MediaFile

The makers of the Blackberry, Research In Motion, unveiled a new version of the smartphone with a touchscreen and slideout keyboard, which is aimed squarely at the iPhone. It runs on AT&T’s network and is called “Torch” –but will it catch fire in world of popular consumer gadgets?

The event occurred as attendees and analysts also wondered how Research in Motion would respond to questions about the security of its messaging system.

Check out the live blog that we conducted during the Blackberry event — with a little help from our friends using  Twitter — with lots of opinions and fact about the new product.

Apple is expected to announce a fix for the iPhone 4′s reception problems, rather than a recall, at a surprise press conference on the device on Friday. The event, which comes only days before Apple reports its quarterly results, may find the company offering hardware or software tweaks, ranging from a rubber bumper case to something more drastic. Or perhaps no fix at all.

Reuters is live at the event, and we are hosting a live blog with updates as fast as we get them. Stay tuned for more, and please post your comments about Apple’s decisions.

Motorola’s phones may not draw overnight campers and lines outside stores that Apple still inspires four years after its first iPhone launch. However Motorola is getting to have a different kind of fun.  

Taking advantage of  widespread complaints about the iPhone 4 around antenna related reception problems, Motorola has been making some thinly veiled digs at Apple in its advertising for the new Droid X, which launches July 15.
 

While Apple has suggested that users avoid holding their phone in a certain way to help improve their phone reception, Motorola happily offered an alternative with Droid X.  After listing the Droid X features Motorola had this to say in a full page ad in New York Times on June 30:

Fans scramble for Apple’s iPhone upgrade-Reuters

“Apple fans lined up overnight by the hundreds outside stores in the United States, Europe and Japan to snap up the latest iPhone, setting a new benchmark in the fast-growing smartphone market,” writes Franklin Paul, Marie Mawad and Sachi Izumi.

Twitter settles privacy charges with U.S.-Reuters

“Microblogging service Twitter has agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over charges it put its customers privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information,” reports Sinead Carew.

Broadband spurs new businesses and ideas in Kenya-Reuters

“When Kenyan graduate Roy Wachira, 25, set out to start his first business, he turned to the Internet, whose growth in the east African nation is spawning opportunities unthinkable even a year ago,” writes Duncan Miriri.

During these economic and political hard times, it’s nice when people can get together to rejoice about something wonderful. You know: the good times.

Such was the case this morning at Apple stores around the nation, where still-employed Apple workers sold phones and stuff  (and clapped a lot), and eager shoppers bought the new iPhone 4 for $200, and signed up for — or renewed — contracts to pay AT&T $2,400 or more over 2 years.

Woo hoo!

Russian president at Twitter, off to Silicon Valley-Reuters
“Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited microblogging sensation Twitter and sent his first tweet message on Wednesday before heading to U.S. technology hub Silicon Valley, which he sees as a possible model for Russia to follow,” writes Peter Henderson.

Fans scramble for Apple’s iPhone upgrade- Reuters
Apple fans queued overnight by the hundreds outside stores in the United States, Europe and Japan to snap up the latest iPhone, setting a new benchmark in the fast-growing smartphone market.

Apple’s new iPhone approaches as iPad surprises again-Reuters
“Apple Inc has sold 3 million iPads in less than three months, a faster-than-expected pace that boosted its stock days before the company’s newest iPhone hits store shelves,” reports Gabriel Madway and Paul Thomasch.

Apple is, of course, absent from this week’s video game extravaganza, the  E3 Expo in Los Angeles. The company just doesn’t do trade shows.  But its presence looms over the event.

Apple has managed to create a whole new gaming market with the iPhone since its debut in 2007. There are tens of thousands of games available for download via Apple’s App Store, and it’s an open debate as to how much the iPhone’s success has hurt the traditional hardware makers, namely Nintendo and Sony, which both make portable gaming devices.

Nintendo is making a big push to differentiate its portable gaming platform with it’s new 3D-enabled DS, which offers a glasses-free experience.

Apple is keen on describing its Apple TV business as a “hobby.”

But one week after Google barged into the living room with its high-profile Google TV announcement, Apple suddenly looks like it’s taking its hobby a lot more seriously.

According to technology blog engadget, which cites an anonymous source “very close to Apple,” the Cupertino, California company has a new version of its Apple TV in the works that completely overhauls the original product.

The price of the Apple TV will drop from $229 to $99 (read: priced to move), and the device will be based on the iPhone operating system and pack Apple’s home-grown A4 processor under the hood.

Watch out for that smartphone! The iPhone, Android phones and the like are the weapons of the latest technology war, in the view of  flash memory maker SanDisk, which supplies the memory chips that hold pictures, video and apps to the phone makers.

“We sell them ammunition. There is a war going on and we sell the bullets,” Eli Harari told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

And bullets are selling briskly, even in the developing world, where people without computers are buying $20 phones and then adding a gigabyte or two of memory to hold all their pictures, the CEO said.

Say it’s not so — ‘the cloud’ isn’t ready for prime time? That’s the view from networking company Brocade, whose marketing chief compared the hype to the rush years ago to call center outsourcing.

All those applications and data that live off your computer somewhere in the Internet make up the cloud, from Google word processing software to your home pictures and video, and it is hot, hot, hot. But Brocade chief marketing officer John McHugh told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco that big business was not ready to embrace it for sensitive data and the most important applications.

“There’s lots of issues. They’re being skirted over because they are really tough and there are no obvious solutions for them today,” he said. It will take “years” before big companies do that with important data, he said.