Gadget owners love to trick out their beloved high tech units. Name it and these people would most definitely buy it – cases (hard or soft?), speakers, stickers, add-on utilities, etc. Just look at the iPod and its millions of owners and you’ll see how big the accessories market is. Unfortunately, with all of the buzz and almost rock star-like frenzy surrounding the forthcoming iPhone from Apple, it looks like this is one gadget that may have a bit of a troublesome “relationship” with accessories suppliers.

The reason is simple, Apple has taken a very tight grip over details of its definite blockbuster, and this has prevented companies from actually making any kind of accessories for it. There is speculation that the reason Apple is doing this is that they want a bigger piece of the accessories market – which is quite lucrative. It will be interesting to see how accessories manufacturers will adapt not only to a new hardware that is one of the most technologically advanced out there, but also to an Apple policy that is not as friendly towards them at this point.

The battle for speed dominance in the processor wars enters a new battlefront with the announcement of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that it will be launching its quad core Opteron microprocessors this August. The first of the three processors that are planned to be released at launch will start at the 2Ghz range.

The announcement, according to the company, should help squash rumors that AMD’s quad core processors are facing delays. Although no specific dates were mentioned during the announcement it was assured that the processors will be on schedule and that the very first systems that will be supporting the Opteron ( Barcelona) will be coming out in the market by September.

Company consolidation seems to be a continuing trend in the PC industry over the last couple of years with the AMD – ATI merger being the most talked about. The industry consolidation trend continues with the announcement that hard drive manufacturer Western Digital has bought the component manufacturer Komag, Inc. The sale, which amounted to $1 billion in cash, will surely create unmistakable ripples in the hard drive sector, which is now facing a sales slump because of aggressive pricing competition among the different companies.

The Komag deal comes a few years after Western Digital bought Read-Rite, a disk drive parts manufacturer that faced bankruptcy. We’ll see if this new acquisition will propel Western Digital towards the top of the hard drive sector, which is currently being occupied by Seagate and Maxtor.

The iPhone is such a sought after gadget that even those who are not in the US or non AT&T users are still waiting to get their hands on an iPhone in the hope that they can have it unlocked and finally use it on their respective carriers.

Based on some observations and information leaking out from various sources, the iPhone is indeed locked. But the good news for hackers and iPhone lovers is that it looks like the phone is just firmware locked. This means that it will be a bit easier to find out how to unlock it compared to, say, a hardware locked phone.

It will still take some time though before someone figures out how to unlock an iPhone because it uses a far different operating system.