Tim Conneally

It's wonderful news for the Windows Mobile family as a whole, but yet another kick in the gut for Windows Mobile 6.5.

Microsoft's App Marketplace looked like one of the few reasons for Windows Mobile 6.1 users to look forward to the 6.5 OS update. Now, however, those millions of WM6 and WM6.1 users will be provided access to the app store by the end of 2009 as well, according to a Windows Mobile Team announcement today.

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Blockbuster Inc. and Samsung jointly announced today that new Samsung HDTVs, Home theater systems, and Blu-Ray players will be equipped with Blockbuster OnDemand, the company's streaming rental service, by Fall 2009.

Blockbuster's streaming media service has been rushing to catch up with Netflix, which scored an early lead with critical placement on numerous popular brands of hardware, and has continued to dominate the streaming movie rental market. However, today's partnership announcement with Samsung marks the second time Blockbuster OnDemand will live alongside Netflix on Demand in the same machines. The first time the two were paired was last March, when TiVo announced Blockbuster OnDemand would be coming to broadband connected Series2, Series3, TiVo HD, and HD XL set-top boxes, where Netflix was made available three months prior.

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The European Commission yesterday announced that it has charged a number of LCD panel manufacturers as an illegal cartel that fixed the prices of LCD screens for televisions, mobile phones, notebook computers, digital watches and cameras, MP3 players, and other CE equipment.

While the EC did not list the companies it had charged by name, the parties previously under investigation by the US, EU, South Korea, and Japan included Samsung, LG/Phillips, NEC, Seiko, Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, and IPS Alpha. Phillips, which divested from its joint venture with LG Electronics last March said it will "vigorously oppose" the allegation that it was involved in a cartel. So far, it is the only company to come forth with a statement that confirms its involvement in the EU's claim.

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When the iPhone 3G S debuted in June, Apple simultaneously announced that the iPhone 3G, the new device's year-old, 8 GB predecessor would be dropping to a scant $99. What the Cupertino computer maker didn't announce was that the price for refurbished iPhones (i.e., phones that were previously owned, but returned within 30 days) would also be dropping to a price less than 15% of the 3G device's original cost.

AT&T is now offering refurbished 8 GB iPhone 3G for only $79 with a two-year contract, a considerable drop from the $150 price tag from six months ago.

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Now that the latest chatter coming from the UK surmises that streaming music services such as Spotify are hot among teenagers, while p2p-based music sharing is not, Microsoft is reportedly about to debut its own contribution to Britain's music streaming boom.

The Telegraph reported today that Microsoft's UK Web portal MSN will be launching a streaming music service this month that is "similar in principle to Spotify."

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Beloved Japanese role playing game franchise Dragon Quest has enjoyed frenzied launches for more than twenty years, with lines that make Apple's launch queues look piddly by comparison.

Last Friday, Dragon Quest IX: Hoshizora no Mamoribito, the latest installment in the series was launched for the Nintendo DS, and long lines of customers shelled out their ¥5,980 for a copy of the game.

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Adobe Systems today released the public beta of ColdFusion 9, the company's application development platform and has unveiled the Eclipse-based ColdFusion Builder Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Adobe went for three simple categories of improvement with this release: Increase user productivity, improve integration with popular enterprise software, and simplify the workflow between Adobe products.

To increase user productivity, server administration has been simplified in this version, with the Server Manager application, which lets multiple ColdFusion servers be managed centrally through an AIR-based app. New tools seek to simplify the development process, such as ColdFusion-as-a-Service which gives access to ColdFusion services through AMF (Action Message Format) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) without having to write ColdFusion Components (CFCs). Also, integration with Hibernate's object relational mapping (ORM) lets developers build database-independent applications without the need to write any SQL.

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The creative end of the music industry is drawing ever closer to a nexus: a point where composing, recording, distributing and publicizing music meets. You could be holding it in your pocket right now, and it's not the same point of convergence sold by the ounce that drove the industry in the past. It's the ubiquitous, lionized, and oh-so-lucrative iPhone.

Recording

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Download Microsoft Silverlight 3 from Fileforum now.

After going live just a little bit early, Silverlight 3 is now an official release. The third iteration of Microsoft's rich internet application platform largely viewed as the chief competitor to Adobe Flash (but really an AIR rival) was officially launched this morning at a Microsoft event in San Francisco alongside Expression 3, the latest version of the company's design and development studio.

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Mobile network operator and ISP Orange UK announced that it has begun to offer DRM-free downloads in the Orange Music Store. Content is available from major labels Universal Music and EMI initially, as well as "a number of independent labels," filling out the catalog with more than 700,000 tracks.

Like Verizon's V Cast with Rhapsody in the United States, Orange Music Store downloads are delivered simultaneously to the mobile handset and PC, and can be transferred and burned at will. Verizon's parent company Vodafone went from protected WMA to unprotected MP3, last March.

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Research in Motion's BlackBerry Tour world phone will be released this weekend on both Verizon and Sprint for $199, and while the device has been received warmly by reviewers and BlackBerry fans, a point of consistent criticism has been the device's lack of Wi-Fi.

A report from Sprint has arrived, saying that Wi-Fi is a necessary feature in major devices, but the Tour was actually rushed out. Bringing the new BlackBerry to Sprint in a timely fashion outweighed the carrier's desire to wait for Wi-Fi, according to the report. Consequently, a version of the BlackBerry Tour will be released next year equipped with 802.11.

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Both Sony Bravia connected HDTVs and the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link module now have access to Netflix on Demand, the popular service which has already found its way onto the Xbox 360, TiVo HD DVRs, LG Blu-Ray players and HDTVs.

Netflix will reside in the Bravia Internet Video platform alongside Amazon Video on Demand, YouTube, Sony Pictures, Sports Illustrated, Crackle, Slacker, Epicurious.com, Concierge.com, Style.com, and Dailymotion. Unfortunately, Sony's PlayStation 3 is not yet compatible with this service, and today's announcement did not mention the video game console.

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Today, DVR pioneer TiVo and consumer electronics retailer Best Buy announced they will be working together to boost TiVo adoption and improve Best Buy's digital presence in the consumer's home.

A joint statement from the companies this morning said, "TiVo and Best Buy plan to investigate development of a unique user interface for TiVo DVRs purchased at Best Buy which would provide Best Buy a platform to more effectively market its digital content services, to regularly offer consumers trusted advice and guidance on the digital home experience, and to provide an ongoing dialogue with customers about Best Buy's various retail offerings."

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Despite what mobile carriers have been saying about LTE's readiness, there is still a fundamental problem with the deployment of an all-data packet switched network: its incompatibility with the old circuit-switched networks. Though LTE will support a tremendous jump in data transmission speeds on our mobile devices, it still cannot support voice and SMS functionality because those are built on the old circuit switched architecture.

Currently, there are a few ways this problem can be tackled. There is IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the 3GPP-endorsed way that delivers voice and SMS through IP architecture, sort of like a big VoIP system. There is network hybridization, where the 4G network would only handle data and the legacy 2G/3G networks would handle voice and SMS. Finally, there is VoLGA, or Voice over LTE via Generic Access, a spec based upon 3GPP's GAN standard, which allows circuit switched traffic to be piped into LTE packets.

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Marking the second generation Kindle's fifth month of availability and its passage into the "majority phase" of the Rogers adoption curve, Amazon has lopped 15% of the popular e-reader's price. The device's price today was dropped to $299.

Though Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the company may never disclose the Kindle's sales figures, an estimated 300,000 Kindle 2 units were reportedly shipped in April. In May, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, which has actually struggled to keep up with demand.

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