Tim Conneally

YouTube UK has lifted the six-month long "premium" music video blackout after arriving at a deal with the Performing Rights Society for Music over royalties.

The description of "premium" music videos included those that have been uploaded, or claimed as property, by record labels. The blackout only prohibited UK YouTube viewers from watching these videos, fan-uploaded copies were not included in the sanction.

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Google's App store for the Android mobile operating system is called the Android Market; for nearly a year, it's looked like a beta build. All of the critical elements are in place, but generally with a lack of presentability and polish. It uses a white-on-black color scheme (not good for reflective mobile phone screens); its application profiles lack screenshots, and it features user reviews a little too prominently to be beneficial to sales; the featured apps are little more than the application's logo on the top of the first page; and overall, its navigability is mediocre.

Developers who have recently made their sales figures public blame the Market's unfinished appearance on the overall sluggishness of sales when compared to the multi-million selling iTunes App Store. While I maintain that the two mobile app markets should not be compared (if only for the fact that the iTunes app store evolved out of the six-year old iTunes MP3 shop ecosystem, and all of its progenies have been designed to be mobile app stores from the ground up), Android Market definitely needed to be re-thought.

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Just about a month ago, Toshiba confirmed it had applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association, and announced its intention to launch both standalone Blu-ray players and BD-equipped notebooks this year.

Today, the company that was formerly responsible for Blu-ray's sole opposition in the high definition disc market unveiled the first details about its Blu-ray hardware.

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Google reached a settlement last October with the Author's Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and several independent authors that filed a class action suit against it three years ago. Once this agreement is approved, Google will be able to greatly increase the number of books that can be searched, previewed and purchased in Google Books. There are currently some seven million books available.

"We hope and expect that this leap forward with our friends and partners in the publishing industry is just the first of many. We love books at Google, and our fondest dream is that Book Search will evolve into a service that ensures that books, along with their authors and publishers, will flourish for many years into the future," Google said in an announcement earlier this week.

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The iPod may be the reigning king of media players, but in Japan, the old king has managed to take back the throne.

Japanese market research company BCN Inc. reports that Sony's Walkman digital music player has outsold Apple's iPod in Japan, according to a Bloomberg report today.

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AT&T today said that just a few days after Summer ends, the iPhone will finally get the ability to send and receive MMS messages.

The company has said that the functionality will be enabled with a software update downloadable through iTunes, and will only be available on iPhone 3G and 3GS models.

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iPhone 3GS users have grown increasingly agitated that they still do not have MMS functionality and the ability to tether their phone to their laptop as a 3G modem despite the fact that these abilities were expected to arrive "at the end of the summer."

Yesterday, New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham called the iPhone "the Hummer of cellphones," burning through bandwidth like the oversized SUVs burn through gasoline. Because of this, AT&T has gotten a reputation for being an inadequate network. Nearly one third of potential iPhone owners are passing on the popular device because they don't want to deal with AT&T. The public has placed the blame for lack of MMS and tethering squarely on the mobile network operator.

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The highly desirable HTC Hero which was unveiled earlier this summer for will become Sprint's first Android phone on October 11. Not only has the device been re-tooled with an EV-DO rev. A radio for Sprint's 3G network (the world version is WCDMA,) but it has also received a total chassis overhaul.

But looking at the two versions side-by-side, the physical design has been almost completely rethought. Where the HTC Hero was slim and angular, with the now-trademark "chin" cropping up from the device's tail end, the Sprint Hero has been rounded out and flattened. It actually ends up looking more like T-Mobile's myTouch 3G more than the original Hero.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting this evening the internet's most popular video streaming destination YouTube is now in talks with movie studios to offer rental streams of new release movies which could potentially be released day and date with their DVD and Blu-ray counterparts.

The site already works with a number of content owners to host ad-sponsored streams of classic television shows and films, but the site has not yet attempted the rental model with these studios. Details are scant at this point, at the WSJ only cites information provided by unnamed sources "familiar with [YouTube's] plans." A $3.99 rental price is reportedly being discussed because that is the cost of a Standard Definition new release movie rental on Apple's iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand.

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I don't know about you, but my view of razor-thin notebooks has been permanently changed by MSI, thanks to a creative (and supremely twisted) viral advertisement that began circulating earlier this month. Because of this, my colleagues and I jokingly refer to this as-of-yet unclassified style of ultraportable as "cracktops."

Of course, within the industry, what I would refer to as a "cracktop" seems to be increasingly falling into "category X." Both Lenovo and MSI call their ultra slim portable lines the "X-series," and Sony today unveiled the Vaio X, which would fit right in among the others. (UPDATE: Samsung has just revealed its own slim notebook, also to be called the X series.)

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As Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto series continues to move ahead with releases of Chinatown Wars for the iPhone, and GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion pack for Xbox 360 on the horizon, the controversy from 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has only just now cooled down.

In a statement from Take-Two yesterday, the company said it will settle the class action suit over the unlockable sex scenes in GTA: San Andreas, and the "historical stock option granting practices" suit which brought the company before the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.

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When Microsoft announced yesterday that "Windows Phones" would be coming on October 6th, it didn't name specific phone models, but instead listed manufacturers and the mobile network operators that would be carrying them.

Today however, joint venture Sony Ericsson announced the sequel to its powerful and pricey Xperia X1 handset will be a "Windows Phone," the Windows Mobile 6.5-powered Xperia X2.

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For as popular as Nokia has been worldwide, it is just not a brand that Americans particularly care about. Even though it has consistently been the most prolific shipper of mobile devices worldwide, Nokia has only an 8% market share in the United States according to IDC, and even that is slipping.

So when Nokia unveiled its first netbook -- the Nokia Booklet 3G -- which has mobile consumers elsewhere in the world taking note, all American consumers seem to do is laugh. Even though DisplaySearch rankings for last quarter showed that we are eating up netbooks almost twice as fast as we are consuming full-sized notebooks, to us, Nokia still doesn't click.

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After refusing connections all morning, Gmail officially went down for the count this afternoon. For more than an hour the service was completely gone, but Google has returned Gmail's status to a "Service Disruption."

This morning, a notice from Google was sent out to users which said, "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change."

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Clear 4G WiMAX has come to ten more cities, just as Clearwire promised in the beginning of August.

Well, it's really like two cities and sporadic chunks of the biggest state in the contiguous United States. Bellingham, Washington and Boise, Idaho were the standalone cities that got switched on today, and the Texas cities launched today were Abilene, Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Killeen/Temple, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, Waco and Wichita Falls.

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