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The creator of the extremely popular show American Idol, Simon Fuller, has seen his roster of artists hit a new iTunes milestone, 160 million songs downloaded.

Fuller's artist management company 19 Entertainment said some of the more famous artists in the group are idol winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and former and present British singers The Spice Girls and Annie Lennox.

"He is without question the biggest manager of the digital age," says Fred Bronson, author of "The Billboard Book of Number One Hits."

Fuller had teamed up with iTunes right at the start, in 2003 when legal digital music was still in its infancy. "I felt there was a real synergy with what I do, which is launching new artists and TV shows, and what iTunes does, which is to sell music in an immediate and interactive way," Fuller added via Reuters.

Engadget has reported today that Apple and AT&T originally signed a five-year exclusivity pact in 2007 with the launch of the original iPhone, although it is unclear whether that deal is still in effect, just three years later.

The site found the official details out after reading a 2008 court filing by Apple, although a USAToday report made it clear in 2007 that AT&T was the exclusive distributor of the phone in the United States. Verizon also passed on the original deal.

The filing was necessary because Apple and AT&T were the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2007, which claimed that the carrier had a monopoly over iPhone customers, since after their contract expired, they could not jump to another carrier, as the handset was locked down.

Nilay Patel of Engadget says the real question may be whether the deal is still in effect, or been reworked since 2008: "Contracts can be canceled, amended, and breached in many ways, and AT&T's spotty recent service history plus the explosion of the iPhone and the mobile market in general have given Apple any number of reasons to revisit the deal. In addition, the two companies obviously hit the negotiating table again to hammer out the iPad's pricing plans, and there's no way of knowing whether that deal involves the iPhone as well."

According to the latest NPD figures, the Android operating system has finally overtaken the iPhone for the number two spot in the U.S. smartphone market share, taking 28 percent in the latest quarter.

RIM's BlackBerry OS remains the clear leader at 36 percent, with the iPhone OS in third place at 21 percent for the Q1 2010.

"As in the past, carrier distribution and promotion have played a crucial role in determining smartphone market share," adds Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD. "In order to compete with the iPhone, Verizon Wireless has expanded its buy-one-get-one offer beyond RIM devices to now include all of their smartphones."

Some of the prominent phones to be used in the BOGO promotions were the Motorola Droid and the BlackBerry Curve, both strong sellers.

Overall, AT&T subscribers accounted for 32 percent of all smartphone sales with Verizon close behind at 30 percent.

Adds Rubin: "Recent previews of BlackBerry 6, the recently announced acquisition of Palm by HP, and the pending release of Windows Phone 7 demonstrates the industry’s willingness to make investments to address consumer demand for smartphones and other mobile devices. Carriers continue to offer attractive pricing for devices, but will need to present other data-plan options to attract more customers in the future."

Vodafone, Orange and O2 have all priced their iPad 3G data plans, with each offering micro-SIM cards, now.

O2 offers the following price tiers:

500MB per day- £2.00
1GB per month- £10.00
3GB per month- £15.00

Orange offers the following pricing:

200MB per day- £2.00
1GB per week- £7.50
3GB per month- £15.00
10GB per month- £25.00

Vodafone is the only to offer unlimited, and offers the following:

1GB per month- £10.00
Unlimited per month- £25.00

Additionally, Orange and O2 offer unlimited Wi-Fi through "BT Openzone" hotspots.

The iPad will go on sale in the UK on May 28th and will cost £429 for the basic model (Wi-Fi, 16GB) and £699 for the 3G/Wi-Fi/64GB model.

Nokia, which announced two months ago it was beginning a "Design by Community" project to create a new phone, has said this week that the project is almost completed, with fans finishing voting on what they want the most in the new smartphone device.

By the end of the month, Nokia designers will have turned out some mockups of the upcoming device.

UnwiredView says fans voted and decided that the phone would be the following: "10mm thin monoblock made out of aluminum. Its features should include: a 4 inch capacitive touchscreen display, open source operating system, unlimited multitasking, Wi-Fi 802.11 n/b/g, USB 3.0, HDMI, Dolby surround sound, and an 8MP camera with 4X optical zoom, dual LED and Xenon flash, and HD video recording."

Twitter users, especially those that had gained a large following over the years, were shocked earlier today when their number of followers was reset to 0.

While the numbers were back to normal soon, the reset had to be done to kill off a bug that was being exploited to force celebrities to "follow" anybody who was using the bug.

"We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to "force" other users to follow them. We're now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place," said the company in a blog post.

Fortunately, adds the company, the glitch did not make private tweets public.

The extremely easy glitch involved tweeting the term "accept (whoever)" and then refreshing. Suddenly, Ashton Kutcher or whoever else you wanted was your fan.

UK citizen Paul Chambers has been convicted this week of sending a 'menacing' tweet via Twitter, with the British Court fining him £1000 and slapping him with a criminal record.

In early January, the airport in South Yorkshire was closed due to excessive snow and Chambers was so mad that he wrote: "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

Airport security officials saw the tweet and then passed on the complaint to the local authorities.

Chambers lost his job after being arrested, and appears to be the first person to ever be convicted of a crime just for tweeting.

Although the tweet was a joke, the Doncaster Magistrates' Court found Chambers guilty of sending threatening messages and therefore imposed the steep fine.

Chambers says he is considering an appeal, as the criminal record jeopardizes his chances of securing a new job.

According to Nintendo's latest financials, the Wii console has topped 70 million units sold worldwide, seeing 20.53 million sales in the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2010.

The number, 70.93 million, is good for about 49 percent of the home console market, with rivals Xbox 360 and PS3 controlling 27 and 24 percent, respectively.

For the year, sales of the Wii hardware jumped in Japan to 2.38 million from 2.06 million, but sales in the Americas fell drastically from 12.93 million to 9.86 million. In the EU and other nations, sales fell from 10.96 million to 8.30 million.

Overall, software sales decreased, but "million-seller titles" jumped from 54 to 79.

Software sales fell from 204.58 million to 191.81 million, with sales only rising in Japan.

Apple has filed trademarks today for iTunes Live, which implies that the company is getting ready to increase its current live music offerings via the iTunes platform.

So far, Apple has offered a lot of live performances pre-recorded at Apple Stores around the globe (such as NY, LA, London, Montreal, Tokyo and Munich).

TechCrunch says the trademark is filed under two classes:

- Online retail store services in the field of entertainment featuring prerecorded musical, audio and audiovisual content

- Entertainment services, namely, arranging and conducting of concerts and live musical performances

While the trademark could be nothing, chances are there are more live performances coming in the near future to the most popular music download platform in the world.

Motorola Milestone owners in the UK have finally gotten their long-awaited Android 2.1 update this weekend, weeks after American DROID owners got the update.

2.1, or "eclair" brings some notable features, such as Speech-to-text, live wallpapers (as seen on the Nexus One), and nine home pages for all those users who have tons of apps.

Reads the Facebook post: UK Milestone owners - At last, the 2.1 upgrade rolls out today. Thank you for your patience and we hope you enjoy enhancements such Speech to Text, live wallpapers, up to 9 home screens, and added security for exchange server users. The update is available now via PC download from Motorola Direct.

If you do not want to download the update manually, it should be available OTA over the course of this week.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have become the first three countries to get Internet addresses in non-Latin characters, being approved in Arabic this week by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Registrations for websites using the new domains will start soon, and Egypt has already given approval to three companies to use the new Arabic suffix.

"Introducing Arabic domain names is a milestone in Internet history,"says Egyptian Communication and Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said in a statement. "This great step will open up new horizons for e-services in Egypt as well as boosting the number of online users and enabling Internet service providers to enter new markets by eliminating language barriers."

Until the recent decision, all websites had to end with ".com" or ".org" among other strings using Latin characters, which could get confusing for nations with no familiarity with the characters.

In late April, Sony was sued in California over its recent firmware update that removed the "OtherOS" feature of the PlayStation 3, a feature that had allowed for the installation of Linux on an HDD partition.

This week, two more class action lawsuits have been filed against the company, one in Georgia and the other in California.

Both cases claim that Sony has made features consumers paid for "inoperable" with the release of firmware version 3.21. The firmware update is "voluntary," but those that do not cannot sign into the PlayStation Network, or play their games online.

Both suits also state that Sony did not properly disclose that they reserved the right to remove built-in features, and that any removal of the "OtherOS" feature was not disclosed in the PS3 TOS, or SSLA (System Software License Agreement).

Late last month iPhone Dev Team member "planetbeing" posted a video showing off a huge accomplishment, the Android OS running on a first-gen iPhone.

This week, "planetbeing" has released a new video, with Android running on the iPhone 3G, giving a lot more iPhone owners the chance to try dual-booting multiple operating systems.

The hacker uses OpeniBoot to boot either the iPhone OS or Android, but he does admit that rebooting is slow "because the NAND and FTL (flash translation layer) drivers aren't optimized yet."

While Wi-Fi, SMS, MMS and other apps work perfectly with Android, the phone loses its "phone" capabilities as audio still does not work through the port. "Planetbeing" says that is currently being worked on, as it is obviously one of the most important parts of having a phone, the ability to make phone calls.

Says the hacker, via DailyTech: "With their help (other developers) I'm sure we'll be able to bring the system to production quality before too long."

One week after computer maker HP agreed to purchase the struggling smartphone maker Palm for $1.2 billion in cash, we reported that the company was removing Windows 7 from its much-hyped Slate tablet, instead choosing to use a WebOS variant.

This weekend, "industry insiders" have noted that a WebOS-based tablet dubbed the HP Hurricane is set for release in the Q3 2010.

Says one analyst of the Slate, Paul Mueller, via The Examiner: "It is a really interesting device, but runs as slow as a turtle. I think they could have had something with a faster processor, but that would have led to less battery life than the Slate already had."

Apple and Japanese carrier Softbank have made a deal today that will bring the popular iPad tablet to Japan starting May 28th.

Softbank is third-largest mobile carrier in the nation, and the company says it will begin taking pre-orders on Monday.

The basic Wi-Fi/16GB model will cost 48960 yen which is about $535 USD.

Softbank has been selling the Apple iPhone since 2008, and hopes the Apple products will help it win subscribers against the nation's largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo.

Apple announced this weekend that the iPad was going international, headed to nine new nations including Japan.

The iPad saw 450,000 sales on its launch day, and recently announced 1 million unit sales. Additionally, 15 million apps have already been downloaded from the iPad App Store, as well as almost 2 million e-books from the iBookStore.