One year ago, market research firm In-Stat released a study that established the average home broadband connection in the United States. The study found that the comparatively small number of residential fiber customers against the high number of narrowband customers amounted to a national downstream average of 3.8 Mbps. Several months later, Broadband Expert released similar research data for the UK, which found the average fixed line broadband speed was 3.61 Mbps.

Similarly, results from Analysis Mason's Fixed Broadband Research Program published this week find that nearly 60% of the broadband connected homes within the 30 OECD member nations are connecting via DSL, where only "a small proportion" can achieve speeds around 8 Mbps.

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ZigBee is one of several brand name specs for the 802.15.4 wireless personal area network standard that concentrates on simple, low data rate connections. In the roughly five years it has existed, it has found its place in home automation, smart metering and remotely controllable embedded systems.

Openness: As carbon waste reduction becomes a greater interest to the public, ZigBee has enjoyed improved adoption, and this week the ZigBee Alliance announced its latest spec will be even more diverse. The next draft will include Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, which will add native IP support to ZigBee and in turn open the low-power wireless technology to new potential uses.

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Amazon's Kindle 2 has received a great deal of acclaim for improving upon many of the shortcomings of its predecessor: shrinking its size, improving its usability, and adding a handful of new features such as rudimentary web browsing and the contentious text to speech function.

What's difficult to quantify is the effect it has on the user; that is, the degree to which it simplifies or improves one's life. Since I've had mine, my reading has gone from two books a month to eight, but because the majority of the books I read would best be classified as "light reading," I feel like the impact it has had on my personal improvement is negligible.

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Acer has been quite candid about its move into the smartphone sector, and is expected to launch around ten new handsets this year, many of which will be rebranded E-Ten designs from the mobile phone maker Acer acquired in late 2008.

The company launched eight phones at a conference in Singapore last week, almost all were powered by Windows Mobile, but Acer has expressed increasing interest in Android-powered handsets, causing speculation that the company would be coming forward with one in the near future.

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Thanks to the fine-toothed comb that the Mac faithful run over their updates, readers of MacRumors noticed a passage contained within the iTunes 8.2 beta "About iTunes" window that references DVD and Blu-ray.

Because iTunes does not support the playback of DVDs or Blu-ray discs, the rumor mill's first train of thought went directly to Blu-ray Macs, and then to DVD ripping in iTunes. But before you too head down that bumpy road, let's look at the context of which the discs were mentioned.

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As we inch closer to the anticipated marketing launch that will reveal to the public exactly what the project code-named "Pink" is, Verizon has reportedly been in talks with Microsoft to secure a contract for the device central to the project.

Rumored to be the touchphone that will finally catapult Windows Mobile into competition with the Apple iPhone, HTC G1, BlackBerry Storm, and Palm Pre, "Pink" is believed to be the product of Danger Inc. makers of the Sidekick OS and part of Microsoft's new Premium Mobile Experiences team. The team is led by Roz Ho, formerly the General Manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, which developed and marketed Office for Mac.

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I'm in the market for a bike, but as a skateboarder of more than twenty years, bicycling has been something of a taboo subject for me. Bikers were the guys who destroyed skate spots with their pegs and caused horrific skatepark collisions that could have been easily avoided if both parties involved were riding skateboards.

But now that I'm older, those prejudices have faded and I find that I know practically nothing about bicycles. I'm clueless about the kind of bike that will suit my needs, much less what brand would be best. However, I do know that I plan to ride more on paved roads than off-road, that I'll be riding for exercise, and that I plan on spending between $500-$900. I will take my case to hunch.com.

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Two weeks ago, a developer preview of Android 1.5 SDK was released, promising developers an early look at what the OS update had to offer if they hadn't already. Now, RC 1 of the Android 1.5 SDK is available from Google for use by emulators, and from HTC for testing on the Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1).

The SDK overview says the Android 1.5 production system image will be deployed starting in May, so there is a possibility of "Cupcake" coming to users even before the week is out.

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Nokia is doing some sculpting. Since last year, the Finnish mobile phone leader has been pressing hard in the field of software and services, and has rolled a broad range of outside services into its Ovi portal, such as Mapping, Gaming, Music, and cloud-based file sharing.

It's got a lot to offer, but apparently not obviously enough for users and at too great a cost for Nokia.

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Soon, funds from the 7.2 billion dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be available, with $2.5 billion going to fund rural broadband projects through the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS). This funding is intended to be used in the construction, improvement, or acquisition of facilities to provide broadband to unserved and underserved locations in the US.

The 2008 Farm Bill (1.5 MB PDF available here) defines eligible rural communities as any area other than a city, town, or unincorporated area with a population greater than 20,000 inhabitants, or a city, town or unincorporated area with fewer than 50,000.

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A patent infringement suit filed against Apple by California integrated circuit company OPTi two years ago has been decided, and Apple has been declared the loser.

The suit was filed in the heartland of patent litigation, the Eastern District of Texas, where Microsoft was sued over its JPEG patent, Sony was sued for its Cell Chip technology, Google was sued for its Database technology, and countless others are sued every day.

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Samsung today announced its first Android mobile handset, becoming the first company since HTC to come forth with a completed piece of mobile hardware supporting the open source operating system.

The I7500 is a GSM and HSDPA touchscreen phone that includes most of the same accouterments as HTC's G1, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, and the full host of Google tools. However, it ups the ante on HTC's products considerably by supplying a 5-megapixel camera, 8 GB of onboard memory expandable to 32 GB via microSD, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a microUSB port.

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The Hatfields and McCoys of the wireless chipmaking industry, Qualcomm and Broadcom, today announced that they had laid down their long legal feud and entered into a multi-year patent agreement.

Since 2006, the two companies have been bouncing in and out of U.S. Courts and U.S. International Trade Commission hearings over patent infringement and licensing of WCDMA technology.

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Today, Adobe has introduced Photoshop Marketplace a site that is part e-commerce, part social network, and part knowledge base for the company's famous photo editing software.

Adobe hopes to create the definitive site for Photoshop-related resources, tools, and services. To populate the Marketplace by its scheduled launch later in the summer, Adobe encourages partners to sign up and contribute their plug-ins, extensions, educational resources, communities, or event listings to the site. Once launched, users will be able to review and recommend these submissions based upon functionalism and popularity.

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The Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius H270 promises "No more compromises on graphics performance" (PDF available here) That is, unless you're running Linux.

This week, Nvidia and Fujitsu released an alert that some Linux graphics drivers for the Celsius' Nvidia Quadro FX 770M cause a corruption of the notebook's Extended display identification data (EDID). Basically, the EDID tells the graphics card important information about the computer's display, such as its size, pixel mapping data, filter type, and supported timings.

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