Chinese iPhone sales off to slow start

In today's podcast: Chinese iPhone sales off to slow start; Nokia finally kills off N-Gage; and Conficker infections top 7 million PCs.

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The iPhone appeared to get a slow start in China on Friday night as China Unicom and Apple held a launch event largely free of the buzz and long buyer lines that have accompanied launches of the handset elsewhere. Smog hung in the Beijing air as buyers filled about two-thirds of an outdoor sales queue set up at a shopping mall. Beijing's first rain in weeks fell on an overhead canopy during the event. High prices may also have kept away buyers. Chinese shoppers can find cracked gray-market iPhones for around 4,000 yuan (US$587) at many local electronics markets, while the cheapest iPhone being sold by China Unicom costs 4,999 yuan with no service contract.

Nokia has finally decided to kill off its N-Gage gaming platform after years of shifting the strategy behind it with little success. Nokia introduced N-Gage in 2003 as a standalone handheld gaming device, which developed a small but enthusiastic following. Nokia later discontinued the device and instead came up with a plan to develop phones that would support the N-Gage platform. After a delay, it began introducing phones that could play N-Gage games in early 2008.
In Friday, Nokia posted a note at its N-Gage Web site informing users that the company would no longer publish new games for the platform, and that the N-Gage.com Web site and community aspects of the platform will be shut down at the end of 2010. Nokia will keep selling the existing games through September 2010.

The Conficker worm has passed a dubious milestone. It has now infected more than 7 million computers, security experts estimate. Last Thursday, researchers at the volunteer-run Shadowserver Foundation logged computers from more than 7 million unique IP addresses, all infected by known variants of Conficker. They have been able to keep track of Conficker infections by cracking the algorithm the worm uses to look for instructions on the Internet and placing their own "sinkhole" servers on the Internet domains it is programmed to visit. Conficker has several ways of receiving instructions, so the bad guys have still been able to control PCs, but the sinkhole servers give researchers a good idea how many machines are infected.

Microsoft is spiking its Office Accounting software family and will stop distributing the products as of Nov. 16. The product had outlived its usefulness, the company said. Office Accounting users will continue to receive support under the original terms, which provide five years of mainstream support and five years of extended support following the product's release. However, certain online services, such as eBay and Equifax tie-ins, will be no more as of Dec. 15. Customers who bought the software very recently have a potential out, as they can return the software within 30 days of purchase.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.