Adobe on Tuesday said it had begun to roll out the first update to its desktop media player, complete with a new interface and content deal with Sony.

Signing Sony onto the service means Adobe Media Player users will soon be able to watch full-length feature films from Sony Pictures. Among the first titles to debut will be Men in Black and The Fifth Element among others, according to reports.

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Sony Ericsson today announced the upcoming availability of its newest Walkman-branded handsets, adding a new top and bottom to the now three-year-old line of phones.

The W302 will be the "most affordable Walkman phone to date," when it premieres in the fourth quarter of this year, according to Sony Ericsson. Offering a 2-megapixel camera, FM radio, and 512MB memory stick storage, the W302 is a quad-band GSM/EDGE/GPRS device -- the only model of this new crop that doesn't offer 3G connectivity.

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In an attempt to further monetize its DVR offering, TiVo has partnered with online retailer Amazon to allow advertisers to sell products to TiVo users directly through their TV.

The new service is most easily described with this example: an author appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his or her new book. At the end of the show, TiVo pops up a window with an option to purchase the book. TiVo currently embeds advertisements at the bottom of certain windows, which is likely where this offer would appear.

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If you notice your hard drive crunching later this month while performing a menial task, fear not: it's just the new Windows Search software creating an index of your files. Microsoft plans to automatically deliver version 4.0 of the software, formerly Windows Desktop Search, to Vista users.

Windows Search 4.0 was released in June and Microsoft says it has "seen a good number of downloads, and a number of positive responses from customers." The advantage over Vista's built-in search function is one of performance, the company claims. The structure of the search index was completely redesigned to speed up locating items on the hard drive and networked PCs.

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After failing to work out a deal for selling TomorrowNow, SAP has now decided to shut down its acquired customer support division, embattled for more than a year now by a lawsuit charging that TormorrowNow employees hacked Oracle's Web site and improperly downloaded documents, posing as Oracle customers.

The European software giant today announced plans to wind down TormorrowNow's operations by October 31, after officials said last November that selling off TormorrowNow was SAP's top choice among "several options being weighed."

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Apple said in its quarterly earnings conference call Monday that it has shipped 2.5 million Macs in its fiscal third quarter, with the company hinting at a "product transition" to come during this quarter.

In typical Apple fashion, chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer gave little details as to what the transition may be. The only hint was that the mystery product would cut into the company's gross margins.

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Alltel Wireless has rolled out a new offering called MyShow that allows subscribers to create picture slideshows using pictures that are taken through a phone's camera or stored on the device through an external memory card.

Created by Fun Mobility, the MyShow service was officially launched in April during the CTIA Wireless 2008 event in Las Vegas. It simplifies the creation of an online photo gallery, while also adding text and background music to each slideshow. Once a slideshow has been created, users are able to share it either through the MyShow Web site, or install a widget created specifically for social networking sites Facebook and MySpace.

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Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) was down for more than eight hours over the weekend, affecting many prominent sites, and the company is still investigating the cause of the problem.

Cloud-based services such as those offered by Amazon provide cost effective solutions in computing and storage. However, the oft-cited drawback of relying on such offerings is that customers are left with little or no control if something goes wrong. The only option is to wait -- and in cases like this, wait nearly half a day.

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Dell is now making some consumer notebook and desktop PC models available pre-installed with the latest edition of Ubuntu Linux, "Hardy Heron," in a number of countries. Still, some observers are raising questions about why these same PCs aren't available with Linux elsewhere, as well as around Dell's continued use of Ubuntu in the face of usability and application support issues.

"As of today, consumers can purchase the XPS M1330N and Inspiron 1525N laptops and Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed at http://www.dell.com/ubuntu," wrote Dell's Anne B. Camden, in a blog entry on Friday.

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In what is proving to be one of Apple's more problematic product launches since the G4 Cube, the company is now admitting some MobileMe users are unable to access their e-mail accounts.

AOL's Unofficial Apple Weblog said Monday that it had been receiving reports of MobileMe subscribers unable to access their e-mail accounts, reportedly for as long as four days.

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Putting even more pressure on rival AMD, which is already struggling and replaced its CEO, Intel over the weekend cut some processor prices from 12 percent up to 31 percent, specifically focusing in on its Core 2 and quad core CPUs.

Intel's Core 2 Duo E8500, which runs at 3.16GHz, received a 31 percent price cut, with prices dropping from $266 down to $183. The Desktop Core 2 Duo E7200, operating at 2.53GHz, received a 15 percent price cut down to $113 from $133.

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Not quite a thin client, not quite a full-blown desktop, the two-watt CherryPal C100 "cloud computer" is available for order today.

Silicon Valley startup CherryPal is offering its eponymous system with a profile of only 5.8" x 4.2" x 1.3", weighing only 10 ounces, with a crawling 400MHz processing speed. But it's not designed to replace a full-fledged desktop, and at most resembles an Internet appliance.

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7 months of beta testing later, Microsoft is finally ready to say it has squashed the data corruption bug that has plagued Windows Home Server since its launch last year, releasing the final build of Power Pack 1 to existing customers and OEMs.

The update to the company's operating system designed to function as a media server in the home was originally slated to include features such as backing up of shared folders, Vista x64 support, more efficient power consumption and improved performance. However, the release was delayed so Microsoft could figure out, and a include a fix for, the data corruption problem.

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For the second time, free wireless Internet at the carrier's hotspots including Starbucks was set to become a reality for AT&T iPhone customers; again, the carrier has pulled the offer.

The first time this happened was in late April. While it was not advertised, many iPhone users were able to access AT&T's network through hotspots without having to pay an additional fee or log in. However, the company later relocked those hotspots.

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Mobile phone video broadcast site Qik, which launched in private testing this spring, has opened today as a public beta.

Qik is a live video streaming site that turns the user's mobile phone camera into something of a remote webcam. Users are encouraged to stream events and other happenings, which can be viewed live and later as video clips, to the Qik Web site.

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