Tim Conneally

With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo's was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.

Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn't carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you're a little bit lazy...you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.

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BlackBerry Tour, the latest smartphone from Research in Motion, will be heading to Verizon on July 12 for $199.99 in two different forms: one with a camera and one without. The device was officially announced earlier in June on both Verizon and Sprint, but Verizon is the first carrier to offer a launch date.

Also known as the 9630, the BlackBerry Tour is a world phone with voice support in over 220 countries and push e-mail support in 175. It is equipped with GPS and can also be used as a tethered 3G modem (2100 MHz UMTS/HSPA, or 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A) for Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect Subscribers. With BlackBerry as the dominant brand in enterprise smartphone deployments, the ability to buy the latest model with no built-in camera is crucial for secure work environments where no cameras are allowed, especially including government installations.

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While Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X looks to turn the Pirate Bay into a legal business, the torrent tracking site's founders have taken the wraps off of their HTML5 project site called The Video Bay, a streaming video service in the vein of YouTube and, what else, The Pirate Bay.

Even though The Video Bay has been in development for two years, it is still extremely rough. The team recently rolled out an "extreme beta" version (like a public alpha) which carries the warning: "Don't expect anything to work at all." Indeed, even the site itself doesn't load for all the traffic it's currently shouldering.

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To cut down on electronic waste and increase interoperability, ten mobile phone makers have signed a European Commission Memorandum of Understanding that commits them to using Micro USB as their standard mobile phone charger and data connection by 2010.

Many of the companies that signed the agreement, which include Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments, are members of the OMTP Forum which agreed on standardizing micro USB for charging and local data exchange last February.

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Last year, Sprint and Clearwire consolidated their WiMAX businesses in the Clear 4G wireless network, which was partly funded by investments from Google, Intel, and cable companies Time Warner, Bright House Networks, and Comcast.

Today, Comcast officially became the first Clear reseller among the investors, launching its "High Speed 2go" WiMAX subscription service in Portland, Oregon. The cable company announced that there will be further rollouts in Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia later this year as well. The plan is similar to the Sprint 4G service the carrier announced last March.

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The two-year old "PSP Phone" rumor has been resurrected yet again, this time because of a weekend article in respected Japanese business journal Nikkei Shimbun. The article says Sony now has plans to set up a PSP Phone development team in July which will be comprised of Sony Ericsson and SCE workers.

Rumors of a PlayStation Portable-branded Sony Ericsson device began when a 2007 patent application for a gaming phone was filed by the joint venture. The device in the patent is designed with a 90-degree pivoting screen not unlike the LG VX9400, and d-pad style buttons rather than the traditional numeric keypad. Earlier this year, a Christmas 2009 launch date for the device was rumored as well.

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Until yesterday, Android developers had to build their applications to run inside Dalvik, the Java virtual machine upon which Google's mobile OS is built. While it is beneficial in embedded systems with limited processor power and RAM, it is limiting for developers who, for example, want to create CPU-intensive, but not RAM-intensive, applications such as more in-depth computations, simulations, or signal processing.

Now that has become possible with the Android Native Developers Kit, a companion to the SDK which gives developers a way to use the ARMv5TE machine instruction set, such as libc, the standard C library, libm, the standard math library, libz, the common ZLib compression library, the Java Native Interface (JNI), and liblog, which can send logCat messages to the kernel.

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British LCD TV maker Cello Electronics has populated the European budget TV market with devices sporting some atypical features, such as the TV with an iPod Dock, which are designed in China and manufactured by North England subcontractors.

Like Vizio in the United States, Cello has grown rapidly in the last four years because of its affordable, but feature-rich products.

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WiMAX operator Clearwire
has acquired the remaining WiMAX licenses from Oneida Communications for an undisclosed amount. Last year, Oneida sold the majority of its licenses to Sprint, but held onto an unspecified number, which now belong to Clearwire. The company did not divulge how many licenses each company obtained or which markets will benefit from the acquisitions.

In 2005, Oneida Communications Group was formed with the purposes of acquiring licenses in the 2.5 GHz spectrum, known as Broadband Radio Service (BRS) licenses, which are crucial to the implementation of point to multi-point WiMAX networks. That spectrum range has been found ideal for high-bandwidth, non-line of sight installations, and has been dominated by Sprint and Clearwire.

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Stockholm District Court Judge Tomas Norström, whose impartiality was called into question after his guilty judgment in the Pirate Bay trial, has been found bias-free by Swedish courts.

Judge Norström is a member of two Swedish copyright reform groups, the SFU and the SFIR, which include some highly outspoken members of the Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI. It was thought Norström's link to these individuals could be grounds for a bias against the Pirate Bay.

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Yesterday, Apple began to push out the Apple TV version 2.4 software update, which adds several usability improvements, including one tied into the iPhone 3.0 software update.

It's by no means a monumental update, and its minor improvements now allow users to view movies by genre, title, or unwatched status. TV shows and podcasts may also now be viewed according to date, show title, or unwatched status. A Flickr tag search has also been added, which allows the user to find new photos or use them as Apple TV screensavers.

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Semanti, formerly known as Semantifind, is a Firefox 3 plug-in that works with a user's chosen search engine to assign context to queries, preview results in line, save good search results, and provide suggestions derived from community use.

This week, Semanti v. 2.0 was released, with features that now include "Social Search," or search results based upon your Facebook friends' search behavior. For example, when Semanti provides an answer to your query that you find particularly effective, you can save that result so that when your Facebook friends search for the same terms, the results that you approved of appear as the top answers to their query. It's something like "starring" the highest quality answer so your friends don't waste time poking around less pertinent results.

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A report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal cited "people familiar with the matter," who said a new Android Phone from Motorola would be coming to Verizon before the end of the year. The report gathered most of the commonly-known evidence, such as Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha's statements from last year that the company would have Android devices out by the end of 2009, to portray the certainty of this new, unnamed device.

The device that everyone is expecting to hit Verizon is what is currently known as the Motorola "Morrison," a blue and white slider which was first leaked last week in unauthorized spy shots.

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Apple's new iPhone 3GS proved to be a hit last weekend, according to Apple, selling over a million units in its first weekend; and if hardware analysis firm iSuppli's latest analysis is accurate, the 3G S costs 28% less to make than the first generation iPhone did two years ago, and only about 2% more than the iPhone 3G last year.

ISuppli delivers reliable bill of materials reports for consumer electronics products, in which it tears down a device, adds up the cost of each of its components and then estimates the manufacturer's total expense in making the device.

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Today, Taiwanese mobile phone maker and principal hardware supporter of the Android platform, HTC unveiled its third Android handset, Hero, which is the first to make a departure from the familiar Android UI.

The first Android handset, released in the United States as the T-Mobile G1, received a great deal of derision for its chassis design, which has been called everything from "annoying," to "an ugly brick." But HTC is sticking with the "chin" design until naysayers get used to it. The Hero looks very similar to the G1, but with a greatly streamlined profile and no physical keyboard.

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