After months of speculation, T-Mobile has finally officially launched the next version of its popular Sidekick handheld device.

Code-named "Gekko," the phone will take the place of the older iD model as the entry level Sidekick. It will also drop any of the extra nomenclature and be simply known as the "Sidekick."

As the legal pendulum continues to swing away from cell phone carriers' early termination fees [ETFs], a judge in California this week ordered Sprint to pay $18.3 million to customers who launched a class action suit over fees charged for ending their contracts early.

Sprint must also credit another $54.5 million to customers who were charged the fees but haven't paid them yet, under the court ruling.

Security firm Secunia said Tuesday that RealNetworks had fixed most of the security flaws within its RealPlayer software that were first highlighted on Friday.

Four separate issues were discovered within most versions of RealPlayer 10, 10.5, and 11 across the Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms. While the company released the patch on Monday, which Secunia noted in its advisory, the firm said the fix was not complete.

While HD DVD was officially declared dead this spring, the Chinese offshoot of the format is living on, with the first production line created for China Blue High-definition Disc, or CBHD, by Shanghai United Optical Disc.

CBHD began its life as CH-DVD, and its introduction was seen as a potential trump card for HD DVD in its battle against Blu-ray last year. Although CH-DVD differed slightly from HD DVD in terms of codecs, it was essentially the same technology. That meant Chinese manufacturers could develop for the format, and flood the worldwide market with cheap HD DVD-capable players.

Even the $100 laptop long envisioned by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) seems pricey in contrast to a $10 laptop announced this week in India.

Also aimed at school children, India's low-cost laptop is now being researched by two Indian think tanks, according to D. Purandeswai, India's Minister of State for Higher Education.

Two years after merging, Telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent has not posted a single profitable quarter. Following its second quarter 2008 earnings statement, a major executive shakeup has been announced for the company.

Though revenues and sales exceeded analyst expectations, so too did the company's net losses, which amounted to €1.1 billion. Bloomberg News analysts predicted a loss of only €135 million.

Nvidia has unveiled a new generation of notebook video cards based upon the Ageia PhysX physics engine, which Nvidia acquired last year.

There are five new Nvidia GPUs available, with the GeForce 9800M GTX, GeForce 9800M GTS, and GeForce 9800 GT serving as the three higher-end cards. The GeForce 9700M GTS and GeForce 9700M GT are the two mid-range cards for mainstream notebooks the average customer will purchase.

Sending images to "the dark side" and creating "omnidirectional views" of city streets are a couple of capabilities already created for Microsoft's Sphere, a new technology that might ultimately bring as yet unforeseen commercial applications in gaming, office collaboration, and other areas of human endeavor.

Expected to be shown this week at Microsoft's annual Faculty Summit, Sphere has already served as the platform for a novel twist on the Pong game that lets you "create virtual barriers with your hands" and bounce images to other players, said Hrvoje Benko, a Microsoft researcher, during an earlier demo in Seattle. If you bounce the image up and over the sphere, rather than across it, you're said to be "sending it to the dark side."

Nokia has made its E71 smartphone available to North American consumers, in the company's latest attempt to successfully crack into the smartphone market outside of Europe.

The E71 has a full QWERTY keyboard, 2.4-inch LCD display, built-in 3.2-megapixel camera, microSD memory card slot, and a multimedia player. It connects both to HSDPA and GSM networks, and has WiFi and GPS connectivity. Most notably, the E71 is only 0.39-inches thick, which makes it the thinnest full-QWERTY device available to consumers in North America.

Symantec is beta testing a new product called Safe Web, built on top Norton Internet Security 2009, which performs many of the same functions as competitor McAffee's SiteAdvisor.

Safe Web requires Norton Internet Security 2009 to run on the user's computer. This differs from McAfee's SiteAdvisor offering, which is a standalone plug-in for Internet Explorer, and a Firefox extension that is also compatible with the Macintosh according to BetaNews tests.

HP has announced a "Limited Warranty Service Enhancement" for many of its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia Geforce GPUs, including a wide range of HP Pavillion and Compaq Presario notebooks.

Like Dell's recent BIOS upgrade to correct overheating GPUs, HP announced a similar fix for its HP Pavilion dv2000, HP Pavilion dv6000, HP Pavilion dv9000, Compaq Presario V3000, and Compaq Presario V6000 series notebooks which contain contain 7-series Nvidia GPUs. This defies previous assumptions that the 8-series of Nvidia products were the faulty GPUs the company did not name in the SEC filing describing the problem.

Calling it the Cloud Computing Test Bed, HP, Intel and Yahoo today announced a multi-datacenter testing environment to promote internet-scale open source collaboration.

Building upon the success of Yahoo and the Apache Software Foundation's M45 project with Carnegie Mellon University, this collaboration will go several steps further and include six test beds, with each facility offering between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores.

9:00pm ET July 29, 2008 - It turns out Airave is not yet available nationwide. Sprint contacted BetaNews Tuesday evening to clarify that its writing, "You will be able to use your Airave at this location" actually means customers can use it at some undetermined time in the future, but not now. Sprint says it has not announced a launch date for the Airave service.

While Sprint has been testing Airave in select markets for months, the company has now begun to sell the service nationwide.

Dell today officially introduced two budget-oriented desktop PCs: the ergonomic and "ultracompact" Studio Hybrid, touted as 80 percent smaller than a typical desktop, and the Inspiron 518, a quad-core processor model featuring an optional removable hard drive.

Although both new products might be described as tower PCs, the Hybrid is a very small tower. Measuring only about 196.5mm by 71.5mm, the Studio Hybrid sports the same kinds of ports and connectors as a more conventional PC despite its size.

Microsoft is releasing an API that allows third-party Web sites to send location information to MSN Direct-enabled GPS devices wirelessly, a first for such services that previously required a USB sync to work.

One difficulty of using GPS devices is the hassle of typing in a location, or selecting one while driving. Microsoft says the API would make entering destinations easier, as the process could be done on the computer and automatically then transferred to the device.