U.S. antitrust regulators have given billionaire investor Carl Icahn the go-ahead to purchase large blocks of Yahoo stock, the Federal Trade Commission said on Friday. The FTC, which routinely looks at large stock purchases, said the moves were approved in a listing that it puts out several times a week.

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Hutchison Telecommunications has sealed a deal with Apple to market the U.S. firm’s popular iPhone handset in the city and Macau as soon as the next quarter, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Friday. Existing subscribers of Hutchison Telecom, a unit of conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, were expected to be the first users of the iPhone in an early program starting this summer, the South China Morning Post said.

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Taipei (Taiwan) - With the 9-inch Asus EeePC just barely getting onto store shelves, now there’s word that a 10-inch version will be introduced at next week’s COMPUTEX convention in Taipei Taiwan. The ultra-portable notebook should be ready to ship in November (yay Christmas) and will most likely contain Intel’s new power-sipping Atom processor.

And speaking of Computex, TG Daily will be providing extensive convention coverage starting next Tuesday.

Read more ... CNET Crave.

Cupertino (CA) - Apple believes it can ease the pain of abruptly dropped calls due to weak network signal - simply by warning users that their connection may be cut.

The filing entitled "Wireless communication out of range indication" discusses an approach to provide an alert when Wi-Fi or mobile network signal is about to be lost, giving users a chance to take "corrective measures". The technology will leverage positioning capabilities of wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and GPS. Apple claims that that hardware such as GPS or an accelerometer can provide a precise estimate of the time before wireless or cellular connectivity is lost.

"The invention is also well suited to be incorporated with mobile devices that are equipped with guidance systems (GPS, accelerometers, etc.) thereby providing an accurate value of the location, velocity, acceleration, elevation, etc. of the wireless mobile device that can be used to give a more precise value of the time remaining until the out of boundary condition is reached," the filing states.

It is one of ideas you would wonder why no one else has thought of this before (assumed that it really works).

What makes this patent even more interesting is the fact that this capability is not only limited to a specific user’s device, but also to other participants in a call. An iPhone/iPod touch could transmit a warning to other participants of a conference call who would then be informed that a call may soon be dropped. The warning itself could be a vibration alert, a ringtone or a symbol on the screen.

"Warnings are only issued for those situations where the loss of signal would affect the user in the here and now and thereby prevent unnecessary (and potentially annoying) warnings being issued," the filing says.

Taipei (Taiwan) - The U.S. dollar appears to be recovering again lately, but there is no denying that the value of the currency has dropped low enough to upset global markets and it appears to be low enough to be hitting back U.S. IT companies that rely on manufacturing contractors in Asia.

We have just arrived in Taipei to cover Computex 2008 and while we are settling in, it appears that one of the hot stories on dinner tables is the situation as Taiwanese contract fabs. Just like the U.S. airlines keep a close eye on each other to make price adjustments, one contractor is m is waiting for the other to make a move. In this particular case, it is all about TSMC and UMC. Reuters recently said that TSMC is looking for ways to increase wafer prices by 3-5% in order to offset the falling U.S. dollar, inflation, and, of course, rising oil prices. Such a move could lead to a rise in prices coming from all contract manufacturers, putting fabless semiconductor companies in a tough spot.

It is interesting to note that that a possible price increase would not span across all products, but target especially the most lucrative segment - high-end manufacturing. This means that Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet and other controller chips would not see higher prices, but GPUs and processors from AMD (ATI), Nvidia, Sun and Via would.

It is an interesting situation and we are sure that the AMDs and Nvidias are watching the development closely. No official information has been given at this point and it appears that the pendulum can swing both ways: If UMC increases the prices for more services, TSMC could follow suit and increase the prices for all of its chips. On the other hand, UMC might decide to sacrifice its profit margin and win new business. In the end, UMC has only one third the revenues of TSMC.

Our impression is that the humid semiconductor heaven of Taipei is nowhere near the oil hysteria we are currently witnessing in the U.S.

We did, however, notice that the majority of taxis in Taipei switched to natural gas, though.

Smoking is a vice that many of us struggle to be free from for years. There are patches, gum, books, helplines, CDs (and in back in the day, cassettes) and DVDs dedicated to helping you kick the habit should you feel so inspired. Well now you can add video games to your list things that promise to help you quit.

Ubisoft yesterday announced its plans to publish a DS game developed to help you stop smoking based on Alan Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking Method.

Sitting on people’s bookshelves in over 50 countries, Alan Carr’s book is an international bestseller. Carr was a chain smoker for 33 years and successfully quit in 1983. He realized he had discovered a method which could enable any smoker to stop and embarked on a mission to cure the world of smoking.

Developed in conjunction with Allen Carr’s top experts, the game echoes the philosophy of Allen Carr’s Easyway method, allegedly enabling players to be entertained, challenged and stop smoking at the same time.

If this turns out to be true, we’ll be impressed. More often than not, people trying to quit smoking tend to be a bit cranky and so, could probably do with a bit of cheering up, anyway.

The press release doesn’t reveal much about the game play so we’re not really sure how it’s supposed to help you quit smoking, but it does tell us you’ll have to input your smoking history into the system and you’ll then be assigned your own Easyway coach to help you quit.

Alan Carr for the DS is another title in a line of DS game developed to help us better ourselves. Brain Training and More Brain Training have both been hugely successful and there’s also Face Training, designed to help you exercise your facial muscles.