Sun Microsystems, Inc., Hutchison 3G UK Limited, Symbian, Motorola and Macromedia Flash Player have partnered to launch a developer competition for the Motorola A920 video mobile. Developers are invited to submit applications to run on 3′s new video mobile, the Motorola A920.

The competition is open to developers from companies and individual developers who wish to submit an entry for any voice, transactional, messaging or games based application designed for the new Motorola A920 handset.

Enter the 3 UK Development Competition today and you could win one of the fantastic prizes for the most innovative and creative applications. The deadline for submissions is November 14th, 2003.

For more information and to enter: http://www.three.co.uk/A920competition

Some business applications define mission critical. You just can’t afford to have them go down. Ever.

Is ‘always on’ a realistic goal? Mark Bauhaus, VP, Java Web Services, and Rich Sharples, Senior Product Manager for Application Server, explore this possibility as they examine examples of high availability and introduce Sun’s approach to enabling high availability in the application server tier.

Date: Thursday, October 2, 2003
Time: 10-11am PT/ 1-2pm ET

Register at: http://www.sun.com/nettalk

Sun has announced the Sun Ray 1g, an improved version of the original Sun Ray 1 that now supports DVI and VGA displays at up to 1920×1200 resolution with 24-bit color.

Sun has started the Software Express for Solaris program, with free downloads of the latest Solaris build for x86 and SPARC platforms.

Sun has also released the SunFire V440, with up to four 1.06Ghz or 1.28Ghz UltraSPARC-3i CPUs, 16G of memory, four 36G Ultra360 SCSI hard drives, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

According to this CNet article and other reports, Sun is in the process of laying off another 1,000 workers.

Sun has formally announced the SunBlade 1500, with one 1Ghz UltraSPARC-3i CPU, up to 4G of registered DDR PC2100 ECC memory, two 80G internal ATA100 hard drives, USB 1.1, 2.0, and IEEE1394 (FireWire) ports, and PCI graphics.

Sun has formally announced the SunFire V250, with up to two 1.06 or 1.28Ghz UltraSPARC-3i CPUs, 8G of ECC DDR memory, 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet, and up to eight 36 or 73G Ultra160 SCSI hard drives.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that quarter-to-quarter (Q/Q), Sun outperformed the overall UNIX server market in both unit and vendor revenue growth, and maintained its position as the worldwide leader in both categories, according to the 2Q03 Worldwide Server Database by Gartner Dataquest. The company’s performance also resulted in growth in the overall OS category. Read more at this press release.

Sun has released version 7 of StarOffice, with a suggested retail price of $79.95.

OpenSSH version 3.7.1 has been released. This update is primarily to fix a potential buffer overflow present in all previous versions of OpenSSH.

According to articles at Reuters and CNet, Sun will be announcing a revamp of its software product lineup today.

Formerly known as “Project Orion”, the Java Enterprise System will have calendar, email, directory, instant messaging, and application server functionality and will cost $100 per employee per year. The Java Desktop, formerly known as the “Mad Hatter” project, will run on top of SuSe’s version of Linux. Java Desktop will also be priced at $100/year/employee.

SFGate.com has a great interview with Scott McNealy online.

Get online on September 16 and 17 at 9 am PDT (1600 GMT) for Sun’s Network Computing 03-Q3 Web event. Hear about Sun’s latest offerings which can help you use network computing for business advantage. Experience live keynotes from Sun leaders and visionaries. Watch videocasts of experts detailing new products, services, and technologies. Plus chat live online with Sun CEO Scott McNealy!

Sign up for an email reminder at: http://sun.com/bignews19/

According to this article, Wind River Systems (formerly BSDI) is discontinuing their BSD/OS commercial BSD UNIX offering as of December 13, 2003. Support for the product will be available until December 31, 2004.