

The two technology firms have been locked in an acrimonious battle in 10 countries involving smartphones and tablets since April, with the Australian dispute centering on touch-screen technology used in Samsung’s new tablet.

The Federal Court in Sydney, in granting the temporary ban, ruled Samsung had a case to answer on at least two of Apple’s patents. The ban applies on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet until the same court rules on the core patent issue.

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Lenovo Passes Dell, Becomes No. 2 PC Vendor

Lenovo surged past Dell to become the world’s second largest PC vendor at the end of the third quarter, according to research firms IDC and Gartner.

Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard also saw its worldwide PC shipments grow by 5.3 percent in the quarter, despite reports that the company may spin off its PC business.

Both research firms said growth for the quarter failed to reach earlier projections. IDC said at the end of the third quarter, worldwide PC shipments increased by 3.6 percent year-over-year, below its earlier 4.5 percent growth projection.

Gartner said PC shipments grew by 3.2 percent year-over-year, which was lower than the research firm’s original projection of 5.1 percent growth for the quarter.

Analysts have pointed to sluggish spending because of weak economic conditions as a key reason behind the slowdown in PC growth. The rise of tablets has also hurt shipments.

“For the moment, PCs have taken a backseat to a range of other devices competing for shrinking consumer and business budgets,” said IDC analyst Jay Chou in a statement.

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Will AOL Merge With Yahoo?

AOL is trying to engineer a merger with Yahoo in order to lower costs.

AOL’s CEO Tom Armstrong reportedly has been working hard to generate support from shareholders for a deal with Yahoo. According to Reuters, Armstrong is presenting the deal as an alternative to going it alone as an internet media company in order to reap cost and advertising reach benefits.

Apparently Armstrong is claiming that a merger with Yahoo, which itself is at the centre of acquisition rumours, would bring in savings of between $1bn and $1.5bn by combining datacentres and consolidating content on areas such as news, sports, entertainment and finance.

Since AOL was spun out of its disastrous merger with Time Warner, the firm has been trying to remake itself into an internet media company by buying popular websites such as The Huffington Post and Techcrunch. While many question whether that is a workable plan, the financials can’t mask the deep trouble AOL is in, with the company reporting a $11.8m loss for the second quarter.

While talk of AOL being bought up has cooled considerably in the last few months, the firm still has a few worthwhile assets. According to Reuters’ sources, shareholders like the idea of merging with Yahoo but are not convinced that Armstrong can pull it off.

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Microsoft Goes After Yahoo

Just three years after a failed attempt to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft may be considering whether to give it another shot, Reuters reported today.

According to the report, Microsoft executives are split on whether the company should bid for Yahoo. A final decision has not been reached, the report noted.

Citing an unnamed “high-ranking Microsoft executive,” the report said Microsoft is evaluating whether to pull in a partner for a joint effort to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. Yahoo didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.

“As long as Microsoft is committed to growing its online presence, this makes sense,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “Yahoo has a large number of subscribers and regular visitors, many of whom are not considering going elsewhere. And that would be a good boost for Microsoft.”

He also noted that Yahoo Mail, Yahoo’s popular free email service, would combine well with Microsoft’s own Hotmail service to create a very large base of email users.

In 2008, Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo. Yahoo’s argument that the bid was tool low prompted Microsoft to finally give up.

Since then, Yahoo has been dealing with some significant problems.

No longer the high-flying Internet pioneer of its heyday, Yahoo last month fired Carol Bartz, who had joined the company as CEO with high hopes that she could return the company to its past glory.

Once Bartz was out the door, industry analysts began speculating that Yahoo’s board might be open to a solid acquisition offer.

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WebOS Lives

HP is aiming to keep WebOS alive by putting it on printers.

The firm has discontinued its WebOS devices such as the Touchpad tablet and Pre 3 smartphone but WebOS will appear on new products, according to Pocketlint. The operating system (OS) will come on the Designjet line of HP printers.

An HP spokesperson said, “HP is currently investigating using WebOS on its Designjet range of professional printers.”

It’s likely that the OS will come on consumer printers at some point in the future, too. The following statement also hints that it could appear on products other than printers.

“HP is 100 [per cent] committed to producing print solutions that meet our customer needs and we will continue to drive innovation to ensure our products and solutions meet market demand. We built our printing franchise based on being OS agnostic – we have been and will continue to be agnostic to meet our various customer needs. As webOS plans develop we will continue to evaluate how and if we incorporate it into our future products.”

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HP’s PC Division Decision This Month

HP will decide on the future of its PC business this month, according to a statement from its newly installed CEO.

While it was under the Apotheker captaincy the firm announced rather shocking plans to dump the PC business. Okay, it didn’t explicitly say that, rather it said that it would consider selling it or spinning it off, which apparently meant something else to HP than it did to normal people.

According to Bloomberg, new HP CEO Meg Whitman sprinkled a little more colour into the HP PC business tapestry, and in a conference call said that the firm is almost ready to say what its plans are.

It’s likely that shareholders and the board are still reeling from the suggestion, but the extra time will give HP room to decide on what it wants to do with the still profitable, but boring hardware arm.

While it was under Leo Apotheker’s rule the firm had given itself the deadline of the end of the year for a decision, but presumably sick of people asking her, “what are we going to do with the PC business?”, Whitman has bought the decision forward.

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Sprint Finally Gets The iPhone

Sprint Nextel confirmed that it will offer the next version of Apple Inc’s iPhone, ending months of speculation about whether it would become the third U.S. carrier to sell the popular device.

But the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider would not say whether its iPhone would come with a flat-fee service for unlimited data use – an offering analysts see as Sprint’s only hope for making its iPhone more competitive than rivals.

While selling the device should help Sprint keep subscribers from fleeing to other operators, some analysts worried whether the costs would outweigh the benefits because Apple phones come at a steep premium to other devices.

This is a huge gamble for Sprint and people are justifiably worried that they won’t be able to make any money doing it. It’s not a company that’s in great financial shape right now,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

Analysts questioned how Sprint will be able to find the money to pay a premium to Apple on top of its obligations to pay back billions of dollars in debt and its plan to spend about $5 billion on an network upgrade in coming years.

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Is HP Going To Court?

HP and its top executives have been accused of misleading investors before a slump in its stock price.

HP is facing a class action lawsuit filed by Robbins Geller Rudman and Down alleging that CEO Leo Apotheker and CFO Cathie Lesjak misled investors before making announcements that included the possible spin-off of its PC business, dumping WebOS devices and the purchase of British software outfit Autonomy.

Those announcements, all made in one afternoon, led to a 20 per cent drop in HP’s share price the following day. That, according to Reuters, was the largest one day decline in HP’s share price since 1987.

The lawsuit against HP does not specify damages but it serves to highlight the growing concern at the way Apotheker is leading HP. The firm’s announcement that it was considering leaving the PC business was a shock to many, but its decision to dump its WebOS devices was perhaps the biggest shock of the lot.

While HP’s PC business was always seen as a low margin operation, WebOS was viewed as a core part of HP’s future strategy. The firm kept banging on about slipping WebOS into as many devices as possible, however all that talk evaporated, just like HP’s Touchpads when it sold them off at fire sale prices for a massive loss.

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