This week, major Japanese consumer electronics companies posted their fiscal 2009 revenues, and provided an outlook into the coming year. To say earnings have been disheartening would be a multi-million dollar understatement.

Because of a harsh currency exchange and declining sales, Sony registered a loss of around one billion dollars, NEC's net loss was upwards of $3 billion, Hitachi lost a staggering $8.03 billion, and Sanyo -- which is in the process of merging with Panasonic -- reported a net loss of $970 million.

Verizon has been an active supporter of LTE since 2007, and anticipated a rollout of the 4G wireless standard in the first half of 2010. Up to this week, judging from what company officials had been saying publicly, the first LTE deployment has been moving along swiftly. CTO Dick Lynch said he expected it would be ready as early as the final months of 2009.

But in an LTE developer's conference on Wednesday, Verizon brought those lofty goals back down to Earth a bit. Instead of the first half of 2010 for commercial deployment, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said the first 20 or 30 LTE markets won't be ready until the second half of the year, and complete US coverage won't be attained for another five years. He did not, however address Lynch's prognosis for an early first rollout. (Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone.)

If you're the owner of an HP Pavilion or Compaq Presario made in the last five years, the odds are in favor of you being involved in a battery recall of some sort. In 2005, some 80,000 Pavilion and Presario batteries were recalled, in 2006 another 4,100 were added. Most recently, the massive recall of more than 10 million Sony batteries affected around 32,000 HP notebooks last October.

This week another 70,000 have been tapped for recall.

For close to two decades now, the design of applications has changed surprisingly very little. At their core, apps wait for users to generate input, and they respond -- a server/client model of processing on a very local scale. So in a very real way, what applications do has been a function of how they respond -- the whole graphical environment thingie you've read about has really been a sophisticated way to break down signals the user gives into tokens the application can readily process.

The big roadblock that has suspended the evolution of applications from where they are now, to systems that can respond to such things as voice and language -- sophisticated processes that analyze input before responding to it -- is the token-oriented nature of their current fundamental design. At the core of most typical Windows applications, you'll find a kind of switchboard that's constantly looking for the kinds of simple input signals that it already recognizes -- clicking on this button, pulling down this menu command, clicking on the Exit box -- and forwarding the token for that signal to the appropriate routine or method. Grafting natural-language input onto these typical Windows apps would require a very sophisticated parser whose products would be nothing more than substitutes for the mouse, and probably not very sufficient substitutes at that.

Japanese consumer electronics company and fundamental DVD patent holder Toshiba filed a patent infringement suit yesterday against Imation Corp and related vendors for "reckless disregard of Toshiba's patent rights" in the creation of recordable DVDs.

Toshiba licenses its essential DVD patents both individually and jointly as a part of the DVD6C Licensing Group, which also includes Hitachi, Panasonic, JVC, Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, and Warner Bros.

Flixster, the social network for movie buffs, has taken strongly to the gadget, widget, and mobile app distribution channel. Following up on the success of its Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, and Orkut gadgets, it released a popular iPhone app at the end of summer 2008. Now the service has moved onto the Android platform and released a similar app.

Flixster's "Movies" app for iPhone was actually not developed by the company itself, but rather by a Carnegie Mellon sophomore Jeffrey Grossman, who released it to the iTunes App store on his own. Flixster hired Grossman as a consultant, bought his app, and re-branded it.

Here's food for thought: Twitter isn't just more popular than professional wrestling, though that's something of a shock. It's more popular than baseball. Seems un-American, doesn't it.

It's more popular than MLB.com, anyway; the April comScore numbers are out, and the microblogging service is the 56th most popular site around (as far as unique visitors go), compared to MLB.com's 87th-place ranking. But all three sites are, along with the 236th-ranked stompin' matches World Wrestling Entertainment site, among the top-gaining properties as measured by the Reston, Va.-based ratings service.

AT&T and Samsung on Thursday announcement the imminent availability of the Jack, a successor to the exceedingly popular BlackJack and BlackJack II. The handset, also to be known as the i637, goes on sale May 19 and will retail for $100 with a rebate, two-year service agreement, and the other usual restrictions.

The earlier BlackJack models have been, according to Samsung, the best-selling series of Windows Mobile phones ever. The significant upgrade in the new Jack's candy bar-style handset appears to be the 3.2-megapixel video-capable camera, an improvement from the 2 Mpx model in the BlackJack II. The phone will ship with 256 MB of RAM (up from 155 MB with the BlackJack II), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and GPS. Like its predecessor it has a microSD slot, and can support cards up to 16 GB (up from 4GB). It'll also ship with Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile and Windows Mobile 6.1, though Samsung says that the handset will be 6.5-ready whenever that operating system is released.

Sony has marked 2008 as a billion dollar loser.

But this is slightly good news. In January, the Japanese consumer electronics giant braced the public for 2008 earnings that it expected to be more than two and a half times worse. The bad part is that despite Sony's best efforts, which include a workforce reduction of 16,000 and closure of 8 manufacturing facilities, the strong Yen is responsible for 85% of the company's losses. The company's sales and operating revenue were only down 2% otherwise.

Geeks have a reputation for happily queueing up to buy new things that show their tribal allegiances -- game consoles, Star Trek tickets, and much of Apple's product line. (I'm sure somewhere in this wide world there was a guy sitting on line three days for the Mac mini.) But with no new consoles on the horizon, Apple suspiciously quiet about their WWDC plans, and your reporter refusing to acknowledge the existence of the new Terminator movie, Pre's the fun to be had at the moment. A cluster of rumors, announcements, and tea-leaf prognostications -- along with one Sprint announcement -- are making the rounds as the end of the quarter draws nearer.

Much of the speculation currently revolves around the single solid fact currently known: Sprint's running a win-a-Pre contest. Signups for that sweepstakes conclude Monday night at 11:59 pm CDT, and the drawing will be held one week later, on May 26.

In March, Verizon representatives unofficially said that it could begin selling netbooks with nationwide broadband service as early as the second quarter 2009. Now, the company has said it will begin selling them on May 17.

For a moment, it looked like Verizon would follow AT&T's plan, and offer the Acer Aspire One netbook. At one point, Acer's brand name even showed up on the Verizon Wireless product page, though it was a dead link, and could potentially have correlated to another Acer product, such as its rebranded E-Ten smartphones.

Earlier this week, Apple posted security updates for both its production and experimental versions of its Safari browser, for both Mac and Windows platforms. But Betanews tests indicate that the company may have sneaked in a few performance improvements as well, as the experimental browser posted its best index score yet: above 15 times better performance than Internet Explorer 7 in the same system.

After some security updates to Windows Vista, Betanews performed a fresh round of browser performance tests on the latest production and experimental builds. That made our test virtual platform (see page 2 for some notes about our methodology) a little faster overall, and while many browsers appeared to benefit including Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, the very latest Mozilla experimental browsers in the post-3.5 Beta 4 tracks clearly did not. For the first time, we're including the latest production build of Apple Safari 3 in our tests (version 3.2.3, also patched this week) as well as Opera 9.64. Safari 4, however, posted better times than even our test system's general acceleration would allow on its own.

RealNetworks is now pointing an accusatory finger at Hollywood, and yesterday filed a countersuit in the U.S. District court of Northern California calling the DVD Copy Control Association and its related Hollywood studios an "illegal cartel."

The suit originated late last year when Real's DVD archiving software RealDVD was taken to court, and then temporarily banned for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The hearings continued, but it turned out that RealDVD wasn't the main reason for the litigation after all. The true threat, as RealNetworks would reveal, was a product known as "Facet" -- a set-top box that allows CSS-protected DVDs to be copied, stored, and recalled at any time, like a much cheaper Kalidescape (the product upon which Real based its initial defense.)

The Federal Communications Commission will soon give voice communication service providers (wireline, wireless, and VoIP) only a single day to transfer a subscriber's number when they change carriers, instead of the previous four-day requirement.

"Delays in number porting cost consumers money and impede their ability to choose providers based solely on price, quality and service," the commission's statement yesterday said.

Twitalyzer, one of those wonderful sites that makes Twitter feel just a little bit more like a high-school popularity contest, has a sense of humor about what they do: "Having worked with numbers for over a decade we are well aware of the fact that most people don't understand them, even when put in context." After which they proceed to at least try to provide a bit of context for their usage statistics, because what else can you do?

Numeracy is on my mind this week here in Seattle, where the geek contingent failed to block the adoption of a set of high-school math textbooks that spotlights "inquiry-based" or constructivist learning, as opposed to the type of learning where you learn how to do math. The idea of the new curriculum is that if you let students "discover" mathematical concepts on their own, they'll all turn into little Newtons or Leibnizes. And their self-esteem will be exquisite!