For years, users wanted Dell to include AMD processors in Dell builds. In May 2006, Dell was happy to announce that they were bringing AMD on board. Everything seemed to be working out, until now. Dell recently announced that they're discontinuing almost all AMD-based Dell computers. The few ones that are left cannot be purchased online, and are only found in stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. This is likely to be a huge blow for AMD, and could not have come at a worse time. AMD recently posted abysmal revenue/loss figures for Q4 2007, and is running a company (ATI) that is worth 30% less than it was at the time of initial purchase. Hopefully, AMD will find more people to sell their processors.

While some people felt that the iPhone would crash and burn, it has in fact done quite the opposite. Of those in America that own mobile phones, 28% own an iPhone. While most people would wonder how a very expensive product isolated to a single network could possibly sell so well, market analysts see this rather large market share as a wakeup call to mobile phone manufacturers. Hopefully, we'll see less generic phones in the future, and more phones that will seem to be works of art more than tools of necessity (for some more than others, obviously).

Some of the most anticipated titles of the year, Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis, have failed to sell very well. In contrast to the overly hyped Halo 3, which boosted actual Xbox 360 sales, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 sales were, in short, abysmal. Since last month, neither game has managed to sell even 100,000 units. To be precise, EA sold 86,633 copies of Crysis, and Epic Games sold 33,995 copies of UT3. The Inquirer claims that Crysis, despite having a beautiful graphics engine that will have benchmarkers twiddling their thumbs for years, failed to impress anyone without a very expensive gaming machine. And Unreal Tournament, despite being absolutely breathtaking, had gameplay that was uncannily similar to the previous two versions of Unreal Tournament. Hopefully, as systems get better and gamers get more money to spend on games, these sales figures will increase.

This fun piece of trivia does more than make you the life of the party when playing "trivial pursuit". It indicates just how popular the Nintendo DS really is. Nintendo claims that they have sold over six million Nintendo DS units in America this year, citing internal estimates. There also seems to be no slowdown of sales in sight. The Nintendo DS is extremely popular to both the casual and hardcore gamer, and Nintendo fully intends to propel that momentum into 2008.

To further increase your trivial pursuit scores, these recent sales figures indicate that the sale of a Nintendo DS happens more than...

• A bad car accident (those happen once every 14 seconds)
• A man making a sexual advance on a woman (that happens once every seven seconds)
• Two or more script kiddies having a "flame war" on internet message boards over the previously mentioned console (which happens once every six seconds).

A recent stratified random sample poll of 100 independent retailers, commissioned by the trade paper MCV, brought back surprising results. 49% of those surveyed believed that the Xbox360 would eventually trounce the competition, despite the fact that the same retailers are having trouble keeping enough Nintendo Wiis on shelves to meet demand. 35% felt that the PS3 had a fair chance of nabbing the best console award, and a paltry 16% felt that the Wii had a chance. Of course, these figures are mostly based one current retail performance. If Microsoft did not have such blockbuster titles as BioShock and Halo 3, and if Nintendo had ample stock of the Wii, chances are we'd be looking at much different figures.

While Microsoft is putting their PR people to work showing the superiority of Vista to XP, Microsoft Watch is doing their part in educating the public on the other side of things. According to Microsoft Watch, you should not be listening to Microsoft, and know that Vista didn't too very well this year. Here are their reasons why, in order from most to least important. Please follow the source link for the reasons in greater detail.

• Windows XP stayed in the market too long; everything was built for XP and not ready for Vista.
• No compelling reason to upgrade from XP
• User Interface changes made Vista seem overly complex
• Bad timing; most sales occur between Thanksgiving and Christmas of any given year
• Too many people were in charge of designing Vista
• People were not ready for Vista
• Advertising campaign was confusing, and stopped as abruptly as it started.
• No obvious link between Office 2007 and Windows Vista
• Legal issues with the US Department of Justice and the EU.
• Way too many versions.

What was once a stalemate on the HD format front now seems like a landslide victory for the Blu-ray team. The latest Nielson figures shows that Black Friday really put Blu-ray in the chips. As of this week, Blu-ray now has a 72.6% market share over rival format HD-DVD. The most likely reason for this sudden push in sales was the release of "Live Free or Die Hard". Despite cheap HD-DVD players, Blu-ray has managed to maintain a sales advantage for quite some time, and currently is holding off HD-DVD with a 2-1 average sales advantage. Last week's sales advantage was roughly 3-1 in favor of Blu-ray.

Microsoft Claims Xbox 360 Outsold PS3 2:1 on Black Friday Week; Sony Denies Claim

According to Microsoft, Microsoft sold roughly 310,000 Xbox 360's during Black Friday week. If true, these figures would make Black Friday week nearly as successful as the Halo 3 launch week, as far as console sales go. While Microsoft did not bother to contest the Nintendo Wii sale supremacy (about 350,000 units), they proudly boasted to Next-Gen that they had outsold the PS3 2-1, citing unknown retail estimates. Sony was very quick to respond to the sales figures Microsoft boasted. While the sales figures were not unreasonable (Microsoft claimed Sony sold 155,000 PS3's during Black Friday week, and Sony confirmed selling 121,000 PS3's during the month of October), Sony alleged that the Black Friday figures were falsified and/or exaggerated. In fact, the Sony representative claimed that any sales figures are premature: the NPD does not release sales figures for November until December 13th. Sony does not dispute that the Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 on Black Friday week, however.

For the past couple weeks, we've been hearing that the PlayStation3 has been beating the Nintendo Wii in sheer sales week-by-week. While hardcore Nintendo and Microsoft fans will be happy to hear that this streak has ended (on the week ending 11/25, Nintendo sold 54,362 Wiis and Sony sold 50,564 PS3s), massive PS3 sales the other three weeks certainly helped Sony out. According to the latest sales figures, 183,217 PS3s were sold in November, as opposed to 159,193 Wiis. The Xbox 360 did not sell anywhere near that well in Japan, with total sales at roughly 26,000 units in November.

Thanks to a price cut and Black Friday, the Sony PlayStation3 is finally doing quite well for itself. During week of the famous American spending-spree day known as "Black Friday", PlayStation3 sales increased by 245%, and the previously mentioned factors bumped up the PS3 sales to the total figures of 298%. During Black Friday, the rest of Sony's consoles got their own time in the spotlight: PSP sales increased 136%, and PS2 sales were up by 287%. Gamespot estimates that Sony sold nearly 321,000 PS3s on Black Friday alone. If these figures are accurate, November may be Sony's most successful month this year.