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HP has said it will not quit the webOS hardware business, although they would not put a roadmap on any future devices.

Even though the company said earlier in the year it was moving out of the webOS hardware business, new CEO Meg Whitman is going a different direction.

Says Whitman:

The answer to that is yes but what I can't tell you is whether that will be in 2012 or not. We will use webOS in new hardware, but it's just going to take us a little longer to reorganize the team in a quite different direction than we've been taking it in the past.

According to Digi, Apple's manufacturing partners are expected to build around 2 million iPhone 3GS this quarter.

This number is certainly significant since the phone was launched 30 months ago and has since been succeeded by the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

The report notes that after this holiday season, production will begin winding down to 1.5 million units in the Q1 2012.

Furthermore, Apple will look to wind down production of the CDMA iPhone 4 from 1 million units this quarter to just 500,000 next quarter.

The CDMA iPhone 4 is sold by Verizon and Sprint in the U.S.

STD destruction game wins award.

"Privates" is a video game that features cartoon soldiers wearing condom-like hats fighting off enemies, such as sperm, with lasers. It was designed to teach teenagers about sexually transmitted diseases, and it picked itself up a Bafta award in the UK in the secondary school education category in late November.

"I was completely and utterly gobsmacked," said Dan Marshall, of developer Size Five Games in Norbiton, which was commissioned to develop the video game. "I had managed to convince myself there was no chance Privates would win so when it did I was simply dumbfounded."

They tried to get the game made available on Xbox Live, but unfortunately its content broke the rules that games have to adhere to. "The original design document broke a vast number of Xbox's rules," Marshall said.

"I sent a copy to the very nice people at Xbox, who loved it, but decided that the rules needed to hold steady."

Samsung sets new smartphone milestone.

The world's second largest mobile handset maker (by volume) announced on Sunday that it had set a new company milestone when annual sales of its mobile handsets passed 300 million units for the first time.

"We look forward to extending this success going into 2012," JK Shin, President and Head of Samsung's Mobile Communications Business, was quoted as saying.

In 2010, Samsung's entire annual handset sales reached 280 million units.

The company has said that its Galaxy S smartphone series contributed significantly to the results.

Handset manufacturers have NFC capabilities in WP Mango.

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Phone 7.5 Mango includes support for near-field communications, and that it is up to handset manufacturers when they want to use it.

"As far as I'm aware, NFC is supported by [Windows Phone], but needs to be enabled by the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). So, if any OEM wants to enable it, that can be done by all means." Will Coleman, product manager at Microsoft UK, told TechRadar.

"Think it's about just about timing, in the not too distant future there are some exciting things that will be coming through with NFC from Microsoft."

Nokia said previously that it did not have time to implement NFC in its first Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 smartphones.

Indonesian regulator cites "security concerns."

Indonesia's BTRI, the communications regulator, has told the Jakarta Post that it may have to ban BlackBerry Messenger and Internet services in the country, saying the data exchanged is "not safe."

Of course, this is simply not true, and the real point of contention for the Indonesian regulator is RIM's refusal to locate a BBM server within the country. As things stand, all messages sent and received using BlackBerry Messenger are handled by Canadian RIM servers.

The information is also encrypted, protecting it from prying eyes. This strong data protection system is one of the main reasons BlackBerry's have been a corporate success.

Saudi Arabia and India made threats of blocking the BBM service in the countries because RIM would not put BBM servers in them. Even if they did, the governments still couldn't decrypt the information without getting the key from the account holders' handsets.

RIM has complied with orders to hand over data in the past, but maintains it does not have the ability to monitor or view private messages.

YouTube makes changes to its Video Manager tools.

The Google-owned online video giant posted some information on the changes made to the Video Manager on its blog. The updated Video Manager gets some new features that'll help you handle all your videos.

Some of the highlights of the changes made by YouTube include:

• Simplified top and left navigation bars to help you get to the tools you need more quickly
Icons to indicate privacy status, if monetization is enabled and scheduled publish status
• Badges to indicate whether videos are HD, Creative Commons and/or captioned
• A new look that's consistent with YouTube's fresh coat of digital paint

Windows Defender Offline Beta targets rootkits and other hard-to-kill infections.

Microsoft's free Windows Defender products are aimed at keeping Windows computers malware-free. Like all security products, it is engaged in a cat and mouse game with malware cooks, who will always be a step or two ahead of the white hat efforts.

The worst types of malware infections, such as rootkits or bootkits (how to remove a bootkit), are difficult for security protects to exterminate because the infection targets the very core of the operation system, capable of intercepting and blocking/altering low level system calls.

These variants are written specifically to thwart efforts to locate and remove them (or even to act as an anti-virus against rival malware), and once booted into the system they can be extremely difficult to get rid of. A long-standing solution for these problems is to attempt removal before the operating system boots.

Some popular security products, such as Avast! Free AntiVirus, have boot-time scan abilities built in, but in order to set a boot-time scan, you actually have to be able to run the Avast utility and enable it. Even if you do enable it, malware can simply change the BootExecute, or any other registry key to prevent such scans being loaded on boot.

Arkansas Supreme Court overturns murder conviction of death row inmate.

Erickson Dimas-Martinez was convicted of murder last year for killing and robbing 17-year-old Derrick Jefferson in 2006. He received the death penalty for the crime, and was awaiting execution by lethal injection on death row.

However, Arkansas Supreme Court judges have had to overturn the conviction due to inappropriate tweeting by a juror while the trial was ongoing. Juror Randy Franco had posted several musings to Twitter during the trial. "Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken... We each define the great line," one of his tweets read.

Dimas-Martinez' lawyers had appealed against the conviction as the judge had instructed the jury not to post comments on the Internet, or discuss the case using their mobile devices in court. The judge scalded Mr Franco about his actions shortly after becoming aware of them.

"I'm waiting for the other 11 to [jurors] to help me come to a conclusion... I have not seen death in my life, like, firsthand. So the talk of death is a little uncomfortable just because it's an unknown - it's an unknown area for me," Mr Franco told the judge.

U.S. judge sceptical of AT&T's reasoning for focusing on DoJ court case.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) said on Friday that it would move to stay or dismiss its lawsuit aiming to halt the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, citing the carriers' decision to withdraw an application for approval from the Federal Communication Commission.

The DoJ's lead attorney in the case, Joseph Wayland, told U.S. district judge Ellen Huvelle that the DoJ doesn't consider it a real transaction until both companies file with the FCC for approval.

AT&T and Deutsche Telekom had hoped to focus only on the Department of Justice case for now. If both companies won in court, they would then refile with the FCC. The communications regulator moved in November to send the proposed merger to an administrative judge, widely seen as disapproval of the deal. The FCC confirmed its stance with the release of a damning staff report that dismissed the competition and economic claims made by AT&T to regulators when seeking approval.

AT&T's attorney Mark Hansen told Judge Huvelle that the issues being raised by the DoJ and the FCC are basically the same, saying that if they won the case in court, they would later refile with the FCC from a position of strength.

Starting tomorrow, struggling retailer Radio Shack is preparing to discount the AT&T models of the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Each will see a $29 discount, bringing the small capacity iPhone 4s to just $69.99 with contract.

Radio Shack says they still have many iPhone 4 in stock, and obviously a large supply of the new 4S.

The 4S will sell for $169.99 at 16GB and $369.99 at 64GB, as expected.

Each phone requires a 2-year contract commitment with AT&T but the phones are cheaper than many high-end Android rivals.

Pic via BGR.

Sharp has noted this week that it expects to sell over 1 million big screen TVs (60" and up) in North America for the fiscal year ended March 31st.

Furthermore, the company expects sales to continue to grow going forward.

Adds Kozo Takahashi, head of the company's operations in the Americas:

With only four months to go it looks as though we will make the 1 million mark in the U.S. alone. We expect that number to grow in the next fiscal year.

According to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, texting while driving keeps increasing, most notably among younger drivers.

50 percent of American drivers between 21-24 have admitted to emailing or texting while driving, even though it is illegal in 35 states.

The study says in 2010 there were 3092 deaths caused by driver distractions that included texting and eating meals.

Additionally, the agency stakes out intersections and manually tallies how many distracted drivers they see, and that number jumped to 1 in every 100 in 2010.

Overall, the study of 6000, showed that 20 percent of those who responded would answer a phone call or would send a text while driving.

55 percent said distracted driving made no difference to their driving, but 90 percent said when they were passengers they felt unsafe if the driver was distracted.

Despite doing so themselves, most of those surveyed were all for banning handheld electronics in the car or steep fines above $100.

Here is today's list of 10 cent apps from the Android Market.

On Tuesday, the Android Market started an excellent promotion, offering 10 days of 10 popular apps for 10 cents.

Android's promotion is in celebration of 10 billion apps being downloaded from the market.

List, available now from here or via your Android phone/tablet:

Pano
Apparatus
The Sims 3
Age of Zombies
Drop7 by Zynga
Season Zen HD
Snowfall Live Wallpaper
SlidelT Keyboard
Kids Connect the Dots
Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD

One school has confirmed it was forced to spend on XXX domain names to prevent any tarnishing of its reputation.

University of Kansas has bought numerous domains, including KUgirls.xxx and KUnurses.xxx.

Total expenses? $3000.

The University will sit on the domains and does not plan to add anything to the sites.

Over 100,000 pages have already been bought including big-name corporation protection such as Nike.xxx and Walmart.xxx.

Other Universities, like Indiana University, Purdue University and Ball State University have also bought the domain for their name, and other similar registrations, like Indiana taking hoosiers.xxx.

The ICM Registry sells the domain names for $100 a piece.