Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia on Thursday announced it had filed claims against Apple in the UK High Court, Dusseldorf and Mannheim District Courts in Germany, and the District Court of the Hague, Netherlands. The three new complaints join those already filed with the US International Trade Commission, and US Federal Courts in Delaware and Wisconsin.

Nokia had already accused Apple of 24 patent violations; 10 counts in its 2009 complaint, and 14 more in its 2010 complaint that responded to Apple's countersuit. The action announced today piles 13 more patents on the case; 4 in the UK, 7 in Dusseldorf, 5 in Mannheim, and two in the Hague.

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Suddenly, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's Consumer Electronics Show keynote is a heavier burden. Ballmer will open CES, with a 9:30 pm EST keynote on Jan. 5, 2011. On January 6th, Apple will officially launch the Mac App Store, exclusively for Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard). Earlier this morning, Apple announced the store opening date, and you can be sure timing is deliberate.

For years, Apple has played a game of oneupmanship with CES, timing announcements so that they would suck away some of the excitement and press coverage around products debuted or updated there -- iPhone in 2007, MacBook Air in 2008 and iPad in 2010. Then there are the rumors, often obviously from internal leaks, ahead of big Apple announcements. Apple has a knack for marketing manipulation -- controlling the message and perception. Blogs' and news sites' ever quest for pageviews makes every Apple rumor worth another story. Then there is clear media bias favoring Apple.

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DisplayLink, maker of graphics-over-USB solutions, has partnered with Canadian company Userful to turn Displaylink-powered docking stations into Linux-driven CPU-less client PCs.

Userful makes a virtual PC solution for classrooms called Userful Multiseat Linux 2011. With this, a single PC can drive ten independent client machines running Edubuntu. Now that Userful has partnered with DisplayLink, owners of consumer docking stations with DisplayLink's USB Virtual Graphics technology (such as those made by Targus and Asus) can do the same thing for free, except in a more limited fashion.

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As Google moves ever closer to its fiber-optic network plans, it has hired networking engineer Milo Medin to oversee its rollout. Medin is widely viewed as an expert in Internet networking, and is credited with pushing TCP/IP in the 1980s as a standard for Internet connectivity.

Medin will manage the fiber team and serve as vice president of access services. Google said in February that it planned to build its own fiber network. Hundreds of communities nationwide have vied to be the location where the planned 1 gigabit network will be built -- Google says it will announce a winner early next year.

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I've long prided myself on being a good cloud citizen. I seemingly live in the browser. But using the Cr-48 laptop running Google's Chrome OS, I discovered the number of important but small apps that are vital to my daily computing. I have been living a double life, meandering as nomad between two computing domiciles, never really settling into one or the other.

All the blogging or reporting I do takes place in the browser. It's where I use Twitter and collect RSS feeds. But I rely on clients for instant messaging and email. I run Skype, too, and most importantly a media client -- right now iTunes, with 90GB of music stored on an external hard drive. The biggest challenge on Day 1 got unexpected relief on Day 2: Gmail. How do you manage separate Gmail accounts -- I've got four of them -- when each requires separate sign-in? I used a different account to set up the laptop than the domain attached to Google Apps. I'll answer the question in a few paragraphs.

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Wednesday, the mapping component of Microsoft's search engine Bing got another significant UX upgrade and new features for both the desktop and mobile versions of the service.

Last August, a new style of the Bing Maps was unveiled, which focused on providing a cleaner visual experience for users. Today, that new style has been updated even further with subtle changes to color contrast and brightness, as well as to the density of information and size of text to help in overall legibility and usability.

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MetroPCS may be the fifth largest wireless network operator in the United States, but it is the first in LTE, the next-generation wireless standard that will eventually be used by market leaders Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Wednesday, the company expanded its LTE network footprint to three more major markets: New York City, Boston, and Sacramento.

In September, MetroPCS opened the first commercial LTE network in the United States in Las Vegas, and a little more than a week later switched on the second deployment in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area. Since then, the company has activated LTE networks in the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia metro areas in Pennsylvania, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.

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Google just announced availability of IT deployment tools for Chrome in a blog post (I also received email from the PR team). The deployment tools step up Google's assault on Internet Explorer turf, earlier with Chrome Frame.

"We've created an MSI installer that enables businesses who use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users," according to the blog post. "We've also added support for managed group policy with a list of policies and a set of templates that allow administrators to easily customize browser settings to manage security and privacy."

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The editors of Time magazine have done just that. But is he worthy?

Time readers chose WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange; Time editors put him as fourth runner up. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg ranked 10th among Time readers. It's a question I pose to Betanews readers: Would you chose Zuckerberg, or someone else, as Person of the Year?

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Microsoft is expected to use the platform of January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to hawk its tablet line, however the real star of the show may be Windows 8 according to published reports. The next version of Windows is not expected until 2012, so a debut at CES would be a surprise.

The Redmond company last used CES in 2010 to show off the HP Slate, a highly anticipated tablet device that has failed to see the light of day. So far, Microsoft's commitment to tablet computing has been a non-starter, with manufacturers either scrapping their plans, or even moving to competing platforms like Android.

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"Just when I thought I was out -- they pull me back in," says Michael Corleone in movie "Godfather III." I understand the sentiment. Two weeks ago I asked: "I sold my soul to Google, can I get it back?" The answer is no. On December 13, I received from Google the Cr-48 laptop running Chrome OS. They pulled me back in.

Google sent the 12.1-inch notebook as part of a 60,000-unit pilot program. The company seeks to shakedown Chrome OS in preparation for commercial release sometime in mid 2011, to provide IT organizations opportunity to test the cloud-dependent operating system and to churn developer interest and new applications. Google is clear that the Cr-48 is a test bed not really ready for primetime.

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Hacking the Xbox 360 Kinect controller is all the rage right now, but it's not exactly sanctioned by Microsoft. The future for 3D gesture-based controls, however, looks extremely promising and Belgian software company Softkinetic launched a content developer program for engineers looking to make a legitimate entry into the field.

Ever since an open source PC driver was devised to turn Kinect into a standard USB device, amateur developers have been coming up with clever new ways of using the "controllerless controller."

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Google launched an update to Android's voice search capability on Tuesday that incorporates speaker recognition to improve results.

The new "personalized recognition" feature is currently quite limited: it's only available in English in the United States on Android devices running 2.2 and above.

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Last week, I took my daughter to Los Angeles for a TV commercial audition. About 20 other teen girls waited with their parents, and all -- every single one and parents, too -- had out a smartphone. Tap, tap, tap text and apps. It's an anecdotal moment supporting an IDC prediction: By 2014 the global market for mobile applications will surpass $35 billion.

IDC published the findings in a new report "Worldwide and U.S. Mobile Applications, Storefronts, and Developer 2010-2014 Forecasts and Year-End 2010 Vendor Market Shares: The 'Appification' of Everything." The analyst firm is quite serious about so-called "appification" (God help us if the word makes the Oxford English Dictionary by end of 2011). There are two main trends: Lighter, mobile apps popping up in more devices -- some stationary like settop boxes -- and mobile applications impacting virtually everything people do. Personal example of the latter: During the drive back from LA, my daughter downloaded an app that turned her smartphone's LED camera flash into a light, so she could do homework.

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The year 2011 will be make or break.

Early year, make or break will be one of perception, whether or not customers and shareholders see the glass as half full or half empty. From the half-full perspective, Microsoft has bet big on the cloud, and at the right time. From the half-empty viewpoint, Microsoft muffed mobile, by first fumbling smartphones and later tablets. The company started pushing the latter category a decade ago, only to lose it to Apple during 2010.

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