You know I'm an iPad freak. I was first in line to buy one and I've used it so much my screen is cracked. It is the device that's changed my life more than any other in the past year, which, in a year that Microsoft Kinect shipped, is totally impressive. For the past few days I've had a Motorola XOOM. I accepted a loaner because I wanted to prove that it would suck next to an iPad.

One problem: I'm falling in love with it. With a couple of caveats. First, the caveats:

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Yesterday, during an exclusive press briefing that was also available by invitation-only webcast, Sony Electronics president Phil Molyneux detailed how the company would embrace the connected anytime, anywhere and on-anything era. He also addressed, and not necessarily answered, questions about Sony's Internet TV and tablet strategies. If one word defines his plan for the consumer electronics company: Differentiation. I attended the event at Sony Electronics' corporate headquarters in northern San Diego, which is about a 30-minute drive from my apartment. Sony Electronics is the largest of Sony's six US organizations.

Molyneux, a 24-year Sony executive, assumed his current responsibilities just six months ago. During his first two months Molyneux traveled to 15 states, visiting 250 retail stores. He wanted to understand Sony's retail situation in the United States. "You can go pretty much into any retailer in the US and you'll be faced with this wall of LCD TVs. I call that the 'sea of sameness.' From a consumer's perspective, you look at that wall and this line of LCD products...how can you decide which product to purchase?"

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We're pretty confident you know what Xoom is by now. Stories we've run about the upcoming Android 3.0 tablet from Motorola Mobility have been some of the most popular items of the last three months.

Yesterday, just before all the advance reviews were published, law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius filed a trademark suit with the US District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of San Francisco-based money transfer company Xoom Corporation.

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The Android Market has never had any specific ban on carrying and selling straight up text documents, and users could search through the market and find apps that were, in effect, standalone e-books. Now, however, there is a section dedicated specifically to e-books which currently features around 500 titles from publishers such as Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, W.W. Norton and Co., Hachette, and more.

The URL for the site, market.android.com/books, was discovered by Android Guys last week, and the site noted that URLs for /music, and /movies worked and resolved to the Android Market.

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It's new to me, anyway. The Android Developers created video, which posted three days ago, uses maps to show how Google's mobile operating system grew from its release in October 2008 through January 2011. I wonder how an iPhone 4 visualization would compare. Earlier this month, Gartner reported that Android sales increased 888.8 percent year over year in 2010. This video is what that growth looks like. Credit where due, I spotted the video on CoolSmartphone.

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Somewhat hidden in between Apple's announcement Thursday of new MacBook Pro laptops was the debut of a new method of PC connectivity: Thunderbolt. It can be most easily explained as the next generation of FireWire, allowing for transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps.

Those who stand to benefit the most from Thunderbolt would be those in the audio-visual industries, which Intel itself bills the technology as perfect for. "Working with HD media is one of the most demanding things people do with their PCs," Intel's PC Client Group general manager Mooly Eden said. "We've taken the vision of simple, fast transfer of content between PCs and devices, and made it a reality."

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In the race to offer Microsoft Office functionality in the cloud, Google has beaten its rival getting a product out of development beta and into production release. Today Google announced global availability of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which went into beta late last year. The technology builds off Google acquisition of DocVerse.

Microsoft is working on its own solution, Office 365, which is beta testing and is expected to go v1 sometime this year. For now, Google can claim first to market advantage as it looks to convert more Office users to its cloud services. The cloud is increasingly important to Microsoft. Last year, COO Kevin Turner said that 70 percent of cloud wins are new customers.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C,) the standards body responsible for HTML5, accepted and published Microsoft's member submission for standardized privacy features on Thursday.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission endorsed a framework for consumer privacy which suggested a persistent browser setting to protect users from services that collect and harvest browser data without users knowing about it.

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Last October, Apple gave the public its first look at OS X 10.7 "Lion", illustrating Cupertino's vision of mobile-inspired future versions of the Mac operating system. Thursday, the company has released its first developer preview of the OS to members of the Mac Developer Program.

Since the launch of the iPhone, Apple has shifted its strategies to focus squarely on the mobile computing paradigm, and CEO Steve Jobs has repeatedly stressed the importance of "leaving the past behind" as computing in the "mobile era" matures. Leaving the past behind has involved shifting the focus onto new mobile standards in HTML5 and abandoning support for legacy technology like Adobe Flash, ending the company's nearly decade-old line of servers, and now phasing features from its mobile operating system into its operating system for PCs.

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Acronis has released a compilation of two of its standalone products under the moniker, Acronis Backup and Security 2011. Boasting a price tag of $69.99, it compromises Acronis True Image Home 2011, the celebrated drive-imaging and backup tool, plus Acronis Internet Security 2011, a complete internet security suite. Also included is Acronis Online Backup, which comes with a complementary 5GB of online storage. Users can upgrade to 250GB storage per year by paying $20 extra for the Premium version of Acronis Backup and Security.

True Image Home 2011 is considered one of the best drive backup and imaging tools on the market, while Acronis Internet Security is actually a rebadged version of BitDefender's Internet Security 2011 product. The 2011 releases see completely redesigned user interfaces, plus integration with Windows 7 and support for USB 3.0.

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Today, Apple finally brought MacBook Pro up to speed with Windows laptops. After skipping the last generation of i Core chips, Apple adopted new Intel "Sandy Bridge" processors for some MacBook Pro models. In a surprising, but rumored move, Apple swapped out nVidia graphics for integrated Intel and AMD graphics. Apple updated all three MacBook Pro lines -- 13.3-inch, 15.4-inch and 17-inch. Apple also introduced a new peripheral port called "Thunderbolt."

The new configurations represent hefty upgrades across the board -- for example, bumping up storage capacity in the entry level MacBook Pro from 250GB to 320GB and doubling the memory on some other models. However, in a disappointing move, Apple did not upgrade 13-inch models' display resolution from 1200 x 800 to match MacBook Air's 1366 x 768.

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Piriform Software has updated its system optimization and cleaning tool, CCleaner, to version 3.04. The latest release adds a number of new features, but most notably also adds support for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, which was made available for download two days ago.

CCleaner is a free tool that cleans out files for both optimization and privacy reasons, covering a wide range of systems, programs and browser settings. It also includes a Registry cleaner, plus tools for managing startup and System Restore points, as well as the Programs and Features Control Panel.

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Every single person I know with an iPad who has used News Corp.'s "The Daily" complains about persistent crashes and really, really, really, slow update times. Now PaidContent reports that the initial two-week free introduction promotion is going on and on and on, kind of like those wait times for news content to download. The Daily Publisher Greg Clayman says a decision on when to end free access has yet to be determined. Say, wasn't News Corp. planning to charge for this thing? You know, 99 cents a week -- better value than McDonalds' Dollar Menu?

The Daily launched on February 2nd in New York City, with News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch leading off the event. It's a digital newspaper initially available for iPad, but a version for Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" tablets could release as soon as a few months. Some advice to News Corp.: Launch the Android version sooner as beta and shake out the nastiness before going v1. Hey, the thing is a mobile application, after all. Why not treat its development that way?

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Four Democratic Senators on Wednesday sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, urging them to quash the GOP-led House Resolution to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's new net neutrality rules with either the appropriations process or the Congressional Review Act.

The letter, drafted by Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Al Franken (D-MN), says, "Such action aims to strip the FCC of its legal authority over modern communications and hand control of the Internet over to the owners of the wires that deliver information and services over them."

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Do you need an email client? These days, many people see the advantage of accessing their email through the web -- not only does this enable you to check it on any internet-enabled computer, it saves you having to open a separate program each time you want to check your email.

Having said that, you'll need to consider a dedicated email client if you want to access your email offline, or your web-based host's interface leaves something to be desired. You should also consider an upgrade if you're still using Windows Mail (Vista) or Outlook Express (Windows XP or earlier). In this roundup we've sourced five alternative email programs, some free, others not so, and put them through their paces to see which one is best suited for your needs.

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