Tim Conneally

Sony Ericsson today announced the "Black Friday" US launch date of its new Xperia X1 Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone, which is good news for consumers who had been led to believe the manufacturer would skip America first.

When Sony Ericsson announced availability of the X1 in September, the company gave it a fourth quarter 2008 launch date for a number of markets, but omitted the United States.

Google today announced an enhancement to Gmail that allows voice and video chat to take place directly within the client.

In Gmail chat, the tag under the conversation window normally titled "options," is replaced by the "video and more" tag. Clicking on this expands a menu that can allow voice or video chats to take place alongside email and text chats at any time.

From the two furthest-flung television markets in America come updates on their respective transitions to DTV. One is being expedited for environmental reasons, and the other will remain on schedule with monthly shutdown tests.

Today, it was announced that Hawaii's mandatory transition to digital broadcast will be completed a month ahead of the scheduled February 17 deadline to accommodate the nesting season of the Hawaiian Petrel, an endangered sea bird.

Despite the looming potential for a permanent injunction on its DVR products from a litigant TiVo, Dish Network announced today new DVRs, including some that are also DTV converter boxes, and some that can be added to existing equipment.

In October, Echostar announced that it would pay $104 million to TiVo as a part of the two companies' nearly four year legal battle over DVR technology patents. This settled the 2006 jury decision in favor of TiVo, however, the "legal workaround" in Dish's DVR technology is still disputable, and TiVo continues to seek a permanent injunction.

Motorola has unveiled a solution that leverages a business' existing Wireless LAN and PBX setups and merges their voice and data functions into a single platform, accessible through Windows Mobile 6.1 devices.

BT North America conducted an online survey of 226 businesses in October and found that 39% have controller-based WLAN architectures, and 22% are actively migrating or have plans to migrate. Though some $20 billion is still spent annually on Ethernet switching equipment, Motorola says its surveys show that 56% of enterprises plan to increase their spending on WLAN equipment next year.

Based around what MySpace's Tom Anderson says are several years worth of user requests, the popular social networking site has rolled out the updated profile system that has been in beta since earlier this year.

The new profile improvements are based around four ideas: privacy, speed, customization, and Web standards. In Profile 2.0, the permissions to each section of a user's profile can be tailored, allowing certain users to see only sections of the profile. Sections can be hidden entirely or truncated to speed up load time, and layout can be tailored by dragging and dropping sections or by using pre-made layouts. Also, with the exception of the MySpace header and footer, the new profile pages are W3C compliant.

AT&T today began the public beta phase of VideoCrawler, a search and organization portal for rich Web media.

Powered by Divvio's "click-2-crawl" rich media indexing technology, VideoCrawler does not host content, but rather creates searches for relevant items hosted on the increasing number of dedicated content provider sites and allows them to be viewed from AT&T's portal. AT&T claims its search base is currently over 1,600 sites.

Picking up where Dash left off, navigation software company TeleNav has released its first connected GPS device, the Shotgun.

Two weeks ago, Personal Navigation Device maker Dash, which made a mobile wireless GPS unit, announced that it would be leaving the device market to shift its business toward pure software solutions, as the PND market's growth has slowed dramatically.

Just last week, the US' second largest CE retailer announced it will close 155 stores and lay off around 17% of its employees in further attempts to lower operating costs. This morning, the second shoe officially dropped.

Since last week's announcement, Circuit City has said that vendor concerns about its liquidity and ability to pay for its purchases have "escalated considerably."

Norway continues its dispute with Apple on iTunes' incompatibility with competition. Because iTunes does not adhere to Norwegian interoperability guidelines, technically, Apple is engaged in illegal trade there.

After two years of inconclusive squabbling, Norway's Consumer Ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon said he is taking his government's ongoing dispute with Apple over iTunes' DRM incompatibility issues to Markedsrådet, Norway's state authority on fair market procedures.

In discussing the new service, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe yesterday said that an MP3 player carrying the MySpace Music brand may be feasible in the future, leading to speculation he could license his brand similarly to Real with Rhapsody.

Because DeWolfe doesn't see iTunes and MySpace Music as competitors, he believes his service actually contributes to iPod sales. "If anything, we'll be accretive to iPod sales unless we develop a device." Reuters quoted DeWolfe as saying.

At this point, there's a social network for everything, and Lifefitter is accepting beta invite requests for no less than nineteen (and counting) action sports-related networks going into private beta testing in December.

Lifefitter's brands include social networks for scuba diving, hunting, skateboarding, surfing, backpacking, motocross, and more. Each sub-site will be treated as a discrete property, but will all sport the same UI, as Lifefitter itself is more of a social network platform.

Not a company frequently seen in the CE field, Blue made its reputation in the professional recording category. Today it has pulled away from its niche market, announcing an HD Webcam and a software-less microphone attachment for iPod.

Blue is widely known for its atypical mic designs, and has managed to maintain that reputation as it releases more products outside of the audio enthusiast category. Now, the company has added to its list of ultra-portable audio solutions which currently only includes its Snowflake USB podcasting mic.

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is considered a superior encryption protocol to the aged and inherently flawed WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), but it is not without its vulnerability, as one researcher is preparing to demonstrate.

Security researchers are now saying they have refined an existing WPA crack, making it more efficient that earlier reports.

On Tuesday, Adobe Systems Inc. issued patches for a five-month old vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat 8.1.2, and today, six critical patches were released for Flash Player 9.

JavaScript vulnerabilities in older versions of Acrobat and Reader could allow remote code execution if not properly patched. This is the fifth update to Reader this year that addresses JavaScript issues. NCircle security expert Andrew Storms told Computerworld in June that Adobe's repeated JavaScript bugs amounted to an epidemic. "Since JavaScript has been a target for so many years, why hasn't Adobe flushed out these vulnerabilities already?" he questioned.