Ed Oswald

As if the press frenzy surrounding the antenna problems with the AT&T iPhone 4 last year was not enough, Consumer Reports has just added some more fuel to the fire. The publication claims that in its own internal tests of the Verizon model, the same exact attenuation issues are occurring.

Bloggers and journalists labeled it a whole bunch of amusing and comical names: from the "grip of death" to "Antennagate." It became a whole lot more serious for Apple, who eventually was forced by the publicity to admit some issues and provide free bumpers to all iPhone 4 owners.

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Google took a big step Thursday night towards dealing with the issue of content farms clogging results, changing its algorithms to weed out low-quality sites. The company said the changes would "noticeably impact" 11.8 percent of all queries, and could affect the rankings for a large number of websites, the company warned.

"We can't make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down," the company posted to its blog. "It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that's exactly what this change does."

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Somewhat hidden in between Apple's announcement Thursday of new MacBook Pro laptops was the debut of a new method of PC connectivity: Thunderbolt. It can be most easily explained as the next generation of FireWire, allowing for transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps.

Those who stand to benefit the most from Thunderbolt would be those in the audio-visual industries, which Intel itself bills the technology as perfect for. "Working with HD media is one of the most demanding things people do with their PCs," Intel's PC Client Group general manager Mooly Eden said. "We've taken the vision of simple, fast transfer of content between PCs and devices, and made it a reality."

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After a day where Apple's iPad was rumored to have been delayed by financial publication Bloomberg -- and then strongly refuted by noted Apple columnist John Dalrymple, a new rumor has surfaced: a date for the debut of the iPad 2.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsDigital said Tuesday afternoon that "multiple sources" are telling her that Apple plans to hold a media event on March 2, where the iPad 2 would make its first appearance. Details are scant, however Swisher says the unveiling would take place at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco.

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One of the three companies that had filed antitrust complaints against Google with the European Union broadened their list of accusations on Tuesday, sending a supplementary complaint to the European Commission's antitrust regulators regarding AdSense.

French company 1plusV claims that Google's advertising system was blocking one of its sites -- legal search engine Ejustice.fr -- from competing in the market place. From 2006 to 2010, Google prevented vertical search engines from using the AdSense product on their sites.

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Verizon confirmed that it would subsidize the cost of the Motorola XOOM tablet on Tuesday, possibly answering critics that it is too expensive for consumers. While the Android-powered device was introduced at CES to generally good reviews, its $799.99 unsubsidized price could be seen as a deterrent.

Those who subscribe to a 2-year contracted data plan would receive the standard $200 subsidy, lowering the cost to $599.99. At that price, the device becomes a whole lot more competitive with its contemporaries such as Apple's iPad. Data plans would begin at $20 monthly for 1GB of data.

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They say if you can't beat them, join them. Rather than fight back against enterprising hackers aiming to get the Xbox Kinect motion-sensing controller working with Windows, Microsoft has now announced the availability of an SDK to come this spring.

The news shouldn't be all too surprising, however: CEO Steve Ballmer had made statements that compatibility with PCs was in the works at this year's CES.

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The first major update to the Windows Phone 7 software is now being delivered to customers, Microsoft said on Monday. While the update does not include highly anticipated features such as cut and paste, it does lay the groundwork for future updates.

Microsoft has improved upon the software update process in order to make it more efficient. While the company did not give much detail on what exactly the update changes, Microsoft did call the update "important because it's paving the way for all future goodie-filled updates to your phone, such as copy and paste or improved Marketplace search," hinting towards what the company is working on.

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Google is committing further to social search, and said Thursday that it would more tightly integrate results from its users' social circles. The Mountain View, Calif. search company first introduced the functionality two years ago in an effort to make results more personally relevant.

"As always, we want to help you find the most relevant answers among the billions of interconnected pages on the web," the company said in a blog post introducing the changes. "But relevance isn't just about pages -- it's also about relationships."

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Fresh off their increased numbers in Congress, the GOP is setting its sights in the FCC controversial net neutrality rules as its next target. Forty Republican senators led by Commerce committee ranking member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas as well as two Republican House members are spearheading a repeal effort.

The Congressional Review Act, passed in 1996, allows Congress to review the rulemakings of government agencies and overturn them if need be. Of course since this is a legislative procedure, any effort would require President Obama's signature or lacking that a two-thirds majority in either legislative body to override a veto.

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In its annual public report on conditions at its overseas suppliers, Apple said it had noted an increase in child labor as well as tackling the issue of suicides at Foxconn, one of its biggest overseas partners. It also said that it had continued efforts to improve workplace safety and morale, two issues the company had taken heat for ignoring in the past.

Apple said that poor checks had resulted in the increases in child labor over the past year, and it had instituted efforts to assist its suppliers in preventing it from occurring. One case was especially severe, and the company found the supplier was doing little to fix the problem, or appeared willing to.

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Nokia is coming under increasing criticism for its partnership with Microsoft, with shareholders looking for the removal of CEO Stephen Elop, and a Finnish union looking for severance pay for workers laid off as a result of the deal. It seems to point to a coming showdown that may rear its ugly head at its annual meeting in July in Helsinki.

The shareholder group calls itself Plan B, and is comprised of nine anonymous "small" shareholders of the company that were also former employees. Among their demands is the firing of Elop, restructuring of the Microsoft deal to limit it to the North American market, and adoption of MeeGo as the company's primary smartphone platform.

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With Google making efforts to improve the quality of its search results, it is now giving users the opportunity to block certain sites from search results. The extension would be available for its Chrome browser, and user's actions in blocking sites could become part of Google's fight against spam content.

"We've been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content," principal engineer Matt Cutts explained. "One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users."

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When Research in Motion adds cellular data to its PlayBook tablet device in the second half of the year, it will commit to higher speed technologies according to statements at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A WiMAX version is set to by sold by Sprint this summer, but RIM will add LTE and HSPA+ versions.

HSPA+ would make the device compatible with a large majority of GSM carriers worldwide that have begun to deploy the technology as an upgrade to their data networks. LTE would make the PlayBook compatible with those further along in their deployments, as well as CDMA providers like Verizon who have chosen the platform for their own wireless data upgrade paths.

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In what can be viewed as a acknowledgment of its weakening position in the smartphone market, Apple is working on lower cost and smaller versions of its iPhone. Sources told Bloomberg that the company is also working on technology that would allow the device to work across multiple networks.

One device would apparently be a smaller version of the current iPhone from those that have seen it, at about two-thirds the size of the iPhone 4, and without a home button. The device would be sold for about $200 without the need for a contract. It is not clear however whether the device would come unlocked making it capable to be used across any network.

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