T-Mobile said Wednesday that it will sell the iPhone in Germany without a contract, complying with a court injunction against it. In addition, it will unlock any phone bought since November 19 -- the date of the ruling -- at no charge, so that the device can be used with other carriers. However, the company has asked the courts to clarify the injunction so it may change its offer to consumers based upon that.

Consumers will gain the option to purchase the device without the two year contract for €999, or about $1,478 USD. In all cases, contract or not, T-Mobile will unlock any iPhone purchased after the ruling. The process is apparently different in Germany than it is here in the US. American consumers may purchase the iPhone sans contract for a flat price of $399, whereas in Germany, consumers are apparently forced to purchase the contract first and the phone second.

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BitTorrent users rejoice: Just a month after offering a symmetrical 20 Mbps option for its FiOS Internet service, Verizon has boosted its maximum download speeds to 50 Mbps. For $139.95 per month, those users will also receive upload speeds of 20 Mbps.

Those not needing such connectivity can opt for a new, cheaper $89.95 plan that includes 30 Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream. Availability of both services depends on the state where the user is located. Verizon's FiOS can offer much faster speeds than traditional cable or DSL broadband because it utilizes fiber optic cables to a customer's home, but it is only available in 16 states currently.

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Members of the Senate from both sides of the aisle are pressing for a review of the current video game rating system in the wake of the controversy surrounding Manhunt 2. Senators including Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) have protested the ESRB's rating of the game, and said that consumers should be able to trust the ratings the board gives.

Sens. Clinton and Lieberman have been regular names in the fight against violent content, and have backed legislation to ban the sale of these games at the federal level to minors. "We ask your consideration of whether it is time to review the robustness, reliability and repeatability of your ratings process, particularly for this genre of 'ultraviolent' video games and the advances in game controllers," the senators wrote.

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T-Mobile confirmed Monday that it had temporarily suspended sales of the Sidekick Slide until it can discover why the phone is turning off when the device is opened and closed. The issue is localized to the Slide models, produced by Motorola. The Sharp-produced Sidekick LX and iD are not affected, T-Mobile said. The Slide first disappeared from the carrier's online store late on Friday.

Customers will have three different options to address the issue, T-Mobile said. First, they could opt to keep their devices until both the carrier and Motorola have more information about the issue. If they do not wish to keep the Slide, they may trade it in for an LX, or apply the purchase price to another phone model. It is not immediately known how widespread the power problem is.

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Beta testers have received access to a release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 3, but general consumers still have a long wait until they'll see SP3 available for download. Microsoft has scheduled the last major update to its six-year-old OS for the first half of 2008 - likely after Windows Vista SP1.

Around 15,000 testers now have access to XP SP3, and Microsoft says it plans one last public beta release before releasing the final bits next year. The same individuals are testing Vista SP1 RC Preview, although Microsoft has also promised a public SP1 build. Although XP SP3 is more of a roll-up of existing hotfixes and should be completed before Vista's first upgrade, Microsoft will likely delay its release and use SP1 to encourage holdout XP users to upgrade to Vista.

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The Cupertino company has admitted that a setting in its firewall application in Mac OS X Leopard to "block all incoming connections" isn't exactly true. Shortly after Leopard hit the streets, independent researchers took issue with its claims about its new firewall. Researchers at Heise Security said that the application was still allowing certain types of connections to come through.

In its first update to Mac OS X 10.5, Apple admitted that Heise was right, saying the setting "allows any process running as user 'root' (UID 0) to receive incoming connections, and also allows mDNSResponder to receive connections. This could result in the unexpected exposure of network services." The fix does not close down these holes, but rewords the option within the firewall to "allow only essential services." Additionally, it will limit the incoming connections when users select this setting to only a small subset of system services.

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With Windows Vista SP1 not set to land until sometime in the first quarter, Microsoft has announced it will delay its annual springtime WinHEC conference until fall, presumably to give SP1 more time to reach users. The company says it rescheduled the event in response to industry feedback.

WinHEC, or Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is devoted to engineers and driver developers. Although it sounds mundane, the event plays a critical role in connecting Microsoft to the hardware vendors that actually distribute its software. It's not clear how the delay will affect Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, which it canceled this year because the company's new wave of developer tools won't launch until next February.

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One of Apple's legal headaches disappeared on Thursday as a judge threw out one of the lawsuits against the company over its options backdating scandal. The suit, brought against it by the New York City Employees Retirement System, was filed in August of last year. It charged that Apple had diluted the stock price by issuing some 200 million improperly accounted stock options. US District Judge Jeremy Fogel disagreed, saying the group itself had admitted the stock price did not fall as a result of the backdating, an important threshold the plaintiffs had to meet in order to sue the company for its actions.

Apple is not completely free of any possible legal action by the retirement fund: Fogel gave the opportunity to the group to refile if they can prove the backdating hurt the company overall. However, several other groups are already attempting to sue the company on that same premise. According to a probe by Apple, between 1997 and 2002 some 6,428 improperly dated stock options were issue.

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Microsoft has released yet another build of its first planned service pack for Windows Vista on Wednesday, opening up the patch to a broader base of testers. While the first public beta of SP1 was shipped to 12,000 testers, this latest build opened up the test to 3,000 additional people. Smaller groups have been receiving private builds since the spring of this year.

The targeted release date still seems to remain as the first quarter of 2008, although the Redmond company is so far staying silent on any word when wider public betas will be available. Details on exactly what will be included are somewhat scarce, although Microsoft is promising to include all fixes issued since the release of Vista last fall plus several new features.

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Yahoo says that it plans to add aspects of social networking to its e-mail and portal in the future, according to an interview in the New York Times. Yahoo's community and communication chief Brad Garlinghouse called the new effort "Inbox 2.0." For example, instead of the typical way of displaying messages, the company is now looking into ways to decipher which messages are from people that you would most want to read.

From here, a user could find out more about the sender through a profile, and a news feed of what is happening with users, such as what they may be doing at current, when their birthdays may be and the like. Heavy users of Yahoo services would have a more extensive profile, as the feature would pull in information from around the Yahoo network "The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see," Mr. Garlinghouse told the NYT. "We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most."

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Amazon has begun offering a promotion that would allow customers to receive one Blu-ray move free when they buy another at full price. Although the sale is said to be for a "limited time," no expiration date was given. 72 movies in all are included as part of the deal, with prices on Blu-ray movies either $19.95 or $26.95. As would be expected, the least expensive of the two discs is counted as the free movie.

There have been reports that the discount has not been applied to some purchases, although Amazon.com said that those not receiving the freebie should contact the site to have their orders adjusted. In any case, such a move is not unexpected. With HD DVD now selling their players for as low as $98, pressure is on Blu-ray to answer back. While Blu-ray cannot match HD DVD on player price, it seems to have turned to its ever-growing catalog of movie titles to drum up sales.

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In what may end up being just the first step in Rupert Murdoch's rumored desire to open Wall Street Journal Online content to everyone by removing the subscription requirement, the publication has inked an agreement with Digg to allow free access to articles submitted to the social news site.

Although articles must be "dugg" by Journal subscribers before they can be viewed by anyone else, the deal should bring a fair bit of new traffic to the WSJ. In return, Digg receives a boost of credibility by partnering with the Journal, and "Digg This" buttons will be placed on all the publication's stories, furthering Digg's reach.

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XM and Sirius trotted out former FCC chairman Reed Hundt to drum up support for the proposed merger of the two services. Hundt served as chair from 1993 to 1997, and played a large part in formulating the licensing agreement and getting it approved. Hundt called the merger "pro-competitive" and said that the market had changed since the ground rules for the licenses had been laid down. Most notably, he said that apart, the companies were unable to mount serious competition to terrestrial radio as was initially feared.

The reasoning for the initial two licenses was that the business model was not clear at the time. "It was never the case that these service rules were intended to be written [in] concrete or, like the Constitution of the United States, changed only through an elaborate process," he said. Instead, Hundt said that the rules were intended to get the industry off to a good start, and make it competitive to traditional radio, which it so far has not successfully done.

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DivX said Tuesday that its codecs will be added to Sony's PlayStation 3, allowing the device to play back videos in the format. The company said it is currently working to certify the console to play DivX, although gave no time frame as to when the PS3 will be certified. Currently about 100 million certified devices have already been shipped to the market, and the PS3 is expected to "significantly expand that number."

A separate software update enabling DivX playback capabilities will be released in the "near future," the company said. Additionally, developers will be able to use the technologies within their games thanks to the addition of DivX to version 2 of the PS3 SDK. That was released by Sony on November 2.

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A $199 Linux-based PC from Everex has proven to be quite a success at Wal-Mart, with the computer selling out online and at most store locations. Reviews have also been overwhelming positive, with one buyer calling it "a wonderful first computer for anyone."

The Everex machine runs a variant of Ubuntu Linux called gOS, which is designed to be simple and directs users to Google services and applications. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is also included for working with documents. On a hardware level, the $199 PC features a 1.5 GHz processor from Via, 512MB of RAM, 80GB hard drive and a combination CD writer and DVD drive, making the purchase price quite a deal.

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