Two of the most popular iPhone apps, Pandora and Facebook, have finally been brought to the Android platform. These apps place increased emphasis on one of Android's strengths that really makes the user experience different from the iPhone: homescreen presence.

Last week, Apple rolled out Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone which improved upon the previous app by adding new features such as Facebook Events and direct-to-Facebook video uploading. It was received with great praise by the iPhone crowd.

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A security advisory issued by Microsoft late yesterday takes to task a security consultant for a British ISP who apparently, and possibly even accidentally, discovered a way that the Server Message Block 2.0 driver can trigger an instant Windows crash. Rather than report the incident directly to Microsoft, Laurent Gaffié went public with his findings first, in such a way that appears to have triggered the enthusiasm of the black-hat side of the security community.

"Microsoft is concerned that this new report of a vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed, potentially putting computer users at risk," reads yesterday's Security Advisory 975497. "We continue to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. We believe the commonly accepted practice of reporting vulnerabilities directly to a vendor serves everyone's best interests."

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The second WebOS device from Palm, known as the Pixi has officially debuted. Like Palm's other devices, it will be making its debut on Sprint. Palm's Jon Zilber said in the company's official blog this evening that it will be released in time for the holidays, but did not disclose a price.

Looking something like a Pre in the open position, the Pixi has a slightly smaller 2.63" touchscreen (the Pre's screen is 3.1") but a similarly designed full QWERTY keyboard. With quite a narrow profile, the Pixi ends up being Palm's thinnest phone ever, measuring in at .43" in thickness.
For comparison's sake, the iPhone 3G is .48" thick with a 4.5" x 2.4" footprint. The Pixi has a footprint of only 3.9" x 2.3", so while it is marginally thinner than the iPhone, it also is smaller overall.

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Nearly two years ago, I proclaimed Microsoft's adoption of Server Message Block version 2 the #6 of ten best new features of Windows Server 2008. Essentially, it provides a way for servers utilizing the Common Internet File System to utilize modern filing tools such as symbolic links and transaction batches, to expedite the process of sending large files over the Internet.

It has taken this long for anyone to find what was described earlier today as a glaring hole in Windows SMB 2.0 security, but it's an embarrassing little hole nonetheless: A security researcher discovered that if you get the order of the words in the SMB 2.0 message headers wrong, in such a way that you end up sending an ampersand (&), where a zero should be in the high word of the Process ID field, then you can end up sending a message block that could literally crash the remote recipient. Conceivably, an exploit could be crafted that could remotely crash a Vista-based client.

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Finnish wireless giant Nokia announced that it has completed trials with the "first ever Long Term Evolution (LTE) capable Internet Modem."

The product upon which the trials were conducted was the Nokia Internet Modem RD-3, a development tool by no means intended for consumer use. The company says it will be used with network vendors as well as measurement equipment manufacturers and operators. The RD-3 is interoperable with GSM/EDGE and WCDMA/HSPA and supports multiple LTE frequency bands with a theoretical peak of 100 Mbps downstream.

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Last month, Microsoft made available to its TechNet partners the first release-to-manufacturing code for Windows Server 2008 R2, the next edition of the server operating system that premiered in January 2008. While I've said here before that I feel Windows 7 is "Vista service pack 3" (and I meant that in a good way), Microsoft is right up front about the fact that R2 is the Windows 7 kernel applied to WS2K8, the result of that alone being an immediate improvement in the system.

But there are other bonuses as well -- so many, in fact, that it took me much more time than I anticipated to pore through the multiple lists of new features, research the potential impact of each one, confer with others as to their significance, and peek into how they are already impacting businesses' deployment plans. In a number of key aspects, WS2K8 R2 is actually the complete package that WS2K8 should have been, minus the Vista core that led some shops to stick with Windows Server 2003.

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And then there's Google, whose development model(s) have been described by its own practitioners as nebulous blobs of arbitrary nomenclature. Gmail, as many of its users will recall, was marked with a "beta" banner for the better part of five years. In the meantime, a number of folks, some of whom actually do test Google's Chrome browser rigorously, wrote in to remind us that Google maintains a development ("dev") track separately from its beta ("beta") track, and that we were confusing a dev build with a beta build.

One independent explanation put it this way: The beta builds are for public beta testing, whereas the public dev builds are for private beta testing.

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Now that HTC has unveiled its fourth Android handset, one begins to wonder what is next for the Taiwanese company and indeed the Android handsets business as a whole. HTC was the first to release a phone running on Google's open smartphone operating system, and now that it has shown off the Tattoo (formerly known as "Click") the company appears to have foregone design innovation in favor of releasing a cheap device.

The HTC Tattoo has a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor with 256 MB RAM, quad-band GSM/HSPA/UMTS radios, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, a 3.2 megapixel camera, 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD-expandable memory. But aside from HTC's Sense UI, which debuted in the Hero last month, the only noteworthy feature of the Tattoo is the ability for users to decorate its chassis with cosmetic designs -- not exactly Earth-shattering stuff.

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The UK's third and fourth largest mobile network operators, Orange and T-Mobile, will combine in a new joint venture this fall, the companies announced today. If authorized by antitrust regulators, the merger will create the single largest mobile company in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 28.4 million subscribers, or roughly 37% of the market.

While the British mobile phone market is much smaller and denser than its American counterpart, there are some similarities occurring between the two markets that are important to consider. Currently the largest UK operator with a 27% share is Telefonica's O2, which is the exclusive iPhone carrier like AT&T in the US. In second place with 25% of the British market is Vodafone, the company which jointly owns Verizon Wireless, the second place US carrier. The merger of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK would be like Sprint and T-Mobile merging in the United States, breaking up the market into thirds.

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The big news this week promises to be Apple's annual September product launch on Wednesday. Of course, the famously secretive company won't confirm anything before then, but if the rumors are to be believed, Apple is about to release another generation of refreshed iPods on a drooling world.

Which begs the question: Does the world even need a new iPod? Or, viewed another way, have the old iPods run their course? Or another, does anyone buy single-function music players anymore, or has the world moved on to multifunction devices?

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While many of the FCC's broadband workshops have dealt with current, concrete issues such as the deployment, adoption, and utilization of broadband in the United States, Thursday's FCC workshop took a refreshing departure from the here and now -- which in government practices is the equivalent to three years ago -- and spent time discussing the ideas that could potentially change what we know as the Internet.

One of the questions in the discussion was, "What might the Internet architecture look like in ten to twenty years, beyond incremental changes like speed increases?"

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It is no secret that Dish Network and partner EchoStar lost to TiVo in a ruling concerning whether the satellite companies' video recorders infringed on TiVo's patents. What was amazing was the possibility of an unprecedented $1 billion in legal sanctions that TiVo sought against the former sister companies. Today, a US District Court Judge in Eastern Texas did award TiVo a sizable contempt sanction sum of $200 million, which by most rational measures is still huge.

TiVo had requested treble damages -- three times the estimated base value of the infringement -- under the theory that EchoStar and its then-subsidiary Dish willfully infringed upon TiVo's technology. That much was apparently rejected today.

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A mere three days after explaining to the Federal Trade Commission in an open letter (PDF available here) that it could not draft a complete privacy policy for its Google Books site since the services such a policy would protect have yet to be invented, Google issued its first privacy policy update specifically for Google books.

But the policy addendum itself actually questions its own need to exist. "Google Books operates a lot like Web Search and other basic Google web services, so there are relatively few privacy practices that are unique to the Google Books product," reads the actual text of the policy statement.

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While the distributor of several e-books was wrong to assume that the "classic" nature of certain titles allowed them to be sold under the public domain license, there's been considerable concern over Amazon's right to "undo" the sale of those titles through its electronic Kindle Store. Last July, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos issued a mea culpa, saying the unannounced deletion of various titles including George Orwell's 1984 was "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."

This morning, as first noted by Gizmodo's Rosa Golijan, individuals affected by Amazon's unannounced deletions are now receiving e-mails that appear to be from Amazon, offering customers the opportunity to the company to deliver legitimate copies of their books free of charge, or alternately to receive $30 gift certificates or refund checks from Amazon.

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YouTube UK has lifted the six-month long "premium" music video blackout after arriving at a deal with the Performing Rights Society for Music over royalties.

The description of "premium" music videos included those that have been uploaded, or claimed as property, by record labels. The blackout only prohibited UK YouTube viewers from watching these videos, fan-uploaded copies were not included in the sanction.

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