In a New York Times interview this week, Opera's Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said Opera Mini has been ported to the iPhone, but cannot be released.

Though the issue was only touched upon briefly in the interview, it confirms the restrictive nature of Apple's SDK that developers such as Mozilla's Rob Sayre have complained about. The NYT said Opera Mini couldn't be released because it competes with Apple's Safari.

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A voluntary recall has been issued for another 100,000 Sony batteries that power notebooks from HP, Toshiba, and Dell.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall yesterday for approximately 35,150 laptops in the US and said another 65,000 were sold worldwide. The Commission said there have been 19 reports of these batteries overheating, 17 of which described overheating to the point of incineration.

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Although reportedly now in legal mediation talks with Apple, Mac clonemaker Psystar this week introduced Blu-ray -- a technology not yet supported by Apple -- in an optional drive for its Mac desktop PCs.

A furious round of legal charges and countercharges with Apple hasn't stopped Psystar from shipping its latest Mac clone, a desktop PC enabled with Blu-ray. Meanwhile, accounts are surfacing that the clone maker plans a Mac laptop, too.

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On Wednesday at PDC, research took center stage, as the company took time to show off its virtual telescope and its experimental engineering projects. But one of these projects is something that applies to big business, not just laboratories.

LOS ANGELES - You might think that a real-world implementation of something that emerged from a project at the Robotics division of Microsoft Research would have something to do with, perhaps, just maybe, a robot. But one of the big surprises at this year's PDC was the emergence of a runtime toolkit for enterprise software developers that ostensibly enables a new -- or, more accurately, unimplemented -- method for dealing with very large scale tasks and problem-solving, that's directly inspired by the way Microsoft is programming robots to deal with complex tasks dynamically.

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An open source project to make a common language runtime for Linux, Mac, and iPhone that's .NET-compatible, has ended up succeeding in an area no one may have expected at first: as an artificial intelligence provider for gaming engines.

LOS ANGELES - The annual Microsoft PDC conference is perhaps the least likely place you'd expect to find a demonstration of an open source programming and scripting environment that runs on Linux and Mac. But the scripting language in this case is C#, created by Microsoft. And what's most impressive about Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET Framework CLR (which also, by the way, has a version for Windows) is that it's being implemented as host of a replacement for the scripting language in one of the most popular cross-platform MMO gaming engines: Unity3D.

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The research and resources that Microsoft has invested in its Surface project will soon pay off for everyday Windows users, with new multitouch functionality being added to Windows 7. But how soon will Windows apps feel the change?

LOS ANGELES - The next version of Windows will enable more multitouch applications, but it cannot automatically convert apps to multitouch that haven't had the capability before. There is a way to enable the scroll bar controls to register vertical and horizontal scrolling capability in case their container app happens to be running in a system that has multitouch, but that's the limit of how much conversion that the next Windows API can do by itself.

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Google's announcement of testing on a new API for OpenID identity providers drew cheers from some quarters. But a few observers seethed at a perceived breach of orthodoxy.

The new API, announced Wednesday, would allow users to log in using their Google account information. Google based that choice on multiple studies indicating that users found it easiest to use information they already easily remembered, such as their e-mail address.

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Today, AT&T and Napster announced that more than 13 million AT&T customers spanning 25 different model phones now have access to Napster Mobile.

Owners of six different BlackBerries, including the Curve and the controversial Bold, the AT&T Quickfire, Samsung's Access and Matrix, and many more can now enter the "AT&T Music" menu under "Shop Music," and access Napster Mobile along with eMusic Mobile. The only other U.S. cellular carrier that supports Napster Mobile is CellularONE.

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Video game giant Electronic Arts released its second quarter fiscal 2009 results, and announced that as a cost-cutting measure, it will be eliminating 6% of its total workforce.

"Considering the slow down at retail we've seen in October, we are cautious in the short term," said EA's CEO John Riccitiello in a statement. Because of this, the company has cut its holiday forecast, typically the strongest quarter of the year.

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In the final days of the election season, representatives of two anti-discrimination campaigns in Florida and California have confirmed that they were both targeted Wednesday night and Thursday morning by denial-of service attacks.

Representatives for Florida's No on 2 campaign confirmed to BetaNews Thursday afternoon that trouble with their Web site has been traced to a denial of service attack launched yesterday. A similar attack hit California's No on Prop 8 site, as confirmed in a press release.

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Citing the difficult economy and a tremendous hit on their intangible value, Sun's earnings outlook is so uncertain the company declined even to give guidance for their upcoming quarter during their 1Q earnings call on Thursday.

The company's announced loss in the July-to-September period exceeded even the prediction the company made last week; adjusted for charges, the loss is somewhere between 2 and 12 cents per share. (Analysts had predicted one cent per share.) The company posted a $1.677 billion loss for the quarter.

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Did mobile phone sales start to tank a lot from July to September, or not? Analysts voice some disagreement over recent sales statistics and how those numbers should be interpreted.

Mobile phone shipments rose 3.2% in the third quarter of 2008, according to a year-to-year comparison from IDC. Another analyst group, ABI Research, put that number at 8.2%. In new reports, however, both analyst firms found smartphones to be a bright spot from July through September, and both predicted that the current economic crisis will cast a shadow on holiday sales.

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UPDATE:: According to AT&T statements today, the free Wi-Fi hotspot offer is not limited to iPhone users, but also users of the BlackBerry Bold, Pearl 8120, and 8820.

AT&T today said that on November 4th, some 17,000 hotspots will be open to "select smartphones," which includes several BlackBerry models. The company has plans to offer the service to more devices in the future.

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On Wednesday, Microsoft announced the "Equinox" beta update to the WorldWide Telescope, its vast astronomical visualization software. We spent some time with the software to see how well you can navigate the universe in 3D.

Since its launch last spring, the WorldWide Telescope has attracted over 1.5 million downloads -- hardly an unknown application, and yet it's so ridiculously vast that it's hard to say anyone knows the WWT. Plenty of people have carved out their own happy niches, though, and among the fresh charms of the Autumnal Equinox beta is improved display of the service's virtual guided tours.

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Motorola today announced plans to ship its first Android phone toward the end of 2009, while canceling some other phones expected to launch early next year and postponing the intended spin-off of its mobile device business unit.

As previously reported be BetaNews, Motorola started to reorganize its mobile phone organization last spring in anticipation of a spin-off, after trying in vain to produce a successor to its once-ubiquitous Razr phone.

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