In its most concerted effort to date to recapture what some have perceived as waning brand interest, Nokia kicked off a four-city worldwide tour today with a gala event in New York City, where five new handset models took center stage. At the high end is the innovative N95, with a two-way sliding keypad that flips its mode between media player and cell phone, a built-in 5-megapixel camera, and speakers Nokia says will produce a "3D stereo effect."

The fact that the N95 is an HSDPA device will likely mean that Cingular will be the first, if not the only, major US carrier to offer the phone to its customers. Competitors Sprint and Verizon are still heavily entrenched in EV-DO -- the other "third-generation" (3G) wireless data technology -- while T-Mobile, which supports HSDPA in Europe, has yet to announce a 3G strategy for North America.

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The Taiwanese electronics industry daily DigiTimes is citing motherboard manufacturers there as saying they're gearing up now for production of new models that will support three new AMD premium processors.

The new FX-70, -72, and -74 models, DigiTimes was told, will effectively launch AMD's new premium platform, currently code-named '4x4.' Motherboards supporting this platform will be unique because they'll feature two CPU sockets, not just one, with each Socket 1207 designed to support dual-core CPUs.

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Today is the day that designated domain name registrars have been given the green light to open up the application process for new .mobi top-level domain Web addresses to anyone seeking to establish a name in the burgeoning mobile Web space. Beginning now, anybody who can provide proof of trademark and country of trademark origin can register for a domain, if it promises to use that name for small device-oriented Web sites only.

Since ICANN announced its approval of the "dot-mobi" plan last May, registrars up to now have been hosting "pre-registration" periods, for companies and individuals wanting to stake claim to their trademarks within the new namespace. With full registration now open, companies such as #1 registrar GoDaddy.com and UK-based Hostway Corp., are taking applications for dot-mobi addresses at higher-than-normal rates for a two-week period.

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Marking what could have been a summer-long hiatus in its "Get the Facts" campaign, Microsoft is re-igniting the flames on the argument over whether enterprises spend less to manage Windows systems than Linux systems.

This morning, the company touted a study it commissioned from independent analyst Mercer Management Consulting, which made the case that companies that implement migration programs away from UNIX systems based on the need to adopt new applications -- what Mercer calls "transformational migrations" -- now tend to choose Windows over Linux.

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Sophos Labs now rates as “critical” a re-emerging exploit to Microsoft’s Vector Markup Language (VML) library, which Microsoft now says it will try to patch before its original October 10 deadline, announced on Thursday. This comes as the SANS Group raises its InfoCon level officially to “yellow,” “to emphasize the need to consider fixes.”

In the meantime, a group of software engineers called the Zeroday Emergency Response Team (ZERT) has issued what it characterizes as an interim patch for the VML exploit, possibly closing the door to a new series of Trojans.

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In response to questions following his keynote address to the Tokyo Game Show this morning, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi announced a drastic 20% price cut for the PlayStation 3 game console, in time for its November 11 premiere in Japan. The 20 GB model will now sell in Japan for about $429 USD, instead of the $515 USD originally planned.

In addition, both the 20 GB and 60 GB models will feature a high-definition HDMI connector, in response, the company said today, to consumer demands following the machine's introduction at E3 Expo last May.

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In advance of a House Committee on Government Reform hearing, in which the matter would have come up anyway, the U.S. Commerce Dept. responded to a Committee request by disclosing in a private briefing yesterday that it believes as many as 1,137 laptop computers have been lost from the Dept.'s inventory since 2001.

Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez delivered the message personally to three Committee members, presumably including Chairman Tom Davis (R - Virginia), and ranking member Henry Waxman (D - Calif.), who first inquired about how the DOC manages its computer inventory in a letter dated July 10.

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NEWSMAKER The key issue at hand before European Union legislators is whether software, by definition, qualifies as intellectual property worthy of patent protection. But the issue has become so sensitive in European politics that neither side of the debate is actually arguing the issue directly. Instead, they're arguing parallel or related issues, in the hopes of garnering public support that would result in the passage of new laws that would incidentally codify their basic points, perhaps without too many people noticing.

So one of the big incidental issues facing the EU, especially with regard to running a government whose mandate is to speak 21 languages is this: When you pass a law saying certain other parts of the law only need to be written in three of those languages, the law you pass must be explained to those who speak all 21 languages. Which means the enforcement of the three-language law must be as multilingual as the system it would try to replace.

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It's sometimes difficult to keep track of whether the names Microsoft chooses to call things are real product names or code names - sometimes the latter is arguably better. But after several months of referring to Microsoft's implementation of Asynchronous JavaScript as "Atlas," the client-side rendition of the product will end up being called "Microsoft AJAX Library."

Microsoft announced this decision, reported by BetaNews last week, in a blog posting by ASP.NET general manager Scott Guthrie. There, he also said the server-side implementation will be known by the characteristically non-romantic moniker, "ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions."

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As a result of investigations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into possible inappropriate accounting among major corporations, many -- including Apple and nVidia -- have received notices from the NASDAQ stock exchange threatening possible de-listing if they don't file their quarterly 10-Q public status reports on time. Add Dell to that list this morning.

Most of the recent wave of SEC probes concern the practice of options backdating - issuing options as compensation to executives, whose exercise date is set far enough in the past that their value is instantly high. For Dell, however, that practice would have backfired; its stock value has traded consistently lower since January 2005.

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In an opening statement of testimony delivered today to the Senate Commerce Committee, Dr. John Twomey, the president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) stated (in prepared remarks submitted in writing) that it has entered into a five-year extension of its current agreement to let the U.S. Dept. of Commerce oversee its operations.

The move signals the completion of the U.S. government's about-face in its stance regarding whether the public or private sector should manage the system that assigns and maps the world's Internet domain names, delegating the authority for registering names to other firms.

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A bitter dispute between Mobile WiMAX partners Intel and Motorola, and wireless broadband partners Qualcomm and Kyocera, over the possible adoption of a Qualcomm technology as wireless broadband standard 802.20 forced the IEEE yesterday to order the complete reorganization of the 802.20 Working Group.

Both sides in the dispute have been crying foul since last November, when Intel and Motorola alleged that a merged standards proposal to the Working Group blending elements of Qualcomm and Kyocera technologies violated IEEE procedures. Suspicion over the way these complaints were handled by the Group's chairman at the time, Jerry Upton, led the companies to allege that he was actually a paid consultant for Qualcomm - an allegation which Upton later admitted.

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An extensive teardown analysis by research firm iSuppli, released this morning on Apple's second generation iPod nano MP3 player announced last week, reveals the company is probably paying 20 percent less to build this new model than for the previous nano generation.

Last April, NAND flash memory and media processor supplier Samsung substantially broadened its contract agreement with Apple, effectively ending Apple's existing relationship with U.S. company PortalPlayer, Inc. Previously, up to 95% of that company's business was in supplying media processors for iPods, which were already using Samsung memory.

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Sensing a real possibility of dethroning Sony as the leading game console manufacturer worldwide, Microsoft has accelerated its marketing effort for Xbox 360. At the Tokyo Game Show this morning, the company announced it is increasing the target number of game titles available in Japan for the holiday season from 80 to 110, and will premiere the 360's HD DVD player accessory there on November 22 for about USD$169.

At current exchange rates, the 20 GB Xbox 360 Core System sells for about $339 in Japan; in the US, its price averages about $300. If Microsoft's suggested retail price for the HD DVD add-on follows the same price scale, the company could be planning to market Xbox 360 plus HD DVD in the U.S. for a combined price of under $500.

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In December 2005, three optical disc engineers now identified as working for Warner Bros. began work on a U.S. patent application for a three-layer optical disc, which would be capable of being adapted to any of 22 different configurations. One enables a hybrid DVD / HD DVD or DVD / Blu-ray configuration, and another would allow for a hybrid HD DVD / Blu-ray disc.

The patent application, dated August 10, 2006, may have used the strongest language put forth by a representative of a major studio against the notion that either format would ever win the high-definition format war.

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