AT&T today said that just a few days after Summer ends, the iPhone will finally get the ability to send and receive MMS messages.

The company has said that the functionality will be enabled with a software update downloadable through iTunes, and will only be available on iPhone 3G and 3GS models.

iPhone 3GS users have grown increasingly agitated that they still do not have MMS functionality and the ability to tether their phone to their laptop as a 3G modem despite the fact that these abilities were expected to arrive "at the end of the summer."

Yesterday, New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham called the iPhone "the Hummer of cellphones," burning through bandwidth like the oversized SUVs burn through gasoline. Because of this, AT&T has gotten a reputation for being an inadequate network. Nearly one third of potential iPhone owners are passing on the popular device because they don't want to deal with AT&T. The public has placed the blame for lack of MMS and tethering squarely on the mobile network operator.

The highly desirable HTC Hero which was unveiled earlier this summer for will become Sprint's first Android phone on October 11. Not only has the device been re-tooled with an EV-DO rev. A radio for Sprint's 3G network (the world version is WCDMA,) but it has also received a total chassis overhaul.

But looking at the two versions side-by-side, the physical design has been almost completely rethought. Where the HTC Hero was slim and angular, with the now-trademark "chin" cropping up from the device's tail end, the Sprint Hero has been rounded out and flattened. It actually ends up looking more like T-Mobile's myTouch 3G more than the original Hero.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting this evening the internet's most popular video streaming destination YouTube is now in talks with movie studios to offer rental streams of new release movies which could potentially be released day and date with their DVD and Blu-ray counterparts.

The site already works with a number of content owners to host ad-sponsored streams of classic television shows and films, but the site has not yet attempted the rental model with these studios. Details are scant at this point, at the WSJ only cites information provided by unnamed sources "familiar with [YouTube's] plans." A $3.99 rental price is reportedly being discussed because that is the cost of a Standard Definition new release movie rental on Apple's iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand.

I don't know about you, but my view of razor-thin notebooks has been permanently changed by MSI, thanks to a creative (and supremely twisted) viral advertisement that began circulating earlier this month. Because of this, my colleagues and I jokingly refer to this as-of-yet unclassified style of ultraportable as "cracktops."

Of course, within the industry, what I would refer to as a "cracktop" seems to be increasingly falling into "category X." Both Lenovo and MSI call their ultra slim portable lines the "X-series," and Sony today unveiled the Vaio X, which would fit right in among the others. (UPDATE: Samsung has just revealed its own slim notebook, also to be called the X series.)

As Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto series continues to move ahead with releases of Chinatown Wars for the iPhone, and GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion pack for Xbox 360 on the horizon, the controversy from 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has only just now cooled down.

In a statement from Take-Two yesterday, the company said it will settle the class action suit over the unlockable sex scenes in GTA: San Andreas, and the "historical stock option granting practices" suit which brought the company before the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.

When Microsoft announced yesterday that "Windows Phones" would be coming on October 6th, it didn't name specific phone models, but instead listed manufacturers and the mobile network operators that would be carrying them.

Today however, joint venture Sony Ericsson announced the sequel to its powerful and pricey Xperia X1 handset will be a "Windows Phone," the Windows Mobile 6.5-powered Xperia X2.

For as popular as Nokia has been worldwide, it is just not a brand that Americans particularly care about. Even though it has consistently been the most prolific shipper of mobile devices worldwide, Nokia has only an 8% market share in the United States according to IDC, and even that is slipping.

So when Nokia unveiled its first netbook -- the Nokia Booklet 3G -- which has mobile consumers elsewhere in the world taking note, all American consumers seem to do is laugh. Even though DisplaySearch rankings for last quarter showed that we are eating up netbooks almost twice as fast as we are consuming full-sized notebooks, to us, Nokia still doesn't click.

Has Google issued an apology about today's Gmail outage, or is the company trying to downplay the issue?

We're not really sure.

After refusing connections all morning, Gmail officially went down for the count this afternoon. For more than an hour the service was completely gone, but Google has returned Gmail's status to a "Service Disruption."

This morning, a notice from Google was sent out to users which said, "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change."

Clear 4G WiMAX has come to ten more cities, just as Clearwire promised in the beginning of August.

Well, it's really like two cities and sporadic chunks of the biggest state in the contiguous United States. Bellingham, Washington and Boise, Idaho were the standalone cities that got switched on today, and the Texas cities launched today were Abilene, Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Killeen/Temple, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, Waco and Wichita Falls.

Last June, the IRS began to investigate the 20-year old tax law that treats work-issued mobile phones as a fringe benefit that is subject to income tax. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman called the law "Obsolete...burdensome, poorly understood by taxpayers, and difficult for the IRS to administer consistently."

At the time of the Listed Property rule's enactment in 1989, it was seen as "a tax on CEOs and rich people." But now that workplace communication has evolved to the point where practically everyone has a cellular phone, the law needs to be updated and simplified.

Opera 10 isn't the only news today from Norwegian company Opera Software. Today, the Nintendo Wii's "Internet Channel" browser based upon Opera 9 received a couple of serious updates: It has gone from Adobe Flash 7 to Adobe Flash Lite 3.1, and now it is totally free to download.

Early adopters got a crack at the Internet Channel had access to a trial version from December 2006 to April 2007, and then a free full version from April to June 2007, but after that period, it has cost 500 Wii Points (5 USD). For users who actually purchased the browser, Nintendo will be offering "refunds" in the form of a free game at the end of October.

Google representatives confirmed yesterday that Sony will be bundling the Chrome browser into its Vaio line of notebook computers along with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is the browser's first bundling partnership, and follows earlier statements from Google which said that a leading computer manufacturer would ship Chrome.

Sony, however has not made any confirmatory remarks.

Hoping to capitalize on the media frenzy surrounding the Federal Communications Commission's investigation into the iTunes app store approval policies, RealNetworks announced that it had submitted a Rhapsody iPhone app to Apple for review.

The Rhapsody app has not yet been approved, but one of its principal competitors in the subscription music space, Napster today discussed the difficulty of bringing a streaming music app to the iPhone, as it unveiled the beta of a new mobile Web interface at m.napster.com where its subscribers can browse, search, preview and buy songs, but not stream them.