SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Inc on Monday unveiled a next-generation iPhone with faster Internet access that will run on advanced wireless networks and sell for as low as $199 -- half the current entry-level price.

Shares of Apple, after strong gains in recent months partly driven by anticipation of the new device, fell 2.2 percent after Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated the company was going after the mass market with the new model.

"It changes the game for all smart-phone makers," Tim Bajarin, head of consultancy Creative Strategies, said of the price and new features.

The new phone also marks a dramatic departure for how Apple will make money in its third major business alongside Macintosh computers and iPod media players.

Wireless network companies will no longer pay Apple part of the subscription fees they get from iPhone users, but instead will subsidize the devices up front to make them cheaper.

"The vast majority of agreements we have reached do not have those follow-on payments, so you can conclude that the vast majority of carriers do provide subsidies for the phone," Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, told Reuters.

Cook declined to comment on how the new arrangement would affect Apple's profit margins, but AT&T Inc, the exclusive US carrier for the iPhone, said the subsidy would hurt its earnings and margins through next year.

"It is still a very profitable business. Now the negative is they announced the elimination of some of the monthly fees," said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research. "But I can't really imagine the economics really being too much different."

Improved e-mail features for the iPhone are intended to woo business people, while its ability to run on faster networks is key to Apple's push to gain market share in Europe and Asia.

"It's amazingly zippy," Jobs said, showing off the encore to a device that melds a mobile phone, iPod media player and Web browser, nearly a year after the original went on sale.

The new one, which looks similar to the old one but with glossy black or white plastic in place of a metal back cover, loads Internet pages 2.8 times faster than the original, he said.

EYES ON NOKIA,

RIM, PALM

An entry-level version of the new iPhone, with 8 gigabytes of memory, will cost $199, versus $399 for an older iPhone with similar memory. A version of the new one with twice the memory will cost $299.

"These lower price points seem somewhat designed to cope with the economy, the softer environment," Wu said. "They definitely make this product more resilient."

The new phones will go on sale on July 11 in 22 countries and regions, expanding to 70 by the end of the year.

As for China, the biggest cell phone market in the world and one where Apple does not have a deal to sell iPhones, Cook told Reuters the company would get there "over time," and CNBC quoted Jobs as saying Apple hoped to be there later this year.

The new iPhone will run on third-generation (3G) wireless networks and includes satellite navigation capability, Jobs told developers at a conference in San Francisco.

"This positions Apple well vis a vis other smart-phone competitors such as Nokia and RIM," said Shannon Cross of Cross Research. "IPhone is no longer an expensive device. It's now priced at the mass market."

Shares of Palm Inc, maker of the rival Treo smart-phone, fell 4 percent, but those in Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry devices, rose 2 percent.

A new service, "MobileMe," will automatically send e-mail and other information to iPhones, similar to Microsoft Corp's Exchange e-mail server product. The pay service will replace Apple's .Mac service and offer Web applications intended to make the phone work more like a desktop computer.

"It clearly puts them in a competitive position on the services side against Google, Microsoft and most importantly Nokia," Ben Wood, research director of UK-based CCS Insight, said of MobileMe.

Jobs said Apple has sold 6 million iPhones so far, and Cook said he was "still very comfortable" that the company would hit its goal of selling 10 million units by the end of 2008.

BERLIN: Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest computer maker, launched a new generation of touchscreen PCs designed to lift user-friendly computing out of its expensive niche and bring it to a wider market.

The TouchSmart All-in-One allows users to work with photos, music, video, the Internet and television by tapping or swiping the screen, and will be priced at $1,299, HP said at the launch in Berlin on Tuesday.

HP's Personal Systems group of PCs, notebooks, workstations and handheld devices has transformed itself over the past few years from a largely commoditized volume business to a far more successful one that emphasizes product design.

The group's executive vice president, Todd Bradley, told Reuters he aimed to set a trend and create a new market.

"We don't think about this as a niche. We think about it as a global product that will inspire demand and drive desirability," Bradley said in a telephone interview.

"Our ability to lead is very important," he added, declining to speculate on what size the market for such PCs might reach.

HP's announcement came a day after Apple announced a new version of its ground-breaking iPhone, the original version of which brought touchscreens to public attention and sparked a host of imitators.

Bradley denied that HP was following Apple, pointing out that HP had been developing touch technology for some time. But analyst Crawford del Prete of research firm IDC said: "I don't think Apple's impact can be underestimated."

Rob Enderle, chief analyst with technology research firm the Enderle Group, said HP's new products, which include 17 new notebooks, could put it out of the reach of rivals.

"Todd Bradley took a unit that many thought was a liability to HP and turned it into one of HP's top performers and into segment leadership ... to a point where it may not be possible for a competitor to catch it," he said.

The new TouchSmart PCs will launch in 17 countries in July, including the United States, Japan, China, India and Britain.

Its price tag is higher than the $1,199 starting price for Apple's iMacs, which do not have a touchscreen, although they do have many pioneering features that make manipulating digital media easier.

Del Prete, who is executive vice president of global research at IDC, said of HP's offering: "I think the price point is getting compelling for a premium PC. I think it would be even more attractive if they could get it under a thousand.

"It requires a set of marketing expertise and it requires a significant amount of investment," he said. "An Apple or someone else could do this but it's not for the faint of heart, it's not for people who don't want to invest in the product."

Del Prete said the HP TouchSmart could appeal to social groups such as families or students sharing an apartment who wanted a PC that could also double as a group messageboard or television set.

LOS ANGELES: The Celtics and Lakers have revived the madness of eighties basketball with their improbably run to the finals. It's a marketing dream. The two most stories franchises in the National Basketball League squaring off once again.

And it couldn't come at a better time. The league, in the middle of rapid expansion overseas, is also in the golden age of fan participation.

Emerging technologies have connected the fan, the league and the players in ways never before imagined. This isn't about fantasy sports (although that's wicked awesome too); instead, this is about the league deploying technologies that have turned the game into a thinking man's sport.

Along with other leagues, the NBA offers fans the ability to receive statistics and updates online and on cell phones. But the most innovative program may be its touch-screen computers used by statisticians to deliver real-time, graphical updates to games.

Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows XP are used by eagle-eyed and nimble-fingered statisticians to instantly distribute stats to the in-arena scoreboards and displays via a digital television interface as well as to TV broadcasters. The stats are time-coded with the game and real-time clocks.

Those stat trackers also allow the league -- and its teams -- to parse out data immediately, synching it with video clips to deliver near real-time video information overlaid with numbers.

Players like Shane Battier can then dissect their opponent's latest trends (because anyone who's played sports knows that you're constantly adjusting what you do) before they hit the court; and weirdo broadcaster Bill Walton can keep up-to-date on the latest news from the league, which he can then distribute to fans across a variety of means. --Internet

SINGAPORE: A Singapore man has been banned from owning a camera phone for a year after he was found guilty of secretly filming a woman in an airport toilet, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Samuel Ong, 19, sneaked into a female toilet at Singapore's Changi Airport earlier this year and used his camera phone to snap shots of a woman from under the cubicle door. The woman caught him and reported him to the police. Ong, who pleaded guilty, has to do 60 hours of community service, observe a curfew as part of his sentence and continue psychiatric treatment, the Straits Times reported.

His parents also had to sign a S$5,000 (1,860 pounds) bond ensuring his good behaviour.

LONDON: Roadrunner was always expected to be fast out of the blocks. And after a test run one night in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, its creators are far from disappointed.

Built from microchips originally destined for games consoles, Roadrunner is the world's latest supercomputer. Yesterday it was officially crowned the fastest computer around, having performed a record million billion calculations per second.

As an indication of how fast this is, manufacturers explained that if 6 billion people were to do one sum a second on calculator, it would take 46 years to do what RoadRunner could do in a day. The world's first supercomputer, the Cray 1 built in the mid-1970s, would take 1,500 years to finish a calculation that Roadrunner would perform in two hours.

David Turek, vice-president of IBM's supercomputing programs, likened Roadrunner to "a very souped-up Sony PlayStation 3". The $120m (£61m) supercomputer was named after New Mexico's state bird, and is more than twice as fast as the previous record holder, another IBM machine called Blue Gene.

By harnessing the power of 116,640 processors working in concert, Roadrunner surpassed a milestone in computing power, to enter a new era of what those familiar with such things call petaflop computing. Peta means a million billion, while a flop is a type of calculation.

"We had teams working around the clock," said IBM's Kevin Roark. "Once they got it hooked up, it was just a couple of days before they broke the record. Everyone here is ecstatic. There were people who doubted it was even possible." The record was broken at 3.30am on May 26.

Next month, the 230-tonne machine will be loaded on to 21 trucks and hauled across the country, from IBM's east coast facility to New Mexico. There, it will become the American military's latest toy, when it is installed, along with 57 miles of fibre optic cable, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb.

For six months, the computer will direct its formidable processing power at scientific problems. It will analyse how HIV vaccines should best be administered, and map the region of the human brain that governs vision.

In another series of tests, it will churn out data on whether firing laser beams into plasmas will trigger nuclear fusion, which advocates believe could one day bring us almost limitless cheap energy. Other projects will focus on testing and improving the accuracy of climate change models.

The first six months will give operators time to get used to the machine, and to iron out any bugs and glitches, before it begins its real task of providing classified data to help assess the safety, and readiness, of the US nuclear arsenal.

Roadrunner will be used by nuclear weapons experts at Los Alamos to simulate the first fractions of a second of a nuclear detonation. Additional computing units will be linked to Roadrunner, allowing a quarter of its power to remain available for unclassifed projects.

Speaking on Monday, the US secretary of energy, Samuel Bodma, called Roadrunner an "enormous accomplishment", adding: "Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the US nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields."

Alan Dix, professor of computing at Lancaster University, said that by rough calculations, Roadrunner was possibly only five to 50 times less powerful than the human brain. "Wait another three to five years and it will be there," he said.