This week, T-Mobile lit up its highest speed HSPA+ networks in Orlando, New York, and Las Vegas, promising a theoretical maximum speed of 42 Mbps downstream. The company expects to deliver this level of service to 25 major U.S. markets by mid-year.

On the CTIA show floor today, we've pitted T-Mobile's 3G and 4G networks against one another on two devices which are nearly identical in design: the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant and the Samsung Galaxy S 4G.

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Oracle further muddied the future of Intel's Itanium platform, saying late Tuesday that it had decided to discontinue all development for the server chip. It is only the latest to do so, behind Microsoft last year, and Red Hat in 2009.

"Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life," the company said in a statement. Intel disagreed with Oracle's claim however, saying it remained "committed" to the platform.

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The "father" of Mac OS X is leaving Apple, the company announced Wednesday. Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Mac software engineering, will be replaced by Craig Federighi, who worked under Serlet and managed the Mac OS team for the past two years.

Serlet is believed to be leaving the company to pursue career options in science after Apple. One of the crowning achievements of his 14 years with Apple is the development of Mac OS X. He is widely credited with being the driving force behind the creation of the platform back in the late 1990s.

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At the Microsoft Management Summit on Wednesday, Microsoft rolled out the final version of Windows Intune and provided information on the betas of a handful of its management solutions.

Windows Intune is Microsoft's new cloud-based PC management solution for small and medium sized businesses. As Microsoft promised in late February, the software is now available in 35 countries and comes with a 30-day trial subscription for small companies looking to try out the browser-accessible remote management suite.

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Suddenly Internet Explorer 9's 2.35 million downloads in 24 hours doesn't look so impressive. Yesterday, Mozilla officially released Firefox 4, which more than doubled IE9's impressive first-day downloads. That's not as many as Firefox 3's debut, but still damn good. Mozilla has long used slogan "Take back the web!" to promote Firefox. FF4 shows that despite Apple Safari and Google Chrome making usage share gains or Microsoft launching IE9, Mozilla's browser has staying power. As I post, Firefox 4 downloads exceed 7.1 million.

"I think Firefox 4 proves once again its popularity," Betanews reader Comet writes in comments about three hours ago. "In less than 24 hours it has already surpassed the 4 million download mark. What surprises me the most is that Firefox doesn't have the support of big companies like Microsoft or Google that literally waste millions of dollars trying to get you to download their browser. As long as a non-profit organization can keep its popularity high perhaps there is still hope for a non-corporate controlled web. Big thumbs up for the browser wars yet again. Overall all browsers are moving forward quite well."

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We got to take a look at some of the features of the LG G2x, T-Mobile's first dual-core smartphone, its fourteenth HSPA+ ("4G") device, and an important release for Korean electronics manufacturer LG.

The G2x is powered by a dual core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and is definitely being presented as a gamer-friendly device. In addition to being packed with a handful of games, the G2x (formerly known as the Optimus 2x) includes the Tegra Zone app which is Nvidia's games-only app store which focuses on the titles that take greatest advantage of the processor's dual core capabilities.

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A federal judge rejected a proposed $125 million class-action settlement between Google and book publishers and authors on Tuesday, saying the deal was "not fair, adequate and reasonable." US District Court Judge Denny Chin said that it would have allowed Google to still profit on books without getting the permission of the publisher.

Google was sued by the Author's Guild in September 2005 and by the Association of American Publishers the following month, claiming its plans to digitize books to create a massive online library violated copyright. The two sides decided to settle out of court, negotiating a deal they saw as beneficial to both sides.

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Like the Consumer Electronics Show in January, CTIA Wireless is shaping up to be another tradeshow of promises. Why can't vendors announce a connected product and imminently ship it (barring FCC approval)? Samsung will ship Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1 tablets this summer. HTC and Sprint are targeting similar delivery time for the EVO 3D smartphone and EVO View 4G tablet, announced today. Yesterday, Sprint started taking preorders for the Samsung-manufactured, Google-branded Nexus S 4G, which is "coming soon."

The competitive landscape could change whole lots before HTC, Sprint or Samsung get any of these products to market. There is the aftermath of the devastating 9.0 earthquake in Japan, which could cause component shortages as soon as next month. On Sunday, Deutsche Telekom announced sale of T-Mobile USA to AT&T for $39 billion. Apple's iPad 2 goes on sale in 25 more countries on Friday. The iPhone 5 is expected in summer, too. 

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At CTIA Wireless in Orlando today, Sprint announced two more 4G devices: The HTC EVO 3D, and the HTC View 4G Tablet which bring the carrier's WiMax-capable canon to a total of 22.

It's been one year since Sprint debuted the EVO 4G, and it has gone on to become the operator's best-selling smartphone ever. This year, the bar has been raised, and the popular smartphone's successor has been equipped with a 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 4GB Internal memory and 1GB RAM; and the defining features, stereoscopic 5 Megapixel 720p cameras and a 4.3" 3D QHD (glassesless) display.

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Adobe has issued an out-of-cycle patch for its Flash, Reader, and Acrobat applications which it recommends all users upgrade to immediately. The fix will close a security hole in the Authplay component, which allows for the use of Flash within PDF files.

Code to exploit the vulnerability was out in the wild, Adobe has disclosed. It had initially believed that the vulnerability was only being exploited through malformed Flash .swf files within Excel spreadsheets, but it was discovered that attackers could also possibly exploit the vulnerability through holes in the PDF file format.

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T-Mobile this week said it was set to double the speeds of its HSPA+ network to 42Mbps in three cities this spring, with service initially launching in New York City, Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas. Long Island, N.Y, northern New Jersey, and Chicago would follow soon after, expanding to about 25 markets by the middle of the year.

The carrier's announcements come just days after it announced a blockbuster merger with AT&T that would create the nation's largest wireless carrier. Regardless, T-Mobile had said it would continue with its plans until the merger's approval, including network expansion and new device releases.

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If you have a large number of images to work with, perhaps in readiness for use on a website, it can be an arduous task performing the same editing process to image after image. XnConvert is a free batch converter and image editing tool, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, that helps to automate the process by making it possible to edit and convert images in groups rather than have to work with files individually.

With support for over 400 image formats, XnConvert will handle almost any file you can think of, and while the program can be used on single images, the real benefits come from importing entire folders of image files and processing them all simultaneously.

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Samsung was arguably the first company to deliver a compelling Android-based tablet with its 7" Galaxy Tab, which debuted in late 2010. The company is continuing its momentum by releasing two other Android tablets in 10.1" and 8.9" profiles. Today at CTIA in Orlando, Samsung took the wraps off of the new 8.9" for the first time.

In its first month of availability, Samsung sold some 600,000 units of the original 7" Galaxy Tab. A common complaint about the device, however, was that the screen is too small to be a competitor to the iPad, yet too big for it to be a truly pocketable smart device. In keeping with the public's demand for larger screens and flatter chassis, Samsung announced the 10.1" Tab at Mobile World Congress earlier this year.

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Adobe AIR applications haven't exactly been renowned for their great performance to date, but that could begin to change with AIR 2.6, released today, which comes packed with major new features.

The new SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine should run code 50-percent faster than before, for instance. Adobe claims that a smaller and more efficient runtime will cut CPU usage by up to 30 percent, and reduce memory consumption immediately, no application recompilation required. And hardware graphics acceleration should help to maximize rendering performance on Android and iOS systems.

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When you're developing a website, it's important to check how your pages are displayed in all the main browsers. But that's not always straightforward, especially with Internet Explorer, as you can't easily install multiple versions on the same system.

Fortunately there's a simple alternative in Microsoft's Express Web SuperPreview, an Expression Web component that's also available as a stand-alone trial version. The latest version has just been released and it makes a very useful addition to every web developer's testing toolkit.

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