Tim Conneally

In the midst of my own Comcast outage today, I began to contemplate the alternatives to my current cable Internet connection and the satisfaction of customers elsewhere. Being a Baltimore native, I'm fortunate enough to have a number of options at my disposal, including WiMAX. It's a technology that I've frequently covered here at Betanews, and one which we've been following for a long time.

For a little while, we had a WiMAX connection in our headquarters and I was using it without even being aware of a difference. I probably wouldn't have even found out if Nate hadn't asked me what wireless network I was connected to one day and informed me that it was actually our Sprint/Xohm WiMAX test line.

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Palm limped toward the launch of the Pre, relying on cash and short-term investments to pull it through eight consecutive money-losing quarters in an attempt to turn things around. And now that the Pre has been turned loose, and Pixi, Palm's second WebOS, device is on the way, the struggling company's long-term outlook remains modest, and it continues to post losses. Yet it doesn't want to get too specific about numbers.

For the quarter ending on August 31, Palm reported a loss of $161.1 million with revenues that dropped 82% to $68 million.

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Yesterday, Skype's founders sued eBay for copyright infringement, claiming that eBay has been using Skype's underlying technology without permission since March, when eBay's license to use that technology ended.

The auction service eBay bought popular VoIP and instant messaging software company Skype in 2005 for a total of $3.1 billion, but allegedly did not buy the software's core P2P technology, which is owned by Joltid, a separate company run by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

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The One Laptop Per Child project is certainly divisive. The press has largely presented the project as one of big promises and few results. But the project's signature laptop -- the sturdily built, low-cost, resource-constrained XO-1 -- has never failed to capture the imagination of techies.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, for example, said last year that he is a huge fan of OLPC, and that its CEO Nicholas Negroponte deserved a Nobel Prize. He said he even intended to switch over to full-time use of the XO-1, but "didn't make it that far."

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Opera software is really on a roll. On the first day of September, the final version of Opera 10 Web browser was released. Today, the Opera Mini 5 beta has been released, porting all the successful design elements down from Opera 10 to even the most sluggish Java phone.

The latest Opera Mini 5 features tabbed browsing, the "speed dial" homescreen with thumbnails of the user's top six most visited sites, support for both touchscreen and keypad-based devices, a password manager, and an interface that is by far the best design work the company has done in the Mini format.

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Yet another home movie product has turned into a color war between red and blue.

Republicans versus Democrats, Bloods versus Crips, HD DVD versus Blu-ray -- whenever two groups are vying for some territory claim, they mark it with a red or a blue flag. Coinstar's Redbox DVD rental kiosks have marked off some 15,000 locations across the United States with a big red...well, box.

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Google's Android development team has made the latest Android SDK available, providing a complete view of all the new features that "Donut" (Android 1.6) will provide.

While most of the features included in this incremental update are no secret, this is the first time they have been presented to the public in a single package.

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In just over a year's time, Facebook has doubled its user base. Now, the social networking site now has more than 300 million users the company said at TechCrunch50 today. And with that size increase comes the company's first cash profit, which it also announced today.

Facebook has been a profitable business for nearly a year, but it didn't expect to start pulling in a cash surplus until 2010 due to investments and acquisitions.

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We're standing on the cusp of a new chapter in video game history: the era of microgames, where titles $10 and under take on a starring role, and attach rates (that is, games sold per console) skyrocket.

The charge is being led by Apple with its iPhone and iPod Touch, two devices without gaming as their stated purpose, both of which have found unmatched success in the downloadable gaming industry. The other video game consoles have their own "app stores," where games can be downloaded directly to the system, but none have reached the heights that the iTunes App Store has...yet.

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Call me crazy, but aren't Web apps just a kind of reversion back to the "Mobile Web" that was so furiously chastised when the full Web browsing experience came to smartphones?

I understand that our modern Web Apps are being rendered by a "desktop browser" engine, and not some junky WAP browser circa 2002, but I can't help but feel that an "application" designed specifically for a mobile phone's browser is the same thing as a Web site stripped down to mobile phone size and speed.

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Just about four months after the WiMAX Forum published its White Paper on WiMAX Roaming Models, leading network provider Clearwire has announced its first international roaming partners: Russia's Yota and Japan's UQ.

This is an important step for Clearwire because even though the company has the largest footprint of any single WiMAX operator in the world contained here in the United States, WiMAX is spreading much more quickly in the rest of the world.

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Many iPhone users today are reporting that they can now send and receive MMS messages, as AT&T promised to do by September 25 through software a software update.

While a lot of users now have MMS, for every single one who has confirmed his functionality upgrade on Twitter, there are five more asking how they check if they have it, what they have to do to get it, and what areas so far have gotten the update.

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Swirling amid the murky Apple rumor pit prior to last week's iPod refresh event was talk of an updated Apple TV, thanks to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's observation that 40 GB Apple TVs were in low availability.

Today, the 40 GB Apple TV model has been removed from Apple's site entirely, and Munster's prediction of an Apple TV lineup change has come true. Now, there's only one Apple TV unit available: the 160 GB model, and that has dropped $100 in price.

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Today, LG officially announced its Android-based GW620 slider, the same 3-inch touchscreen device that was shown off at IFA in Germany under the name "Etna" last week. Though LG didn't release any in-depth specs for the new Android phone, the company said it will be released in select European markets in the fourth quarter of the year.

But the specs of the GW620 aren't the important news with this release. The important news is that three of the top five worldwide mobile phone manufacturers -- Samsung, Motorola, and LG -- have each announced their own Android-based device. Samsung debuted the Galaxy in April; last week, Motorola premiered the the Cliq, and now with LG's GW620 on the way, it's time to look for an Android-based Xperia from Sony Ericsson.

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Unnamed sources have told the UK's Daily Telegraph that mobile network operator T-Mobile may be making a bid for Sprint some time in the "next few weeks."

If German-owned T-Mobile indeed goes ahead with such a bid, it will be a virtual repeat of its actions in the United Kingdom last week, when it announced its merger of operations with Orange Telecom. The two companies are the third and fourth largest wireless providers in the UK, just like Sprint and T-Mobile in the US.

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