BioWare and LucasArts today officially announced the long-rumored story-based MMORPG for PC called Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was not long before an EA exec began talk of creating a console version.

MMORPG blog today called it "the worst-kept secret in the video game industry," because the project has been known since last year, but has not been officially announced until now.

Customers stayed in suspense until this morning, but most of Google's 50 promised open source applications were indeed ready for download from Android Market when T-Mobile's G1 phone launched today.

Although T-Mobile customers didn't know for sure until this morning, and at least some developers didn't get the word until last night, some three dozen open source applications made it onto the Android Market in time for the start of G1 sales this morning.

Hoping that consumers will also be willing to vote with their dollars in two weeks, AT&T has chosen Election Day in the US as its premiere date for the BlackBerry Bold, with Android G1 phone sales already well under way by that time.

In a statement this morning, AT&T said it's preparing to sell the HSDPA-supporting BlackBerry Bold for a starting price of $299.99, exclusively through its own retail outlets on November 4.

5:23 pm EDT October 21, 2008 - During Apple's afternoon earnings call for its fiscal fourth quarter on Tuesday afternoon, CFO Peter Oppenheimer reported that any slowdown on iPod unit growth was effectively stopped, along with record Mac and iPhone sales.

Since the premiere of the iPhone 3G in July, Apple has sold 6.9 million units according to company estimates -- which compares to 6.1 million first-generation iPhones sold over the entire life of the product up to the 3G launch date.

This morning, global #1 flash memory provider Samsung announced it is completely withdrawing its bid to acquire NAND flash card leader SanDisk, and even provided a parting insult on its way out the door.

"The decision to withdraw the proposal to acquire SanDisk Corporation at $26 per share was made in considerations of the growing uncertainties in SanDisk's business, its stand alone value, and the current difficult economic environment," reads Samsung's public statement of its decision reached late yesterday.

2:55 pm PDT October 21, 2008 - Yahoo's third-quarter earnings call included news of layoffs in the next few weeks, a weakening outlook for operations in Europe and Asia, and word of a "brief delay," in Jerry Yang's words, in the partnership with Google.

The call (ongoing at 2:50 pm PDT) indicated that even though user growth numbers are up and the company's new APT publishing platform launched successfully earlier in the quarter, dismal numbers for the company's premium display advertising business are having a significant impact. The company reported revenues of $1.786 billion, a one-percent increase year-to-year, but earnings fell to 4 cents/share over the same period -- down 7 cents and short of predictions.

With T-Mobile's G1 launch set for Wednesday, Android developers such as Wrike and Intermedia were still in the dark on Tuesday night about the status of Google's online Android Market.

A pair of Android developers, Wrike and Intermedia, plan to offer their ContactsSync application for Exchange/Outlook synchronization on their own site -- and, if possible, on Google's Android Market, too.

"While [our customers] may postpone purchases in tough times, they're unlikely to abandon the quality and seamless integration which they have personally experienced and become accustomed to with Apple's products," said Apple's CEO.

During Tuesday afternoon's quarterly conference call to close out Apple's fiscal year, CEO Steve Jobs made an uncharacteristic appearance -- along with CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook -- ostensibly to allay fears that Apple would suffer any significant dips in growth as a result of the current global economic crisis.

Many new Android users had already purchased their G1 phones from T-Mobile days before the Wednesday launch. But on Monday and Tuesday, they were wondering whether Google would re-list apps mysteriously removed from the Android Market.

With delivery of T-Mobile's G1 Android phone platform slated for Wednesday, Google released the final edition of the Android OS on Tuesday. Yet questions flared within the Android community over whether Google will also release all of its planned 50-or-so Android applications this week.

As polling places report record numbers of early and absentee votes cast, Fortify has released a report pinpointing where trouble with e-voting could most easily arise in 2008.

Reports from around the nation indicate that turnout for the 2008 elections is on track to set participation records. But after a series of mishaps, meltdowns, and curious coincidences in recent years, voters may not trust the gear with which they're voting.

After two years of diminished excitement from both the publishers and players of video games about E3, the gaming convention's strict invitation only rules will be slackened a bit for 2009.

This change is no doubt a result of E3 2008, which many bloggers (here's one example, and here's another) considered the "worst E3 ever." However, it's not hard to find commentary calling each of the last five E3 events the "worst ever." The real problem for 2008 was the disinterest from major software companies.

Several months after the company began its first shipment of its hardware-supported virtualization platform, Microsoft has officially closed development of its premium management console for that platform.

Up to now, many enterprises that had already adopted Hyper-V -- Microsoft's hardware-supported virtualization platform for Windows Server -- have been relying on a release candidate of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the only working management software for Hyper-V, to get them by. At last, the time for walking that tightrope is over, with the release to manufacturing of the final SCVMM 2008.

Download Mozilla Fennec for Windows 1.0 Alpha 1 from FileForum now.

It's not really a "community technology preview" of the first edition of Firefox for mobile devices, as some have described it to be. Rather, it's a peek inside the minds of people trying to solve some fundamental design problems on small platforms.

A projection that T-Mobile has received 1.5 million pre-orders for the Android-based G1 -- a device that launches tomorrow -- is incorrect, according to The Motley Fool which first made that projection.

The admission came about two weeks after The Motley Fool published the widely recirculated but inaccurate number on October 14, a number which knowledgeable sources refused to verify for BetaNews that day. BetaNews received the retraction from the Fool this afternoon.

Part of Microsoft's "New Xbox Experience" initiative is a massively multiplayer pseudo game show with a live host and real prizes called "Xbox Live Primetime." Now, the launch of this genre-bending feature has been delayed.

The New Xbox Experience is scheduled to begin on November 19 with the rollout of a large number of upgrades designed with the casual gamer firmly in mind. One such upgrade Microsoft showed off at this year's E3 was an Xbox Live version of the TV game show "1 vs. 100" where a huge panel of players compete for real life prizes, with a real life host.