With Android 2.3.4, Google equipped its Google Talk app with video and voice chat support, which became a banner feature for the Nexus S on T-Mobile. Unfortunately, in May, T-Mobile began to block users from connecting to video chat over their 3G/4G connections, and only allowed users to connect while on Wi-Fi.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile's Video Chat by Qik, which lets users video chat over 3G, remains exclusive to the myTouch 4G, GalaxyTab, Dell Streak 7, Vibrant 4G, Sidekick 4G, and G2x.

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iolo has released version 10.5 of System Mechanic, its comprehensive system maintenance and performance tool. Version 10.5 adds two major new tools to System Mechanic's armory: Designated Drivers and SSD Accelerator. You also receive a comprehensive whole-home license, which covers all the PCs in a single household.

System Mechanic 10.5 also promises enhanced and improved versions of existing components, specifically Tune-up Definitions, DriveAccelerator, Memory Mechanic and -- Professional version only -- Secure Online Backup, which now offers 5GB of free online backup space. In addition to these major improvements, version 10.5 includes "hundreds" of minor improvements too.

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Facebook is moving beyond its flagship mobile application, reportedly preparing to release a photo sharing application for the iPhone, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday. The site obtained about 50MB of images and documents detailing the social networking site's plans.

Photos on Facebook are a big deal: about 6 billion photos are uploaded to the site every month, and it currently hosts about 100 billion images in total. That's a whole lot of photos, and plenty for an app like the one Facebook's planning to start out with.

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Today begins the great Google experiment. Will people really buy into the cloud?

On Sale Today

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Mobile advertising company Millennial Media on Wednesday released a report that says MP3 players and gaming devices are still better vehicles for delivering in-app mobile ads than tablets such as the iPad, even though tablets have exploded in popularity over the last year.

It's Millennial's first Mobile Mix Report that counts mobile ad impressions on non-phone devices, and it appears that non-smartphone app consumption is still completely dominated by the iPod touch. 70% of impressions in the "connected devices" category (which itself makes up 16% of the total impressions) came from Mobile Gaming Devices/MP3 Players, which includes the iPod touch and Sony PSP, among other things.

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Network hardware company Black Box announced on Wednesday a new line of 802.11n wireless access points for enterprise which utilize a cloud-based management system, eliminating the need for physical WLAN controllers and opening up IT to remote administration.

The service is called SmartPath, and when a new access point is connected, it hooks up with the SmartPath Enterprise Management System (EMS), Black Box's $99 per year cloud-based subscription management service, and automatically discovers nearby access points that it will be working with. By doing this, each access point does not need to be connected to a central wireless network controller.

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Fire up your copy of Firefox and what are you greeted by? The last tabs you had open? A blank page? The Google search page? All of these are useful options, but EIGHT offers something a little different. It is basically a browser start page, in itself nothing new, but it takes inspiration from the look of Windows 8, giving your browser a clean and uncluttered feel while providing access to useful links.

Out of the box, EIGHT includes a series of tiles that link to various popular web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google et al, as well as a search field. But no such tool is going to prove too popular if it cannot be customized -- one size rarely fits all, after all. Thankfully, providing you are happy to get your hands dirty in a little (albeit simple) coding, EIGHT can be tweaked and customized in whatever way you like.

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Apple's iOS devices may have something of a stranglehold on the mobile market, but for anyone that has tired of the iPhone and iPad's dominance, the ever-increasing range of Android devices is something to be welcomed. Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 brought a new player to the arena and, as is customary with operating systems, there have been endless comparisons between Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7. Launcher 7 is a free utility for Android users who like the way their device works but are taken in by the look of Windows Phone 7.

The app is a combination of a skin and a launcher tool, and it closely mimics the Windows Phone approach with its interface. The app breaks the screen up into a series of tiles that can be used to house all manner of shortcuts. The main screen provides access to common features such as the dialer for your phone, displays information about your inbox and much more. As you would expect, the function and look of each of the tiles can be completely customized.

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LulzSec has started crowdsourcing its nefarious online activities by opening a request line for future assaults.

Yesterday, the hotline number went out via LulzSec's Twitter account: "Call into 614-LULZSEC and pick a target and we'll obliterate it. Nobody wants to mess with The Lulz Cannon -- take aim for us, twitter. #FIRE." I called the number today. There's something there. I didn't leave a take-down request.

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In what is an embarrassing oversight for Citigroup, attackers that got away with information on over 200,000 credit card holders only needed to make a change in the string of the URL itself. This means that as long as you had the account number, you would be able to access all personal data associated with that particular account.

Citigroup should consider itself lucky that more customers did not have their accounts compromised. How the hackers got the credit card numbers themselves is not clear yet, but the vulnerability allowed them to jump among accounts automatically by just being logged in and running a script.

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I got wondering, because the noise about it has quieted down since Google I/O last month. So I looked and, gasp, not much is different at all.

On April 1, only 2.5 percent of Android devices ran the newest versions -- 2.3 or 2.3.3, according to official Android Developers stats. The others: 63.9 percent Android 2.2; 27.2 percent v2.1; 3.5 percent v1.6; and 2.7 percent v1.5. Android 2.3 released about four months earlier.

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Developer Daniel Amitay has some words of caution for those locking their iPhones down with a four-digit password: use something that isn't on his list of most commonly used passcodes. Amitay created the Big Brother Camera Security app for iOS, and anonymously collected passcode data from users.

The app can take pictures remotely of whomever's using your device with the front-facing camera, as well as its location. What Amitay collected was the passcode information for the app itself, which is nearly identical to the iOS lock screen. He figures the data collected on 204,508 user passcodes would be similar.

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Let the mobile device wars begin. Like AMD and Intel battled for desktop chip dominance in the 1990s and Noughties -- the megahertz and gigahertz wars -- mobile devices are their new territory. But instead of speed, the new marketing mantra is longer battery life, lower power consumption and better graphics capabilities. Following last month's Intel announcements for Ultrabook and "Medfield" processors, today AMD jumped in with Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

The nomenclature makes me think of some wonky, scifi "B" movie or George Orwellian-like novel. But AMD's APU pitch is something more monumental.

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LulzSec continued to push its collective luck over the weekend, breaking into US Senate computers and publishing the directory structure on its website. The move is LulzSec's most brazen yet: breaking into government computers is a serious offense.

The group is responsible for hacks on FBI-related sites and Nintendo, and has also claimed responsibility for attacks on PBS' site where it posted an article claiming late rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive, as well as at least a half-dozen attacks on Sony.

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Last year, Google debuted Google Instant, a feature that took search suggestions a step further, and instantly returned search results as the user typed.

Today, Google announced it has taken it yet another step further and it can now pre-render the pages it pulls up in search results, so when users click away, the page has no load time.

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