With a handful of Zune HD leaks now out in public, and a semi-solid release schedule for Windows Mobile 6.5, we're now beginning to hear some development in the "Pink" category.

"Pink" is Microsoft's code name for a mobile product with very little in the way of concrete information behind it. What is known is that it will likely be coming from Danger, makers of the OS found in the T-Mobile Sidekick which Microsoft acquired in February of last year. Before CES this year, CNBC's Jim Goldman said "Pink" was going to be a device that would "provide true competition to the iPhone."

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Exactly three years ago, Sprint unveiled its plans for a child-tracking phone service. The $9.99 monthly plan hooked a kid's phone up with a piece of software that pinpointed the handset's location on a map.

Today, AT&T has debuted FamilyMap, its version of essentially the same service, which will also cost $9.99 for two trackable phones, and $14.99 for up to five. Compatible handsets do not require full GPS connectivity, but can be made visible through A-GPS or cell tower pings.

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Time Warner Cable's proposed trials of consumption-based billing were originally slated to begin in several markets this summer, where customers would be a part of a tiered pricing scheme. Pricing would have started at 1 GB per month for $15, and go up to 100 GB per month for $75, and include a per-gigabyte overage fee.

The public's reaction was less than favorable, and the trials in Texas have been rescheduled.

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Another promotional shot of the Zune HD has leaked out, this time to Windows Mobile Power User, fleshing out the appearance of Microsoft's newest PMP a bit more, and revealing a few more details.

According to the report, the Zune HD is equipped with a capacitive OLED screen that supports multi-touch and offers a 16:9 aspect ratio. Further, the device and updated Zune Marketplace will offer HD media and support for "3D Xbox games." The report claims that the visible port on the side of the device is an HDMI out, but that looks to be mostly wishful thinking, since the device's slim profile leads one to believe it is actually Micro USB.

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Repeating his belief that the synergies between Skype, eBay, and PayPal would be and are limited, eBay CEO John Donohoe announced today his company will spin off Skype in an initial public offering in 2010. That will mark the five-year anniversary of eBay's acquisition of Skype.

Comments from Donohoe during an earnings call in January of this year caused speculation that auction company eBay was looking to offload popular VoIP service provider Skype. Donohoe said, "I think we're now confident that the synergies between Skype and the other parts of our portfolio are minimal...We are going to continue to run and operate the business. It's not a distraction currently and at such time when we have further announcement to that, we'll let you know, but for now, we are very pleased with the momentum of the business and it's not a distraction."

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Nintendo announced last summer that it would be updating its Wiimote controllers with an add-on called MotionPlus that promises "true 1:1 response in gameplay." Now, the peripheral has a price and a US launch date.

Similar to the way Wii Play was packaged with an additional Wiimote, the $49.99 Wii Sports Resort will include the MotionPlus controller add-on, and will ship on July 26. It will also be available individually for $19.99. The unit, which plugs into the bottom port on the Wiimote, will not enhance the control of all games. Rather, it will only affect MotionPlus-compatible titles, which with the exception of Red Steel 2 by UbiSoft, will likely all be sports games.

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Each of the major US mobile carriers has its own exclusive touchscreen smartphone, and they are providing the fuel for the smartphone market's continuing growth. We are closing in on an all-fronts update, so prepare for another round of comparisons and competition.

AT&T leads the pack with the Apple iPhone, which will receive its 3.0 software update at an unspecified time this summer.
T-Mobile has the Android-based G1, which will be updated to Version 1.5

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Korean software company EYA Interactive announced the upcoming "Grand Opening Beta" of its Free MMORPG called Titan Online, which is the English-language version of "Mo Siang," a martial arts-themed MMO based in China (both in story and server) and popular in Southeast Asia.

On April 28, Titan Online will open to the public in an unlimited beta, and will let users download and play the game until its commercial launch, which does not yet have a date. All players will begin the game at the same level to foster an environment of fair competition, and once the software has officially been launched, nothing on the player's end will change.

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Google released a developer preview of the next version of Android, officially adding the "cupcake" features to the operating system's SDK that have been a vague reality for Android users since late last year.

Yesterday evening, Android developer Xavier Ducrohet announced that developers can now download an early version of the Android 1.5 SDK, based upon the Cupcake branch of the Android Open Source Project.

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One week from tomorrow, Bluetooth 3.0 will be unleashed upon the wireless world.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group confirmed to Phone Scoop late last week that next week's All Hands Meeting in Tokyo will be official unveiling of the updated Bluetooth spec.

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What's being called a "glitch" on Amazon.com has exclusively affected books dealing with gay and lesbian themes.

On one side, Amazon's Kindle 2 is the central element in the civil rights conflict between authors and those with reading disabilities. On the other side, Amazon.com is now accused of de-ranking and re-classifying content as "adult literature" simply because it contains homosexual themes or characters. Specifically, the complaint is that listings for some books with homosexual content are not displaying comparative sales rankings.

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It's safe to say that Zune team "senior partner" Brian Seitz's little message was a reiteration of what we already knew, since there was never any announcement that Microsoft was discontinuing it's line of portable media players. But what a way to set the rumor mill churning! That tweet successfully reminded us that we still don't know the most important things about the next Zune: when we'll see it this year, what sort of functions it will have, what it is going to look like, how much storage it will offer, and how much it will cost.

On Friday, a series of promotional shots turned up that show the "Zune HD," suggesting at least that the next generation of the device is going to be metallic instead of plastic, and offer a velocity sensor that will shift the screen to portrait/landscape mode.

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Another day, another arbitrarily-named video service.

Though Vevo is a name that could very easily be lost among the likes of Veoh and TiVo, the soon-to-be launched music video site has backers that are far from forgettable: Google and Vivendi, or, more specifically, YouTube and Universal Music Group.

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By taking Amazon to task over the text-to-speech function of the Kindle 2, the Author's Guild has put itself in an undesirable position. Whereas the feature was originally open for use on any text contained within the device, the Author's Guild is now pressuring Amazon into letting publishers decide on an individual basis whether a book should be enabled with "voice performance" abilities.

At the end of March, twenty groups representing visually and cognitively impaired individuals, such as the American Council of the Blind, the International Dyslexia Association, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, joined together and formed the Reading Rights Coalition to oppose the action of the Author's Guild.

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The Mac vs. PC viral video and advertising war continues to rage, but now Linux has gotten involved. The nonprofit Linux Foundation began a contest in December challenging users to design a commercial for Linux that would take the "I'm a Mac....I'm a PC" self-branding campaign and spin it to fit the open source community: "WE are Linux."

The contest winners were announced today, just about a week after the latest salvo of Microsoft ads where computer shoppers are followed around as they look for their perfect machine. The first of these viral ads caused an explosion of blogospheric proportions at the end of March, when the cute girl in the commercial said, "I guess I'm just not cool enough for a Mac."

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