Marco Arment's post, "The Android tablet problem, nicely summarized by one review's conclusion", stirred up some fierce debate here at Betanews on Friday. Instapaper's creator uses an ArsTechnica review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to diss Android, for which the Mac fan club of bloggers and journalists beloved with links over the past two days. But Arment's assessment is short-sighted. My response here could easily have been titled: "The iPad problem, nicely summarized by one developer's blog post."

The "Chicken-and-Egg" Problem

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Another Father's Day  is upon us, and you must be wondering what to give dear old dad. Mom seems to get all the love, while dad suffers with socks, ties and aftershave for Christmas that he doesn't need; he gets not much better on his special day. Why not make this year really memorable for dad and plunk down some serious dough on a last-minute present that will keep his arms (and wallet) open to you for years?

I've selected a short-list of presents that dad will die for -- and hopefully not for real because you bought him something so nice (keep the receipt just in case).

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I love Microsoft Outlook. I know a lot of people hate it, but I'm inclined to believe that they don't use Outlook well enough. I've been using it as my primary email program since the 1990s, and there's not a lot I can complain about. But I quit it at the beginning of this week. It's working well in some ways, but in others I have some buyer's remorse.

There's a long story behind how I got to this point, but the bottom line is that my email domain is on Google Apps and I have an Android phone. By switching to using Gmail, Google Calendar and the other Google Apps. I gain a lot in terms of mobility. All of my data is in the same cloud. I can move from one computer to another, and everything I read on one looks read on the other.

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Bitcoins have become popular as an alternative to government-controlled currencies, but a new Trojan seems to be specifically targeting Bitcoin wallets in an attempt to steal funds, security firm Symantec warns. The news follows reports earlier this week of a Bitcoin user being hacked to the tune of 25,000 bitcoins, or about $500,000 USD.

Symantec says that the 'Infostealer.Coinbit' Trojan aims to find your wallet file and then mail it to the attacker. There is also similar code which looks for the file, but uses FTP to transfer it to the attacker's servers. With this file, the user can then use a 'brute-force attack' to break in and pilfer the user's coins.

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But don't crash your phone along the way.

Microsoft is preparing the developer channel for release of Internet Explorer 9 Mobile, which is coming with Windows Phone "Mango" sometime in the Fall. Today, the company announced the IE9 Mobile Test Drive, which showcases some of the browser's capabilities. Among the most highly-touted by Microsoft: hardware-accleration support for HTML5.

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LulzSec is having quite the week of hacktivist actvity. After launching DDoS attacks against gaming sites' log-in pages, setting up a hotline for requesting hacks and hacking both the CIA and US Senate, the group released a long list of passwords and email addresses it had obtained. Is yours among them? Whew, mine isn't. You should check, too, if using public services like AOL, Gmail or Yahoo.

I'm amazed at the ridiculous passwords people use. A quick search of the 62,000 released by LulzSec finds hundreds of instances of  "123456" and "password" as password. There are 28 "11111", more than twice as many "0000" and 20 variations of the "f" word. Then there are the repeaters, like "alex186" for five different email addresses.

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The days of needing to use Friendly or other third-party applications to access Facebook on the iPad may be soon over. The New York Times reported Friday that sources said the social networking site is close to releasing an application of its own after nearly a year in development.

Facebook's long delay in bringing an official app to market seems also surprising. The company was one of the first in 2008 to launch a native app when Apple opened up iOS to third-party developers.

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With the public outcry over Facebook's facial recognition feature growing ever louder, Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen is now requesting a meeting with the social networking site. In a letter sent to Facebook, he says the company's failure to provide an opt-in "overlooked a critical component of consumer privacy protection."

Jepsen is not the first time the government has gotten involved with Facebook's new tagging option. The Electronic Privacy Information Center earlier this week filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing the social networking site of running afoul of the same regulations Jepsen is.

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This week, Mozilla's whirlwind release cycle yielded the first release candidate of Firefox 5 in the beta channel, just a matter of a week before the final version is expected to be released.

Changes in this version include: Support for CSS animations; a more prominent Do-Not-Track header preference; improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance; Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas, improved desktop environment integration for Linux users; and more.

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Editor's Note: We would have posted this story for no other reason than the cute rodent.

File compression tools are funny things. For beginners, they can be confusing affairs with a bewildering number of file formats, many of which are only supported by specific programs. For more advanced users, finding a compression tool that means more demanding requirements can be tricky. In many homes, a computer is used by several people, which means there are likely to be multiple skill levels to cater to. This is where Hamster Free ZIP Archiver can help.

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Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) Engineering has concluded that WebGL, the royalty free cross-platform API for browser-based 3D graphics, is "overly permissive," insecure, and potentially harmful to machines using it. Development of the technology was spearheaded by Mozilla, Google, Opera, AMD, and Nvidia, and was endorsed by the Khronos Group.

Based upon an MSRC Engineering review, and using two Context Information Security reports as supportive evidence, Microsoft on Thursday said it cannot endorse the use of WebGL in its current form.

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It's taken a long time. A very, very long time. But, at last, the latest Chrome 13 beta sees the browser finally gain a Print Preview function. And this isn't just some half-finished beta version, either -- it's really quite impressive.

To see it this action, just click Print and the preview will appear in a new tab (which seems more natural than the "special" window used in some other browsers). You're able to choose your destination printer from a list, which includes Chrome's own Print to PDF option. You can select your preferred page layout (portrait or landscape), or choose colour or black and white output and the preview window updates immediately. Of course you also get all the usual settings, like the pages to print and the number of copies, and when you're happy then clicking Print will deliver the finished results.

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Sometimes the most brilliant moments in marketing are the simplest ideas. In the video above, a youngster dance, dance, dances before Xbox 360. Microsoft smartly uses Kinect to connect with customers. The action takes place at Microsoft Store Bellevue, Wash.

I've seen the same kind of youngster dancing here in San Diego at Microsoft Store Fashion Valley. The tikes, middle schoolers or tweens will sometimes draw sizable crowds of gawkers. The store here opened one year ago this month, and it was the first where the public could play with Kinect, nearly five months before its official release. Microsoft placed the Xbox 360-Kinect setup right in the front window, where anyone walking by can see the action.

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It seems inconceivable that Pandora's public offering could get any worse. But it has. The newly minted stock, which closed down 24 percent, fell another 4.3 percent in after-hours trading this evening. The IPO was only yesterday!

Pandora shares traded for $12.69 after hours, following a close of $13.26 late this afternoon. Pandora's IPO price was $16, but the stock initially surged to $26 in early trading yesterday, closing $1.26, or 8.9 percent, above the start price. In early trading today, Pandora shares buoyed up and down around the IPO price, only to collapse by market's close.

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Research in Motion seemingly took forever to ship its first BlackBerry tablet. None too soon. PlayBook was one of the few bright spots during a quarter that foreshadows a grim year ahead.

After the bell today, RIM announced fiscal first quarter 2012 results -- $4.9 billion revenue, up 16 percent year over year but down 12 percent sequentially. Seventy-eight percent came from hardware, 20 percent services and 2 percent software.

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