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When Microsoft's Office group formed in the early 1980s, something was missing from the DNA. Simplicity. Today's Office 365 plans -- seven of them -- are anything but simple. While Microsoft offers a stunning range of hosted apps capabilities, Office 365 pricing, or its feature set, is nowhere as straightforward as Google Apps. Nor as cheap.

Little more than two months after opening the public beta, Microsoft's hosted productivity apps service debuted today in 40 countries. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Office 365 during a live New York event late this morning.

The speed of 4G LTE makes our 3G mobile broadband networks feel like stone age technology, but on Tuesday Swedish telecommunications leader Ericsson blew them all away with the next-gen network technology that's 10 times faster than LTE.

3GPP Release 10, also known as LTE Advanced, was first submitted to the ITU in 2009 and included "high mobility" and "low mobility" peak data rates which could be either 100Mbps or 1Gbps. Tuesday, Ericsson utilized 60MHz of aggregated bandwidth that was temporarily "on loan" from the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (PTS) to demonstrate the kind of speeds it could attain with current commercial radio equipment and the nascent LTE Advanced technology.

If there's one department where Android absolutely cannot compete with Apple's iOS, it's in the camera. The iPhone 4 has completely shattered any previously held beliefs about low-quality CMOS photography, and is now beating DSLR cameras in popularity. It recently beat the Nikon D90 as the most popular camera on Flickr with 4,841 registered users.

Meanwhile, the most popular Android phone on Flickr, the HTC Evo 4G, has only got 523 users. That isn't even in the same league as the iPhone 4, despite the fact that it has an 8 megapixel sensor against the iPhone's five. The reason should be clear to anyone who's used a variety of Android-powered smartphones. From shooting to sharing to editing, the camera experience is always less streamlined on Android than it is on iOS.

Today, Microsoft made official its most important push into the cloud, ever, with release of Office 365. The software giant took off the beta moniker and released final pricing ahead of a New York launch event with CEO Steve Ballmer.

Office 365 combines Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online into a single cloud-based package that is scalable from small businesses to large enterprises, with a per-user license cost depending upon the volume of users. The new service is available immediately in 40 countries.

Opera has released the final version of its popular alternative web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, Opera 11.50. Codenamed "Swordfish", this latest release actually debuted yesterday as Release Candidate 5, but was quickly updated to become a final release.

The most notable change in Opera 11.50: it features major improvements to the program's Speed Dial page, making it possible to get all the information you need from a Speed Dial without having to open the web page itself.

Last week, I reported first about buyers dissing Final Cut Pro X. Then comedian Conan O`Brien turned negative reaction into a punchline. Now there's a petition against the product -- and demands. My, God, they're making demands of their holy leader Steve Jobs. Well, they don't directly mention the CEO, just Apple. But aren't they one in the same?

When I started writing this post, there were 1,300 petitioners claiming "Final Cut Pro X is not a professional application". As I post, the number is more than 1,650.

Nonprofit organization TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is famous for the annual conferences it has held for over 20 years, which concentrate on promoting and sharing interesting ideas in the arts and sciences. For the last five years, the group has been posting videos of its famous "TEDTalks" freely on its site, to help spread its ideas even further.

The library of videos started with just six presentations and has grown to just under 1,000 today, On Monday, along with the first non-English TEDTalk, the group announced some of its most impressive statistics: its talks have been viewed more than 500 million times across TED.com, iTunes embedded and downloaded, Hulu, and more. Just one year ago, TED's video count was at 290 million across 700 available videos.

LulzSec may have faded off into the hacking annals of history, but Anonymous isn't resting. The group on Monday released a file of what appears to be a cyberterrorism training manual. It is not clear how the group obtained the document.

"Little teaser while we work on the actual release: Ever interested in anti-cyberterrorism training?" a tweet from a Twitter account associated with the group reads. The manual appears to come from FEMA's Counter Terrorism Defense Initiative and is dated from 2009.

OK, probably is a stretch, but more likely. :)

The ebook reader market is beginning to pick up -- and why not with Amazon and Barnes & Nobile offering good devices and marketing the Holy Hell about them. You have to be vacationing on Mars not to know what Kindle and Nook e-readers are.

The relationship between Apple and Samsung has become increasingly hostile as of late, and it appears to be getting no better. The Cupertino company appears set to tap a Samsung competitor for development of its "A6" ARM system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company will begin manufacture of the chip sometime in 2012, says Ars Technica.

Samsung has produced the A4 chips which first appeared in the original iPad and the iPhone 4. The A5 chip, Apple's current SoC, can be found in the iPad 2 and is believed to be in the next generation iPhone due in September of this year. The A6 will not make it into Apple products until next year at the earliest.

Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei and Norwegian network operator Telenor have erected the world's northernmost LTE tower in Longyearbyen on the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Circle. The location is about halfway between the North Pole and Europe, and temperatures there drop 50 degrees below freezing in the winter.

Longyearbyen, the Earth's most northern "city" (settlement with a population greater than 1,000) now has mobile broadband that reaches downstream speeds of 100Mbps. The site first opened in late May, and Telenor described it as a natural location for Arctic research.

Tomorrow morning, in New York City, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will break out the band and play tribute to Office 365 -- the company's hosted app companion to its PC productivity suite. It's not rocket science understanding Microsoft's motivations, fending off competition from Google Apps among small businesses and enterprises and providing customers with what they really need -- anytime, anywhere access to their stuff on anything.

Google's cleverly titled "365 reasons to consider Google Apps" blog post gives anything but 365 reasons. If Google can't find 365, Microsoft should do so for its cloud suite launch. That would be great counter-marketing tactic.

Apple is set to begin manufacturing of the next-generation iPhone in late August, claims one analyst, with a release date sometime in late September. Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty made the prediction in a research note following meetings in Taiwan, which were likely with some of the Cupertino company's suppliers.

The prediction lines up with those of other analysts and Apple watchers, most of which have targeted September as the time for the introduction of the new iPhone. Huberty wasn't explicit on what she expected the next-generation iPhone to be, although she did say two million units are expected to ship in the fourth quarter.

The N9 and N950 clearly show that Nokia had good smartphones already in the development pipeline, but new CEO Stephen Elop never gave them a chance. He bet the company on Windows phone, which will be good for Microsoft but not so great for Nokia.

Analyst predictions tell the story, in the simplest way. As measured by operating system, IDC predicts that Symbian will go from 20.6 percent global market share this year essentially to zero in 2015. Meanwhile, Windows Phone -- Nokia's new primary mobile operating system -- will reach 20.3 percent in four years. That's less than a zero-sum gain, since Nokia isn't the sole Windows Phone distributor.

Six years ago, California adopted a state law that criminalized the sale of violent video games to children under 18, and called for stricter regulation of video game labeling. Since the law's passing, it has been challenged by the video game industry in all levels of the U.S. Judicial system.

Today, the Supreme Court upheld the 2009 District Court ruling and declared the California law to be a violation of the first amendment to the Constitution.