We started Panic with two things: $500, and a love of the Mac. We had no idea what we were doing. Fortunately, someone else did.

But even in this early state, Windows 8 is unambiguously a first-class tablet operating system.

Update: you can read the press release from the Build Windows event on Microsoft’s website.

The Inkling digital sketch pen captures a digital likeness of your work while you sketch with its ballpoint tip on any sketchbook or standard piece of paper. Designed for rough concepting and creative brainstorming, Inkling is ideal for the front end of the creative process.

$199, and available from mid-September. But what makes this product interesting is this:

Inkling does not require any specialized paper. It is intended to be uses with standard paper or Sketchbooks on flat, rigid drawing surfaces.

This is unlike my LiveScribe Pulse, which requires its own notebooks.

The company came under fire after telling its employees to open copies of Deus Ex and remove coupons for competing digital distribution service OnLive, which were included in the game’s packaging.

That’s some disgusting behaviour; to open another company’s product and remove a part of it before sale. But the game’s publisher’s response is even more disgusting:

Square Enix issued a statement Wednesday supporting GameStop’s decision.

“As part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s boxed offering on PC, Square Enix included a third-party coupon,” the gamemaker said. “GameStop was not made aware of this inclusion and Square Enix respects the right of GameStop to have final say over the contents of products it sells and to adjust them where they see fit in accordance with their policies.”

Don’t utter a bad word about GameStop, because without them, you can kiss goodbye to retail sales in the United States.

Hewlett Packard has confirmed plans to exit PCs, tablets and phones, in order to refocus on software.

HP also said it was considering a sale of its personal systems group, which includes the world’s biggest PC-making business.

Aside from the potential purchase of Autonomous, what software of major significance does HP have?

[Update] The Financial Times has the details on how large a role software plays in HP now:

Former SAP chief executive Léo Apotheker, who took the top job at HP last year, has said that the company wants to expand in software, an area that accounted for only 2.4 per cent of HP’s $32.4bn revenues in its latest quarter, and 4 per cent of its operating profit, or $154m.

If it decides to sell its PC business, the company is in for a major change in how it operates.

Sony has revealed that Vita development kits will cost just €1900 plus VAT, making the upcoming portable a viable proposition to smaller studios.

I really want the Vita to succeed, as it has many things going for it: attractive hardware, especially the addition of a second analogue stick; a competitive price point, helping it to compete with Apple’s and Nintendo’s offerings; and a cheap devkit with which to entice indie developers.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will become the world’s largest smartphone maker this quarter, overtaking struggling Nokia Oyj which has lead the market since 1996, Nomura said on Monday.

The end of an era.

Gamers have been waiting years for Nintendo to finally release its Wii successor, and Game Informer has heard from multiple sources that the company will unveil it at E3 this summer if not sooner.

It’s about damn time.

A highly placed development source has confirmed to Digital Foundry that the new disc format being beta tested in a new dashboard upgrade adds 1GB to the storage of Xbox 360 game discs.

The maximum space allocated to game data on the current disc format is just 6.8GB out of a maximum of 7.95GB on a standard dual layer DVD, with over 1GB dedicated to a DVD-Video partition that also contained anti-piracy security sectors.

What’s most interesting about this news is what isn’t being said: allocating resources to improve the disc format of a five-year-old system suggests to me that Microsoft isn’t planning on announcing the successor to the 360 in a while. That, or the method described above can be adapted to whatever storage format the 360′s successor will have.

I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

As one of my friends pointed out, this may very well be the most comprehensively photographed/videotaped natural disaster in memory.

Steve Jobs took the stage to kick off Apple’s event on Wednesday, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.