News archive (9 / 2011)

AT&T has asked a federal judge to dismiss lawsuits by Sprint and Cellular South opposing their buyout of T-Mobile USA.

AT&T's deal to buy T-Mobile, once thought almost a sure thing, has been sidelined thanks to an antitrust suit from the Justice Department. Sprint, the smallest of four national US carriers, and regional carrier Cellular South have filed similar suits of their own.

AT&T argues it's actually competition, not a lack of it, the two companies are afraid of. Sprint claims that the loss of T-Mobile as an independent entity would eventually lead to their own demise, resulting in just two national carriers.

Cellular South is arguing the buyout would result in less competition for roaming deals which regional carriers rely on to extend their coverage.

In fact, like so many arguments AT&T has made so far, their claims of competition seem to be dishonest, if not completely false. They argue Sprint fears their ability to become a more formiddable competitor.

Yesterday Verizon Communications filed a challenge to the FCC's authority to mandate net neutrality through their Open Internet rules.

The rules, drafted last December, were officially entered into the Federal Register last week. They will go into effect on November 20 unless a successful legal challenge is mounted between now and then.

Verizon's filing was actually an appeal of a decision from April when they first challenged the rules. The case was dismissed at the time because new rules can't be challenged until after a schedule to put them in place has been set.

A Verizon statement on the lawsuit said:

Today's filing is the result of a careful review of the FCC's order. We are deeply concerned by the FCC's assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself. We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.

RIM has no intention of giving up on the tablet market according to an email from a company spokeswoman.

The PlayBook initially sold well after its release in April. More recently lagging sales have led to RIM rethinking plans for a 4G model and drastically reduced prices.

In an email to Reuters, RIM's Marisa Conway called rumors the PlayBook will be discontinued, "pure fiction." She went on to say, "RIM remains highly committed to the tablet market and the future of QNX in its platform."

The rumors she was referring to started with an analyst's note yesterday claiming RIM had discontinued production on the tablet and cancelled development on additional models.

Of course it's hard to imagine what RIM would stand to gain from getting out of the tablet market. Unlike HP, who gave up on their tablet operation last month, tablets are essentially part of RIM's core business.

If they can't get a foothold in the tablet market, it seems unlikely their smartphone business will keep them afloat for long.

Amazon may be looking to move from Android to WebOS for future tablets based on a report from VentureBeat.

Although Amazon's upcoming Kindle Fire runs Android, it has been customized to be more of a dedicated client for their various services than an all-purpose tablet. It even has a custom web browser which uses an Amazon service to speed page load times.

According to VentureBeat, "a well placed source" told them Amazon is negotiating buy Palm from HP.

HP bought Palm in 2010, hoping to use their WebOS mobile operating system as the basis for smartphones and tablets. After a half hearted attempt to continue developing Palm's phone business, they launched the TouchPad tablet this July.

After less than two months, facing poor sales and complaints from retailers, HP decided to get out of the mobile device business entirely.

Palm's assets seem like a much better fit for Amazon than HP. Unlike HP, Amazon isn't concerned with turning a profit from hardware sales.

Intel may appear to have moved on from MeeGo, but ASUS isn't ready to ditch the mobile OS just yet.

Intel announced their plan to move on from MeeGo and support the upcoming Tizen mobile OS. Like MeeGo, Tizen is based on Linux.

In reality, the timing of their announcement probably had more to do with taking a shot at Nokia, their former MeeGo partner, who released a phone running the OS just two days earlier. Tizen also happens to have the support of Nokia rival Samsung.

ASUS Technical Marketing Manager Gary Key told PCMag.com reports of MeeGo's demise are greatly exaggerated, or at least premature. ASUS released a MeeGo based netbook, the Eee PC X101, earlier this month.

Key also says he expects Intel to release MeeGo 1.3 on schedule next month.

That's not to say ASUS plans to stick with MeeGo indefinitely. He said:

I actually think it is a good thing as there are some real positives with MeeGo, especially for its intended audience, but with full support from the two Linux foundations and additional technical support from the Hardware Council, it should be a very viable player in the sub-$200 market next year.

Spotify seems to be completely missing the point when it comes to concerns with their new signup system which requires a Facebook account.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced changes to the Spotify client, tweeting, "We're rolling out a new client as we speak where you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures. It works like a browsers private mode."

In fact, this is just an addition to the option which was already in the Spotify client which already allowed users to turn off sharing via Facebook entirely.

Just 3 days earlier Ek tweeted that the company listens to criticism and makes changes accordingly. But today's announcement is still dismissive of the people who simply don't want a Facebook account.

For some the reason is a general distrust of Facebook, while others simply don't see any benefit to it. But just as importantly, many people don't want to be given an ultimatum telling them to sign up for a third party service whether they want it or not.

Ironically, Spotify's success has been predicated on choice. It allows you to choose not to pay for your music without breaking the law.

Samsung appears to be offering Apple a preliminary settlement in their Australian patent infringement lawsuit over the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

In the Australian suit, Apple is claiming Samsung's tablet infringes on a patent for touchscreen technology. The dispute over two other patents for "selective rejection," which helps the device ignore accidental contact with the touchscreen, have already been settled with Samsung agreeing to drop the feature.

Based on an account of the proceedings from The Wall Street Journal, Samsung's proposed settlement would allow them to release the tablets before a final hearing on the matter.

This should make it possible for them to begin selling the tablet in Australia well before Christmas, perhaps as early as next week.

Details of Samsung's offer, which was presented privately to Apple representatives, weren't discussed in court, it seems likely they are proposing a preliminary licensing agreement.

Samsung has made it clear they have no objection to licensing patents for their devices. They consider it a standard cost of doing business.

A coalition of US privacy and civil rights groups wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook over alleged deceptive trade practices.

The letter was sent by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on behalf of themselves and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), American Library Association (ALA), Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), Consumer Action, Consumer Watchdog, PrivacyActivism, Privacy Times & Stanford Law School lecturer Chip Pitts.

They are asking the FTC to examine the harm to consumer privacy caused by a combination of Facebook's new frictionless sharing features and tracking cookies used without the user's knowledge or consent.

The letter contends:

In light of recent changes announced by Facebook that impact the privacy interests of almost two hundred million Facebook users in the United States, we would like to bring your attention to new privacy and security risks to American consumers, the secret use of persistent identifiers ("cookies") to track the Internet activity of users even after they have logged off of Facebook, and the company's failure to uphold representations it has made regarding its commitments to protect the privacy of its users.

Facebook's tracking of post-log-out Internet activity violates both the reasonable expectations of consumers and the company's own privacy statements. Although Facebook has partially fixed the problem caused by its tracking cookies, the company still places persistent identifiers on users' browsers that collect post-log-out data and could be used to identify users.

"Frictionless sharing" plays a leading role in the changes Facebook announced at the recent f8 development conference, and works through the interaction of Facebook's Ticker, Timeline, and Open Graph. These changes in business practices give the company far greater ability to disclose the personal information of its users to its business partners than in the past. Options for users to preserve the privacy standards they have established have become confusing, impractical, and unfair.

As many of our regular visitors have probably noticed, we had outgrown our four-year-old server setup quite a while ago. We have worked on a new infrastructure for quite a while now, and finally switched to a new location earlier this week.

We have now ironed out much of the (inevitable) bugs that appeared in the transition. However since this was quite a major upgrade, there's bound to be some more problems lurking around in the shadows. Therefore please do let us know if you encounter something that is not working as expected.

In addition to moving to completely new server hardware, we also switched from very old and unsupported BlueDragon FREE Coldfusion server to an open source version of the same software - Open BlueDragon (or OpenBD for short).

Probably the most significant change was moving the hosting location from Dallas, Texas to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The change in location allowed us to get much more beef behind the scenes (full server specifications after the break).

Patent troll UltimatePointer, maker of the Upoint laser-pointer presentation remote, has sued Nintendo, GameStop, Best Buy and Sears over alleged patent infringement.

The company says it owns the patent for "Easily Deployable Interactive Direct-Pointing System and Presentation Control System and Calibration Method."

Nintendo "directly infringed the patent with the unauthorized selling of its Wii remote hardware," says the company.

The retailers, by association of selling the Wii remote, infringed as well, explains UltimatePointer.

While looking for monetary damages, the company also wants Nintendo to pay its court costs.

It is important to note that UltimatePointer's Upoint is currently vaporware, and is not even up for sale.

(Pic via Rant)

According to the Justice Department, U.S. carriers like AT&T and Verizon retain customer data, including texts, call records, billing records and cell towers used for at least one year.

As usual, AT&T is the biggest offender, keeping your data for up to 7 years.

Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, panned the carriers:

This disclosure reflects the importance of data minimization. Some companies do a much better job of disposing of sensitive, personally identifiable information. Once such information is no longer needed for business-reasons, it shouldn?t be held onto because of the risks that it could be obtained by a hacker.

Government sources have noted today that a highly anticipated $12 billion plan for Foxconn to produce iPads in Brazil is now seriously "in doubt" thanks to stagnant negotiations over tax breaks.

Additionally, Brazil apparently lacks skilled labor, say the sources.

Factories being hit with high taxes, an overvalued currency and lack of skilled factory workers has put the deal in complete jeopardy, however, and the proposed start date of November 5th is likely to be delayed indefinitely.

Says one Brazilian official:

The talks have been very difficult, and the project for a Brazilian iPad is in doubt. (Foxconn) is making crazy demands [for tax breaks and other special treatment].

Microsoft will bring in an estimated $444 million this year from extorting Android manufacturers, says Goldman Sachs, bringing in $3-6 per mobile device sold.

Android has a 40 percent global market share, while Microsoft's own Windows Phone 7 is only expected to take 4 percent.

For now, manufacturers pay $11 to license Windows Phone 7 so Microsoft will make significantly less money from their own platform than they will from Android, which they had no part in creating.

Continues the Goldman analyst:

Despite the royalties Microsoft is demanding for alleged patent infringement, we see its legal battles as playing a lesser role in its overall mobile strategy as compared to its desire to strengthen the ecosystem for Windows Phone going forward.

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft will begin offering online pay TV service from both Comcast and Verizon via its Xbox Live platform.

The software giant is currently in talks with two dozen providers in the U.S. and Europe and could announce some deals as early as next week.

Outside of Verizon and Comcast; HBO, Crackle, Bravo, Syfy and Lovefilm are all expected to sign deals with Microsoft, as well.

It is unclear how the other services will work, but Comcast?s Xfinity TV and Verizon?s FiOS would require users to prove they already are pay-TV customers in regions where the services operate, likely with a simple account number-based authentication.

Almost since the moment it launched, Apple's iPad has been the best selling tablet in the world. But in Australia and New Zealand, Android tablets are taking a bigger share of tablet sales than you might expect.

Tablet shipments in the two countries doubled in Q2 compared to the previous quarter, reaching 420,000 units. However, sales of Android tablets actually increased threefold according to numbers from IDC.

As a result, Android tablets accounted for 25 percent of the total market. By comparison, iPad sales accounted for 80 percent of the market in North America over the same period.

IDC Market Analyst Yee-Kuan Lau explained the trend, saying:

The market expansion was a combined effort of early adopters refreshing devices purchased last year and new users who were interested in a media tablet as a complementary device, with some waiting for more non-Apple variety. That said, there is still strong demand for Apple's iPad 2 since its launch at the end of March.

A new report from Knowledge Networks suggests Dish Network's strategy of combining pay TV and unlimited streaming could cost Netflix customers.

Currently, according to the report, more than a third of US consumers say they watch a movie or TV show from Netflix at least once per month. That includes both their streaming and disc rental business.

Some of that viewing is coming at the expense of VOD offerings from pay TV services.

However, 20 percent of respondents to their survey who indicated they are watching less VOD in favor of Netflix also said if their pay TV provider offered a similar streaming service, they would be "very likely" to switch.

That could be good news for Dish Network and Blockbuster, who unveiled just such a plan last week called Blockbuster Movie Pass.

Dish bought Blockbuster earlier this year largely to get their streaming service. They are also considered a leading contender to buy Hulu.

Google+ may not be ready to take on Facebook yet, but traffic to the would be contender for the social networking crown spiked immediately after opening to the public.

According to data collected by Experian Hitwise, Google+ traffic grew more than 1000 percent from the week ending September 17th to the week of September 24th.

Interestingly, their data seems to suggest the reason Google chose to end the invitation-only beta and open Google+ to everyone may be that user interest had already started to wane.

According to a Samsung representative, Samsung's decision to enter into a patent licensing deal with Microsoft was intended to protect them from Apple.

The deal, announced yesterday, gives Microsoft and Samsung each access to the other's patents. It was accompanied by a commitment from Samsung to continue producing Windows Phone handsets.

An unnamed source within Samsung explained the company's concerns to the Korea Times, saying, "Samsung knows it can't rely on Google. We've decided to address Android IP issues on our own."

Google has made a push recently to increase their patent pool in an effort to defend Android from patent claims, including a recent agreement to purchase Motorola's phone division for $12.5 billion. But that hasn't stemmed the tide of patent infringement lawsuits, particularly from Apple.

Samsung's deal with Microsoft, as well as a new initiative to develop a separate Linux-based mobile OS with Intel, seem to indicate how fragile the relationship between Google and handset makers might be.

Visa Europe has launched a new Android app which will allow transfers directly from one card holder to another.

The app was announced by Visa Europe Chief Executive Peter Ayliffe in his keynote speech at the EFMA conference in Paris. Right now the app is available only in English and allows transfers in a single currency for Visa and V PAY cardholders within Europe.

Visa promises support for additional operating systems and multiple currencies, as well as payments to and from countries outside Europe in the future.

In order to transfer money, the sender will need to use a Visa card issued by a bank which supports the service and register with Visa. Money can then be sent, via the app, to a Visa pre-paid or debit card.

The recipient will not have to be registered with the service.

Another feature of the new app is access by a Visa card holder to notifications whenever their card is used.

In his keynote address, Ayliffe said:

The way we pay is changing, driven by the rapid uptake of new technologies and growing consumer demand for more flexible payments. Today's announcement is the first in a series of new products and services that Visa Europe will be launching in the coming months to reflect the fundamental shift in consumer behaviour. We are already seeing early adoption of mobile payments, and in the coming months we will see the arrival of mainstream NFC technologies, advanced loyalty and e-commerce services, and ultimately, the launch of a new digital wallet.

According to a new report, it appears that music piracy has consistently fallen since 2009, thanks to the popularity of Spotify, at least in Sweden.

Overall piracy has fallen 25 percent in two years, says the Swedish Music industry.

Spotify, which is free with some restrictions, has millions of tracks from all the major labels and independents. Premium versions give mobile access and unlimited streaming to users.

The recent Swedish study showed streaming as the preferred way to listen to music, with 40 percent of responders saying they now use a streaming service compared to just 10 percent who download music legally. 23 percent still regularly pirate, but that number has been dropping.

Says Music Sweden's CEO Elizabet Widlund (via Freak):

The long-term trend is a sharp increase in legal streaming while we see a reduction in illegal file sharing and downloading. When 800,000 Swedes are willing to pay for streaming music, there is clearly a market for more legal players in the digital music market. We encourage diversity of music services as it will provide better conditions for both those who create music and those who listen to it.

Google has dropped a complaint against the US Department of the Interior (DOI) claiming the agency improperly awarded a cloud services contract to Microsoft in violation of a federal law governing the bidding process.

Google's lawsuit stemmed from a DOI decision to exclude their Google Apps for Government service from consideration when they decided to adopt cloud-based services. One of the reasons given at the time was a lack of certification for Google's government oriented services.

When documents related to the bidding process were unsealed, it was revealed they were excluded from bidding on the grounds their Google Apps For Government hadn't been certified.

Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard seemed to take great glee in pointing this out in a Technet blog post, but conveniently missed key details which seem to give credence to Google's claims of preferential treatment for Microsoft.

While it was true Google Apps For Government had yet to be certified, it was based on another product called Google Apps Premier Edition which did have FISMA certification. Microsoft's service also didn't have FISMA certification when it was chosen by the Interior Department.

The media reform organization Free Press filed suit yesterday, asking a federal judge to review the FCC's new net neutrality rules.

When the FCC formally announced the adoption of their Open Internet rules last week, the clock started ticking on a 2 month window for legal challenges before they go into effect.

The complaint from Free Press is notable because it is different from those expected from broadband providers like Verizon, who tried unsuccessfully to have the rules overturned in April. Instead of claiming the FCC has no authority for their rules, Free Press argues they may not set different rules for wireline vs wireless service.

The Open Internet rules exempt mobile providers from some rules applied to services like DSL and cable Internet. Specifically, the new rules would allow wireless providers to prioritize different types of traffic as they see fit.

Like traditional broadband providers, they would be required to disclose such practices to customers and would be forbidden from completely blocking lawful traffic. However, it would be within the rules for them to degrade third party services which compete with their own offerings.

The EU will not be participating in a signing ceremony for the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) intellectual property treat according to a statement from the European Commission.

Earlier this week, the Japanese government released a statement announcing an October 1 signing event which suggested the EU would be among the signatories. In fact, it appears their representative will be one of three mentioned who will not be participating in the ceremony.

Yesterday Out-Law.com reported that a spokesperson for the European Commission corrected the earlier report in a statement:

The EU has not yet completed its internal procedures authorising the signature, therefore it will not be signing ACTA at this event. Neither will Mexico and Switzerland, since they did not conclude their domestic proceedings.

For the EU, the domestic process for signature is that the Council [of Ministers] adopts a decision authorising a EU representative to sign ACTA. Since this required the translation of the treaty in all the EU languages, such decision has not yet been adopted. It may still require a couple of months for the EU to be able to sign ACTA. After the signature, the European Parliament will have to vote its consent of ACTA.

The latest rumor is that Apple is finally prepared to kill of their iPod Shuffle and Classic.

Says TUAW: "Obviously we can't divulge our source, but it is NOT an analyst."

Additionally, an updated iPod Touch will be coming later this year, say the sources.

There have been rumors of the iPod's demise for years now but this time they might be on to something. iPod sales now only account for 5 percent of Apple's net income, down from 10 percent in 2010, and overall sales are in continued decline (check the chart, via Time).

Furthermore, if Apple kills off the two models, the more expensive Nano and Touch will remain, which will boost income (or at least keep it steady for the time being).

Samsung and Google will unveil the Nexus Prime flagship device on October 11th, powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The hardware maker has sent out invites for CTIA with the tagline "get a look at what's new from Android."

Youtube.com/android will be the home of the live streaming for the event, and Samsung is expected to announce some major products besides the Nexus Prime.

The Prime is expected to be similar to the Galaxy S II (spec-wise) but there are still likely surprises waiting.

The broadcast begins at 11:30 AM PST and we will have a report as it streams.

(Pic via AndroidandMe)

The US Department of Justice has sent Google a request for additional information as part of their scrutiny of the search giant's proposed purchase of Motorola Mobility.

As with any deal of this magnitude, the DOJ must conduct an investigation before it can be finalized. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission may have a say in the matter.

Google Senior Vice President David Drummond announced the DOJ request on the company's Public Policy blog, writing, "Today we received what is called a "second request," which means that the DOJ is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal."

He added that he doesn't believe there is any reason to believe the Justice Department will not approve the sale.

However, that doesn't mean there won't be additional hurdles to clear before everything is said and done. At a US Senate antitrust hearing last week Google's Erich Schmidt faced hostile legislators who accused Google of anticompetitive behavior.

Even though the hearing was focused on their search business, more than one Senator intimated Google uses the Android OS primarily to further their dominance.

With bids for online video service Hulu in, it looks like the competition is coming down to three options, and the leading contender may be no sale at all.

If the sale does happen, the two leading buyers appear to be Dish Network and Google.

According to Business Insider, Google offered $4 bilion with the condition Hulu's current corporate parents would guarantee the current content deals for several years. Dish offered just $1.9 billion, but without the additional demands.

Hulu's owners, which include News Corp and Disney, reportedly want to renegotiate licensing terms after two years. A third owner, Comcast, was forced to give up control of the company as part of their deal to buy Hulu co-founder NBC.

It remains to be seen if any deal can be reached which would satisfy News Corp and Disney. News Corp's Fox Network has already begun delaying the availability of their shows on Hulu by two weeks.

Intel has decided to kill off the Meego mobile OS and partner with the LiMo Foundation in developing a new platform called Tizen.

LiMo is a consortium of companies, including Samsung, whose goal is creating an open, hardware independent, version of Linux for mobile devices. A third partner, the Linux Foundation, is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth of Linux,

MeeGo, also a Linux-based OS, was originally conceived as a way to combine the efforts of Intel and Nokia, who were each working on their own Linux-based mobile operating systems, Moblin and Maemo.

Although other companies decided to join their efforts, Nokia's decision to jump ship and partner with Microsoft to create Windows Phone devices left MeeGo's future in limbo.

It's likely not a coincidence that the announcement of MeeGo's demise comes less than a week after Nokia released their only MeeGo phone.

Although both operating systems are are Linux-based, there are significant differences between MeeGo and Tizen.

On October 2 Samsung's Galaxy Tab 8.9 will hit the shelves of US retailers. It will be priced at $469 for 16GB of memory or 32GB for $569.

It features an 8.9" Gorilla Glass display with a resolution of 1280x800. It is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core T250S processor.

It can handle up to a 32GB microSD card and also has a USB 2.0 port. For connectivity, it features Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 support.

Rounding out the hardware are both front and rear facing cameras, 2 Megapixels and 3 Megapixels respectively, and a 6100mAh Li-polymer battery.

Embattled would be wireless provider LightSquared has published an open letter blaming the GPS industry for his company's problems rolling out a nationwide LTE (4G) wireless network in the US.

LightSquared has become a subject of debate among US legislators over their plan to use frequencies normally reserved for satellite communication for mobile phone service. Although they have received FCC approval for their service, it was with the condition that they be able to show it won't interfere with GPS equipment.

LightSquared's wireless service would be a wholesale product sold to regional mobile providers, allowing them to expand their networks to offer nationwide coverage.

The original plan was to use two different frequency ranges. That plan was modified when it was determined one of them would interfere with standard GPS communications which use an adjacent frequency range.

Problems remain with the second range of frequencies due to interference with high precision GPS signals used in industries like aviation and agriculture, as well as by the military.

In his letter, LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja wrote:

The software update is being rolled out as we speak.

7.5 Mango should finally turn Windows Phone into actual smartphone contenders, following a botched launch and a botched "noDo" update that actually bricked some devices.

Mango brings 500 new changes, fixes and updates.

PCW has a great list (they have been using for 30 days):

Messaging Threads: Within a messaging exchange between you and another party, you can switch the messaging platform on the fly. You can start off instant messaging, switch to SMS texting, then jump over to Facebook messaging all within one message thread.

Group Contacts: With "Mango" you can create groups of contacts like "Family", or "Softball Team". You can filter incoming messages in the People Hub using the groups, and you can use the Group as a contact for outbound messages if you want to send an email or text message to the whole group.

Local Scout: The Maps app in "Mango" has a new tool called Local Scout that identifies places nearby to eat or drink, tourist sites and things to do, and places to shop. You can also use it to plan a trip by finding where you're going to travel on the Maps app ahead of time and then using Local Scout to discover what's near there.

Amazon has embarked on a voyage to control the entire e-reader market.

The company has unveiled the Kindle Touch e-reader for $99, a full $40 cheaper than Barnes & Noble's popular Nook Simple.

If you want the 3G data version of it, the cost is $150.

Additionally, Amazon has set a new low price for e-readers with its latest E-ink Kindle, which is "small enough to fit in your back pocket" and will cost just $79.

The smaller device is "75 percent lighter" than current Kindles, says CEO Jeff Bezos.

Both are available today, although they have not shown up on Amazon just yet.

Samsung has become the latest company to enter into a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft for its Android devices.

Since Android has become a significant player in the smartphone market, Microsoft has threatened to sue handset vendors over a handful of mobile phone related patents. They filed a patent lawsuit against Motorola last year.

Microsoft has also made a lot of noise about supposed infringement by Android itself. For years Microsoft has claimed Linux, which Android is based on, violates a number of their patents. However, to date they have never actually said what patents they are talking about.

In the last few months several companies, including Acer, ViewSonic & HTC.

Neither Samsung or Microsoft has disclosed the terms of the new licensing agreement, although statements from both suggest part of the arrangement was a promise by Samsung to continue building Windows Phone handsets, or at least publicly affirm their support for it.

Amazon has unveiled their long-awaited tablet offering this morning, the $200 Kindle Fire.

The device will be 7-inches and run on Android but will remove some functionality seen on rival tablets like the iPad.

Offering Wi-Fi but no 3G, the device also removes a camera and a mic, in an effort to cut down costs. Despite its smaller size, the display is impressive IPS with Gorilla Glass.

The Kindle Fire will have its own new mobile browser dubbed Amazon Silk. The browser is ?cloud-accelerated? and uses Amazon's EC2 to turn 100 millisecond waiting times into 5.

Additionally, all buyers get a 30-day free trial to Amazon Prime, and access to free TV and movie streaming along with the usual free two-day shipping and discounted 1 day shipping.

As expected, Amazon has closely integrated their ecosystem of services into the Android operating system make it very easy for users to find music, movies and magazines. Cloud access, via the Cloud Drive and Cloud Reader, are also one-click away.

The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox browser, released yesterday, promises to cut down on the amount of memory it uses.

Poor memory management is perhaps the biggest complaint among Firefox users. With the emergence of Google's Chrome browser, which is notably light on memory usage, has made the issue more pressing for Mozilla developers to address.

The announcement on the Mozilla blog promises:

Firefox manages memory more efficiently to deliver a nimble Web browsing experience. Users will notice Firefox is faster at opening new tabs, clicking on menu items and buttons on websites. Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days.

The cheapest price ever for the tablet.

For the next 24 hours, 1SaleaDay has the BlackBerry Playbook tablet on sale for $300, down from its MSRP of $500.

The model available is the smaller 16GB version, but this is still the cheapest the tablet has been and likely a sign that an across-the-board cut is coming in the near future.

RIM sold 500,000 PlayBooks in its first quarter of availability but sales have dried up now, with the company only moving 200,000 last quarter.

The PlayBook features the standard 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB RAM but its real differentiating factor is its Internet experience. The browser has support for Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, and HMTL 5.

Additionally, the PlayBook has a 7-inch screen, 1024x600 resolution, dual cameras, a microHDMI port and the BlackBerry App World, which has thousands of apps.

The main reason the tablet has been universally hated is the fact that RIM botched the software launch so badly there was not even a native email client.

Apple has lost in its bid to trademark the term "multi-touch" in the United States.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office says the term cannot be trademarked because it is simply a way of describing how users interact with their products.

Reads the decision (via MR):

Thus, from the foregoing, we find that 'multi-touch' not only identifies the technology, but also describes how a user of the goods operates the device. Based on the evidence discussed above, as well as other evidence in the record, we agree with the examining attorney that Multi-Touch indeed is highly descriptive of a feature of the identified goods.

Thus, applicant's evidence pertaining to the success, sales volumes and, to a limited extent, advertising expenditures of the iPhone, is not helpful in establishing that the purchasing public associates the term Multi-Touch with applicant.

One of the new features Microsoft is adding to Windows 8 is the ability to login to your computer using a Windows Live ID.

The primary purpose for this is sharing of Windows settings across multiple computers, all of which would have to be running Windows 8 of course. You can either select settings to share between computers or simply use Microsoft's default settings.

In addition, it will allow you to automatically load Metro style apps purchased from the Windows App Store and automatically login to websites which use Windows Live authentication.

Shared settings will be divided into the following groups:

• Personalize
• Themes
• Ease of access
• Language preferences
• Apps
• Web browser
• Other stuff
• Some passwords

ACTA, the secretly negotiated agreement to strengthen intellectual property laws and enforcement, will be signed on October 1 at a ceremony in Japan.

According to a press release from the Japanese government, signatories will include Japan, the EU, US, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore & Switzerland.

From the beginning, ACTA has been negotiated in secret with the public and consumer interest groups excluded while entertainment industry lobbyists have actively participating. The secrecy has even extended to prohibiting elected officials from finding out what their own governments were agreeing to.

Despite assurances by the negotiating parties that ACTA would not require changes to the laws of any participating country, every draft of the agreement which has been leaked have shown that to be absolutely false.

In the US, officials from the US Trade Representative's office have defended ACTA by saying it's an executive agreement, rather than a treaty, meaning it wouldn't require changes to the law. ACTA critics have pointed out that this is merely an excuse to avoid having the agreement debated in the Senate.

Amazon has reportedly finalized deals to offer digital versions of magazines from three of the four major US publishers on their upcoming tablet.

Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith have all reached agreements with Amazon. The lone houldout is Time Inc.

Comparing Amazon to Apple, one publisher told AllThingsD, "You've got beauty and design with Apple, which we love. But with Amazon you have marketing, and ease of use. We?re very optimistic."

Ironically, magazine publishers appear to be looking at the opportunity much like book publshers did Apple when the iPad came out. They see an Amazon tablet as a necessary competitor for the iPad.

Amazon's tablet, believed to be called the Kindle Fire, is expected to be announced at a media event tomorrow.

A new requirement to sign up through a Facebook account isn't sitting well with a number of potential Spotify users.

What has probably made the situation much worse for Spotify is their tone deaf response. CEO and founder Daniel Ek responded to criticism on Twitter yesterday by tweeting, "We want to remove barrier to sign-up and create a more seamless experience. As we think our users are social."

An official statement from Spotify says:

To us, this integration is all about creating an amazing new world of music discovery. As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins. We already use Facebook as part of our backend to power our social features and by adopting Facebook?s login, we've created a simple and seamless social experience.

Despite falling to around 74 percent earlier this year, the iPad has regained its 80 percent tablet market share in the North American region as of July 30th.

During the quarter of April to July, iPads accounted for 6 million of the 7.5 million tablets shipped in the U.S. and Canada.

The figures come from research group Strategy Analytics, who calls Apple a "formidable market leader".

Says one analyst: "Apple remains a long way ahead of its main rivals such as Motorola, Samsung, RIM, Asus and HTC. A combination of cool branding, user-friendly hardware, entertaining services and savvy retail distribution has made Apple a formidable market leader."

Amazon, when it announces its much-hyped tablet/e-reader on Wednesday, will become a strong challenger, says the firm:

Amazon's new tablet, which is expected to be unveiled tomorrow, has been the subject of much speculation since rumors started spreading earlier this year. It will reportedly be called the Kindle Fire.

Combining an account from someone who has actually had the tablet in his hands with other rumors and reports, we can make some educated guesses about Amazon's tablet strategy, at least for the next few months.

MG Siegler of TechCrunch got access to a development unit, which he reports has a 7" display and looks similar to a BlackBerry Playbook. In fact it's apparently made by the same manufacturer and based directly on the same design.

That would seem to suggest Amazon plans to continue focusing on the e-reader market rather than competing head to head with Apple. So does the rumored price of $250, which would make it competitive with Barnes & Noble's Nook Color, another Android-based e-reader.

Unlike Apple, which basically uses services and software to sell hardware, Amazon sells hardware to promote their services. Selling the tablet at cost, or even a sleight loss, makes some sense for them.

T-Mobile has showed off their new devices at the GigaOM Mobilize event in San Francisco this week.

The Galaxy S II and HTC Amaze 4G will be the first T-Mobile devices to have support for the company's very fast 42 Mbps HSPA+ mobile broadband network. T-Mobile's current devices have support only up to 21 Mbps.

Upgrading the network has been a priority at T-Mobile, and the CMO says "75 percent of the phones T-Mobile sells this year will be smartphones, and of those, 90 percent are Android."

The Galaxy S II will be identical to models released on rival carriers (in appearance), except much better. The device will the 42 Mbps radio, a larger, 4.52-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, a more powerful 1.5 GHz dual-core processor and NFC.

HTC's Amaze 4G comes with Sense 3.0 on top of Android 2.3.5, a 4.3-inch qHD (960×540 resolution) Super LCD screen, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, the 42 Mbps radio and a 8MP wide aperture f/2.2 camera.

Apple has confirmed.

The iPhone 5 will be revealed at Apple's Cupertino headquarters on October 4th.

Press has been sent invitations with the headline "Let's talk iPhone" for the event at 1pm.

Although it is unclear when the phone will actually be released, Apple has blacked out vacation days for employees for October 9-15, indicating that a major product launch will be in that time period.

Updated specs for the phone are likely to be an A5 dual-core processor, an 8MP camera, mobile payments (NFC?), a slightly larger display and more memory.

Verizon and AT&T will be getting the smartphone, but there has been massive speculation that Sprint is getting the device, as well.

The Nokia N9 MeeGo smartphone announced back in June has begun shipping.

The N9 occupies a somewhat strange position in Nokia's smartphone lineup since it doesn't run either Nokia's legacy smartphone OS, Symbian, or their OS of the future, Windows Phone. In fact it's a relic of plans Nokia has all but abandoned, to get back to the top of the smartphone market with an OS of their own.

MeeGo is a Linux-based OS which resulted from a partnership of Nokia and Intel. It was created through a fusion of Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin.

When Nokia announced their partnership with Microsoft to develop Windows Phones, it appeared to be the death knell for MeeGo.

Unfortunately, with a bunch of money already spent on development, Nokia was left with little choice about releasing the N9.

While it doesn't feature a bleeding edge processor or the biggest screen in the industry, the hardware is quite respectable. It has a 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, a 3.9" Gorilla Glass display & 8MPx camera with a Carl Zeiss lense and LED flash.

Warner Home Video may be expanding their delayed release window to include brick and mortar rental outlets.

In 2009 Warner, along with the other major studios, implemented a policy of delaying the availability of new releases to kiosks by 28 days. This was intended to improve disc sales.

The delayed release window also includes online rental services like Netflix.

A distributor has told Home Media Magazine that the delayed release window will be extended to include all rental operations starting in November. He said, "Some of the Warner reps have called our key customers to let them know about this upcoming change."

The problem with this move is it ignores the obvious. The DVD boom of a few years ago wasn't sustainable because it was never just about new releases.

It was a perfect storm of replacing decades old technology, the availability of more titles at better prices than ever before, and even multiple releases of many titles.

A Samsung spokesman said the company isn't worried that Apple's lawsuits will cause them to miss tablet sales projections for 2011.

Apple patent lawsuits around the world have already resulted in a delay of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and a ban on sales of the tablet in most of Europe. However, the European ban is specifically against Samsung.

European retailers are still free to sell the tablet.

Samsung's J K Shin says the company expects to increase tablet sales by more than 5 times compared to last year according to Bloomberg. Since Samsung hasn't disclosed their 2010 numbers, it's hard to be sure exactly how many that is.

According to analysts, last year's sales were probably around 1.6 million, which would mean at least 8 million units sold this year if Samsung's prediction is accurate.

That would put them squarely in the lead among Android tablets, but still significantly behind Apple's industry leading iPad.

HTC has unveiled its Raider smartphone today in South Korea.

The new flagship Android device runs on Android 2.3.6, Sense 3.5 UI, a large 4.5-inch qHD (960 x 540) IPS touchscreen, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and 1GB RAM.

Making the phone even more notable, the device has 100 Mbps LTE support and 21 Mbps HSPA+.

Additionally, the device is 128.8 x 67 x 11.27 mm, has 16GB of internal storage, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with dual LED flash, a front 1.3MP camera, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and a 1,620 mAh battery.

According to the results of Nielsen survey, Android dominated US smartphone sales between June and August of this year.

While they estimate only 43 percent of smartphones in the US run Google's mobile OS, they accounted for 56 percent of smartphone purchases over the three month period.

Toshiba has announced today that its Canvio line of external HDDs will be given a cloud storage backup service as an option.

Furthermore, the Canvio Basics and Canvio 3.0 lines have been updated to add support for 6 Gbs USB 3.0. The other lines remain on the 480 Mbps USB 2.0 standard.

The Canvio 3.0 drives come with NTI's BackupNow EZ software allowing for fully-customizable cloud and drive backup.

BackupNow EZ is based on Microsoft Azure tech and allows for single file, folder or file system backup.

Says Toshiba:

All the consumer has to do is click, 'OK.' It's a complete system backup to the hard drive, including the OS. And, it's a bootable drive so if your computer breaks down, you can boot to drive and select a point and time and when to restart and your computer puts everything back.

Google and the Israel national museum have teamed up to digitize the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

The scrolls were written over two thousand years ago and were discovered in the 1950s in desert caves.

Five of the 972 scrolls were put online today, including the biblical Book of Isaiah.

Using Google technology, users can search for specific passages and translate them into English.

All of the scrolls are currently at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Both teams are working to have all the scrolls available online.

New FCC net neutrality rules for US broadband providers are set to go into effect on November 20. The rules were drafted last year, but have been on hold pending an official announcement of adoption by the agency.

In practical terms, there are two rules and an exception which renders their actual effect less than clear. The first rule mandates transparency with regard to network management practices:

Transparency. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their broadband services

No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful Web sites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services

Adding to its ever-increasing Prime catalog, Amazon has added a new streaming licensing agreement with FOX.

The new deal will bump Amazon's library from 9000 movies and TV shows to 11,000, starting this fall.

TV shows being added are “24,” “The X-Files,” “NYPD Blue,” “Arrested Development,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Ally McBeal,” and some older movies like “Speed,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Doctor Dolittle,” “Last of the Mohicans,” and “Office Space.”

Concludes Amazon:

We have received very positive feedback from Prime members about Prime instant videos. Customers love the instant access to thousands of movie and TV favorites. Since the launch of Prime instant videos in February, we have more than doubled the library to 11,000 titles and will continue to add more of our customers’ favorite movies and TV shows to Prime instant videos.

According to JPMorgan Chase, Apple has cut down orders to vendors in the supply chain for its iPad.

Analyst Mark Moskowitz says orders have been cut by 25 percent and it is the first cut in the history of the iPad.

Despite the drop, the analyst did not lower his projection of 10.9 million to 12 million units of iPad shipments in the third and fourth quarters.

Apple and the manufacturers have not confirmed the move, but the analyst cites weakening demand in Europe as the cause. As the media continuously reminds us, Europe has been having economic issues.

Google is finalizing contracts before it launches its much-hyped YouTube "channels," says sources.

The channels will feature regularly scheduled content on different themes, including sports and fashion.

Some of the channels will be available within 60 days, and a general launch is ready for early 2012.

YouTube has paid millions of dollars to content creators who will develop content for the channels.

Google will make back its original investment via ad revenue, and then share the rest of the revenue afterwards with its partners.

Chinese mobile giant Huawei has announced their new Honor Android smartphone, which they say can have 72 hour battery life on a single charge.

The Honor runs on Android 2.3.5, has a 4-inch screen, a 1.4GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, a microUSB port and dual cameras.

Packing a 1900 mAh battery is what gives the phone its expected battery life.

The phone will be launched in China, Russia, the Middle East and markets in Asia-Pacific sometime in the next quarter.

Pricing was not revealed.

According to multiple sources, Apple will announce the iPhone 5, at its headquarters in Cupertino on October 4th.

The headquarters is where Apple has chosen to launch all their iPhones and iPad devices, to date.

Although it is unclear when the phone will actually be released, Apple has blacked out vacation days for employees for October 9-15, indicating that a major product launch will be in that time period.

Updated specs for the phone are likely to be an A5 dual-core processor, an 8MP camera, mobile payments (NFC?), a slightly larger display and more memory.

Verizon and AT&T will be getting the smartphone, but there has been massive speculation that Sprint is getting the device, as well.

The latest rumor is that Barnes & Noble is preparing to launch a new tablet by the end of the year.

Following in the footsteps of the Nook Color e-reader/tablet, the book company will release the Nook Acclaim for $350, making it a more fully featured tablet than the Color.

Prices for the Nook Simple Touch ($140) and the Nook Color ($250) will stay the same, giving B&N three devices in its line.

There was no word on specs, but an October release date was cited.

The device could be a response to Amazon's imminent tablet, which will likely retail for under $250 and be a strong competitor to the market leading iPad.

Netflix has signed a new licensing deal to stream films from DreamWorks Animation, the hit studio behind animated film franchises like "Shrek."

The deal will replace a current (but less lucrative) deal DWA has with HBO.

DreamWorks is said to be making $30 million per picture over a specific time period (likely 3-5 years).

Says DWA CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg:

We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed. This is a game-changing deal.

You’re seeing power moving back into the hands of content creators. When a company like DreamWorks ends a long-running pay TV deal — when a new buyer in the space steps up — that’s a really interesting landscape shift.

Samsung says its new smash hit smartphone has hit 10 million units sold, without even launching in the U.S.

The Galaxy S II has seen a massive uptick in sales the last two months, after launching in April in Korea.

Samsung's new device has a 4.27-inch WVGA Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, Android 2.3.4, a 1.2GHz Samsung dual-core processor, an 8.49mm thin chassis (at lowest), an 8MP camera with autofocus and 1080p recording, NFC support, 4G, a 2MP front-side camera and HSPA+, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0+HS.

Furthermore, the device will run on Samsung's updated TouchWiz UI and weighs just 4 ounces.

So far, in the U.S., the device has only been available through Sprint since the 16th, and will hit T-Mobile and AT&T next month.

AT&T has said today it has restored cell service for most of the users in Southern California that experienced an outage yesterday and today.

Starting at 3pm yesterday, customers lost service completely or at least had difficulty making/receiving calls. Data and texts were not affected.

Sokeswoman Meredith Red says (via PCM) the downtime was due to a hardware equipment problem, a mechanical issue with the switching equipment that routes calls through the network.

900 towers around LA County were affected but service is now mostly restored.

Red says the "handful of towers" left will be up and running by the end of the night.

Facebook and security firm Sophos have warned visitors of a new hoax affecting millions of Facebook users.

The scam, which is a message that purports Facebook may begin charging a '$10 Gold Membership' if you don't forward the message before midnight, has been sent to million of users duped into sharing it with their friends.

Says Sophos:

It’s amazing what people will believe when they are sent a message from a trusted friend - but let me assure you, Facebook is *not* going to ask you for your payment when you sign onto the site tomorrow morning. And no, the announcement of Facebook beginning to charge its users has *not* been on the news.

As I explained at the end of last week, these claims are complete and utter poppycock. If a friend of yours forwards you the message, admonish them for spreading a chain letter and suggest they inform all of their friends that they were mistaken.

Microsoft has launched their new daily deals service.

Adding it to the Bing suite of services, Microsoft has unveiled its new Deals platform this week.

A daily deal site like Groupon, Living Social and others, Deals brings together deals from large stores and small merchants, and is an aggregator.

Says Microsoft: “Instead of building another program, we’re harnessing deals from major providers and retailers.”

Bing Deals offers 200,000 deals from around the nation, eliminating the need to sign up for a million different email notifications.

Check the site here: http://bing.com/deals

Pics have finally leaked for the Motorola Droid Razr (formerly dubbed the Droid HD, or Droid Spyder).

The Razr is said to be the thinnest LTE device on the market.

Specs for the device (unconfirmed) are:

4.3-inch 960 x 540 qHD Super AMOLED display
Unspecified dual-core 1.2GHz processor
8 megapixel camera with 1080p video recording and image stabilization
“HD” front-facing camera
1GB of RAM
Gorilla Glass and a Kevlar casing with a splash-guard coating
Webtop support and Lapdock accessories
4G LTE

The most popular torrent client in the world has now been opened up to new markets.

uTorrent, which has 100 million active users per month and a 50 percent market share, has now been updated to integrate iOS, PS3, Xbox 360 and Android devices.

Users can now use the client to sync all downloaded content to their devices with one click.

Later this year, if you purchase the premium version of the client (uTorrent Plus), you will be able to convert videos and audio to the most compatible file type for your device. For example, MKV files will be converted to MP4 for PS3 users that cannot play MKV.

To access the new features you will need uTorrent 3.1 alpha.

Apple has opened its first store in Hong Kong this week, in an effort to slow down the ever-growing gray market for Apple products in the nation.

Thousands of fans showed up and some camped out for 2 days to be the first into the store.

Located in the International Financial Center Mall, the store follows the trend of other similar locations and includes a glass spiral staircase.

There are now 4 Apple store in China, and the expansion to the nation is seen as the key to future earnings growth for China.

Revenue was up 600 percent from 2010 in the Greater China region and expected to keep growing.

The Chicago Public Library has added Kindle books to its extensive catalog.

To checkout the ebook, all you need is a valid zip code and a valid library card.

Readers can then head to the library's website and click and download.

Adds library spokesman Ruth Lednicer:

It’s really cool! Readers never have to leave their homes. They’ll have three weeks to read the book before it electronically returns itself to the library — there are no late fees.

Library Pirate wants to help poor college kids with the outrageous prices of university textbooks.

The site's goal is: "Our mission is simple and specific. To revolutionize the digital e-textbook industry and change it permanently."

Library Pirate, which runs on a "Hire-a-Pirate" initiative, lets users reduce the cost of digital textbook rentals and also keep that textbook forever, via the stripping of DRM.

TF explains:

First, the student lets LibraryPirate know the title of the book they’re looking for. Then, site staff locate the product on eTextbook rental services and advise the student of the current rental price. An example shown to us was a book costing $200, but with a time-limited digital rental copy also available at $118.50.

Participating students are then asked to purchase a gift certificate from the official seller for the full amount ($118.50 in our example) and send the gift code to LibraryPirate. Site staff then rent the book on the student’s behalf.

HP's newly fired CEO Leo Apotheker gets to leave with a golden parachute.

Spending just 11 months on the job, Apotheker gets to walk away with $25 million in severance, in addition to his $1.2 million salary and $4 million signing bonus. The CEO made about $100,000 per day while losing the company $20 billion in market value.

The golden parachute will be $7 million in cash and $18 million in stock options that vest immediately and leave him in charge of 800,000 shares of HP.

Former CEO Mark Hurd, who was fired last year after a sex scandal, was given severance pay of $12.2 million and was eligible for up to $53 million but he instead took a job with Oracle.

The HP board of directors just signed former eBay CEO Meg Whitman on as new CEO.

If there was any more reason to believe that daily deal giant is not a viable company, the site has now restated its 2010 earnings, slashing previous revenue by 57 percent.

Additionally, the company announced its chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after just five months on the job.

"Correcting for an error in its presentation of revenue," the company restated revenue for 2010 from $713.4 million down to $312.9 million.

The company was set to go public next month but cancelled due to the market conditions.

Now, instead of reporting revenue as all the money total received (what the subscriber pays) from sales of Groupons it will only report the merchant fees it makes.

Gartner analysts are predicting Apple's iPad will finish 2011 with nearly three quarters of all tablet sales worldwide.

Last year, they say, Apple had an 83 percent share. Of course, when you consider they also predict total tablet sales in 2011 to triple last year's numbers, that's certainly good news for Apple.

Android tablets are expected to account for 17 percent of the market in 2011, increasing from just 2.5 million units last year to 11 million this year.

Despite major gains by Android, Gartner says the iPad will be the leading tablet through at least 2015.

Gartner's Robert Cozza said:

Most of Apple's competitors are struggling to meet Apple's prices without considerably sacrificing margins. Screen quality and processing power are the two hardware features that vendors cannot afford to compromise on. They should consider everything else ‘nice to have,’ rather than essential, in order to keep bills-of-materials costs competitive with those of the iPad.

Confirming recent stories about their strategy for fighting Apple patent lawsuits, Samsung has officially acknowledged they plan to be more aggressive in their patent battle with Apple.

Since April, Apple has been filing lawsuits around the world, attempting to get Samsung smartphones and tablets taken off the market. Recent reports have suggested Samsung intends to respond in kind by suing to block sales of the next iPhone, expected next month.

Samsung's Lee Younghee told the Associated Press, "We’ll be pursuing our rights for this in a more aggressive way from now on." She accused Apple of "freeriding" on Samsung's own wireless patents.

It appears Amazon's rumored tablet could be unveiled at a press conference scheduled for next Wednesday.

The tablet, which is expected to run Android, could end up being the first serious competitor for Apple's iPad. Since its release last year, no tablet has even come close to the iPad's sales.

Although Apple has shown a willingness to use patent lawsuits to get the most promising competition taken off the market, right now it's not clear they have anything to worry about. If Amazon enters the tablet market, that could change quickly.

Invitations to Amazon's Wednesday press event were reportedly vague. Perhaps they're taking a play from the Apple playbook, figuring speculation among the media and blogosphere will generate more buzz than actual details.

Arguably, Apple has more to fear from Amazon than any other potential tablet maker. Amazon already has cloud services, streaming video, and a successful e-book store to attract customers.

The decision, by Netflix, to increase the price for using both their disc by mail and streaming services isn't just costing them existing customers. According to Chief Financial Officer David Wells it has also resulted in fewer new subscribers.

Replying to a question yesterday at a Goldman Sachs conference, he said, "what we see is the word of mouth did make an impact."

He didn't elaborate on how much new subscriber growth was affected. He also emphasized, "We're still the market leader," but also admitted the continuing trend of subscribers cancelling wasn't anticipated.

In the past, he said, the effect of a price increase had been immediate, followed by a return to growth. That was not the case after the drastic changes announced in July.

"What we saw in Q3," said Wells, "was a spike and then a sort of a steady response through the quarter, so more cancels through the quarter."

Wells also pointed out there has been no international impact. Not exactly a surprise considering Netflix customers outside the US didn't experience any changes.

Blockbuster and Dish Network have just announced a new package called Blockbuster Movie Pass.

This new service will be similar to the combined disc by mail and streaming service Netflix recently abandoned. It offers unlimited movies and games by mail and streaming video, as well as in-store disc exchange at Blockbuster brick and mortar stores.

The catch is it's only available with a Dish Network subscribtion, although they did indicate Blockbuster may be launching a separate streaming service later for non-Dish subscribers at some point.

Another key feature of Blockbuster Movie Pass is the the availability of Blu-ray at no additional charge. Blu-ray discs cost extra for Netflix customers.

The key question is whether Dish Network's assertion that customers would prefer a streaming and disc rental service which is bundled with pay TV. There's no question such an approach is attractive to content partners, particularly Starz.

Recent trends toward cord cutting seem to suggest customers may be less interested.

Apple has the highest customer retention rate of all handset manufacturers by a wide margin according to a new report.

Although down from last year's figure of 95 percent, Apple's retention rate of 89 percent is far better than second place HTC's 39 percent. Half of those who are considering a switch from the iPhone are actually undecided, meaning their retention rate could be as high as 93 percent.

The numbers, which come from a survey conducted by UBS Research, show an even more important trend from Apple's point of view. More than 30 percent of Android users indicated their next phone would likely be an iPhone.

According to the survey results, Samsung's retention rate is unchanged from last year. Not surprisingly, RIM and Nokia are the big losers.

At 33 percent, RIM's customer retention rate is just over half what it was last year. Although interestingly that still leaves them ahead of Samsung. Of course, many Blackberry sales are for use on corporate networks running Blackberry server software.

Nokia's retention rate fell from 42 percent a year ago to 24 percent this year. No doubt this is partly due to Nokia's decision to abandon their Symbian OS.

VIA Technologies has sued Apple over patent infringement.

The company designs low-power microprocessors and controllers.

HTC recently made similar claims, unsurprisingly since HTC and Via have worked together multiple times.

The complaint, filed with the ITC and the U.S. district court, claims that all Apple devices using iOS and the A4/A5 processors are infringing on 'microprocessor functionality, namely “method and apparatus for double operand load” (6253312) and “instruction set for bi-directional conversion and transfer of integer and floating point data” (6253311 and 6754810),' said Xbit.

Adds Via:

Via has built up an extensive IP portfolio consisting of over 5000 patents as a result of significant investments in world class technology research and development. We are determined to protect our interests and the interests of our stockholders when our patents are infringed upon.

Blockbuster is expected to announce a new streaming video service at a media event scheduled for later today.

Dish Network bought Blockbuster earlier this year. At the time, Blockbuster's most valuable asset, from Dish Network's point of view, may have been Movielink, the streaming video service Blockbuster purchased from a group of movie studios in 2007.

Despite years of trying to update its brick and mortar business with the addition of online rentals and kiosks, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy a year ago.

At today's media event, called "A Stream Come True," it's likely they will be introducing a subscription streaming service similar Netflix's Watch Instantly.

Given their ownership by Dish Network, it's likely to only be available for subscribers to the satellite service initially, but may be offered to the general public down the road.

Thanks to Facebook, you no longer need an invitation to join the popular streaming music service.

CEO Daniel Ek announced that users can now log in with their Facebook accounts and have access to the free streaming music service.

As with other free users, the first 6 months are unlimited but are then reduced to 10 hours of music per month afterwards, unless of course, you upgrade to the premium subscriptions.

The first premium sub is $5 per month for unlimited ad-free music while the second, more popular option costs $10 and gives access to higher quality tracks, mobile access (tablet, phone, etc) and offline listening capabilities.

Facebook, at their F8 developer conference yesterday announced deals with multiple music-streaming service, bringing music "discovery" to the social network.

George Lucas' blockbuster franchise can add another milestone to its celebrated history, the biggest first-week sales for a Blu-ray, ever.

The 9-disc-set made $84 million globally, with 515,000 units sold in North America, alone.

Additionally, the set was the most pre-ordered title, ever.

Despite its popularity, fans have universally panned the films due to their "tweaks," such as added lines or re-done scenes to the original series.

The set includes all six movies, and three extra discs with hours of interviews, making-of documentaries and deleted and alternate scenes.

The Justice Department has confirmed that the FBI has arrested two alleged members of LulzSec and Anonymous.

A third suspect, has had charges secured and an arrest is forthcoming.

Additionally, search warrants were being executed in more cases.

Cody Kretsinger, 23, Christopher Doyon, 47 and Joshua Covelli, 26 were each indicted. Kretsinger was charged with conspiracy and the unauthorized impairment of a protected computer while the others were charged with conspiracy to cause intentional damage to a protected computer, causing intentional damage to a protected computer and aiding and abetting.

Kretsinger, known as "recursion," is said to have been a former member of LulzSec, and is accused of hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment earlier this year via SQL injection.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has confirmed today at the Facebook F8 developer conference that the company's services will be integrated into the social network, except for in the U.S. where it is illegal due to law.

After logging into Facebook, users can see what movies or TV shows their friends have been streaming and watch right from their browser within Facebook via an overlay player.

Hastings says the services will be integrated in 44 countries, but the U.S.' Video Privacy Protection Act, passed in the 80s, does not allow the integration to happen here in the U.S.

Netflix currently has 23 million subscribers, with most in the U.S., making the new deal pretty useless.

Hastings says the VPPA is currently being reviewed and could be amended soon.

AOC releases specs and prices for their i2353Fh monitor.

The new ultra-thin monitor is just 9.6mm thick, 23-inches and LED-backlit.

An IPS panel with 178/178 degree viewing angles, AOC's display has 1080p resolution, a 5ms response time, two HDMI connectors and D-Sub.

The i2353fh also has a dynamic contrast ratio of 50,000,000:1 and 250 cd/m2 typical brightness.

AOC has put an MSRP of €179.

One analyst believes the move is coming.

Wedbush Securities, in a report to clients today, says Amazon could be ready to purchase Netflix and become the market leader in the streaming business.

Says the client note:

Upon reflection, it appears to us that the driver for the separation of Netflix into two businesses—Netflix.com (for streaming) and Qwikster.com (for DVD rentals—was to position the streaming business for sale to Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN)...In our view, Amazon has always wanted to be in the streaming business, and has been constrained from buying Netflix due to tax considerations.

"We arrive at our $155 price target through a sum-of-the-parts valuation analysis that values the Netflix streaming business at $130/share, and the Qwikster physical DVD rental business at $25/share. For Netflix streaming, we have assigned a 24x P/E multiple to our 2012 diluted EPS estimate of $3.63, plus an additional 50% premium should Amazon acquire it. For Qwikster, we have assigned a 14x P/E multiple to our 2012 diluted EPS estimate of $1.75. This multiple is roughly in-line with its primary DVD rental competitor, Coinstar.

Hulu Plus now has 1 million paid subscribers according to CEO Jason Kilar.

The announcement from Hulu's chief executive came at an investor conference yesterday. This milestone matched a prediction by Kilar earlier in the year when they had 875,000 paying customers.

He also promised the company's content investments will reach $375 million in 2011.

Hulu first added a subscription service to their free offerings less than a year ago. They immediately faced criticism over a shortage content.

Since then they have secured exclusive deals to add movies from Criterion Collection and Miramax, as well as expanding their selection of TV episodes.

Google's Eric Schmidt faced accusations of his company illegally rigging search results to favor his company's services at a US Senate subcommittee hearing yesterday.

Although some Senators were clearly on Google's side, the majority made thinly veiled accusations that Google's search algorithms, combined with their dominant position in the search market, violated antitrust laws.

Complaining about the ranking of Google Products listings in their search results, Utah Senator Mike Lee said:

I see you magically coming up third every time. I don't know whether you call this a separate algorithm or whether you've reverse engineered one algorithm, but either way you've cooked it, so that you're always third.

Kara Swisher has reported today that former eBay CEO Meg Whitman will be named the new CEO of HP.

Current CEO Leo Apotheker will be fired after just 11 months on the job.

As reported yesterday, in his 11 months on the job, Apotheker has lost HP $20 billion in market value while slashing sales forecasts three times.

Apotheker, who had a failed stint as CEO of software giant SAP, has recently purchased Autonomy for $10 billion, a move that has been completely criticized by all shareholders due to its huge price tag. The CEO also shut down webOS and firesaled their tablets at $99, just a few months after the company's acquisition of the mobile OS from Palm.

Sources say Whitman will be hired for the long-term, not just an interim position as speculated.

Says one source:

Meg is not someone who wants to be a steward of a process to find another CEO for HP. She wants to run the company and be a strong leader for what she considers an important tech powerhouse.

OnStar, the service that allows connected drivers to call live operators in case of emergency or even for directions, has recently changed its ToS and has come under fire.

Beginning later this year, OnStar will continue collecting data from users who have discontinued their service, unless they specifically call in and say they want the connection severed.

Speed, location, and other GPS data will remain collected, even if you don't pay for the service anymore.

Adding to concerns is the fact that the ToS says the data collected can be shared with or sold to third parties for any purpose, as long as personal identifiers are removed.

GM, the owners of OnStar, say leaving the connection on will let it send car owners updated warranties, recall data or warn of dangerous weather conditions.

YouTube has announced today that their 3D video conversion tools are now live, after months of testing.

You can now convert your standard 2D videos into 3D, although you will still need a 3D glasses-free display (or a display + glasses) if you want to truly enjoy the new videos.

Furthermore, the company says they have removed the 15 minute video limit as long as you are a verified user.

The company is quick to note that the video will not be as good of quality as video caught properly with 3D capable cameras. The software simply "measures the motion and color of a single video to simulate depth and hobble together a hacky, 3D-ish video," says TC.

Finally, YouTube rounded out their announcements confirming a video editing partnership with Magistro and an effects partnership with Vlix.

Would be wholesale mobile provider LightSquared says they have a fix for GPS interference problems with their proposed LTE network. Unfortunately their solution raises as many questions as it answers.

LightSquared's plan involves operating a terrestrial 4G network in a frequency range normally reserved for satellite communications. This has raised objections from both private industry and government regulators due to interference issues with a broad range of GPS systems.

LightSquared's network would cause problems for high precision GPS units used by the military, and also in a wide range of commercial applications, including aviation, agriculture & surveying.

Their proposed solution would require GPS users to modify existing equipment to use newly developed hardware which they say is capable of filtering out the problem transmissions.

In a conference call with the media, a company spokesman said, "LightSquared is in active conversations with the government about covering the cost in whatever way we can legally, of retrofitting all the federal government GPS precision devices."

Security measure could impact on Linux dual-boot options.

In order for a PC to be sold bearing a "Designed for Windows 8" logo, it must ship with secure booting (enabled by UEFI) enabled. This could pose problems for users who wish to install (an unsigned) open-source operating system.

For most users, the solution would simply be to disable the secure booting in the UEFI settings. That will not effect Windows 8 booting. However, this does mean that the hardware vendor is responsible for making it possible to disable the security feature.

Why protect the bootpath? In recent years, malware authors have resorted to attacking the bootpath to get around security features in Windows. As an example, the TDL-4 rootkit utilizes a bootkit to disable the Windows kernel mode code signing policy of the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

The only airtight way to counter the threat is to protect the bootpath by requiring that all firmware and software involved in the boot process have been signed by a CA. Google has done the same thing with its Chromebooks to avoid bootpath attacks. Google mandates that a Chromebook feature a physical switch (under the battery component) which would allow it to be disabled.

"Cloud console" service makes jump to UK market.

Partnered with retailer GAME, OnLive offers UK gamers a subscription to play the latest top-tier games on demand, delivered over the Internet form OnLive's powerful cloud gaming technology. UK gamers can play on their HDTV, PC, Mac or any combination of the above, regardless of performance capabilities, and soon they will even be able to play on iPad and Android tablets.

They can buy the games they want individually, with prices starting at £1.99, or subscribe to OnLive's PlayPack Bundle, which now offers access to more than 100 games for just £6.99/month.

OnLive has struck a strategic partnership in the UK with BT, the first internet service provider in the UK to offer cloud-based gaming to customers through the exclusive partnership. To mark the launch, BT is giving its 5 million broadband customers three months free access to 100+ games when customers sign up at: www.bt.com/onlive.

"We're incredibly excited to see the OnLive community expand across the globe, bringing OnLive’s unprecedented live instant gaming experience to Europe. UK and US members can now play live in our massive spectating Arena and chat with players and spectators across the Atlantic," said Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO, OnLive.

Adobe to deliver major update for "game console of the web."

Adobe has announced that Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will launch early next month. It promises that the release will enable the next generation of immersive application experiences across devices and platforms including Android, Apple iOS (via AIR), BlackBerry Tablet OS, Mac OS, Windows, connected TVs and more.

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will enable game publishers to deliver "console quality" 2D and 3D games over the Internet to nearly all PCs, and a host of other mobile devices.

"Media companies can take advantage of new features to seamlessly deliver protected feature-length, cinema-quality HD video through the Web, in mobile apps, and even with surround sound for connected TVs. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 provide a cross-device entertainment platform, enabling the best in online gaming and premium video while helping content publishers to reach the broadest possible audience with highly-leveraged development investments."

Internet radio service Pandora has shown off its new completely redesigned HMTL5-based player, now available to all users.

Thanks to a new influx of cash after going public during the summer, Pandora has been testing the service and has now rolled it out to the public.

Besides being easier to use, the old Flash-based service is now completely gone, a relief to many.

Perhaps more notably is the fact that Pandora has now removed the 40-hours-per-month cap it had on free music.

As a long time user I can confirm it's much faster and frankly more aesthetically pleasing.

Check it out, as always, here: Pandora

Jon Oberheide of Duo Security has released a video demonstrating two security vulnerabilities which could allow apps to take control of Android devices.

The video was created to generate interest in the firm's upcoming workshop on mobile security at the SOURCE security conference in Barcelona this November.

Last year Oberheide was responsible for exposing a weakness in Google's Android Marketplace, which allowed the remote installation of malicious code from within an app.

The first vulnerability demonstrated in the new video affects all Android devices. It allows an already installed app to install other apps without prompting the user to approve their permissions.

He says this problem can also be exploited by an attack which compromises an otherwise safe app after it has been installed.

The second attack demonstrated would allow an app to gain full control over an Android device by using a Linux kernel exploit which bypasses security permission limitations.

Yesterday, 100 House Republicans signed a letter that urged the current administration to end the DOJ lawsuit and let AT&T purchase T-Mobile for $39 billion.

Today, Bloomberg is reporting that 99 of those 100 reps have received political donations from AT&T since 2009, raking in a total of $963,275.

Earlier this month, surprisingly, AT&T's bid to buy the rival carrier was blocked by a DOJ lawsuit which calls the acquisition anti-competitive.

Additionally, the DOJ has said that blocking the deal will help save jobs in the U.S.

If successfully blocked, AT&T will have to pay a huge breakup fee of $3 billion to Deutsche Telekom (TMo's parent company) as well as $4 billion worth of wireless spectrum.

A study from NPD Group suggests Microsoft's marketing efforts for Windows Phone are beginning to generate interest from consumers, but there are still major hurdles to clear before it can be a success.

The study reveals that 45 percent of people who own or are planning to buy a smartphone are considering a Windows Phone handset.

However, the biggest obstacle for the platform appears to be a lack of visibility. The same study showed 45 percent of consumers don't know enough about Microsoft's mobile OS to consider buying a handset running it.

Furthermore, more than 20 percent of consumers who plan to buy a smartphone in the next six months said they aren't interested in Windows Phone because of the time or money they already have invested in another platform, such as Android or the iPhone.

That's good news for manufacturers of Android handsets, which accounted for at least of half of all smartphone sales in each of the last three quarters.

"Windows Phone 7 has a way to go before consumers really understand what it is," said Linda Barrabee, research director for NPD's Connected Intelligence. "But with the right marketing mojo, apps portfolio, and feature-rich hardware, Microsoft could certainly improve its standing and chip away at Android's dominant market position."

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has accused Google of discrimination today, thanks to the "graphic sexual term" that accompanies his name in Google searches.

In fact, if you type in "Santorum" into Google, the first result will give you this description (possible NSFW):

Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.

I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they'd get rid of it. If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.

To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can't handle but I suspect that's not true.

According to a new Pew Internet study, young adults send/receive an average of 110 texts per day, far above the norm for other age groups.

The users, Americans aged 18-24, exchange 3200 texts per month.

Overall, 73 percent of American adults with cell phones text and 31 percent even prefer to text rather than talk on the phone.

All carriers offer unlimited texting and the service has become a standard.

The average cell phone user exchanges 41.5 messages per day.

Charts and full results of the study:

AT&T finally announces release date.

The carrier says the highly anticipated Android superphone will be released on October 2nd for $200 with contract.

Sprint has already launched their version of the phone, and T-Mobile's is expected next week.

Samsung's new device has a 4.27-inch WVGA Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, Android 2.3.4, a 1.2GHz Samsung dual-core processor, an 8.49mm thin chassis (at lowest), an 8MP camera with autofocus and 1080p recording, NFC support, 4G, a 2MP front-side camera and HSPA+, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0+HS.

Furthermore, the device will run on Samsung's updated TouchWiz UI and weighs just 4 ounces.

Based on the results of a recent survey, Redbox could be the biggest beneficiary of Netflix's decision to increase prices for combined streaming and disc rental plans.

The report, from Minneapolis based Magid Associates, indicates more than half of Netflix customers already rent from Redbox and a significant number of those expect to rent more from the industry leading kiosk-based service.

Magid's Mike Vorhaus pointed the finger at Netflix's limited selection of streaming content. He said, "A major reason that many consumers are not happy with their Netflix service is due to the quality of the content selection in the streaming service."

Since the announcement of their new plans two months ago, Netflix has suffered a series of setbacks.

Almost immediately after the announcement their stock price dropped 10%. It has continued to decline following additional announcements of a larger than expected subscriber decline and, most recently the decision to completely separate disc rental into the new Qwikster brand.

After just one year on the job, it appears the board of HP is about ready to fire the CEO Leo Apotheker.

In one possible scenario, Apotheker would be replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, likely in an interim situation.

The current CEO has only had 11 months on the job and has lost HP $20 billion in market value while slashing sales forecasts three times.

Following the news of the board's possible decision, the HP stock jumped 8 percent, with investors clearly happy with the news.

Apotheker, who had a failed stint as CEO of software giant SAP, has recently purchased Autonomy for $10 billion, a move that has been completely criticized by all shareholders due to its huge price tag. The CEO also shut down webOS and firesaled their tablets at $99, just a few months after the company's acquisition of the mobile OS from Palm.

According to a report from content delivery company Pando Networks, South Korea has the fastest Internet speeds in the world with an average download speed of over 17 Megabits per second.

By comparison, German speeds were barely above 5Mbps, which was still better than the US or UK. Those countries had average speeds of 4.93Mbps and 4.79Mbps respectively.

The report is based on data collected on downloads from Pando's content delivery network during the first half of 2011.

Northern European countries were well represented in the top 15, including Sweden (7^th), Denmark (9^th), Netherlands (11^th), Finland (12^th) & Norway (15^th).

Looking at the speed data overlaid on a map, one thing that stands out is how slow Internet speeds are in developed countries with strong content production industries.

On the other end of the spectrum, countries where tech industries dominate the economy, including South Korea and Finland, tend to also have relatively fast Internet service. Japan is something of an outlier, likely reflecting the fact they are representative of both categories.

As we get closer to October, more information (and speculation) about Apple's plans for the iPhone 5 continue to emerge. The latest is a report indicating Apple will hold a media event on Tuesday, October 4.

Don't assume the iPhone 5 will be available immediately afterward. Recent rumors of production delays suggest it may not be ready as soon as Apple had initially planned.

According to unnamed sources cited by AllThingsD, it will be available, "within a few weeks," of new Apple CEO Tim Cook showing off the device.

There has been a lot of speculation that the iPhone 5 will hit stores some time in October. That seems to be confirmed by leaks from mobile carriers indicating a launch date of October 15.

However, if the report of production problems is accurate, it's possible the only new product available on that date could be the rumored iPhone 4S, a new discount version of the iPhone 4 aimed at the budget smartphone market.

GameFly, the current market leader in video game rentals-by-mail, has responded to Netflix's recent decision to split its streaming and DVD services and add video game rentals to its new by-mail platform, Qwikster.

Says the company, via JoyStiq:

GameFly has expanded steadily over the past nine years by focusing exclusively on video gamers. We are the only retailer offering games physically and digitally for both rental and purchase.

Gamers can try before they buy, choosing from new releases and classic titles that span the last decade. GameFly has more than 8000 games for 10 console and handheld systems to choose from, and over 1500 Windows/Mac games are available for download.

GameFly is the leading video game rental service, and we have continued to grow even as Blockbuster and Redbox increased their investment in console games.

In October, Logitech will begin selling a new product to turn your Android or iOS device into a remote control.

The Harmony Link is a small piece of hardware which performs the standard functions of a universal remote. It requires an iPad, iPhone, or Android device running the accompanying Harmony Link app to give it commands via Wi-Fi.

A single Harmony Link can control up to eight devices, and even take commands from multiple tablets or phones.

The iPad Harmony Link app will include a personalized program guide provided by Rovi. The iPhone and Android versions of the app will not have this feature initially, but will be able to control the Harmony Link hardware.

Ashish Arora, vice president and general manager of Logitech's Digital Home Group said:

Our research revealed that many iPad owners are using their iPad on the sofa while watching TV, many of them seeking ways to find out what shows are on. We set out to make this experience easier. Using Logitech Harmony Link and the Harmony Link App, iPad users can browse for what is on television, and with one touch of "watch now" icon next to the show of their choice, they can automatically turn on their TV and other electronics, and tune directly to the show they want to watch.

After a few months in invite-only beta.

Google has announced today that their social network Google+ is now available to all, and no longer in invite-only beta.

Additionally, the popular "Hangouts" feature is now available on mobile devices.

Hangouts for the web has also been updated with the ability to screen-share and the ability to name your Hangouts.

Furthermore, Hangouts on Air is now a possibility, allowing users to make public broadcasts that others can tune in to.

The first broadcaster will Black Eyed Pea's Will.i.am.

Finally, there is also improved SMS support, better +mentions and +1'ing comments and one of the big things is that Huddle has now been renamed as Messenger, says TechRadar.

Cellular South, a regional mobile carrier nearly 900,000 customers in the southeastern US, has joined the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit to block the buyout of T-Mobile USA by AT&T.

Cellular South's criticisms are similar to those expressed by the Department Of Justice and the attorneys general from various states. However, they also add an additional detail of particular importance to smaller providers.

Specifically, they believe the loss of T-Mobile will lead to higher prices for roaming deals, which are essential to carriers who don't have a nationwide network of their own.

Their complaint alleges, "The proposed merger will allow AT&T to increase this influence by eliminating T-Mobile as an independent source of demand for wireless devices and an independent roaming partner."

Parties in the lawsuit are scheduled to meet tomorrow for a conference, at which time the judge expects them to discuss terms for a potential settlement.

T-Mobile’s Chief Marketing Officer Cole Broadman has noted today that there will be no iPhone 5 on the carrier, at least not this year.

At an internal company event the CMO is quoted as saying "we are not going to get the iPhone 5 this year."

There was no other word on why the carrier would not be getting the device, but the likely culprit is AT&T's pending purchase of the carrier for $39 billion.

Apple is expected to launch the device on October 15th around the globe including on Verizon, Sprint and AT&T in the States.

Just a month after announcing the end of webOS hardware, HP has begun laying off employees in the division.

AllThingsD says the company will lay off up to 525 employees this week.

HP would not admit the number but did confirm that the layoffs had begun.

Added the company:

As communicated on August 18, HP will discontinue the development of webOs devices within the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2011, which ends Oct. 31, 2011. As part of this decision, the webOS GBU is undergoing a reduction in workforce. Today’s actions are part of this initiative.

During this time, we stand by our commitment to our webOS customers and will work to ensure that support and service for customers are not adversely affected. HP is exploring ways to leverage webOS software.

Rovio Entertainment, the company behind the blockbuster franchise 'Angry Birds' has confirmed today that they are working on partnerships with B&N and Starbucks in an effort to sell a broader range of products.

For Starbucks, Rovio will have in-store promotions, such as electronic leader boards or the ability to buy special virtual goods.

For Barnes & Noble, the company already has electronic leader boards but wants to add books and stuffed animals.

Says Rovio:

It’s tying in the real world with the virtual world. Retailers get new customers who’ve not been to their stores yet, and repeat customers. However, while we are always looking for great partnerships to better meet the needs of our customers, at this time we have no announcements regarding any work with Rovio Entertainment.

Verizon has announced the latest milestone today.

In a press statement, the company says their VOD catalog is now at 30,000 monthly titles, half of which are free.

The service is available to customers of the company's FiOS TV offering.

Additionally, the cable company says subscribers can rent/watch 4000 movies and TV episodes on their PC, mobile or HDTV with "Flex View."

Finally, Verizon says it will become the first cable operator to offer VOD rentals with a 48-hour window. All other companies only offer 24 hours for rentals.

Dish and Blockbuster are expected to announce their new streaming service this week, taking advantage of the recent weakness in market leader Netflix.

At launch, the service will only be for Dish subscribers, but is expected to have a wide release later this year.

Calling it "the most comprehensive home entertainment package ever," Dish will unveil the details on Friday.

Blockbuster, which was saved from death earlier this year by Dish, has come back leaner in the brick-and-mortar business but stronger in its online presence with a DVD-by-mail service and a VOD service.

Although unconfirmed, there are reports that the new offering could include Starz content. Netflix will lose its Starz content in February when a four-year deal runs out.

If Apple's numerous lawsuits against Android go badly for Samsung, they may already have their future strategy mapped out in the form of Bada.

Announced with little fanfare in 2009, Bada isn't exactly an OS. It's more of a middleware application layer which is tied closely with an embedded OS called Nucleus RTOS.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Samsung has plans to make Bada open source next year. If true, this may be purely a PR move. It's unclear exactly what the value of Bada is to other phone vendors since it only supports a single embedded OS right now.

That means won't run on the standard ARM chips used in most smartphones. This is intentional since it was initially created for emerging markets like China where cost trumps performance. Of course, that might be the point. If Android disappears, Samsung will want a replacement for it in places like the US and Europe. That means developing a new OS, probably based on Linux since Bada is already built to work in a POSIX environment.

Samsung has put significant development efforts into an app ecosystem for Bada. While there isn't a big app selection yet, particularly for the markets Android dominates, it's still not a bad starting point. At the very least, it could be seen as a head start in establishing a developer community.

As the presumed October launch of the iPhone 5 gets closer, signs that Samsung may launch a series of patent lawsuits to block sales of the device continue to surface.

Over the weekend a report came out of South Korea that Samsung is leaning toward a suit blocking sales of the next iPhone in that country. Now it seems they may take the same approach in Europe.

Samsung had no comment on the claim from an unnamed source according to a Reuters article.

From Apple's point of view, the obvious question is what, exactly, do they stand to gain from killing Android?

The iPhone is by far the most successful smartphone on the planet. If they are planning to introduce a discount model based on the iPhone 4, and that seems likely, it stands a good chance of being the number two model.

The hype of a new iPhone is unmatched by any competitor. In fact, you could argue Samsung's Galaxy S II's public visibility was increased more by Apple's legal campaign than anything Samsung could have done.

Google Wallet was launched yesterday exclusively for Sprint customers using the Nexus S 4G Android phone. It is a new payment system which uses Near Field Communication (NFC), enabling your phone to communicate directly with a merchant's point of sale hardware.

Google's initial partner in processing payments for Google Wallet is MasterCard. That means retailers will need to have a MasterCard PayPass terminal installed. Those are currently rare.

Google has indicated they are working on support for Visa, Discover & American Express cards as well.

If your MasterCard isn't issued by Citi, another partner, you will have to transfer funds to a Google Prepaid MasterCard to use them with Google Wallet. You can also transfer funds from non-MasterCard sources.

To find retailers who accept Google Wallet payments, you can use the tool on Google's website or PayPass locators from MasterCard on their website or in their Android app. You can also look for various logos on or around their card processing terminals.

Last week, while showing off their upcoming Windows 8 operating system, Microsoft dropped a bombshell, explaining that HTML5 "Metro-style apps" for Windows 8 would be "plug-in free."

Rather than using plug-ins like Silverlight to render content on web pages, it will rely on HTML5, said Microsoft. This is similar to the approach taken by Apple for Mobile Safari on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Today, Adobe has said that Flash will be the exception to rule, due to Adobe AIR.

Says the post by Adobe:

Adobe is about enabling content publishers and developers to deliver the richest experiences for their users, independent of technology, including HTML5 and Flash. We are working closely with Microsoft, Google, Apple and others in the HTML community to drive innovation in HTML5, to make it as rich as possible for delivering world-class content on the open Web and through App Stores.

Although Samsung's Galaxy S II has only been available in the US for a short time, rumors are already beginning to surface about its successor, the Galaxy S III.

A report from an anonymous source posting on the 4chan message board claims to list specs for the phone. The information is claimed to come directly from someone at Samsung.

If the leak is genuine, it looks to be an impressive unit:

• 2GHZ processor
• 1.5GB RAM
• 32GB storage
• 4.65" Super AMOLED display
• 1280×1024 resolution
• 10 Megapixel camera
• FullHD (1080p) video recording @ 60fps

Thanks to its second high-profile case in which an employee lost a prototype of an upcoming iPhone, Apple is hiring two new security personnel in an effort to fight theft of its product.

Additionally, the new personnel will be in charge of fighting against the growing amount of counterfeiting done of Apple products.

The two new "experienced professionals" will join the company that in the past has hired ex-FBI agents as well as intelligence and law enforcement vets to protect their investments.

One security consulting firm, TraceSecurity, says Apple's paranoia is at least warranted:

Corporate espionage, that’s big money. Billion-dollar money. The paranoia is justified. Whatever they’re trying to do, their competitors want to know. Everybody wants to know.

The results of a study by Harris Interactive seem to indicate the adoption of e-book readers is leading to people in the US buying and reading more books.

The numbers include both dedicated e-readers, like the Kindle, and tablet computers with e-reader apps.

Half of all the people surveyed indicated they read the same number of books per year as in previous years. That number is essentially the same for those with and without e-readers.

The difference comes in people who read more or fewer books than before. 35% of respondents with e-readers said they read more books than before, compared to just 16% of those without.

Meanwhile, fewer than 10% of people using e-book readers are reading less, compared to nearly a quarter of non-e-reader users.

It will be interesting to see if the trend continues in the future. Although the survey indicates 15% of people are likely to purchase an e-reader in the next year, that number isn't broken down between dedicated e-readers and tablets.

With even Barnes & Noble apparently moving toward tablets, it's entirely possible they won't. However, for many e-reader buyers a tablet is simply not an option financially.

According to Qualcomm's President of Internet Services, the company plans to slow down on its BREW mobile OS, seen on feature phones for 10 years now.

Says Rob Chandhok (via Om):

[It's] not really the thing that’s in the spotlight for us anymore….we shouldn’t be too surprised: it’s been around for 10 years, there aren’t too many operating systems that have been around with only a couple of revisions in 10 years in the market….the pace might be a little bit slower than it was before, just because the market has changed.

The iPhone 5 may have bigger hurdles to overcome than competition from Android. There is a report that significant production problems could force Apple to push back the launch date.

The most credible reports for Apple's planned launch of the next generation iPhone, primarily based on sources inside mobile carriers both in the US and Europe, say it should be here by the middle of October.

A new story from 9to5 Mac says production delays on one assembly line could delay the launch for a short time, and even lead to shortages of the much anticipated phone for a few months.

They say reports that millions of iPhones have already been produced actually refer to a new bargain version of the iPhone 4, which has been rumored for some time.

If accurate, this could be good news for manufacturers of high end Android phones. A shortage of iPhones over the Christmas season could boost their sales significantly.

Google Executive Chairman Erich Schmidt will defend his company's business practices in a US Senate antitrust subcommittee hearing later this week titled, "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?"

Google has come under heavy fire over the last few years over allegations that it abuses its position as the leading search engine in the US and various other parts of the world. Schmidt will be one of two Google representatives at Wednesday's hearing, and the only one who is actually an employee of the search giant.

Google initially resisted requests for Schmidt and Google CEO Larry Page, who replaced Schmidt in that position, to appear at the hearing. Page, who is in court today working on a potential lawsuit settlement with Oracle, will not be attending.

After his testimony, the committee will hear from a panel mostly representing companies critical of Google. They include Nextag CEO Jeff Katz, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and former Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Barnett, who represents Expedia.

Last week, at the BUILD event, Microsoft gave out 5000 Windows 8 developer tablets to attendees.

The Samsung-built tablet is now selling for thousands on eBay in a couple of auctions, with developers or early adopters overly eager to purchase.

One auction, with 7 bids currently up to $2700, has the following:

Here are the specs:
2nd Generation Intel Core i5
Samsung Super PLS 1366x768 display
UEFI BIOS
4GB DDR3
64GB solid state HD
Sensors, USB, micro SD, HDMI
11.6' diagonal, 909g, 12.9mm

Verizon has introduced their first sub-$100 LTE phone today, the Pantech Breakout.

That price point requires a 2-year contract and a minimum 2GB data tier plan, but at $99, the price is significantly cheaper than Verizon's other offerings (unless you do the Amazon promotion).

For specs, the Breakout runs on Gingerbread, has a 1 GHz single-core processor, a 4-inch touchscreen with 800×480 resolution, 720p HD video, Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS, dual cameras, and of course, Verizon's 4G LTE.

In Verizon stores, the cheapest 4G devices you will find are likely the high-end Droid Charge and Thunderbolt, each which retail for $200-250 with contract.

A settlement conference between Oracle and Google in the multi-billion dollar lawsuit over Java patents will take place today with the CEOs of both companies in attendance.

The suit was filed last year by Oracle following their purchase of Sun Microsystems, the creators of Java. It alleges Google willfully infringed on Sun patents and copyrights.

The meetings are part of a court effort to force the two sides into reaching a settlement. Oracle's Larry Ellison and Larry Page of Google were ordered to attend the conference personally by US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal earlier this month.

They were also instructed to make themselves available for additional conferences which could be required between now and the end of the month.

At the heart of the suit is Android's Dalvik Virtual Machine, which is a core component of the OS. The Dalvik VM is based on an open source implementation of the Java VM developed by the Apache Software Foundation.

If their lawsuit is successful, Oracle could be entitled to a license fee for every Android device sold and each copy of the Android SDK distributed. The SDK is used both for app development and end user device management.

If you were hoping to get one of the last TouchPads at the fire sale price of $99.99 or $199.99, your chances just got a little smaller unless you are an HP employee.

After a HP announcement last month that they will discontinue the TouchPad, the initial production run sold out quickly at the highly discounted prices. Soon after, they announced plans to produce just 200,000 more in order to fulfill contracts with suppliers.

In an email recently leaked to TechCrunch, HP employees were told they will get exclusive access to the additional stock:

After a thorough review of options, I'm pleased to share that starting at 9:00am (Pacific Time) on Wednesday, September 28^th, HP employees in the United States will have one last chance to buy an HP TouchPad through the Employee Purchase Program on a first come first serve basis. Pricing will remain the same as it has been during the wind down process -- $99.99 for the 16GB TouchPad, $149.99 for the 32GB TouchPad...while limited supplies last.

Recent lawsuits filed by Samsung against Apple may be a sign of a new strategy for defending their smartphone and tablet business based on recent comments.

Beseiged by lawsuits from Apple around the globe, Samsung filed a lawsuit of their own last week in France. The suit alleges violations of 3G related patents.

They also filed a countersuit in Australia, on similar grounds, as a response to Apple's lawsuit there. That suit has resulted in delays to the launch schedule for Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1.

According to a new report, Samsung plans to continue on the offensive when the next iPhone comes out. A Samsung executive, speaking off the record, told The Korea Times, "Just after the arrival of the iPhone 5 here, Samsung plans to take Apple to court here for its violation of Samsung’s wireless technology related patents."

Although South Korea is a relatively small country, high smartphone penetration rates make it an important one to compete in. The country's two biggest mobile carriers have accounted for more than 3 million iPhone sales.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has posted a lengthy blog entry tonight, explaining the new service and apologizing to customers.

Qwikster is the name for the newly separated DVD-by-mail business, while the streaming service will remain with the name Netflix.

Says the CEO of the newly named service:

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies. One improvement we will make at launch is to add a video games upgrade option, similar to our upgrade option for Blu-ray, for those who want to rent Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Members have been asking for video games for many years, and now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done. Other improvements will follow. Another advantage of separate websites is simplicity for our members. Each website will be focused on just one thing (DVDs or streaming) and will be even easier to use. A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places. Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.

CyanogenMod7 for the TouchPad will likely be here within weeks.

The team continues to work at creating a working port and the latest video (below) shows their progress.

Working now are Wi-Fi, audio, the accelerometer, the Android Market, Angry Birds and YouTube (within the browser).

For now, the audio is still not perfect as it only works on a single core (the TouchPad is dual-core) and is classified as a work-in-progress.

A full release to the public is expected by early-mid October for those who definitely want Gingerbread on their $99 TouchPad.

Joel Tenenbaum, the graduate student who was convicted of illegally sharing 30 tracks via P2P has had his original massive damages verdict reinstated.

Tenenbaum was originally fined $675,000, but the fine was reduced to $67,500 last summer, after a judge deemed the original penalty unconstitutional and "excessive."

Seeking an even further reduction, Tenenbaum has been rejected, and his initial reduction has also been reversed back to $675,000.

DigitalTrends explains that the main issue the appeals court had with the original reduction was that the ruling Judge "jumped over other procedures and went directly to the constitutional argument."

In a perfect world, Judges should "exhaust all other options for jumping to the Constitution for support."

Could the discount be extended to everyone soon?

RIM has begun discounting its PlayBook tablet for Rogers employees this week.

Slashing the price of the 16GB to $250, the 32GB to $350 and the 64GB to $400, the discounts range from 42-50 percent, significantly marked down.

Furthermore, the offer has been extended until December 1st.

RIM sold 500,000 PlayBooks in its first quarter of availability but sales have dried up now, with the company only moving 200,000 last quarter.

According to the WSJ, Yahoo continues to be contacted by potential bidders that are interested in purchasing the company or at least taking a large stake.

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners is said to be very interested, although Yahoo has not yet met with them.

Peter Chernin, the former COO of New Corp and current owner of Chernin Entertainment has also had discussions with the company, but those talks are still in the early stage.

Chernin is also talking to private-equity firm Providence Equity Partners to be part of the deal.

Yahoo is worth around $18 billion, currently, but around 40 percent of the company's value is based in two long-term investments, their 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan and their 40 percent stake in Alibaba. Most PE firms have noted they are not willing to purchase the company until those Asian stakes are sold or spun off, making Yahoo lighter and easier to purchase.

Verizon, as of their latest "Data Disclosure" FAQ dated September 15th, has confirmed they will begin throttling 3G users with unlimited data plans.

The new policy means users who hit over 2GB of mobile bandwidth per month will have their connection throttled, at least in high congestion areas (looking at you NYC and San Francisco), during high congestion times of the day.

As of August, Verizon says the top 5% of subscribers used over 2GB, so it says the new policy will not affect the vast majority. Some (very) quick calculations show there will around 2 million of Verizon's 106 million subscribers affected.

Verizon does note that 4G LTE is not affected (at least for the time being) so if you have a new fast 4G device, do not fret. (That is until Verizon gets enough 4G users and implements the same throttling).

The most notable user base to get screwed is likely the new iPhone 4 owners, who were given unlimited data with the phone's launch in February as a means to keep customers away from AT&T.

Read the whole FAQ, at 9to5

Get them while their hot.

Amazon Wireless has launched a new promotion that will run until the 26th.

Reads the site:

Get a $50 Amazon.com Gift Card code when you purchase a Verizon phone or mobile broadband device with a new line of service between midnight PDT September 16, 2011, and 11:59 p.m. PDT September 26, 2011. Your code will be sent via e-mail on October 10, 2011. This offer is limited to one per customer. See complete terms and conditions at www.amazon.com/gc-legal.

Facebook has quietly integrated Twitter into its social networking service.

The integration means Twitter fans can now update their streams from within their Facebook profile.

Facebook's "Subscribe for Public Figures" guide has the following:

Yes, soon you'll be able to update your Twitter account directly from Facebook.

To get started:
1) Go to facebook.com/twitter
2) Link your profile or Page to your Twitter account

Once you link your accounts, your Twitter account will be updated every time you post a public update to Facebook.

Rovio general manager Andrew Stalbow announced the number this weekend.

Additionally, mobile gamers now play 300 million minutes of Angry Birds, collectively, on any given day.

Stalbow, who joined the company earlier this year after being a Fox Entertainment exec, wants to move the popular series from a game to a full multimedia franchise.

One of Stalbow's first deals was the "Rio" version of AB, where Rovio created a version of the game that included the birds of Rio (instead of the standard evil pigs) and had cross-promotion with the movie.

Adds the general manager (via VB):

People in Hollywood are really surprised with the quick acceleration in the way consumers engage with entertainment on their mobile phones. There will be some interesting entertainment partnerships that will hopefully take what we had from [Angry Birds Rio] to a totally different level.

RIM, on the same day they reported horrible earnings, is hit with a massive BBM disruption.

On Friday, BlackBerry maker RIM's BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was hit with a huge outage in Canada and Latin America.

The company, based in Waterloo, Canada, confirmed the disruption via their Twitter page in the afternoon.

Support teams were investigating into Saturday.

Users affected were sent this warning message:

Esteemed user, BlackBerry informs us that the chat service is unstable at the international level. We will advise you when it has been re-established.

SanDisk has launched their latest and greatest memory cards aimed at mobile devices.

The company says mobile phone sales are expected to reach 1.7 billion by 2014, and pretty much all current devices have a microSD slot in addition to internal memory.

At 64GB, the memory cards will offer a huge amount of storage for a tiny footprint, but there is one catch. Because they are microSDXC, there are very little, if any devices that currently have compatible slots. The cards are not backwards compatible with microSDHC.

Says the press release:

SanDisk's new 64GB microSDXC card can double the capacity of even the most advanced smartphones and tablets. The UHS-based, high-capacity card features up to 30MB/sec4 transfer speeds and offers the Class 6 performance needed to capture Full HD videos. The card is compatible with any tablet or smartphone equipped with a microSDXC card slot.

Apple's change to the store is effective as of this week.

According to Macworld, users who are forced to re-purchase their Mac apps will at least now be warned that they will be paying again for the pleasure to do so.

Says the new pop up warning:

[App name] is already installed and was not purchased from the Mac App Store

Do you want to buy [app name] again?

According to sources close to the process, Hulu's auction to sell it off could be in serious jeopardy.

There are complications over digital rights, say the sources, as well as a huge bid-ask gap between bidders and Hulu.

Furthermore, Yahoo in the midst of firing its CEO and restructuring, is likely out of the running for the time being. They were a top choice for the auction.

During his company's Q3 earnings last month, News Corp (one of the studios behind Hulu) even acknowledged that the sale may not even happen this year, says Reuters.

There is a new round of bids upcoming this week, and will be the catalyst as to whether the auction moved forward at all.

Current bids have ranged from $500 million to $2 billion coming from giants like DirecTV, Google, Amazon, Yahoo and DISH. All bids, so far, have had complications, either in price or licensing agreements. The main issue at hand is how long exclusive rights will be given to the new owner. Hulu has stayed steadfast on 2 years, while the bidders want 3-5.

The EU has extended the copyright terms for music to 70 years from the current 50 years, just months before the first Beatles albums would have entered the public domain.

Critics, most notably the Open Rights Group (via TF) were majorly disappointed by the decision:

Research showed that around 90% of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels. Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.

Earlier this year, following a year-long investigation, the U.S. DEA arrested and indicted 46-year-old rap music manager James Rosemond on 18 felony charges of leading a narcotics rings that smuggled cocaine across the U.S. in musician's "road cases."

Today, the Smoking Gun is reporting that members of the ring arranged pickups and deliveries at the offices of Interscope Records, a noted RIAA label.

Prosecutors have provided shipping records for deliveries made at Interscope Record's LA office from a cargo company that transported music cases that had their contents replaced with cocaine and up to $1 million in cash.

Additionally, there were pickups and deliveries at a recording studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Intel CTO Justin Rattner demonstrated an experimental ultra low power processor which is so efficient it can be powered by a solar cell the size of a postage stamp under a light workload.

The CPU, which they are calling a Near-Threshold Voltage Processor, consumes less power by drastically reducing the voltages used to represent a 0 or 1. The name refers to the threshold at which a transistor begins conducting current.

The voltage representing a 1 on the chip is extremely close to that threshold.

Intel's core business revolves primarily around chips built for speed, rather than energy efficiency. But like all processor vendors they are having to adapt to a new world where smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices will be the dominant hardware for every day computing.

Nowhere is this more apparent than their recent work with Google to ensure Android will support Intel processors.

The Near-Threshold Voltage Processor is purely a research unit, but they hope the technology could eventually help them reduce power consumption by 80% in future products. In the long term their goal is a reduction to as low as 0.001% of current levels.

Seven states have joined the Department Of Justice antitrust lawsuit opposing the purchase of T-Mobile USA by AT&T.

Citing concerns over a lack of competition, the attorneys general of California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington threw their support behind the suit.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said:

We must do everything we can to encourage innovation and job creation. In vulnerable upstate communities, where concentration in some markets is already very high, and in New York City’s information-intensive economy, the impact this merger would have on wireless competition, economic growth, and technological innovation would be enormous.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has proposed changes to the rules governing Internet privacy for children under the age of 13.

Among other things, the existing rules, which went into effect in 2000 after the passage of COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, require online service operators to obtain parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 13 years of age.

A review of COPPA provisions is required by law every 5 years. The previous review, in 2005, resulted in no proposed changes.

This time around the FTC is recommending several changes, such as expanding the definition of "personal information" to include geolocation data and tracking cookies. They also want to reduce restrictions on certain types of data collection to make it easier for children to use services like social networks.

The commission also proposes the adoption of electronic scans of signed consent forms, video-conferencing, and use of government-issued identification for obtaining parental consent to collect information.

This would be offset by eliminating the option for consent via email, which is available to operators when collecting information only for internal use.

A plan by a company called LightSquared to offer wholesale mobile phone service throughout the US appears to be stalled indefinitely due to technical and political problems.

Extensive testing by various government agencies, in cooperation with LightSquared, has shown their signal to interfere with GPS reception.

Although LightSquared statements in recent months have claimed the problems are solved, testimony in front of a US House Of Representatives sub-committee yesterday painted a different picture.

The problem stems from the location of the frequencies licensed by LightSquared. They are in an area of the spectrum normally reserved for Mobile Satellite Service.

In fact until last year, when the company (known at the time as SkyTerra) changed ownership, that was exactly what they did. The original business involved selling satellite based data services.

Low power terrestrial transceivers operating on the same frequencies as their satellite service were used to supplement the signal.

Under such a system, a dual mode device is used which can switch to a terrestrial connection when satellite service is not available. As required by law, this was authorized by the FCC.

Changsha, a city in China's Hunan province, has opened up an Angry Birds-based theme park, but it appears they did so without proper licenses.

CBS says the park allows visitors to shoot stuffed birds with giant slingshots to knock down items and pig balloons.

Rovio, the developer of the game says it would love to partner with the park but has not been contacted.

Says a Chinese park official:

This [Angry Birds attraction] serves as a method for people to purge themselves and to gain happiness.

Sony has posted a quick video showing off the remote play feature of the upcoming PSVita.

Remote Play on the handheld allows for gamers to play their PS3 games on the go.

Sony's Shuhei Yoshida shows off the feature, playing Killzone 3 in the clip and using the Vita's rear touch panel and dual analog sticks:

Next week, France's Archos will begin taking pre-orders for new line of low priced Android tablets with prices from $299 to $469.

The new tablets will run Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The Archos 80 G9 features an 8" screen, while the screen on the 101 G9 measures 10".

The entry level Archos 80 G9 8GB will be the first model available, with a dual core 1GHz TI OMAP processor and 8GB of flash storage. They will begin taking orders on September 20.

Other models will have 2.5GHz dual core OMAP CPUs with either 16GB of flash storage or a 250GB Seagate Momentus hard drive. All models will include a USB port.

Unlike other tablets, like the iPad, the new Archos tablets will be upgradable to use 3G data connections with the purchase of a USB adapter. They will also have built-in Wi-Fi and also Bluetooth.

Archos G9 tablets will be in stores some time in October.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the G9 series is the included suite of multimedia apps. Archos was known for their portable media players long before they began making Android devices.

Although the screen resolution will only be 1024x768 for the 8" models or 1280x800 for the 10" version, both will be able to play 1080p video and include HDMI output. Video standards supported include MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) up to High Profile@L4.2.

A group of 15 members of the US House Of Representatives sent a letter to President Obama yesterday asking him to support AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile USA.

In their letter, they parrot AT&T's claims that the deal will result in thousands of jobs being created and increased investment in high speed data networks across the country. Those would be excellent reasons to approve the buyout.

But do they have any basis in reality? If you believe AT&T's promises to investors the answer would be no.

The letter claims:

the merger will engender new private investment to deploy wireless high speed Internet access services to 97% of the U.S. population. Coverage of this magnitude will necessitate an additional $8 billion investment from AT&T over and above its current industry leading capital investments.

Video sharing giant YouTube has announced the addition of in-video editing tools.

The new tools will allow users to edit their clips without needing third-party software or ever having to leave the site.

YouTube says the new tools will allow for cutting of frames, changes the in the soundtrack music, stabilization or rotation of the video, modification of contrast and colors and the ability to add new effects.

When edited, the video remains at the same URL with the same ID, so you don't lose any views/favorites, etc.

From Google:

Asus has announced the Eee Pad Slider will finally hit the U.S. this month.

The much-hyped and long-awaited tablet will be available by the end of the month, in two models.

For $475 you can get the 16GB model and for an extra $100 you can jump up to 32GB.

The Slider runs on a Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, has a 10.1-inch (1280 x 800) LED-backlit touchscreen, a full QWERTY keypad, 1GB RAM, dual cameras (5MP and 1.2MP), GPS, a G-sensor, an e-compass, an ambient light sensor, a microSD card slot, an USB 2.0 port, and a mini HDMI output.

Finally, the tablets run on Android 3.2 Honeycomb and will be upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich in the future.

RIM reports terrible earnings.

The makers of the BlackBerry line of smartphones are seeing their stock down 18 percent today, following another quarter of weak sales.

Income fell to $414 million USD from $904 million last quarter and revenue fell to $4.2 billion, at the very bottom of where the company guided down to just 3 months ago.

Shipments of new BlackBerrys were down to 10.6 million, well below the 12 million expected, thanks to "lower than expected demand for older models," said RIM co-chief executive Jim Balsillie.

Sales of the PlayBook tablet were down to 200,000 for the quarter from a strong 500,000 in the first quarter of availability, mainly thanks to missing features promised at launch, like a native email client.

RIM just released the latest BlackBerry 7 phones, the last of the line before the company moves to the better QNX platform seen on the PlayBook.

In-line with other estimates for the device.

Today, the CEO of France Telecom Stéphane Richard has let slip that the iPhone 5 is coming on October 15th.

While Apple has not even yet confirmed its existence, the upcoming iPhone is expected by the entire world sometime in the next 45 days.

Says the CEO:

If we believe what we have been told, the iPhone 5 will be released on 15 October

Google is continuing their patent buying spree, acquiring more than 1,000 patents from IBM.

This is the second such deal between the two companies this year. Google bought 1,029 patents from IBM in July.

A partial list compiled by SEO by the Sea, includes patents related to scripting, phones, wireless, and web search.

You can find all the patents using the US Patent and Trademark Office's search page.

In recent months Google has spent billions of dollars buying patents in response to attacks on Android around the world by companies like Apple and Microsoft. They have gone so far as to buy Motorola Mobility primarily to acquire their patent portfolio.

As Android has become a serious threat to the iPhone's dominance in the smartphone market, Apple has engaged in a campaign to remove competing devices. Samsung's phones and tablets, in particular, have been targeted by Apple in countries including the US, Germany, Australia, and Japan.

With all the big announcements coming out of Microsoft this week in conjunction with their BUILD developer conference, perhaps none is bigger than the accompanying changes to Internet Explorer 10.

Windows 8 users will have two different interface options for IE 10 - the standard desktop version and a new Metro style version. In addition to the use of Metro, this new variant of IE is also different in another significant way.

Rather than using plug-ins like the Flash Player to render content on web pages, it will rely on HTML5. This is similar to the approach taken by Apple for Mobile Safari on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky wrote on the Building Windows 8 blog:

Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI.

Samsung's former manager Suk-Hoo Hwang, fired in 2011 for his part in insider trading, has testified today against James Fleishman, the former vice president at expert-network firm Primary Global.

The manager revealed some details about how he leaked information about iPad shipments to the hedge fund manager months before Apple even announced it.

Hwang was given immunity from trial for his testimony.

In December 2009, Hwang met with the fund manager and explained that Samsung was supplying screens for an upcoming Apple tablet, and a lot of them too. The fund manager had been "very excited" by the news, adds Hwang.

During the convo, Hwang notes that he saw a man sitting near them staring and listening and figured it could have potentially been an Apple employee.

Within a month, Samsung lost a contract with Apple for a different product and in June of this year, the FBI approached Hwang looking for info into the insider trading. The former manager was then fired by Samsung.

Netflix is lowering projections for subscriber numbers in Q3 by 1 million.

The change is due to customer reaction to the price increase for combined disc rental and streaming plans, which was announced during their Q2 earnings call. The price of Netflix's lowest tier DVD plus streaming plan was doubled from $7.99 per month to $15.98.

Their original prediction of 12 million subscribers to the new combined disc and streaming plan hasn't changed. However, estimates for streaming only and disc only plans have been reduced by 200,000 and 800,000 respectively.

The revised projections were revealed in a letter to shareholders from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells.

AT&T's LTE network is finally live.

The major U.S. carrier has announced today that the LTE network will go live in five cities this weekend.

Starting September 18th, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio will get the fast mobile data service.

Unfortunately, even for those in the cities, there are very few AT&T devices with LTE support outside of their LTE modem and the HTC JetStream tablet.

Data plans start at $50 for 5GB of use with a modem, comparable to Verizon's rival plan.

Qualcomm has shown off their latest mobile processor roadmap, and it appears your phones are going to get a lot more powerful, and soon.

Snapdragon processors, seen in a majority of today's Android phones will soon see core speeds of 2.5GHz, 67 percent faster than the current leader in the market, the dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon seen in the upcoming Sensation XE.

The "S4" chip, slated for launch in devices in February, will not only have quad-core at 2.5Ghz, but Adreno Graphics, 3D, 1080p HD, and 3G/LTE multimode as standard.

CEO Paul Jacobs says it is not all about speed however (via Lint):

It’s not about how many cores or how many gigabytes, it’s how well you can optimise the system.

AoL, Microsoft and Yahoo have teamed up this week to compete better against search giant Google.

The three companies will begin selling ad inventory on each other's service/sites in an effort to increase their share of ad spending.

Each also hopes to get larger Web properties to share their ad inventory, as well.

For now, the deal is for "Class 2" display inventory (aka graphic ads that need to be handed over to ad networks to sell) but could be extended.

WSC explains that if, for example, "Microsoft were to receive a big order for a certain kind of ad impression, it would fill that order with its own inventory as well as with what’s available form its partners, AOL and Yahoo." The new partners would then share the revenue and take a larger cut than if a third-party had done it.

Clarifying statement he made earlier in the week, Microsoft Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky, told analysts programs written for older Windows versions won't be compatible with Windows 8 on ARM processors.

During Tuesday's keynote address at Microsoft's BUILD conference, Sinofsky mentioned that the applications being demoed would run on either the x86 or ARM architecture.

ARM processors are typically used for devices like phones and tablets where low power usage is more important than speed. Windows has been primarily (except early versions of Windows NT) been written for x86 chips.

At Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting yesterday, Sinofsky was asked how legacy applications would be able to run on ARM processors, to which he responded:

I don't think I said quite that. I think I said that if it runs on a Windows 7 PC, it'll run on Windows 8. So, all the Windows 7 PCs are x86 or 64-bit. We've been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won't run any x86 applications.

Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick reveals figures at this year's ThinkEquity Growth conference.

Zelnick says the blockbuster game has now shipped 22 million copies worldwide since its debut in early 2008.

While the figure is shipments and not sales it is hard to imagine there are too many unsold shipments for such an old game.

The chairman adds that they have now shipped 114 million units of the franchise. It is unclear whether those figures include GTA and GTA 2, which were released for the PlayStation 1.

Other hit games from RockStar (Take-Two) include Red Dead Redemption at 12.5 million shipped, the Max Payne series at 7.5 million and L.A. Noire at around 4 million.

Rumors have been flying around that Take-Two will launch GTA V next year.

AMD set a new world record for CPU speed, overclocking one of their upcoming 8 core FX chips to a speed of 8.429GHz.

The blazing fast speed was achieved by cooling the CPU to -180 degrees centigrade using liquid nitrogen cooling.

The achievement, which tops the prior record of 8.308GHz, was officially recognized by earlier this week by Guinness World Records. They presented an award to the company at an AMD technology showcase in San Francisco, Calif.

Although that's not particularly useful for the typical consumer, AMD also managed a significant speed boost using air and water cooling.

AMD's Simon Solotko wrote:

Even with more conservative methods, the AMD FX processors, with multiplier unlocked throughout the range, appear to scale with cold. We also achieved clock frequencies well above 5GHz using only air or sub-$100 water cooling solutions.

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata makes it clear the company will not get into the mobile games business.

Reiterating statements he has made in the past, Iwata, speaking at the Tokyo Game Show press conference, has said unequivocally that Nintendo will not begin making games for Android, iOS or other mobile platforms that aren't their own.

Says the CEO (via Rant):

If we did this, Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo. Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength. It’s the duty of management to make use of those strengths. It’s probably the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones we’d make profits. However, I believe my responsibility is not to short term profits, but to Nintendo’s mid and long term competitive strength.

Steve Ballmer continues to insist Windows Phone can be the number three platform in the smartphone market.

In a presentation at Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Ballmer said, "I think we're in absolute good shape in order to be a very strong third ecosystem in the smartphone world."

He appears to be pinning his hopes on Microsoft's primary partner in the platform, Nokia, who hasn't released a single Windows Phone handset yet, and will likely be concentrating on European markets initially.

He said of the partnership:

With Nokia we have a dedicated hardware partner who is all in on Windows Phone. They're working with us in exactly the way we described, to try to get into new markets, find new price points, take a look at new hardware design. They're all in on Windows. They're not doing something with Android, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Boom, our innovation interests are completely aligned.

New Terms Of Service for Sony's PlayStation Network make it nearly impossible for their customers to sue over any future data breaches.

The TOS changes were rolled out as part of a consolidation of Sony online services into Sony Online Services. The new terms affect both PSN and Sony Entertainment Network customers.

The TOS sets out a dispute resolution process designed to make it as difficult as possible for Sony to be sued by users of their online services:

If you have a Dispute with any Sony Entity or any of a Sony Entity's officers, directors, employees and agents that cannot be resolved through negotiation within the time frame described in the ?Notice of Dispute? clause below. Other than those matters listed in the Exclusions from Arbitration clause, you and the Sony Entity that you have a Dispute with agree to seek resolution of the Dispute only through arbitration of that Dispute in accordance with the terms of this Section 15, and not litigate any Dispute in court. Arbitration means that the Dispute will be resolved by a neutral arbitrator instead of in a court by a judge or jury.

MOG will be launching their own free streaming music service tomorrow, rivaling Spotify in the U.S.

Supported fully by ads, the service will be very similar to its rival, offering millions of on-demand tracks for free.

Differentiating itself, MOG will give users a "gas tank" with a certain number of free tracks they're allowed to play.

Once you empty your "tank" you will have to share playlists with friends on Twitter and Facebook and other social networks in order to get more free tracks. As long as you share MOG virally, you should have an infinite amount of free tracks.

Spotify, while completely free for now, will move to a 20 hours per month capped tier in the coming months. The 20 hours are replaced on the 1st of the month.

According to the FT, Facebook has pushed its IPO to the Q3 2012.

The IPO had been expected for April, with some analysts believing it could come as early as this November.

When the social networking giant goes public, it could have a market value upwards of $100 billion. Private valuations have placed the capitalization at as high as $80 billion, so far.

The source claims founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook's employees focused on the site and not on a potential payout, and therefore has pushed the IPO.

Zuckerberg himself will be filthy rich once the company IPOs, as he has a 24 percent stake.

Microsoft is providing ISO images of the Windows 8 Developer Preview software shown at the BUILD keynote yesterday, and with VMware you (should) be able to sample it as a virtual Guest OS.

First things first. VMware Workstation is not free (VMWare Player is no good for this, for now). However, you can get VMware Workstation on a 30-day trial. To do this, you need to get a product key from VMware. This is a little bit annoying, but worth it (and definitely better than paying $199.99 for a license just to check out software).

You will need Workstation 8, which was just officially released yesterday.

Step 1 - Get VMware Workstation

Two tortured bodies were found hanging from a bridge in the city of Nuevo Laredo in northern Mexico this week.

The male and female are believed to be bloggers although the bodies have yet to be identified.

Next to the bodies were posters that read "this is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the internet," and alluded that the bloggers had used social media to denounce crimes by the major drug cartels. Each of the posters was signed off with the letter Z, which authorities have taken to imply the "Los Zetas" cartel.

The cartel is known to be one of the most ruthless in the world, specializing in assassinations and beheadings in their native land.

These murders are the first directly related to social media but in total there were over 15,273 drug-related crimes in Mexico in 2010 and over 40,000 people have died in the country since 2006 in drug related violence.

Following years of bickering between the companies, U.S. prosecutors have opened a criminal case to investigate into whether eBay stole confidential information from Craigslist in an effort to start their own classifieds site.

In 2006, eBay bought a stake in Craigslist, and the company claims then used that stake to misappropriate confidential information before building its own rival classifieds site, Kijiji, in 2007.

The new subpoena is seeking info on eBay employees including founder Pierre Omidyar and former Skype CEO Joshua Silverman.

Says eBay (via reuters):

EBay believes that Craigslist's allegations against eBay are without merit. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves, and we will aggressively pursue our claims against Craigslist.

HTC has announced their new "multimedia superphone," the Sensation XE.

The smartphone has a 4.3-inch qHD S-LCD display, runs on a 1.5GHz dual-core processor (the most powerful we've seen yet for a phone), has integrated Beats Audio and Sense 3.5.

Additionally, the phone has 768 MB RAM and will run on Android 2.3.6, upgradeable to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the future.

The Sensation XE is the first device with Beats Audio, the "high-end audio" company purchased by HTC in August. The device will ship with special Beats headphones.

Rounding out the specs, the XE has dual cameras, dual LED flash, quad-band GSM, dual-band 3G with HSPA support, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, FM radio, a standard 3.5mm audio jack, an MHL-enabled microUSB port and a microSD card slot if you need more storage.

Sony has said today that their highly-anticipated PlayStation Vita handheld will hit Japan on December 17th.

For 3G connectivity, Sony has selected NTT DoCoMo, and prices will be 980 yen ($13 USD) for 20 hours of prepaid time or 4,980 yen ($64 USD) for 100 hours.

Sony has also revealed the battery life of the console, which is horrendous, at just 3-5 hours (depending on usage) and recharge time takes a full 2:40 from 0% to 100%.

The Vita will run on an ARM Cortex A9 quad-core processor and be powered by a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU.

Featuring a 5-inch capacitive multitouch OLED screen (with 16 million colors), the device will be 7.16 by 0.73 by 3.28 inches.

Despite rumors that Sony would skimp out on RAM, the Vita has 512MB memory and 128MB VRAM in its graphics processor.

Wes DeSoto, a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) member, has pleaded guilty to leaking a handful of DVD Screeners such as "Black Swan."

The actor has pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright-infringement and could now face up to 16 months in prison. The government prosecutors however, are seeking three years of probation and monetary restitution. The judge has also ruled that DeSoto can appeal if given over 10 months.

DeSoto's house was raided earlier this year after a number of high-quality DVD screeners were leaked online following their limited release to SAG members via iTunes. Thanks to digital watermarks, DeSoto was identified pretty quickly, say authorities.

While the MPAA and authorities believe DeSoto was responsible for the leaks The Fighter, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours and Rabbit Hole, the guilty count is for his release of Black Swan only.

Apparently Google only outbid itself in its frantic effort to purchase Motorola Mobility.

Last month the company shocked the world by purchasing Motorola Mobility (MMI) for $12.5 billion, in an effort to secure thousands of patents to protect itself on the Android front.

The news today, with the release of the acquisition proxy is that Google was ultimately forced to pay $10 more per share to acquire the company than its initial bid of $30/share.

Motorola, advised by Qatalyst Partners, rejected the offer despite their not being any other bidders or even word of anyone interested. Eventually the two parties settled on $40 per share.

Qatalyst may be the reason behind the huge bump in asking price, as they have, on 3 occasions in the last 12 months, forced buyers to pay up for the company they want. In one such case, Dell and HP began a bidding war for 3Par that led to a 91 percent premium over the initial bid.

CyanogenMod 7, the top custom ROM for Android devices, has now made its way to the popular HTC Sensation and Evo 3D smartphones.

The open source project, released just yesterday in alpha, can be installed now two both devices.

As both are still very early ROMs, CM notes that there are still many bugs to be worked out and it should be stable for daily use.

There is one notable catch, and that is you cannot use HTC's official unlocking tools to root your device. It must be rooted with S-Off.

More info here: For Sensation and for Evo 3D

Major Nelson confirms Xbox Live on Microsoft's upcoming operating system.

"We are confirming that we will be bringing Xbox LIVE to the PC with Xbox LIVE on Windows. We are very excited about Xbox LIVE coming to Windows 8. Xbox LIVE brings your games, music, movies, and TV shows to your favorite Microsoft and Windows devices," a blog entry read.

"Bringing Xbox LIVE to Windows 8 is part of our vision to bring you all the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, made easy. At BUILD we are showing that it is easy for developers to create games for Windows 8 that take advantage of the power of Xbox LIVE. We have much more detail to share about the capabilities of Xbox LIVE on Windows and look forward to the opportunity to do so in the near future."

Intel gets a boost in its efforts to break into the tablet and smartphone markets.

Google has announced today that upcoming versions of Android will be compatible with Intel processors. Currently Intel processors, as part of "Wintel," have only been compatible with Windows devices.

Says Intel of the big move:

We want to make Intel architecture the platform of choice for smartphones. Every time we have collaborated with Google, good things have come out of it.

Microsoft has announced today that they have now sold 450 million Windows 7 licenses since launch in October 2009.

The software giant is averaging 650,000 licenses per day over the lifetime of the OS.

Windows 7 is now the "fastest selling version of Windows ever" beating out Vista.

For comparison, Windows XP sold 210 million licenses in 2.5 years while Windows 7 sold 240 million within one year.

Windows 8 is set for launch next year, on desktops and tablets.

The Symbian OS accounted for less than 40% of smartphones in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK in July of this year. That would be good news for other vendors, but represents a major drop for the market leader.

Symbian was running on more than half of all smartphones in those countries just a year earlier.

That's not good news for Nokia, whose CEO recently told an interviewer his company expects to convert the company's existing Symbian customers to Windows Phone. If Android's ascension in the market continues, that won't be much of a feat.

Nokia has put nearly all their eggs in Microsoft's basket, betting on Windows Phone to put them back on top in the smartphone industry. Even after the iPhone's introduction, their Symbian phones continued to sell well.

The addition of even more serious competition from Android phones, particularly from Samsung and HTC, combined with missteps in Symbian development led to the freefall they have experienced in recent months.

Samsung has gone on the offensive in their ongoing patent war with Apple over smartphones and tablets. They are suing Apple in France over the iPhone and iPad.

The new suit revolves around three Samsung patents related to 3G technology.

Perhaps taking a shot at Apple, a Samsung spokesman told Agence France-Presse, "The complaint focuses on three technology patents, and not on the design of the tablets."

Apple's suit against Samsung in Germany, which has resulted in a ban on sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 by their subsidiary in that country, is based on alleged violations of a Community Design Patent which appears to cover all thin tablets with rounded corners sold in the EU.

In addition to the new lawsuit in France, Samsung has appealed the German ruling.

As rival broadcast networks Fox and ABC continue to fight online viewing in order to prop up relationships with their traditional partners, NBC appears to be moving in the opposite direct. Late last week they updated their iPad app to offer live access to their programs as they air.

Vivi Zigler, President, NBCUniversal Digital Entertainment said:

We are thrilled to offer our fans full episodes via our NBC.com app. Now the app truly reflects the deep fan experience that we have created online at NBC.com. And our fans are going to love the latest update to the NBC Live app which now offers them more content, better access and a unique social television experience.

Microsoft just showed off an early development build of Windows 8 at the Windows BUILD keynote.

Steve Sinofsky took to the stage to boast some stats on the success of Windows 7, but that's not what we wanted to hear/see (we'll talk about that later.) What we wanted to see is how is Microsoft going to revamp Windows so much to justify the comparisons to the changes made when Windows 95 was first unveiled?

Sinofsky first wants to calm any fears that Microsoft is simply building all of these new features as layers atop its Windows operating system. He takes out a first-generation netbook from Lenovo that runs Windows 8, and then shows us just how it manages it.

Windows 8, today, in its early development stage, uses less memory and runs less processes under normal use, compared to Windows 7. At its Preview release stage, Windows 7 required 540MB of RAM, running 34 processes. That dropped to 404MB and 32 processes in Windows 7 SP1. Windows 8 blows it out of the water, running on about 208MB with 29 processes.

A picture of the Samsung Windows 8 tablet rumored to be unveiled at Microsoft's BUILD conference later today has appeared online.

Stories about the tablet surfaced last week. It's an obvious move considering Microsoft's focus on promoting Windows 8 as a legitimate tablet OS.

The picture was posted by by a Chinese blogger to her Weibo page. Analysis from MobileTechWorld suggests it may be the recently introduced Samsung Slate PC Series 7, which is powered by an Intel i5 processor.

Alternatively, the article suggests, it could be an nVidia powered variant of that design using the Kel-El quad-core CPU.

In the aftermath of Google's announcement they will be buying Motorola Mobility, the Android patent situation has received the lion's share of attention. But could the set-top box business they get in the deal end up being the real prize?

While Android may be Google's highest profile project right now, in recent years they have increasingly focused on video.

Since the beginning of 2010 they have introduced Google TV, purchased a DRM company specifically for video distribution, acquired HTPC software vendor SageTV, and even started renting movies via YouTube, leading to a companion service available through the Android Market.

But if you want to be a major player in online video distribution, it takes more than a bunch of services. You need a direct pipeline to your customers' TVs.

Smart TVs, game consoles, and dedicated internet set-top boxes are part of the equation, but a large segment of the population either doesn't want or can't afford those devices. Many of those people are already using one or more Motorola cable boxes, or something similar from another company.

Apple has asked a federal court to temporarily delay a patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola Mobility pending the completion of Google's takeover.

Apple's lawyers claim the acquisition agreement with Google results in Motorola Mobility losing their standing to sue because they have already given up control of the patents in question, as well as their right to negotiate binding legal settlements. They say this means any decisions or settlement in the case could be challenged by Google.

According to a report from FOSS Patents, the filing states "[W]ere Apple to prevail in this case, it risks an attack on its victory on appeal by a third party, whether Google or another Android smartphone manufacturer, contending that the judgment should be overturned due to a lack of prudential standing."

Among other arguments, Apple lawyers cite a case in which Google lawyers argued against the standing of a shell company suing for patent infringement damages. In that case Google argued the company which controls the patents must bring the suit.

Open Rights Group says music copyright extension term from 50 to 70 years in Europe is a cultural disaster.

In a blog post, ORG Executive Director Jim Killock said the change means it will be harder to publish older works, and many will simply remain out of print. He also said research shows that 90 percent of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels.

"Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation," Killock writes.

He references the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, an independent review of Intellectual Property in the UK, and the Hargreaves Report, an independent review of how the Intellectual Property framework supports growth and innovation in the UK, and how both were highly sceptical of the need to extend the copyright term.

The Hargreaves Report had said that copyright policy needed to be based on hard evidence, and that for copyright term extension, the evidence just wasn't there to support it.

Nintendo hopes a big push in 3DS software will help to pick up disappointing sales.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata promised an unprecedented range of games at an event held two days before the Tokyo Game Show. Some of the games will feature Nintendo's adored Mario character, while others will take aim at female gamers.

"From the end of this year to the beginning of next, we are planning the kind of extensive line-up that has probably never been seen before in the history of video games," Iwata told reporters and guests at the event. "We will make an all-out effort to see that the 3DS sells enough to become the successor to the DS."

Earlier Nintendo DS models have sold a staggering 148 million units to the end of June this year. The 3DS has been underwhelming in comparison, selling just 710,000 units in April - June of 2011, forcing Nintendo to slash the price of the handheld. It had sold 3.6 million units in the first month after its launch.

Nintendo's handheld is now also competing with Apple's iPhone, iPad and dozens of devices that run the Android mobile operating system.

Sir Brian Souter fuming over "mysterious" disappearance of his website in Google search results.

The Scottish businessman accused Google of stopping links to his website appearing when people search for it. He claims that on August 13, his site "mysteriously disappeared" from results returned for a search on "Brian Souter".

He has vowed to launch a campaign to stop search engine censorship. "It's not Google's place to decide which sites we can see and those we can't," he said in a statement. He asked Google in late August why his site disappeared from search results, and claimed they "mumbled" something about algorithm changes.

"Our search algorithm relies on more than 200 signals to help people find the answers they're looking for, and and last year alone we made more than 500 improvements to our algorithm, while experimenting with thousands more," Google said in a statement, reported by BBC.

Belgian firm finds no conclusive evidence of major breach.

Earlier this month, Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar was breached, resulting in the creation of hundreds of false certificates. Some of these were used by rogue entities in Iran, prompting major browser vendors to act to protect their users.

An anonymous post from "ComodoHacker" claimed to have breached four certificate authorities, naming GlobalSign. In response, GlobalSign temporarily ceased issuance of all Certificates while it carried out an investigation. It brought in help from Fox IT, a security firm that investigated the DigiNotar hack.

While GlobalSign did find evidence of an attack on one of its web servers, it found no hard evidence that its systems had been compromised. It said it would resume issuing Certificates on Tuesday.

Hundreds of certificate authorities around the world provide certificates to web services, verifying that they are legitimate and are what they appear to be. They are used to provide secure access, mainly through SSl, to privacy-conscious users.

App developers who advertised that their Apps could treat Acne told to stop making "baseless claims."

The Applications were available via the Apple App Store and Google's Android Marketplace. AcneApp and Acne Power told users to hold their smartphone screens to their face for several minutes every day while the screens emitted Acne-terminating colors.

"Smartphones make our lives easier in countless ways, but unfortunately when it comes to curing acne, there's no app for that," said FTC Chairman, Jon Leibowitz. There were approximately 3,300 downloads of AcnePwner, which was offered for 99 cents in the Android Marketplace, and 11,600 downloads of AcneApp from the iTunes store, where it was sold for $1.99.

“This app was developed by a dermatologist. A study published by the British Journal of Dermatology showed blue and red light treatments eliminated p-acne bacteria (a major cause of acne) and reduces skin blemishes by 76%," AcneApp's description read.

The FTC charges that the claims made by both developers / marketed were unsubstantiated, and charged the marketers of AcneApp for flasely claiming that the study in the British Journal of Dermatology proves that blue and red light therapy, such as the type provided by AcneApp, is an effective acne treatment.

Payout will settle criminal case in software theft case.

SAP AG has agreed to pay $20 million to resolve a criminal probe, a source familiar with the matter as told Reuters. An investigation was launched into allegations that SAP AG illegally downloaded millions of files from rival Oracle.

SAP's defunct TommorrowNow Inc. was charged with 12 criminal counts by the U.S. Department of Justice last week, for illegally retrieving the Oracle data.

SAP had agreed to settle the case, but the public court documents did not include how much it had agreed to cough up.

Copyright protection extended in European Union from 50, to 70 years.

The Directive extends the term of protection for performance and producers of musical works to 70 years, closer to the protection that is offered to authors and composers, which is life + 70 years. It also narrows the gap between the term of protection in Europe and that of other countries and regions, where term of protection can range from 70 to 95 years.

It was adopted on Monday by the EU Council of Ministers in Brussels after a vote in the European Parliament in 2009. Governments of member states will implement the Directive to national law over the next couple of years.

Plácido Domingo, chairman of IFPI:
"The decision to extend the term of protection for recordings in Europe is great news for performing artists. Artists at the start of their careers will benefit from an increased pool of revenue that will be available to invest in new talent. Established artists can benefit from their work throughout their lifetimes. This is especially important today when licensed digital services make music widely available online. Extension of protection also reflects the important role performers play in the success of songs by narrowing the gap between the protection offered to recorded performances and that offered to compositions."

Adobe will push out update for security issues that effect several of its products.

The updates are pushed out in response to recent revelations that a hacker compromised Dutch certificate authority (CA) DigiNotar (now under control of the Dutch government). The DigiNotar Qualified CA root certificate is part of the Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL) program.

The AATL is designed to make it easier for authors to create digitally signed PDF files that are trusted automatically by Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 9 and above, and includes many certificates from around the world.

Based on the nature of the breach, Adobe is now taking the action to remove the DigiNotar Qualified CA from the Adobe Approved Trust List. This update will be published Tuesday, September 13.

The issue affects:

• Adobe Reader X (10.1) and earlier 10.x versions for Windows and Macintosh
• Adobe Reader 9.4.5 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh
• Adobe Reader 8.3 and earlier 8.x versions for Windows and Macintosh
• Adobe Acrobat X (10.1) and earlier 10.x versions for Windows and Macintosh
• Adobe Acrobat 9.4.5 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh
• Adobe Acrobat 8.3 and earlier 8.x versions for Windows and Macintosh.

Last month, "TabCo" was revealed to be Fusion Garage. FG created the unsuccessful "joojoo" tablet in 2009 which the CEO admits could not live up to the hype surrounding it.

The company launched the Grid10 at their TabCo event, calling the device such because it uses the new "Grid" OS. Grid is built from scratch on top of the Android kernel.

Today, CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan confirmed they will be delaying launch a few weeks but also, on the bright side, dumping the price massively to $299.

The price drop was a direct result of "lengthy negotiations with our supply chain partners," says the CEO.

Featuring a Tegra 2 processor, 1366x768 resolution, Grid 1.0 and 16GB the tablet uses a number of new features. Grid Desktop is syncing program and brings all content directly to the Grid10. Coolest feature shown off is the Grid homepage, which is one full page, not separate home pages for "Clusters" of apps (social, music, movies, business) etc. GridStore and Amazon Android store for apps, native email, gallery and more with split-screen capability in the browser. All of it looks very sleek, including movie playback.

A popular Samsung-focused tech blog seems to think so.

SamFirmware via their Twitter page have started the speculation that Samsung will dump Windows Phone 7 at the end of 2012. Says the tweet: "Samsung will support Windows phone till end 2012." (Excuse the grammar, they are from Amsterdam)

The site went on to say, "Samsung will check what the status is end next year. Samsung Will support till end 2012 for sure," leaving the conclusion open as to whether the company will continue support past next year.

Samsung currently has its own Bada operating system, available in Europe and Africa, and has said it will be placing more funding and focus on the smartphone OS.

Regardless, Samsung is releasing two new WP7 devices for AT&T with the updated Mango 7.5 firmware.

IBM's supercomputer will now help save lives.

After beating up on lowly humans on 'Jeopardy,' IBM's supercomputer Watson will now help Wellpoint Inc., the health insurer with 34 million members, to diagnose medical problems and authorize the correct treatments.

By integrating Watson's database into its own existing patient information, Wellpoint says they should be able to find the best treatment and remedies in the quickest time.

Says IBM: "This very much fits into the sweet spot of what we envisioned for the applications of Watson." Wellpoint agrees: "It's really a game-changer in health care."

More specifically, the databases being integrated are Wellpoint's patient charts/electronic record, the insurance company's history of medicines and treatments, and Watson's vast database of textbooks and medical journals.

IBM says it will only take seconds for Watson to sift through all the data and provide several diagnoses or treatments.

THQ CEO talks benefits of eliminating physical media from games industry.

Chief Executive Brian Farrel predicted that the industry will soon abandon physical media entirely for games consoles, favouring cloud computing solutions instead. He made his comments at the Cloud Gaming USA Conference while making a presentation.

He argued that the lack of physical media could save money for hardware makers, since they would not have to include an optical drive in their consoles. For developers and publishers, it would cut costs associated with producing, storing and shipping inventory.

"The box, ship, and done model is transitioning to observe, measure, and modify," Farrell said, adding that the industry is moving to "a games-as-a-service model where direct consumer feedback allows the ability to operate in this always on, always connected environment."

Farell acknowledged that the content of the game matters more to consumers than the way in which it is delivered to them.

HMV Group chief executive Simox Fox insists he is still optimistic about the future.

The High-Street store has seen a 12.8 percent drop in total retail sales. "Trends in HMV Retail were broadly unchanged during the Group's first quarter, with like for like sales decline at 15.1%," said Fox in an official statement.

"Total HMV Retail sales, including the impact of 29 store closures, were down 21.8%, and including HMV Live, the Group's total sales declined by 19.4%." The chain is now looking toward the Christmas market for a boost, with Fox saying big name game releases are likely to provide it, giving special mention to FIFA 12, Batman: Arkham City, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and more.

Newer HMV stores that have a stronger focus on tech products such as headphones, MP3 player docks and so forth were also mentioned by Fox. 150 HMV stores are to make a transformation to a new Apple Store-like appearance. "We're very encouraged by what we've seen in our technology stores," said Fox.

"The business has been through a very tough time, and the line up of the products looks very good, the technology offer that we've got we feel very confident about it. I'm certainly more optimistic now then I was when we last spoke in May."

Updates to be pushed out Tuesday, September 13, address Windows and Office flaws.

Microsoft does not rate any of the five bulletins as critical, which might appear to be a good thing on the surface, but the five "Important" bulletins address some serious vulnerabilities. One in particular patches an undisclosed remote code execution bug affecting Windows.

Another code execution flaw affects the Microsoft Office from 2003, to 2010.

Five found to be unlawfully discharged by New York non-profit for Facebook discussion.

Hispanics United of Buffalo provides social services to low-income families. It fired five of its employees after they argued on Facebook over some of their working conditions, such as work load and staffing issues.

A National Labor Relations Board Administrative Law Judge has found that the Buffalo nonprofit organization unlawfully discharged the five employees. It all started with an employee overhearing a coworker criticize other employees for not doing enough to help the organization's clients.

She then went ahead to post the allegations on her Facebook account. Responses from other employees included defences of their own work, criticisms of working conditions, staff load comments and so forth. Hispanics United responded by discharging the five employees who took part.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is getting an increasing number of charges related to social media sites in recent years. This case is the first involving Facebook that has resulted in an Administrative Law Judge decision, following a hearing.

Judge Amchan found that the Facebook discussion was protected concerted activity within the meaning of Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, because it involved a conversation among coworkers about their terms and conditions of employment, including their job performance and staffing levels.

Website forced down as UK prime minister travels to Russia for state visit.

David Cameron's visit to Russia is the first visit by a British leader to Russia since Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London. Litvinenko died from radioactive poisoning (polonium-210) in 2006, degrading ties between the UK and Russia.

Britain demanded that Russia extradite Andrei Lugovoy, ex-KGB, to be prosecuted for the murder, but Russia refused. Relations between both countries have improved slightly since Dimitri Medvedev took office in 2008, and David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010.

"Prior to the visit of Prime Minister David Cameron to Russia, the website of the Russian Embassy in London (www.rusemb.org.uk) was brought down by a suspected DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack," the embassy said in a statement.

An embassy spokesman said the site started to experience problems on Friday. On Sunday, it was forced down due to a denial of service attack, so the embassy setup a mirror site at www.rusemborguk.ru.

New entry-level Desktop APUs bring price down to $70.

Last week, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced the availability of the AMD A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) A4-3300 and A4-3400 desktop processors, bringing the price down to $70 for the HD graphics-packing microprocessors.

Both the AMD A4-3300 and A4-3400 APUs combine two x86 CPU cores with 160 Radeon cores, offering DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics and dedicated HD video processing on a single chip. Both chips feature 1MB L2 cache. The new APUs support AMD Dual Graphics, providing a graphics performance boost if paired with select AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series graphics cards.

AMD Steady Video also instantly removes shakes and jitters when re-watching video. An integrated USB 3.0 (SuperSpeed) controller provides for rapid transfer and storage of digital content.

The AMD A4-3300 APU runs at 2.5GHz (CPU) and 444MHz (GPU) and has a suggested retail price of $70. The AMD A4-3400 APU pushes the CPU to 2.7GHz and GPU to 600MHz, with a suggested retail price of $75. They are available now from Amazon.com and other stores.

(All AMD A-Series processors are designed for use with FM1 motherboards. AMD A4 APUs require the AMD Vision Engine Control Center 11.8 driver release or later releases.)

Summarizes conduct of lawyer as "staggering chutzpah."

Last September, Texas lawyer Evan Stone filed suit against 670 file sharers that he (and Mick Haig Productions, whom he was representing) accused of sharing a German adult film called Der Gute Onkel. He asked the court for permission to take out early discovery.

Judge David Godbey refused to grant permission, and brought in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Citizen to represent the interests of the 670 Does in the case, none of whom had been identified personally yet and were nothing more than IP addresses to the case.

Public Citizen and EFF discovered that Verizon had already handed over information to Stone, and asked Judge Godbey to investigate.

Evan Stone was found to have issued subpoenas seeking the personal information of Does in the case at least four times. He then went on to contact an unknown number of the potential Does. The court presumes the reason for contact was to reach a settlement for the alleged infringement.

German court rules against EMI in case involving Russia-Hosted eD2K website.

The Cologne court heard a case brought against Internet Service Provider (ISP) HeaseNet by the EMI record company. EMI said a HeaseNet customer was using HeaseNet's network to access a Russian-hosted file-sharing website that offered eDonkey links to files.

Since the customer was using HeaseNet's network to access the website, EMI argued that HeaseNet was contributing / aiding the copyright infringing activities taking place. EMI wanted access to the file sharing site blocked by HeaseNet, arguing that failure to comply with the demand made the ISP party to the lawsuit.

The Cologne District Court 28th Civil Division found no legal basis for forcing an ISP to control the data communications of their customers, saying that the, "defendant is not committed to such precautionary measures."

Using litigation to force ISPs to block access to websites that offer pirated content (or link to somewhere else it can be found) is the latest trend for the industry as it battles Internet piracy, and is bringing up serious questions about censorship (and who decides when its necessary) and the privacy rights of Internet users.

Researchers are predicting mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, will dominate Internet use within the next four years.

The latest forecast from International Data Corporation suggests the number of mobile Internet users will grow by more than 16% per year, spurred primarily by tablet adoption, while PC based browsing will decline.

"Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet," said Karsten Weide, research vice president, Media and Entertainment for IDC. "Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it's going to make the Internet a very different place."

IDC's report shows the importance of recent lawsuits around the world which could have long lasting implications for consumer choice in both hardware and service providers. If AT&T has their way, the US will lose T-Mobile, the mobile Internet provider who has been instrumental in promoting both the Android smartphone OS and higher speed data networks.

Attempting to block the move through an antitrust lawsuit, the Justice Department claims this would eventually result in a further reduction to just two nationwide mobile carriers.

If you want to know why so many people think the PROTECT IP censorship bill is so dangerous, you don't have to look any further than how the RIAA misuses current laws to attack non-infringing content.

DMCA takedowns submitted to Chilling Effects show the RIAA claiming links posted to Twitter pointed to infringing content when in reality they were direct links to a label owned website.

Chilling Effects is a clearinghouse of DMCA takedown requests, many of which are submitted by companies like Google and Twitter. It is run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in cooperation with several prestigious law schools from across the US.

PROTECT IP's proposed blacklist starts with the assumption complaints from organizations like the RIAA are honest and fully informed when they claim a given piece of content is infringing. The reality is very different.

Music industry organizations have a history of problems distinguishing official content from unauthorized. They've even been known to make DMCA claims over content not owned by their members.

The FBI is looking into the hacking of NBC News' Twitter account on September 10.

Hackers took control of the account on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Tweets were made by the hackers claiming the site of those attacks had once again been targeted.

"Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking. more as the story develops," read the first tweet.

It was followed by another reading, "Flight 4782 is not responding, suspected hijacking. One plane just hit Ground Zero site at 5:47."

The Twitter account was disabled just minutes after the first tweet appeared according to MSNBC.

Hackers likely gained access via an email attachment sent to Ryan Osborn, the director of social media for the network.

The hack was allegedly the work of a splinter group from Anonymous and LulzSec known as The Script Kiddies. The same group is believed to have been behind a similar hack of the Fox News Twitter account earlier this year.

The power struggle between Michael Arrington and Ariana Huffington over control of the TechCrunch blog has ended with Arrington leaving to concentrate on his new venture fund.

According to a statement from AOL, "Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund."

Editorial control of TechCrunch was wrested from Arrington earlier this month by Huffington, who runs The Huffington Post. Both content providers were purchased last year by AOL.

At issue was the venture fund mentioned in AOL's statement.

Arrington fought back, citing an earlier promise of editorial control. He demanded AOL either return control to him or sell TechCrunch back to its original investors. He threatened to discontinue his association with the website.

They apparently decided his presence wouldn't be required.

Today they named Erick Schonfeld, who has been with the blog since 2007, as Arrington's replacement. They also indicated more editorial changes would be coming in the next few months.

GameStop has said today that it will soon launch an Android-based gaming tablet that will come with titles pre-installed.

President Tony Bartel says the device is already created and will be part of the new "GameStop certified gaming platform" and will launch in 2012.

Notes Bartel (via GI):

I don't see any need to create a new one with the three hundred or so on the market already. We have a refurbishment centre and we can bring in the product and preload certain games onto it. It's an Android device.

We definitely have selected one. We're in test phase right now. But we're excited at the prospect of coming out with this tablet. I would call it a 'GameStop certified gaming platform.' We looked at all the tablets and these are the ones that really worked for gaming and we're going to give you a few benefits that you're not going to get elsewhere.

According to Focus Taiwan, HTC is looking into purchasing its own mobile operating system.

Cher Wang of HTC, when asked about their future smartphones, said "we [HTC] can use any OS we want," and then confirmed the company had held internal meeting on perhaps obtaining their own OS.

Currently, the device makers has Windows Phone 7 and Android devices and has been a strong supporter of Google's decision to purchase Motorola Mobility for its patent portfolio.

That being said, like other smartphone makers in the market, it is clear the Motorola's hardware division could gain advantages from having Google as its parent, and could look elsewhere.

"Our strength lies in understanding an OS, but it does not mean we have to produce an OS," adds Wang.

One analysis says HP's maligned webOS could be a target.

NEC has revealed its Windows 7 tablet.

The company's second-ever tablet will run on Windows 7 Home Premium and an Intel Atom Z670 processor unlike most new devices that run on Tegra or Snapdragon (ARM architecture) and have Android operating systems.

Dubbed the LaVie Touch, the tablet will have a 1.5GHz processor, 10.1-inch screen (1280x800), 2GB RAM, a 64GB SSD, an SDHC card slot and two USB ports.

Finally, the tablet also has Bluetooth 2.1, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, HDMI, integrated graphics, weighs 1.65 pounds, is 15.8 mm thick and has 10.6 hours of battery life.

In an interview last week, Nokia's CEO seemed more interested in sowing the seeds of uncertainty about Android than explaining exactly why his company's decision to back Windows Phone makes sense.

Stephen Elop, who has also held prominent executive positions with Macromedia, Juniper Networks & Microsoft, told a Chinese interviewer Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, "creates a great deal of uncertainty for the Android ecosystem that I'm sure is of great concern to many of the Android participants."

While it's true Android manufacturers like Samsung and HTC are concerned about Google's decision to buy Motorola Mobility, so far Google appears to remain a good partner. If anything, Microsoft's apparent preferential treatment of Nokia seems like more of a barrier for those companies than anything Google has done.

He repeatedly emphasized the Motorola acquisition as a key to Nokia regaining their previous market position, saying:

I think particularly with the uncertainty around Android created by the Motorola acquisition and so forth, it's clear that the formation of the Windows Phone ecosystem as another ecosystem that can compete - in large part because Nokia made a commitment to that ecosystem - I think it's the case that some of those other vendors are now in a position where they also have options in terms of how to balance their efforts, which I think is good for the industry and certainly good for Nokia.

AT&T announces their first Mango-based Windows Phone 7 devices.

Additionally, the carrier says they will be the first to update existing devices to the new software.

The three new devices are the HTC Titan, the Samsung Focus S and the Focus Flash.

HTC showed off the Titan last week with a huge 4.7 inch S-LCD, a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon, 16GB storage, 512MB RAM and dual cameras.

The Focus S has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, a 1.4 GHz processor, 4G, and dual cameras.

Finally, the Focus Flash has a smaller 3.7-inch Super AMOLED screen and a 1.4 GHz processor.

Amazon is negotiating with publishers to launch a "Netflix-for-books" type service.

Consumers would pay an annual fee to be given access to a large library of e-books.

The talks are still in their early stages, and are said to already be stalling as publishing execs balk. They believe the service could lower the value of books, and strain relationships with retailers that sell print versions.

Amazon wants the catalog to only include older titles, and will be free with an Amazon Prime membership. Amazon Prime costs $79 per year and give users free 2-day shipping on all purchases through Amazon.

The amount of books would be limited per month, and Amazon will pay publishers "a significant amount" to get the deal done.

Samsung has launched a solar-powered netbook, aimed at the African market.

The NC215S is now available in Kenya, and the target market is the hundreds of thousands of consumers that are not connected to the national power grid.

Furthermore, the device is aimed at the thousands of consumers who are connected, but have sporadic outages.

The device will cost 35000 Kenyan shillings ($370 USD) and gets up to 15 hours of battery life.

Says Samsung:

With Netbook NC 215S Samsung is demonstrating its capacity to bring to the consumers technology that satisfies their needs and takes care of the environment.

Less than a week after being fired, former Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has also resigned from her seat on the Board of Directors.

Says Yahoo! in a Sunday announcement:

On September 9, 2011, Carol Bartz resigned from the board of directors of Yahoo! Inc., effective immediately.

Twitter has sued online advertising service provider Twittad today.

The company has registered for the trademark “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets." Twitter, as it has made abundantly clear, is not a fan of third-party services using the term "tweet."

Reads the complaint (via TC):

This action arises from the registration of the mark “LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS” by Twittad, LLC (“Twittad” or “Defendant”) in connection with online advertising services for use on Twitter. Defendant’s LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS registration unfairly exploits the widespread association by the consuming public of the mark TWEET with Twitter, and threatens to block Twitter from its registration and legitimate uses of its own mark.

In fact, it appears that Defendant has used LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS solely as a generic phrase to refer advertising in connection with Twitter itself, and as such it is incapable of serving as a mark, rendering the registration subject cancellation on that ground. Alternatively, if Defendant is able to establish use of LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS as a mark, its registration is subject to cancellation based on Twitter’s preexisting rights in the TWEET mark.

Intel will be among the few companies submitting bids for InterDigital's patent portfolio, says Bloomberg.

Samsung, Ericsson, HTC and possibly Google are expected to bid on the patents and are currently reviewing confidential data.

Apple and Microsoft have also looked, but do not seem to be serious bidders.

Bids may surpass $5 billion, says analysts, based off Google's recent purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion for its patents and hardware business and the purchase of Nortel patents for over $4.5 billion.

InterDigital invested some of the tech used in mobile broadband networks and has 8800 patents on inventions currently used in smartphones.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that AoL was looking into merging with Yahoo!, with AoL CEO Tim Armstrong looking into the CEO spot recently left by Carol Bartz.

CNBC has now reported that a "source close to Yahoo says no interest in a deal with AOL."

Original story:

Bloomberg has reported that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been talking to Yahoo! advisers to gauge any interest in a merger of the two struggling companies.
Over the past few months, AOL has been speaking to private equity firms in an effort to go private while they complete their turnaround efforts.

Armstrong is said to have pushed a merger last year, but newly fired Yahoo! Carol Bartz had rebuffed the talks at the time.

While both companies are in similar markets, Yahoo is worth $18 billion and AOL is worth just $1.6 billion (market value) with declining revenue and losses. AOL has lost $800 million since 2009.

Concerns over data collection force Microsoft to remove app created by one of the world's most popular security software companies.

Questions had already been raised about the necessity of AVG Mobilation for Windows Phone 7. Firstly, there's no malware to be found on the platform at least yet, and the operating system automatically sandboxes all applications and restricts their access to system files and other applications that are installed.

The only files that the AVG app had access to are media files; music and photos, and so that's what AVG scanned. According to a blog post from Rafael Rivera, all it actually does is check the names of the files and see if they match a couple of strings, one in Hebrew. The app is available for free, supported by advertisements.

The lack of need for this application (at least now) is not why Microsoft pulled it from the Windows Phone Marketplace though. Justin Angel, a former Microsoft employee, examined the application more closely and found that it collects some data about the phone and sends it back to AVG.

Not likely to be a working loophole for very long.

Customers of T-Mobile in the United States might be able to browse the web on their Android phone even if they don't have a data plan. Smozzy is an Android application that lets you browse through the web without a data plan, because the content is requested and delivered entirely via SMS and MMS messages.

Of course that means your plan had better include unlimited messaging.

It has been tested only with the Nexus S and HTC G2 devices so far, and will only work with T-Mobile's U.S. service.

Use of he beta app is entirely at your own risk of course. Reviews for the app so far are mixed.

More info: https://market.android.com/...

Has four tuners, double the recording space and is THX Certified.

TiVo announced its TiVo Premiere Elite set-top box earlier this week. It packs four digital tuners and a 2TB hard drive which is says is good for 300 hours of Full HD recordings. It is TiVo's first and only DVR with four tuners allowing for simultaneous recording of four different shows while viewing a fifth recorded program.

The TiVo Premiere Elite is intended for use with digital cable systems only and does not work with analog cable or over-the-air antennas. It maintains TiVo's easy to navigate user interface, integrating Web entertainment 'from Netflix, Pandora, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube, and much more.

"We are pleased to announce the TiVo Premiere Elite at this year's CEDIA show as this product was designed specifically for the high-end custom home theater integrator or enthusiast looking to complete their home entertainment system with a best-in-class TV experience. Only TiVo Premiere Elite seamlessly combines digital cable programming with the best of Web entertainment, in full 1080p HD, and with 300 hours of HD recording space," said Doug Bieter, Vice President of Retail Sales for TiVo Inc.

Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says the company will power the first quad-core tablets on the market.

Confirming a leaked roadmap from earlier this year, Huang says Nvidia will be the first, beating out heated rivals like Qualcomm, whose quad-core Snapdragon processors will only go into production later this year.

Says the CEO (via Forbes):

We’re the only people seriously on the dance floor with Qualcomm. We’re really the only two active players [in the high-end mobile processor market].

Intel VP sees company as leader in software as well as hardware.

Doug Fisher, Corporate Vice President, General Manager of the Software and Services Group's Systems Software Division, Intel Corporation, was speaking at Intel's Software Media Day on Thursday in San Francisco. He said the company had a challenge to get people to recognise it as a software company as well as a hardware company.

He singled out the consistency of Intel's architecture in the chipmaker's close relationship with industry partners who develop for everything from high-end servers to mobile platforms. Servers and high-performance systems can rely on Intel's Xeon microprocessors, while Intel's Core products power most of the world's PCs and laptops. For mobile users, there's Intel's Atom line.

MSI presentation discredits Gigabyte claims about PCI Express Gen3-ready motherboards.

On August 8, 2011, Gigabyte issued a press release that announced their entire range of 6 series motherboards are ready to support the next generation Intel 22nm CPUs (LGA1155 Socket) as well as offer native support for PCI Express Gen. 3 technology, delivering maximum data bandwidth for future discrete graphics cards.

In total, it listed more than 40 motherboards that it said were Gen3-ready. Gigabyte rival MSI investigated the claims made by the Gigabyte press release and published its findings in a presentation. It seeks to discredit the claim that all the boards listed are Gen3-ready, and instead insists that only one of the Gigabyte boards is technically Gen3-ready.

The motherboard-manufacturer based its argument around the claim that if not all Gen3 components are available on a motherboard, then Gen3 will never be enabled. Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs with PCI Express Gen3 can deliver double the bandwidth (32GB/s Max) compared to Gen2, if the board is truly Gen3-compliant.

MSI made its points clear through a presentation (click to enlarge/browse images):

Component maker Hon Hai Precision has reportedly upped its projected shipment figures for the iPad 2.

Due to strong demand, projected shipments have been increased for the Q3 by 42.8 percent.

Apple sold 9.25 million iPad 2 units in the Q2, after a slow Q1 with 4.69 million sold.

Despite the tragedy in Japan, Apple says their supply chain has not been affected, and if they could have built more, the demand was so high they would have sold out of those, as well.

Research group iSuppli, including Hon Hai's updated estimates, now assumes Apple will sell 44.2 million units in 2011.

Apple has about a 70 percent share in the tablet market.

Northern Ireland man says Facebook put his daughter at risk.

The 12 year old girl posted what are being described as "sexually suggestive" photos of herself on the social networking site. It is this material, and the fact that she also revealed where she lived and attended school, that he claims has put her in danger from sex abusers.

At the core of the case is Facebook's own age limitation that bars under-13s from using the service. "It relies on children stating their correct age and it doesn't have any checks in place," his solicitor, Hilary Carmichael, said.

"My own personal view is that Facebook isn't suitable for under-18s, but the company isn't even able to uphold its own policy of keeping under-13s out. An age check, like asking for a passport number would be a simple measure for Facebook to implement."

The writ, lodged in Belfast High Court earlier this week, deems Facebook is guilty of negligence, and as such, has created a risk of sexual and physical harm to the child. Also, since the girl was in the voluntary care of the Northern Health and Social Care Trust when the images were posted, the trust was named as a defendant.

Apple insists it is only clearing stock of the old software.

Last week, an older version of its Final Cut video editing software became available again amidst ongoing complaints that its successor, Final Cut Pro X, is not good enough for professional editing.

Final Cut Studio is available to order (by phone) selling for £834 in the UK, as Apple insists it is only clearing out old stock. Final Cut Studio includes the Final Cut Pro 7 software. "It's really good news all round. I don't know what people would have done over the next year otherwise," said Ben Franklin, head of post production at London-based Spectrecom.

"Final Cut Pro X just doesn't seem to fit within the way we work, so we have to make the decision, do we stick with it or do we look elsewhere like Avid or Adobe Premiere Pro." Apple has also reportedly been pushed by some major customers and broadcasters to do something about what are seen as major issues with the new software.

Reviews for Final Cut Pro X were mixed, but particular attention was paid to the removal of key features from previous iterations of the software, and the inability to import projects from older versions.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D drive family is now shipping worldwide.

After becoming the first to ship a multi-disk 1TB hard disk drive back in 2007, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies can now also boast that it has squeezed 1TB on a single disk in a new series of its HDDs. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D drive family has begun worldwide shipments.

"The areal density race continues and while having the highest capacity is appealing, reaching 1TB per platter is equally important as it serves a full range of applications and opportunities across the industry's largest market volume," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST.

"As we ship our first 1TB per platter drives, we know we’re delivering capacity, reliability and value to a broad customer base. Not only are we shipping our 1TB per platter drives to our own Branded Business, but we are shipping to our channel partners as well, enabling them to design affordable HDD-based solutions at attractive price points."

Launched in May, the beta Google Music platform is now available to iOS users.

Google Music, a cloud storage and streaming service for desktop and Android users, can now be accessed via the web, HTML 5-optimized.

The storage, still free in the U.S. for all beta testers, allows you to upload up to 20,000 songs.

All things aside, the browser app should work just like its Android counterpart.

If you are a beta tester, try it out by heading to music.google.com from your browser (Safari, Opera, etc)

The highly anticipated smartphone is selling on the cheap.

Wal-Mart will sell Sprint's version of the Samsung Galaxy S II for $99 with two year contract, cheaper than its $199 price tag on other carriers.

Samsung's new "superphone" has a 4.27-inch WVGA Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, Android 2.3.4, a 1.2GHz Samsung dual-core processor, an 8.49mm thin chassis (at lowest), an 8MP camera with autofocus and 1080p recording, NFC support, 4G, a 2MP front-side camera and HSPA+, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0+HS.

Furthermore, the device will run on Samsung's updated TouchWiz UI and weighs just 4 ounces with access to Sprint's 4G Wi-Max.

The device will hit T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint on September 16th.

Bloomberg has reported that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been talking to Yahoo! advisers to gauge any interest in a merger of the two struggling companies.

Over the past few months, AOL has been speaking to private equity firms in an effort to go private while they complete their turnaround efforts.

Armstrong is said to have pushed a merger last year, but newly fired Yahoo! Carol Bartz had rebuffed the talks at the time.

While both companies are in similar markets, Yahoo is worth $18 billion and AOL is worth just $1.6 billion (market value) with declining revenue and losses. AOL has lost $800 million since 2009.

Although unconfirmed, it appears Google's eventual successor to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be called "Jelly Bean."

Sources speaking to ThisIsMyNext say Jelly Bean will be the next version of the OS after this November's launch of ICS, although other sources have claimed Jelly Bean is in a very short list and has not been selected yet.

ICS is said to be a huge release, with "major architectural, functional, and design changes," and will not be a rehashed Gingerbread or Honeycomb like critics worry.

Still unconfirmed, ICS is also said to integrate Google TV, the struggling platform which lets users stream content from their TVs.

Android 4.0 will also finally unify the fragmented smartphone and tablet offerings.

When Jelly Bean is launched, it is expected to be a minor update, perhaps a 4.1.

It's taken a very long time but Netflix fans got some good news today.

Android phone users with software 2.2 Froyo or above can now use the Netflix app which had been available to just two dozen handsets.

Be reminded, Netflix is still not available for Honeycomb tablet users unless you have a Lenovo IdeaPad.

Downloading the updated Netflix app, version 1.4 will give access to 80 percent of Android users, which have Froyo or higher (up to 2.3.4 currently).

To use the Netflix app, you need a $7.99 streaming account from the company. Also, if you have a phone with Android 2.1 or lower, you are likely not moving to 2.2 anytime soon, (at least not without root).

Get it here: Netflix 1.4 at the Android Market

Group promises that work on "Do Not Track" standards is starting.

Around the world, privacy concerns have been raised as advertising firms track the habits of regular Internet users as they go about their daily online business. The tracking helps the firms to target more adequate advertisements at users with different tastes, but not everyone is OK with all the methods if tracking in practice.

This has prompted privacy groups and regulators in the United States and Europe to call for "Do Not Track" features to be offered to Internet users, giving them the option to opt out of this form of data gathering.

W3C has announced the creation of the Tracking Protection Working Group, which will meet September 21-22 with an ambitious timeline to publish standards by mid 2012.

"The W3C's action here can help protect consumers from unwanted tracking. Microsoft welcomes the opportunity to work with the industry and governments on a web standard based on our earlier work," said Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

W3C is seeking broad-based participation, hoping to gather together browser vendors, search engines, advertising networks, regulators, civil society actors, and many other interested parties involved in the task. The group will be led collaboratively by a pair of industry-sponsored co-chairs, one from Europe, one from the US, of which the first is Aleecia M. McDonald, senior privacy researcher at Mozilla.

According to the latest NPD figures.

Microsoft's "Major Nelson" has reported today that the "Xbox 360 sold 308,000 units in August, maintaining the # 1 console spot in the U.S. for 2011."

The company has now led the U.S. in 14 of the last 15 months, as the PS3 remains strong and the Wii tapers off.

Sony's PS3 is rumored to have sold over 200,000 units on the month, thanks to their $50 price cut.

Flash Media Server 4.5 will set the stage to expand online content libraries and give audiences more choice and access to the content they want, Adobe says.

RTMP delivery through Flash Media Server has supported the largest live events in the world such as Obama's Presidential Inauguration, the World Cup and the Royal Wedding, and with Flash Media Server 4.5, HTTP streaming will help broadcasters and content providers scale to meet the demands of more video online.

HTTP streaming is the focus of the new release. While iOS does not support Adobe Flash, it does support HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). When Adobe's Media Server encounters an iOS device (or any that do not support Flash), it will provide the streaming video in a supported container through HLS.

This will allow for publishers using Adobes server software to offer their content to iPad and iPhone users. It does not, however, provide a solution for flash games, just for video.

Key New Features inside Flash Media Server 4.5

• Same Source Video delivery to Apple Devices and Adobe Flash (single workflows to reach both platforms)
• On Demand video packaging / segmenting for HTTP video delivery (no need to pre-package your content)
• Set-level F4M Manifests and Variant M3u8 playlist support
• Simple and robust content protection workflows for HTTP streaming (as easy as saying on or off)
• Live PVR/DVR support for Apple Devices and Adobe Flash with Disk Management (don’t miss that special moment in live)
• Support for Studio-approved DRM with Adobe Flash Access 3 (robust DRM that exceeds your requirements on Desktop and Android)
• Multicast SSM and ASM, with Multicast re-broadcast
• SIP Device support for communication
• P2P support in Flash Media Interactive Server

Not the best week for cloud services.

Users of Google Inc.'s popular Google Docs suite of web-based applications were unable to use the service for some time on Wednesday. Alan Warren, Engineering Director at Google posted an explanation on the official Google Docs blog.

The outage is the result of an update that should have made the service better. The change was designed to improve real-time collaboration within document lists, but a lurking memory management bug showed its ugly head when the servers came under heavy usage.

"Every time a Google Doc is modified, a machine looks up the servers that need to be updated. Due to the memory management bug, the lookup machines didn't recycle their memory properly after each lookup, causing them to eventually run out of memory and restart," Warrern writes.

"While they restarted, their load was picked up by the remaining lookup machines - making them run out of memory even faster. This meant that eventually the servers couldn’t properly process a large fraction of the requests to access document lists, documents, drawings, and scripts which led to the outage you saw on Wednesday."

Google's automated monitoring alerted the team to a spike in failure rate of attempts to access Google Docs. The engineering team atarted rolling it back 23 minutes after the first automated alert. They then doubled the capacity of the lookup service to mitigate the impact of the memory management bug, and the rollback completed 24 minutes later. Within five minutes the service was restored and everything got back to normal.

Judge sides with Electronics Arts in case over use of football player's image.

Former Rutgers University Quarterback Ryan Hart sued the giant video game publisher for the use of his image in its NCAA Football game without getting his permission first. EA argued that it had a constitutional right to free expression, and that the case should be dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson in Trenton, New Jersey, agreed, citing the First Amendement to the United States Constitution that guarantees the right to free expression, saying it outweights Hart's right to control the use of his image.

Electronic Arts' lawyer, Elizabeth McNemara, said the company is pleased with the Judge's decision, adding it "validates Electronic Arts' rights to create and publish its expressive works."

Hackers tweet phony terrorism reports on NBC's Twitter.

With the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania approaching, and with U.S. authorities urging vigilance amidst a "credible threat", Americans are keeping an eye on the media and hoping it all passes without incident again this year.

Unfortunately for followers of NBC's Twitter account, some hackers decided to exploit the current atmosphere and post messages about a phony terrorist attack happening in New York.

"Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking. more as the story develops," one of the tweets read.

NBC released a statement explaining the tweets. "The NBC News twitter account was hacked late this afternoon and as a result, false reports of a plane attack on ground zero were sent to @NBCNews followers," the statement read.

"We are working with Twitter to correct the situation and sincerely apologize for the scare that could have been caused by such a reckless and irresponsible act."

According to sources, Sprint will be the only carrier to offer unlimited data for iPhone 5 users.

Sprint currently offers unlimited data plans for Android and RIM products, including Wi-Max 4G, for a flat fee per month.

AT&T and Verizon recently dumped their unlimited plans and now charge for tiered plans, at around $30 for 2GB.

According to Nielsen, the average Android user on Sprint uses just 582 MB of data per month, while AT&T/Verizon iPhone users use just 492 MB.

In the past, AT&T has said that only 5% of their subscribers ever use over 2GB per month, and that unlimited data is unnecessary.

Techland says it is "disturbed" by wording in line of code revealed by Steam forum goers.

The launch of Dead Island did not go as smoothly as hoped. When the game made its way to Steam, it turned out to be an incorrect developer version of the game. It has since been replaced to the proper final version of the game, but one little nasty detail got out.

Inside a file, Data0.pakDatadefault_player_setup.scr, is a reference to a skill in the game that gives a female character an extra 15 percent damage against men. In the final version of the game, this skill is "Gender Wars". In the not-for-public version, it appears to be called "Feminist Whore" ("FeministWhorePurna" found in default_player_setup.scr).

"It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened," Blazej Krakowiak, international brand manager, told Eurogamer. "We're investigating this right now and we'll issue a statement later. For now, I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland."

Internet giant agrees to start collecting sales taxes next year.

Amazon agreed to start collecting California sales taxes on September 15, 2011, unless the United States Congress passes legislation setting a national standard in a debate that has spread to numerous states.

While brick and mortar stores are subject to sales tax, Amazon does not collect the taxes, referring to a supreme court ruling in 1992 that declare the collection of taxes from companies that don't have stores or warehouses within a state unconstitutional.

Amazon had refused to collect sales taxes and gathered over 500,000 signatures of registered voters to put a motion to repeal a law that took effect on July 1 on the June ballot. "Nobody wanted this referendum," said Lenny Goldberg, a supporter who is executive director of the labor-oriented California Tax Reform Assn. "There's a big down-side risk for everyone with the referendum. Amazon gets hammered with bad publicity, and we could lose [the election]."

Increasing numbers of states have been probing the sales tax issue, as it could be a source of hundreds of million of dollars of tax revenue per year.

Our friends at VSO Software released a new useful tool into the wild last week, and it's completely free.

VSO Downloader sits in the background while you are browsing the Internet and consuming multimedia. To the best of its ability it will download any streaming video or audio that it can detect.

It supports the typical sources that you would expect, such as YouTube and Metacafe, but it also has been tested against an extensive list of sources. To see the list, click here.

VSO Downloader will allow you to rename files as they download from remote servers, and using a download accelerator engine, will achieve the best speed it can, supporting resuming if something goes wrong. It also supports VPNs and proxy servers.

It does not matter what web browser you are using to view / listen to multimedia. The software is easy on system resources too, and is only a small installation completely free of adware, toolbars, spyware etc.

You can get VSO Downloader from: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/...