Thursday, AT&T and Motorola announced pricing and availability of the Motorola Atrix 4G convertible smartphone. The public first recoiled at the pricetag --$199 for the phone and $500 for its notebook dock-- but the Atrix is an extremely enticing new type of gadget that could be a good solution for specific users.

The main idea behind the Atrix 4G is that the smartphone acts as a "brain" that can power a notebook computer, a set top box, or stand alone as a phone. It features a dual gigaherz core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1 GB of RAM, up to 32 GB of storage, and features the Android 2.2 operating system with special dedicated interfaces for the notebook and multimedia set top box.

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Ahead of its planned investor meeting on Feburary 23, Apple is once again having to deal with questions on a succession plan. The Cupertino company might have been able to avoid a lot of publicity surrounding an effort to force it to publicly disclose its plans, but Steve Jobs' indefinite leave of absence couldn't have come at a worse time.

Institutional Shareholder Services, a group that advises shareholders on how to vote on proxy ballot issues, has now said that it is advising a yes vote for the proposal. Under it, the company would be required to publicly disclose its plans for succession, and do so yearly.

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Are you looking at a digital photo in its raw, original state -- or has it been edited? Under normal circumstances this can be very hard to determine. But if you really need to know JPEGSnoop may be able to help. Just open your image and the program will examine its compression characteristics, compare these against a database of thousands of cameras and photo editors, and deliver its verdict.

So if your image matches the signature of a camera, it's probably an original shot; if it matches a photo editor, it probably has been edited, or at least saved in an editor; and if the signature isn't recognized then JPEGSnoop won't be able to say (though you can add signatures to the database manually to improve its accuracy).

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Ancestry.com has released version 2.0 of its mobile app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users. Ancestry 2.0 features a major redesign of its user interface, which has been optimised for iPad users to make browsing your online Ancestry.com tree much easier than previously. The app also adds new options for accessing records and source citations linked to individuals in your tree. It also extends access to shared trees.

The Ancestry app is designed to give family historians access to any family trees they've stored online at Ancestry.com. Not only can users browse their own trees, they can also edit selected information, upload photos and even add new family members from scratch while away from a computer and web browser, making the app much more than a simple browsing tool.

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There's a reason why Betanews didn't report the ridiculous research report claiming that the return rate on Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets was overly high: It wasn't believable. Finally, Samsung has stepped up with its formal denial.

Samsung posted the statement yesterday (yeah, I missed it; I was celebrating the Lunar New Year on Seoul time): "The return rate of the Galaxy Tab in the US as claimed by an North American market research firm is incorrect. According to Samsung Electronics Mobile Communications Business the return rate is below 2 percent." Now how's that for terse and to the point?

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The last IPv4 addresses have been allocated, highlighting the need for companies and organizations to move to a new system amid the ever increasing number of net-connected devices. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) made the announcement at an event in Miami on Thursday.

Each of the five regional Internet registries has been allocated a single block of around 16 million addresses. While true exhaustion would be hard to gauge -- a small number of IP addresses will be held for several years for the transition -- the rate at which the different registrars will burn through their allocations will likely vary.

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California software company Diskeeper today announced that its Emergency Undelete is now a standalone product, independent from the Undelete 2009 software suite where it originated.

Diskeeper's Undelete 2009 is available in two editions, Professional for $59.95, and Server for $499.95. But for users who don't need full-scale disk recovery software and just want to protect themselves from accidentally deleting important files, Diskeeper's Emergency Undelete is available for $19.95 today.

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Nokia, a company that last made news for cancelling its X7 smartphone's U.S. launch, has an opportunity to make some positive headlines at GSMA's Mobile World Congress in two weeks. According to a report in The Nokia Blog, an event at MWC called Intel AppUp Application Lab will showcase the first hardware running the MeeGo mobile operating system.

Though the registration form for the event does not expressly mention that MeeGo will be shown running on dedicated hardware, but the MeeGo team had a workable version of MeeGo for tablets at the same time as it released the very first version of MeeGo for handsets, and hardware manufacturers Asus and Acer have pledged support for the OS. Recently-leaked information about a prototype Nokia tablet has led some to believe there may be a device ready to show off for MWC.

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Apple's approach to magazine and newspaper subscriptions and third-party e-book sales stink of the kind of practices that got Microsoft into trouble with trustbusters on two continents during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A year ago, publishers embraced iPad as the savior of their industry. Now iPad looks like a devil's deal instead.

Trouble started three days ago, when Sony said that Apple rejected its Reader software from the App Store in a policy change. Apple responded that there is no policy change. Oh? Well, if there is no overt policy change, it is effectively one of enforcement. Either way, the demands Apple is placing on publishers is too much, and arguably being made from a monopoly position. Essentially, the company wants sales to go through the App Store, which would compel the likes of Amazon and Sony to sell e-books indirectly through Apple and would prohibit magazine and newspaper publishers from offering existing subscribers the benefits of iPad editions without paying more.

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Amid what it called "unprecedented" demand for the iPhone as pre-orders began Thursday morning, Verizon is now quietly taking measures to curb those that may put a strain on its data network. Effective immediately, those who fall in the top 5% of data users may find their throughput speeds reduced.

The change in policy could affect around 1.1 million customers: Verizon counts about 21 million smart phone users. Those throttled would find their speeds reduced for the remainder of the current cycle, as well as the next full billing cycle, a document posted to the Verizon website reads.

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Apple executive briefing at first Apple retail store, May 2001.

Ten years ago -- that's right, 2001 -- Apple made four investments that bore fruit in a 21st-century success story. Everything that came afterwards, even iPad and iPhone, traces back to what I call the "2001 Four."

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Uh-oh, the plot thickens in the war of words between Google and Microsoft over pilfered search queries. No less than Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, has piped up a fervent denial. You know what, emotionally, I want to believe him. Mehdi is one of the few at Microsoft I respect, and he doesn't get enough respect inside the company.

He blogged this afternoon: "We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting." Well, I'm glad that's cleared up, or is it?

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Mozilla on Wednesday released the fourth beta version of Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo mobile operating systems. The update fixes some compatibility and performance issues, and attempts to provide an overall faster browsing experience.

In the Mozilla Blog today, the team wrote "Our recent tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser; roughly three times faster on Kraken, about twice as fast on SunSpider and slightly faster on V8. Everything from start-up time and page load time to responsiveness and panning and zooming are snappy in this release. Other advancements in this release include increasing stability, reducing installation memory usage, improving readability with zooming, and fixing some keyboard issues."

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Internet access started to return across Egypt on Wednesday, nearly one week after the government cut access over increasing civil unrest in the country. By midday local time, many websites were once again accessible within the country according to local ISPs.

Facebook and Twitter were once again accessible, which are said to play a key role in helping organize anti-government protests. It is not exactly clear why the government decided to restore Internet service, although it may be part of a wider effort to restore some sense of stability to daily life in Egypt following President Hosni Mubarak's statement that he would step down in September.

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Piriform Software has released a new monthly build of its free defragging tool. Defraggler 2.02 includes a number of enhancements to increase performance, such as improvements to the speed and accuracy of the program's search algorithm, and a redesigned NTFS process for optimising both performance and memory.

Defraggler is a fully functional defragmentation tool for Windows users that has evolved from a program that originally defragmented selected files and folders only. Version 2, which was released late last year, featured a new tool for defragging system files at boot time along with a redesigned interface.

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