So we've seen Sprint's Xohm trucks driving around downtown Baltimore during most of September, in anticipation of the service's impending launch. But as the month nears its end, there's still no launch announcement.

BALTIMORE (BetaNews) - Rumors have recently circulated that Sprint's Baltimore Xohm network would be announced as soon as this Friday, with availability beginning on October 6 and with Baltimore, Maryland being an early rollout target. Sprint told Betanews this morning that the September launch for Xohm in Baltimore is still firm, so at most we've got one week before getting Sprint WiMax.

Google's two founders appeared on stage this morning at T-Mobile's launch event for the G1 phone, describing it as essentially a smaller laptop computer that isn't too much trouble to carry with you.

NEW YORK, NY (BetaNews) - At the T-Mobile G1 launch event, executives announced the launch date for the G1 Android-based phone in the US will be October 22. November is the scheduled month for the European launch, though a specific day has not been mentioned.

In what CEO Shantaru Narayan describes as his company's largest-ever product launch, Adobe on Tuesday formally unveiled all six flavors of version 4 of its Creative Suite, ranging in price from $999 to $2499 and slated to ship next month.

In an online presentation that went live this morning, John Loiacano, senior VP for the Creative Solutions Business Unit, divided Adobe Creative Suite 4's improvements into three categories: increased speed and efficiency, better Macromedia integration, and new "wow factor" features. Improved asset management is one of CS4's emphases, as are mobile application development and project collaborations, and Loiacano briefly touched on Adobe's trend toward hosted services such as Acrobat Connect.

In an ongoing string of rejections by Apple's iPhone App Store, Angelo DiNardi's MailWranger is the latest application to get turned down, for much the same reason that Alex Sokirynsky's Podcaster was rebuffed about a week ago.

Apple officials have deemed that, like Sokirynsky's application, DiNardi's "duplicates the functionality" of an Apple tool built into the iPhone platform. As in DiNardi's case, Apple sees similarities with the iPhone's built-in Mail app.

Presaging dismal second quarter results for next Monday, Circuit City said today that its chairman, president, and CEO Philip J. Schoonover was stepping down, to be replaced by a retail turnaround artist named to the board in June.

James A. Marcum, who has served as vice chairman since August 18, has now been appointed to serve as acting president and chief executive officer.

The maker of microSD memory is a highly desirable property for both Samsung and Toshiba right now, and its newly-announced content delivery service slotMusic could almost be useful to either, at a stretch.

Since 2004, a full three years before Apple's iPhone became a reality, pundits predicted that the eventual "iPod killer" would be a phone. At that time, the predictor of things to come was the Samsung SPH-V5400, a music phone with a built-in 1.5 GB HDD. Analysts came to a consensus that the music phone would do for the MP3 player what the camera phone did for the point and shoot camera.

Maybe T-Mobile doesn't have its own Steve Jobs, and maybe it's difficult to get worked up over something as nebulous as "Android." But some analysts do expect it to pick up considerable steam over the coming months and years.

At the most optimistic end of the scale, Strategy Analytics has predicted that the Android platform will grab a four percent share of the US smartphone market in the fourth quarter of this year. Yet the success of Android will hinge in large part on the impact of carrier subsidies on pricing, analysts at the firm acknowledged.

A PlayStation 3 owner has brought to attention Sony's policies regarding movies purchased from the PlayStation Network: if one is deleted, it is rather difficult to obtain again.

According to Sony's licensing agreement: "Content cannot be redownloaded once it has been downloaded to either a PLAYSTATION 3 or PSP system. Content cannot be redownloaded once it has been downloaded to either a PLAYSTATION 3 or PSP system."

In response to an order from the US Federal Communications Commission in August, Comcast Corp. released on Friday a "protocol agnostic" network management plan that could result in poorer performance for the heaviest users.

On August 1, the FCC found the cable operator in violation of net neutrality rules, meaning that despite Comcast denials the agency believed the company was restricting point-to-point traffic such as BitTorrent. Among other things, the report that Comcast released on Friday conceded that the company had indeed done that, though by way of protocols and not content.

In a further gamble that its quality of service is enough to sustain its customer base, VZW this morning announced it will let customers pay for service month-to-month if they're also willing to pay full price for their phones.

Pre-paid contracts typically let customers acquire the phones they want for little or no up-front payment, and usually the best phones are paired with the longest contracts. Now, Verizon Wireless will let customers of its Nationwide Voice and Data plans either bring their own CDMA equipment -- which was an option expected since its historic announcement last November -- or purchase phones from VZW at full price.

SanDisk's potential acquisition, either by hostile Samsung, white knight Toshiba, or some other vendor, is likely to have little effect on its slotMusic product, said an analyst who has been watching the potential acquisition.

"Given that the acquisition, if and when it happens, is several months out, nobody can say," said Jim Handy, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based director of Objective Analysis, a semiconductor market research firm. "If Samsung is true to their word and allows SanDisk to continue to operate as a separate entity, then the service could continue."

At some point after the publication of still images from the second phase of Microsoft's ad campaign on its Web site -- as first reported in Computerworld -- observers noted they'd been prepared on a Mac.

The still images -- frames from a TV ad which then aired Thursday night -- were posted to Microsoft's PressPass site last week.

AT&T has announced its HomeManager, a 7" touchscreen device by Samsung that looks to revitalize landline communication by bundling it with other services.

The HomeManager device offers converged content through its simultaneous connection to a broadband router and to a landline. Voice calls can take place both over VoIP or landline, and address book syncing from AT&T Mobile Backup allows customers to port their mobile device's contacts over to the HomeManager base station. The touchscreen device acts as a portable speakerphone, but also comes with a Dect 6.0 cordless handset for regular conversations.

A spokesperson for Nokia flatly denied a report from Reuters which claimed to have cited UK retailer Carphone Warehouse as having announced the first Nokia 5310 "Comes With Music" phone would premiere in about three weeks.

"The sales start for Nokia Comes With Music has not yet been finalized, and the date that was posted on the Carphone Warehouse Web site was in error," Nokia spokesperson Victoria Dickson told BetaNews early this afternoon. "We're delighted with the level of interest in the launch of Comes With Music, and will confirm further details in due course."

In Budapest, Hungary on Friday, the Acer group unveiled its strategy for marketing and identity-branding for all of its consumer computer labels.

TBR analyst John Spooner remarked to us earlier this year that Acer looked to be arranging itself at the top of its brand pyramid, ahead of Gateway and Packard Bell, and eMachines. In the new conglomerate, it looked like all the brands would retain their identities. On Friday, Acer announced the relative markets where these products would be aimed, and there doesn't appear to be a change in course.