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Exclusive cell phone sales and distribution contracts, such as the one between AT&T and Apple Inc. for all models of iPhone, are solely responsible for the quickening pace of innovation in the American handset market, or solely responsible for its imminent demise -- solely. That's the black-and-white nature of the arguments raised before the Senate Commerce Committee last Wednesday, as executives from the nation's second largest carrier and two smaller ones joined industry advocates in debating whether locking out carriers' access to popular phones is good for competition and good for the consumer.

"Today, when you sit down at a computer and you access a broadband connection, you're not told by your broadband provider that you have to have a Dell or an HP or an Apple in order to access the network," stated Sen. John Kerry (D - Mass.), the former presidential candidate who chaired a portion of Wednesday's hearing. "And when you purchase a wireless phone in Asia or Europe, you typically don't buy it through a wireless carrier. You purchase it separately from the manufacturer or from an outlet."

It's a question friends and family have been asking me ever since The Wall Street Journal reported last Saturday that Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs had undergone a liver transplant two months ago: Should our health records be made public?

I admit I'm of two minds on the issue. On the one hand, Apple shareholders have the right to know how the company they essentially own plans to manage itself both today and in the future. They deserve enough information to make informed decisions about whether they wish to retain their ownership stake and how they wish to remain involved, as shareholders, in the evolution of the company. It's a fundamental pillar of our economic system that publicly traded companies provide enough transparency to keep shareholders informed -- not to mention senior leaders honest.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Although two (2) "candidates for release candidates" for the next Mozilla Web browser have been released in the past week (with the first being given the weird title "Beta 99"), the official notice of what it's calling "the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate" was posted this morning.

We first began to see this device only four months after the G1's launch, as the HTC Magic for European Markets, and then again as

According a statement from Apple today, between Friday's launch of the iPhone 3GS and Sunday evening, its third full day on the market, more than one million units were sold, and six million customers downloaded the iPhone 3.0 software.

Apple's ailing but soon-to-be-returning CEO Steve Jobs said, "Customers are voting, and the iPhone is winning. With over 50,000 applications available from Apple's revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever."

If you have a completely new search engine -- in other words, one that's not a renamed version of Windows Live Search -- you need to give it a niche that somehow emphasizes the quality of its results compared to those from Google. Wolfram Alpha's niche of choice is the intelligence of its results, in an effort to wring the educational power out of the verbal sponge that is the Internet. So that slot's taken for now.

Enter Collecta, the product of former AOL search chief Gerry Campbell, and an indicator of what AOL could have accomplished had its previous leadership chosen to invest in ingenuity. Launched last Thursday in public beta, the ideal of Collecta is that it searches content that tends to be updated quickly and frequently, and that it conducts those searches on the fly -- it's truly searching for what you've asked it to search for, rather than look up results from a massive index.

Perhaps you've noticed that the world is becoming more global? It seems that everywhere you go these days, you're reminded that America is no longer necessarily the center of the universe. This morning's WN|WN takes you through Taiwan where Acer may become the world's #2 PC supplier, through mainland China where our emissaries would like a word with the government about filtering, through Iran where a lady named Neda has instantly become the symbol of a revolution thanks to technology (though we may have to revoke our thanks from Nokia), and back to a little out-of-the-way part of the planet called Bozeman, Montana.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset: The aftermath

Now that the next iPhone launch is at least a solid year away, the truth behind CEO Steve Jobs' six-month medical leave has finally been released to the Wall Street Journal.

In January, Jobs said he had been diagnosed with a hormone imbalance, and the public speculated it was actually intestinal cancer. Tonight, it was revealed that the "hormone imbalance" was an issue with his liver. According to the WSJ report, Jobs underwent a liver transplant two months ago in Tennessee, and has been in recovery since that time. A statement from Apple to the paper said the CEO is still looking forward to a return to work at the end of the month.

This episode of Recovery is brought to you by axial tilt: It's the reason for the season. (What? It's just as funny at Solstice as it is around Christmas, dammit.)

Having lately increased the amount of time I spend around small children, I have gotten a refresher course in lying. No judgment implied, but little kids are still learning how the reality thing works, and if they wish something to be so, most will at least take a shot at saying it already is. (I'm sure it's not fair to blame Walt Disney for all that wish-upon-a-star, wish-and-Tinkerbell-lives stuff, but if those people could slap a trademark on the performative utterance, they'd been richer than... um, Disney. Oops.)

Avoiding the lines of dozens upon dozens who showed up at Apple Stores early this morning, our server engineer Eric Steil pre-ordered his new iPhone 3G S. It arrived at 9:54 am EDT -- early enough today for Eric to catch a few rays of fleeting sunlight on this otherwise dreadfully wet day in the northeast, and capture some test images from the backyard and around the house at just before noon.

Click the cat for more iPhone 3G vs 3G S comparison shots.

Next Tuesday at the Femtocells World Summit in London, chipmaker picoChip, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and Continuous Computing will give the first live demo of a new 3GPP standard critical to the deployment of IP Radio Access Network-based femtocells.

What's that again? 3GPP is the Third Generation Partnership Project, the international consortium that lays down specs for telecommunications standards. Femtocell is a system for increasing 3G cellular coverage with small, indoor distributed antenna systems. They are sort of like tiny cell towers, hence the femto- prefix which denotes 10-15, making the name roughly mean "really really small cell."

No, this isn't an accidentally posted Betanews article from back when we had a capital "N." The findings of a recent Harris Interactive poll released yesterday, whose major headline was to demonstrate the lack of recent consumer uptake for Blu-ray players more than one year after the high-definition format war ended, says that among 2,401 Americans polled last April, 11% own an HD DVD player console. But just 7% own a Blu-ray player console.

Could the pollsters be counting Xbox 360 as "an HD DVD player," or "HD DVD-capable," as some did during the format war's heyday? Apparently not. Some 9% of respondents own a Sony PlayStation 3, all of which are Blu-ray capable. Thus, 9% of citizens polled own Blu-ray players of some sort, whether or not they use them as Blu-ray players -- a gain of 4% over last year. Meanwhile, 3% of those polled own an Xbox 360, which Harris says "plays HD DVDs" even though the drive for doing so was well-known to have been an optional attachment.

For fanatics of anything, camping out in line for the latest product or event is a chance to show off their loyalty and devotion to whatever their chosen obsession may be. Waiting for hours in unforgiving conditions creates a real camaraderie between folks, and helps soften a person's judgment of the product they waited for.

I think back ten years when Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out, when dozens of people I knew, Star Wars geeks or not, waited in a line that extended literally six blocks down the street from Baltimore's Senator Theater just for a ticket to any showing. After we witnessed that cinematographic abomination, we held our tongues and told ourselves it really wasn't that bad. Even harsh critics I knew who I'd followed out of theaters mid-movie in the past gave the movie a longer consideration than it deserved.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.

It was apparent yesterday, after a test of the organization's latest private daily build of the Firefox 3.5 browser, that Mozilla's developers had discovered a jackpot of performance improvements in some specific areas: JavaScript math, RegEx (regular string expression) searches, and general control flow. Betanews tests yesterday gave the Thursday morning build 8% better overall speed in Windows 7 RC, and a better overall performance index score on that platform of 9.35 versus 8.81, relative to the performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista on the same physical machine.

The Bing marketing push has been a short-term success for Microsoft in that it got people to trying out its search engine, including several of the features Windows Live Search actually already had for a year or more and just never tried...because it was Windows Live Search. But in a speech last night, the man at the top of Microsoft presented what looked like a "moral," like at the end of a bedtime story, the message we're all supposed to have learned...as if Bing's success is a fait accompli. Sometimes when Steve Ballmer starts talking like Tom Osborne, you have to start worrying...and not always for Microsoft.

Search mavens: They've just like us!