Confirming the rumors that devices such as Asus' Eee PC are prolonging the life of XP, Microsoft today announced that the previously-established June 30, 2008 cutoff date for OEM and retail Windows XP sales was final, except for the new class of what the company has termed ULCPCs: Ultra Low-Cost PCs.

The nebulously-named class of computers including UMPCs, MIDs, Origami devices, subnotebooks and even desktops that offer lower power have received the official Ultra Low Cost PC (ULCPC) moniker from Microsoft.

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Opera on Thursday released a beta version of Opera Mini 4.1, the company's free Web browser for mobile phones that runs on Java. Most notably, the new release is now signed, which means the phone will not prompt users every time they run the software.

Aside from eliminating the annoying Java security pop-ups, version 4.1 noticeably speeds up Web surfing by up to 50% thanks to improvements to Opera Mini's rendering engine. Accessing sites will be quicker, too, as the browser saves previously entered URLs and auto-completes them for users.

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Comcast will begin offering a new "extreme high-speed" Internet connection in the Minnesota Twin Cities region today, with nationwide rollout expected by 2010. The new Internet service will cost $150 per month and will offer 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps in upload speeds.

The new high-speed Internet is part of Comcast's rollout of the DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications) cable broadband standard, which was first introduced during the Consumers Electronics Show last January.

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While a lot of music sites on the Web only offer tunes from big name labels, a new joint venture unveiled today will eventually bring together music from Sony, Warner, and Universal recording artists with that of lesser known talents on MySpace.

Participants in the MySpace social networking community will continue to be able to download and stream DRM-free music without cost on MySpace Music, officials said in a teleconference today. The addition of three of the four major labels, however, will make the service more appealing to users.

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The Classmate PC, Intel's answer to OLPC's so-called XO-1 "$100 Laptop" (powered by AMD), is now in its second generation, with Intel already looking toward future models based upon the Atom architecture.

The new Classmate PC's debut took place today at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. Built upon Intel's Celeron M processor and supporting Windows XP and Linux variants, the low-cost portable computers the company has termed "netbooks" offer 802.11b/g and MESH network capabilities, two USB 2.0 ports and one SD slot standard.

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Ian Rogers, who pushed the music industry to drop DRM, is resigning as general manager for Yahoo Music to take the helm at a new startup called Topspin Media, which calls itself "the future of digital artist services."

Rogers, though his appearance will fool you, is a long-time veteran of the music business. He helped start the Internet Underground Music Archive, and worked with the Beastie Boys on Grand Royal Records. Rogers also worked on Winamp in the early days with creator Justin Frankel and built a streaming music service called Muse.Net before joining Yahoo over four years ago.

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TiVo will roll out a new software update to all subscribers in the next few weeks, which promises to remedy a common complaint among TiVo users since the service launched over eight years ago: speed.

TiVo software version 9.3 will significantly speed up nearly all of the common tasks that customers do with a TiVo. No longer will the DVR pause for nearly a minute while it reorders Season Pass priorities or stall for half a minute when a Season Pass is created. Users will see between 10 and 30 second speed improvements in these areas.

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Although ISO approval was not entirely unanimous, the Microsoft-originated Open Office XML (OOXML) protocol has finally become an international standard as of April 2.

Still, though, with OOXML foes accusing Microsoft of playing politics -- and OOXML fans accusing IBM of doing likewise -- the European Commission (EC) continues to investigate whether Microsoft might have used market dominance to unfair advantage in clearing passage for the controversial document protocol.

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Consumers are finally seeing WiMAX adoption across a small range of ultraportables and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), with plenty more reported to be coming. But the question is still "When?"

WiMAX, or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard, and can be simply classified as the next generation of Wi-Fi for wide-area deployments. WiMAX is considered a "4G" technology and has broad industry support, but it's run into numerous hurdles along the way.

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Microsoft has again quashed rumors that it will ship a Blu-ray drive in or for the Xbox 360. This time, the speculation was fanned by DigiTimes, which quoted industry sources who claimed that manufacturers had been chosen to start production of the drives.

According to the report in DigiTimes, which has had a shaky past in predicting companies' future moves, Taiwan's Lite-On IT was asked to participate in the production of the Blu-ray drives for Microsoft.

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Mobile text messaging as a form of order placement has seen early adoption in the fast food industry, and now it comes to the Internet's largest retailer.

Late yesterday, Amazon launched TextBuyIt, a system that enables shoppers to text Amazon a keyword or a product's UPC/ISBN to compare prices and buy items.

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To carve out room for more HD channels, Comcast has now made the decision to sacrifice on the side of quality. But will customers, already hesistant to pay extra for HD content packages, accept sub-standard HD?

As described in detail in a blog on the AV Forum's Web site, Comcast recently started to recompress and degrade HD video on some of its systems, with the process going into affect in most Comcast areas by early April.

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At the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai today, the highly anticipated Atom microprocessors, designed especially for use in ultra portables/mobile internet devices (MIDs) and embedded systems were given their official SKU numbers and unit prices along with detailed specs.

Intel's Atom microarchitecture is made up of the company's smallest chips yet with a die size of 7.8mm x 3.1mm and total Thermal Design Point of under 3 watts. These tiny processors offer speeds of up to 1.8Ghz while requiring very little power to do so.

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Video search company Blinkx has combined an IPTV offering similar to Joost with its speech and visual recognition technology, which is now available for the Windows platform.

In order to watch BBTV, users will need to download a small 1.8MB application that works on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. From there, the user would be able to access a variety of videos provided by Blinkx's partners.

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Although text-based Internet searches using a PC or mobile phone are nothing new, a Web search service updated its service and now lets users dial a phone number and ask a question rather than type it in.

The ChaCha service, available at (800)-224-2242, publicly launched in January and has had more than 40,000 users test the call-in searches 600,000 times. Callers receive responses in the form of text messages.

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