Sony's latest handheld game console, the $250 PSP Go hit retail today -- the first major video game system that does not support physical media, with games offered only via download.

To kick start the device's life today, Sony has beefed up the catalog of downloadable games in the PlayStation Store with more than 100 titles ranging from $5 all the way up to $39.99, including the highly hyped Gran Turismo PSP. Sony will be giving away one copy with every PSP Go for the first ten days of its availability.

Even though collective analysis shows that the iPhone hasn't done as well as peer marketers would have us believe, the iTunes App Store undoubtedly has. In the first nine months the App Store existed, more than a billion apps were downloaded. Five months later, another billion were downloaded. Naturally, less than half of this vast quantity is thanks to the iPhone, as Apple combines the tens of millions of iPod Touch users downloading apps with iPhone downloaders.

But regardless of the device doing the downloading, the app store model has proven sound and has created a multi-million dollar business. This "app gold rush" has compelled thousands of developers to try their hands at creating software for the iPhone and iPod Touch in hopes of making a fortune.

Attorneys for Uniloc, the independent developer whose patent for software activation was the subject of an infringement case against Microsoft, told Betanews Thursday morning they will appeal a Rhode Island district court judge's decision Monday vacating the jury's award of $388 million to Uniloc.

In a statement to Betanews, Uniloc's attorneys said the following: "We are disappointed by the decision the trial judge has made to overturn the jury's unanimous verdict in Uniloc's patent infringement case against Microsoft. We believe that the jury's verdict in April was thoughtful, well reasoned and supported by the evidence presented. Since the patent status remains unchanged, Uniloc will continue to protect its intellectual property and appeal the Judge's decision to override the jury's verdict to the US Court of Appeals. We are confident that Uniloc will ultimately prevail."

As first reported by TechFlash's Eric Engleman, Amazon has elected to settle out of court with a Michigan high school student, who sued the Kindle maker last July after having remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from his and about 2,000 other users' Kindles. The electronic publisher in that instance did not actually have the rights to those works from Orwell's estate; but as Amazon acknowledged in its published settlement order (PDF available here, courtesy Puget Sound Business Journal), deleting those works from their systems was a violation of Amazon's own Terms of Service.

The settlement is unique in that Amazon was willing to let its terms be known. Student Justin Gawronski's attorneys will receive $150,000, on the stipulation that the attorneys' portion will be donated to a charity that promotes literacy, educational, or children's causes. Amazon will continue to honor its plan to give purchasers a $30 gift card.

By all definitions, Apple's iTunes App Store is a massive success, with sales numbers that would make McDonald's franchisees green with envy. Two billion applications -- half a billion in the last quarter alone -- have been downloaded since the store went live just over 14 months ago. With over 85,000 apps, it puts every mobile platform competitor to shame. The 125,000-strong iPhone Developer Program and successive evolutions of iPhone and iPod touch devices should keep driving growth for a while.

This is all obviously good for Apple, because a vibrant online App Store naturally drives demand for its high-margin hardware. And in the case of the iPhone, AT&T and other partner-carriers benefit from carrying a device whose sales are driven not only by desirable hardware, but by the ability to easily turn the device into pretty much anything the end user wants. The paltry few-thousand choices on Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World, or Palm App Catalog's even paltrier few dozen apps, end up serving as inadvertent advertisements for the iPhone.

American business history almost certainly will recall Apple as one of the most successful marketers ever. With iPhone, the company has performed a remarkable magic trick: Making the late-starting mobile seem ready to take over the world. But the hard reality of facts -- not the torrent of glowing emotions coming from American and European financial analysts, journalists or Mac loyalists -- show something else. Apple's smartphone is by no means the roaring success everyone here claims it to be.

Let me preface by reminding that I'm on record as calling Microsoft's mobile strategy a train wreck and asserting that the cell phone is poised to replace the PC. I've also called Apple's mobile platform -- iPhone, iPod touch and App Store -- as leading contender to become the next-generation computing platform.

The US Dept. of Commerce will no longer have a direct oversight role over the independent corporation responsible for maintaining the Internet's domain name system (DNS) and top-level domain (TLD) registry. This announcement came from ICANN on the very day -- essentially, the last minute -- of the Commerce Dept.'s official oversight of the group.

Under the terms of an Affirmation of Commitments document released by ICANN today, the United States will maintain a seat on ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, an 109-member league of nations, not all of which actively participate. But that's it. The periodic review process for accountability that ICANN underwent since its establishment by the DOC in 1998, will now shift to what new ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom describes as "an international committee of parties chosen by the chairman of our Governmental Advisory Committee."

As smartphones gained popularity outside of the business world, a division formed between devices made for consumers (lifestyle smartphones) and those made for enterprise deployments (professional smartphones). Professional devices tend to be more integrable into bigger systems and offer more in the productivity department while lifestyle devices cater more to the individual's tastes and offer more in terms of entertainment.

Though Microsoft has plenty of consumer smartphones running Windows Mobile, the operating system has found itself on the far end of "Professional," struggling to appeal to consumers enamored with touch-based operating systems. So Microsoft has worked to make Windows Mobile 6.5 and future versions much more "finger friendly," without sacrificing their professional capabilities.

Verizon has reportedly discontinued the Verizon Hub VoIP phone/widget tablet a little more than six months after it debuted.

The short-lived Hub was intended for households with multiple Verizon Wireless phones, where it could act as a calendar, home messaging and management platform and VoIP base station. And though fixed-line telephony continues to dwindle as technologies such as Femtocell gain cachet among wireless carriers, both The Hub and Verizon's femtocell Wireless Network Extender suffered from the same problem: they weren't tied into FiOS.

Today, Google is expected to invite as many as 100,000 more participants into the private beta of its concurrent communications system, called Wave. As that happens, many more participants will be able to not only communicate with one another in a more granular form of real-time, but potentially collaborate on work and projects.

It's that latter part of the program that's supposed to congeal at some point into a collective sense of purpose. But this time, unlike Microsoft's first experiments with Dynamic Data Exchange between applications on the same computer three decades ago, there isn't yet a clear, single purpose for the system. No question it could bring individuals as close together as people separated by indefinite distance could become; but as to the question of what they do with one another once they do get together, Google is hoping this question -- like so many others it puts out there in the open -- resolves itself.

Just about one year after announcing their partnership, TiVo and Research in Motion today have announced that the "TiVo for BlackBerry smartphones" application is downloadable today in BlackBerry App World or as a direct download.

The free app lets users schedule recordings on their Series2 or Series3 TiVo DVR from their BlackBerry (software v.4.2.0 and up), browse most popular shows or daily picks and view programming details such as title, description, runtime original air date and time and thumbnail. It also includes an advanced search function which lets users filter results by title, keyword, or by actor.

It's beginning to be a habit: In the short history of Microsoft's surprisingly popular Windows Home Server product, its first two major upgrades (each with truckloads of bug fixes), called Power Packs, suffered from delays -- especially after Microsoft heavily promoted their upcoming release. Monday evening, it happened again: After what appeared to be a successful launch event at the CEDIA 2009 expo in Atlanta last week, Microsoft announced that Power Pack 3's release is now slated for toward the end of this year.

That's bad news for many customers who had been planning to upgrade their home systems to Windows 7. There are a number of features in the current Windows Home Server Power Pack 2, designed for Vista, that do not work properly in Windows 7, especially with respect to backup -- one of the main reasons to use Home Server in the first place. PP3 was supposed to include the fixes that make it compatible with Win7's completely revised backup, and last week, at least, they looked pretty good.

Launched on Tuesday, Bento 3 is the third major release of the personal database from Apple's FileMaker division since the original rollout of the product in January 2008.

With the new Bento 3, users can employ Apple Bonjour, a technology intro'd earlier for iTunes and iPhotos, to let other users on a Wi-Fi or wired LAN locate and view information in their personal databases.

In the second colossal overturning of a jury verdict against Microsoft this month alone, a US District Court judge in Rhode Island has completely tossed out a $388 million patent infringement ruling against Microsoft. But rather than just accept the arguments that the jury's formula was excessive -- an argument that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with last September 11 -- the district court judge flame-broiled the case of an Australian inventor who claimed to have created keycode-driven software activation, as not only without merit but ludicrous.

Judge William Smith shot down most of inventor Uniloc's arguments, except for the one right up front. It concerned whether Microsoft's product activation system used a locally unique identifier (LUID) to represent a software license holder -- the person, not the software. Uniloc's patent described a system whereby a completely unique (or as Microsoft might put it, "globally unique") identifier represents a licensee. The randomizer in this system is supposed to be powerful enough that it would be virtually impossible for any two systems operating independently to generate the same number. (This despite the fact that, years ago, this reporter was able to accomplish this feat during a beta test of GUID.)

This week, all three of the world's top general search engines touted the addition of deep links to their search results, although Google has been actively experimenting with deep links since this time last year. The basic premise is this: For Web pages that have named anchors above selected subsections -- for example, <A NAME="Details"> -- the search engine is capable of generating subheadings in its search results that link users directly to those subsections, or at least to subsections whose titles imply they may have some bearing upon the query.

The fact that deep links are now official features of Google, Yahoo, and Bing search may not be nearly as relevant today as the fact that all three services made their announcements almost in unison. It's an indication of an actual race going on in the search engine field, reminiscent of the horse-and-buggy days of the early '90s when Lycos and AltaVista were vying against Yahoo for search supremacy. This despite the fact that Yahoo is due to be utilizing search results generated by Microsoft's search engines Real Soon Now.