Tim Conneally

Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung on Monday announced its first Android tablet to be powered by Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) will be the 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2.

Though it's called the Galaxy Tab 2, it's actually the third of Samsung's 7" tablets. The first Galaxy Tab debuted in September 2010, and then just about a year later, the Galaxy Tab 7.0 plus was launched.

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As a part of its ongoing restructuring efforts, America's century-old imaging company Eastman Kodak announced it will phase out its "dedicated capture devices business" which includes a big chunk of its consumer portfolio, such as digital cameras, pocket camcorders, and digital picture frames.

The company said it will instead seek revenues through licensing the patents that it has in these areas.

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Adobe "Muse" is a piece of desktop software from the InDesign team that lets graphic designers create websites in a purely graphical format without the need to manually enter any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. On Wednesday evening, Adobe rolled out the beta 6 build of Muse that includes more than 80 updates and performance enhancements.

This is a mandatory update because Adobe has changed the install and update mechanism of the software. Once this beta is downloaded and installed, future beta builds will be sent automatically. The initial release of Muse is expected to be some time in early 2012, under a different name, as a subscription-only product.

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Yesterday, Google pulled the trigger and finally launched Chrome for Android in beta. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant app releases ever for the Android platform, but like other platforms, the browser market is a strange beast and BetaNews readers, of all people, should be acutely familiar with that fact.

If you do not own an Android device capable of running the Chrome Beta, you probably looked around at the reviews and got a general feeling for the new software and why it's "the platform's best new browser," or the native browser killer with an improved interface and simple tab handling. But none of these reviews really addressed the burning question:

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Big news came from Google on Tuesday as the company released the very first beta version of its Chrome web browser for Android. Like the mobile versions of Opera and Firefox for Android, browser tabs and favorites from the user's desktop version are synced to the mobile browser, providing a unified experience across platforms.

The beta version is currently only available on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, Korea, Argentina, and Brazil, so if you don't have ICS at your disposal right now or you're in a country not listed, we'll follow up with some first impressions to let you know how it fares against all the other Android browsers.

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Yesterday, with the announcement of Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Mobile, I touched on the big developments taking place in mobile sales, marketing, and support. The ever-increasing power of smartphones is shifting the way businesses and customers interact in nearly all forms of commerce (B2C, C2C, B2B, and so forth) because both ends rely on their mobile devices as the primary method of communication.

An important component in this customer relationship model is automated communications, and Microsoft on Tuesday announced it has formed a long-term equity partnership with 24/7 Inc. that focuses on that aspect. Microsoft and 24/7 Inc. have joined up to develop a next-gen automated customer service platform that pairs big data analytics with touch, speech, and gesture interfaces for a more mobile-friendly self-service customer experience.

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Amazon on Tuesday reduced the price of its Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud-based storage platform by between 12 and 13.5 percent for U.S. customers. With the reduction, the retailer-turned-cloud-services-provider is attempting to draw the attention of businesses utilizing on-premises storage solutions with a more affordable and scalable cloud platform.

As a bonus, current customers also get a nice reduction in their monthly bill. It applies to both private enterprise and users of AWS GovCloud.

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Coinstar-owned DVD rental kiosk company Redbox was one of the biggest reasons Blockbuster video went bankrupt. Monday, Coinstar announced it has begun a joint venture with communications service provider Verizon to build a subscription streaming video service.

It is a move nearly identical to the one Netflix took three-and-a-half years ago, when it branched out from being a DVD-by-mail service to also being a streaming video provider through a partnership with Starz.

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If 2011 was all about integrating social media relationships to CRM software, 2012 looks like it will be all about taking relationships to the mobile realm, and mobilizing sales, service and marketing teams with powerful CRM apps.

Microsoft on Monday announced the next update to its customer relationship management product Microsoft Dynamics CRM will include a new native mobile client for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7.

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Microsoft on Friday announced the publication of the C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (AMP) specification under the Microsoft Community Promise license. This specification lets C++ developers write programs that can compile and execute on data-parallel hardware like discrete graphics cards or the SIMD vector instruction set in a processor. It can also be thought of as hardware acceleration.

Soma Somasegar, the Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division, revealed last summer that the company was working on support for parallelism in the next version of Visual Studio.

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Hacktivist group Anonymous has released an audio recording of a January 17 conference call which it claims includes members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the UK's Scotland Yard discussing their latest anti-hacking efforts. We've embedded the 17-minute long clip above.

The participants in the conference call talk about Anonymous, LulzSec, Antisec, CSL Security and other black hat security groups, the evidence they have against such groups, and their progress in arresting suspects.

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Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android mobile platform, revealed on Thursday that the Android Market has secretly had a system in place named "Bouncer" to scan apps for malicious code.

"Bouncer" was running in secret for most of 2011, and Lockheimer says that the period between the first and second halves of 2011 showed a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market.

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Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, takes a slightly different approach to social content organization and management, and includes a couple of new APIs to let application developers surface social network data.

If you've got ICS running on your phone already, you have probably already noticed the "People" application, Android's revamped contacts system that unifies different social networks and methods of communication under a single profile, allowing information to be more centrally located on a user's phone and shared out when needed.

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Qualcomm on Thursday finally came forward to announce an LTE milestone that took place at the end of December: the first voice call to be seamlessly handed over from an LTE mobile network to a WCDMA network using Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC). This is an important milestone because SRVCC lets the LTE-based VoIP/IMS packets be transferred to the legacy circuit-switched domain, unifying the old mobile networks with the new.

This has been one of the big challenges for LTE VoIP for the last four years, and the industry was exploring SRVCC alongside a technique called Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) to offer continuous voice over LTE service. With the ability to hand over connections, VoIP subscribers can roam between LTE and other wireless networks without disconnection.

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Corning Incorporated and Samsung Mobile Display Company on Thursday announced they are beginning an equity joint venture in Korea that focuses on making the glass substrate for Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays.

OLEDs were a big topic at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, especially the large-panel TVs sporting the display technology. But OLED tablets were also on the menu, as Toshiba teased with a 7.7" concept tablet with a high contrast AMOLED display.

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