Tim Conneally

Even though Windows Phone has been leading the innovation curve for the next generation of all of Microsoft's graphical interfaces --everything from Windows 8 to Xbox Live is expected to adopt the mobile OS' "live tile" system-- Windows Phone seemed to have been lost in the shuffle in Microsoft's E3 keynote yesterday.

Updates to Kinect, Xbox Live, and of course the Halo franchise took center stage, and nearly nothing was said about Windows Phone and its upcoming improvements in the gaming realm and deepened integration with Xbox Live.

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Shown in early previews as "NGP" or "Next Generation Portable," Sony officially announced the PlayStation Portable's successor will be called PlayStation Vita, and it will be available with AT&T 3G connectivity.

Sony's new portable combines the traditional dual-analog gamepad interface with a smartphone-like capacitive OLED touchscreen, and adds a rear-mounted touchpad, and sixaxis motion sensors for a versatile gaming experience. It is also equipped with a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor and an SGX 543MP4+ graphics processor.

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At Sony's afternoon E3 keynote, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) Jack Tretton issued an apology to third party partners, retailers and consumers for the massive Playstation Network outage.

To the media, who profited a great deal off of the bad news, Tretton said "you're welcome."

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Apple on Monday debuted a new subscription service called iTunes Match which scans a user's library of music, and "matches" the user's songs with iTunes' database of 18 million songs. Instead of actually uploading the songs to a server like Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music Beta, iTunes Match simply identifies the song on the user's machine and then makes the equivalent song available "in the cloud" for download on other devices.

The company did not reveal whether the service will have any methods of detecting music ownership.

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In Apple's unveiling of iOS 5 on Monday, the company revealed iMessage, a new feature that brings the functionality of BlackBerry Messenger to all iOS devices: iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

The feature lets users send texts, photos, videos, contact information and group messages over Wi-Fi or 3G. It has delivery receipts and "read receipts" and live typing notifications which are pushed to all of a user's iOS devices.

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Though the name and concept behind Kinect Fun Lab leaked before its keynote, Microsoft showed off three very cool features available in Kinect Fun Labs when it launches for all Xbox 360 users later today.

The first was Xbox Live avatar creation demo called Kinect Me, which lets you snap pictures of your face and clothing with Kinect, and it's rendered as an Xbox Live avatar. It's actually exactly the same thing that Nintendo did with the Mii Maker for 3DS, but the results look a lot more sophisticated, and the clothing-scanning feature adds a bit more depth.

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In Los Angeles on Monday, Microsoft revealed its further plans to make the 360 a comprehensive streaming entertainment solution with Xbox Live TV, YouTube integration, and voice activated navigation and Bing search.

It's been just about three years since the "New Xbox Experience" debuted which brought Netflix Streaming, animated avatars, and live parties to Xbox Live. Microsoft today actually used the phrase "New Xbox Experience" again to describe this latest update, which will bring a new dashboard, voice controls including Bing voice search, YouTube integration, and Xbox Live TV in the fall.

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Just six months ago, we looked at a dual-screen 14.1" tablet called Kno that was being tested with university students. We got to play with the device a little bit, and got a feel for the ambitious goals of its creators. In short, they wanted to make e-textbooks exactly the same as their paper counterparts with the same page numbers, and with the ability to write on the pages.

Unfortunately, one of the main drivers behind the e-textbook movement is their affordability, and the custom Linux-driven tablet hardware was projected to cost students between $600-$900.

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MacDefender, the fake antivirus malware targeting Mac OS users that stole headlines in the month of May has changed names yet again. It can now be found under the name "MacShield."

The fake antivirus program, best classified as scareware, has gone by five different names since it was discovered: MacDefender, MacProtector, MacSecurity, MacGuard, and MacShield. The premise of the malware and its UI remain unchanged from version to version, according to security companies Intego and ESET.

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We'll be attending the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this year for one reason above the rest: the possibility of a new Nintendo console that attempts to match the explosive success of the Wii.

Today, Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb posted a blog with some pre-E3 statistics related to Microsoft, the Xbox 360, and the current generation of video game consoles as a whole. Included in his blog is the graph we've embedded below which, shows how each console hits a sales peak and then "tails" off for several years.

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As a part of Mozilla's new rapid release cycle that has screwed us up once already, the beta version of open source email client and RSS reader Thunderbird received a milestone update to version 5.0 on Thursday.

But what happened to 4.0? The most recent stable version of Thunderbird is version 3.1, and this new beta skips number four altogether.

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Readability, the service that eliminates ads and lets users reformat and store Web content in a less cluttered fashion, now supports Amazon's popular Kindle e-reader.

With today's update to Readability's browser add-on, all users are given the new "Send to Kindle" button. When clicked, the content onscreen is sent over to the user's Kindle via its @Kindle email address. Users on Readability's subscription tier also get the ability to Sync their Daily Digest with their Kindle as well.

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Russian security software company Elcomsoft on Thursday released a free tool dedicated solely to recovering Facebook passwords cached in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome called Facebook Password Extractor.

We've looked through a lot of software, and this is the first freeware we've seen dedicated solely to peeling Facebook login information out of a system. It's based on Elcomsoft's Internet Password Breaker, a $49 piece of password recovery software that can extract account information from other social networks, webmail, POP3/IMAP, and instant messenger clients.

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On Wednesday, Engineering Director of Google's Security Team Eric Grosse said his team had uncovered a password-stealing campaign originating from Jinan, China that targeted senior U.S., South Korean, and other Asian government officials, Chinese political activists, military personnel, and journalists.

Unlike a typical phishing scam looking to steal money from whomever falls for its social engineering tricks, Grosse suggested that this campaign was more for the purposes of espionage or information collection, and was targeting individuals.

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At the D9 Conference on Wednesday, Microsoft gave the public a much deeper look at Windows 8 than it had previously, revealing the company's progress in making a Windows that is scalable to the most popular types of interfaces in addition to the most popular instruction sets.

The result looks a lot like Windows Phone, but it has a lot of the underpinnings of Windows 7.

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