Although Google's popular webmail service has long offered POP support, accessing an account via IMAP was not possible until today. Gmail users are beginning to see an IMAP option enabled by default in their account settings, which will make the service more useful to those accessing e-mail remotely.

Google has put together detailed instructions on how to make IMAP for Gmail work with a number of clients, including Apple's iPhone. The advantage of IMAP is that it keeps e-mail data synced across multiple devices, so any changes made remotely instantly appear on the Web and elsewhere.

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This afternoon, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office announced that Verizon Wireless had reached a settlement with the state, which had earlier accused it of wrongfully terminating about 13,000 accounts of customers of its "Unlimited" nationwide Internet service, for excessive usage.

A nine-month investigation by the A-G's office determined that Verizon Wireless had actually instituted a monthly usage cap for its "NationalAccess" and "BroadbandAccess" service tiers, without disclosing that cap to its customers.

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Further upping the ante in its effort to steal customers from cable providers, Verizon unveiled a new high-speed symmetrical plan for its FiOS Internet service. Subscribers will have both 20Mbit/sec download and 20Mbit/sec upload speeds - something that is unheard of in the industry.

Although 20Mbit/sec uploads may primarily whet the appetites of file swappers, Verizon notes there are some useful purposes for such speeds including video conferencing and uploading family movies. The 20/20 service is first launching in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but Verizon says it will come to the company's 13 other markets eventually. The cost will be $64.99 per month for those with a Verizon phone contract, and $69.99 for those without.

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Up to now, most analysts have confronted the topic of the viability of the Windows platform on mobile devices from the user's perspective: What applications can she run? Will her documents be portable? Can her contacts and e-mail be synchronized effectively?

Beginning in the second quarter of next year, there will be one more connection to be drawn: Windows Mobile devices will become manageable through Windows Server-based networks using group policy tools.

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Are the C programming language and its object-oriented offspring - C++, C#, Objective-C - still well-suited to the requirements of multithreaded, network-oriented computing environments today? That's the question on the minds of engineers at Microsoft Research, whose latest programming language is today being officially moved off the back burner. The F# language has received the company's official blessing.

"I am a big fan of technology transfer between a research organization and a product development organization so that we can 'productize' the great research ideas and deliver to customers in a timely manner," pronounced Microsoft corporate vice president for the Developer Division, S. Somasegar, in a blog post last Wednesday. "This is one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft ever since we created Microsoft Research over 15 years ago. Here is another great example of technology transfer at work."

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In what could serve as a chilling warning to operators of other private file sharing networks, UK and Dutch police jointly raided the homes of those running OiNK, an invite-only BitTorrent site that allegedly has been the source of much pirated music.

According to investigators, pre-release music was first uploaded to OiNK and would then spread to other Web sites, blogs and file sharing networks. Because membership required an invitation, OiNK's operators felt secure from legal crackdowns that have recently occurred on other P2P sites and service.

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Learning from the continued success of Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft is taking a new approach to gaming this holiday season by focusing on family gamers who care more about basic fun games then complex worlds with high-powered graphics like "Halo 3."

Although much of the next-generation console war was centered on advanced visual capabilities, Nintendo had the surprise hit with its relatively diminutive Wii. The casual and family gamer, who was largely overlooked by Microsoft and Sony, has become the driving force behind Nintendo's resurgence in the gaming industry.

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While Japanese consumers have associated the Hitachi name with personal computers since 1978, recently it was more for historical reasons than practical ones. The company barely shipped half a million units worldwide between March 2006 and March 2007, with only 130,000 of them ending up in homes, according to Asahi Shimbun. Today, Hitachi decided to close a chapter of its history, discontinuing production of its Prius PC line apparently effective immediately.

The exit may not make much of a ripple in the consumer PC business, but it could later have an impact in servers. Hitachi assembled its Prius line at its principal Toyokawa factory in Aichi prefecture. That's one of the crown jewels in Hitachi's manufacturing war chest, having been the place where it launched its 1997 entry into the server business, forging a pact with HP, Microsoft, and Intel that extends to this day.

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Although the reviews were lackluster, Michael Bay's Transformers has become the fastest selling title on HD DVD. More than 100,000 copies of the movie sold in the first day and over 190,000 in the first week, setting a record that beat every title on both HD DVD and rival format Blu-ray.

The HD DVD Promotions Group says the success of Transformers has shown the importance of standalone players, the area where the format is beating Blu-ray due to lower prices. Still, HD DVD sales paled in comparison to over 4.5 million copies of the movie sold on regular DVD on its first day of release. 8.3 million units on DVD have sold since October 16, over 43 times the number sold on HD DVD.

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MySpace announced today that through a partnership with Oberon Media, it will add a section of free, multiplayer games to the popular social networking site.

Oberon, a worldwide provider of multi-platform casual games, has previously worked with Microsoft, Comcast, AOL Games, Verizon, France Telecom, and NHN. Such games are turning into a huge industry, with growth expected to double to over $500 million in revenue this year.

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In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios.

On the surface, what Turbolinux gets out of this is the interoperability information it needs to develop a single-sign-on service, enabling users to authenticate themselves once and transfer that security authority between operating systems. That's how Microsoft is playing up the deal today, as it announces it will establish a permanent workshop at its Beijing office "to focus on testing and showcasing solutions for customers and partners," as last night's announcement put it.

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As expected, TiVo Series3 and HD units are beginning to see support for the DVR's TiVoToGo and Multi-Room Viewing features with the arrival of software update 9.2. The capabilities had been disabled due to concerns about sharing copy-protected HD content.

Multi-Room Viewing also TiVo boxes to share recorded content back and forth. HD content is not available for playback on standard-definition Series2 TiVos, however. TiVoToGo enables subscribers to transfer shows from the DVR to the PC using the TiVo Desktop software or Roxio on the Mac.

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During its quarterly earnings conference call Monday, Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook estimated that 250,000 iPhones were sold to people with the intention of unlocking them, adding that most of those sales happened after the $200 price drop.

While it's not entirely clear how Cook calculated such a number, it likely relates to the discrepancy between sold phones and those that were actually activated on AT&T's network. 1.4 million iPhones have been sold in total, meaning that a whopping 17% were intended to be unlocked by customers. Hackers have managed to bypass the device's restrictions, but Apple warns that future updates could make an unlocked iPhone inoperable, just as firmware version 1.1.1 did temporarily.

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Little was surprising about Apple's quarterly numbers surrounding the iPhone, as sales met expectations and forecasts. However, Mac sales surged to record levels and the company posted far better revenue numbers than expected.

The company, known to be conservative in its forecasts, had forecasted $5.7 billion in revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter. On Monday, Apple ended up posting $6.22 billion in revenue, on profits of $904 million, or about $1.01 per share.

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Recently leaked on Buy.com, SanDisk's new Sansa TakeTV device touts the ability to take PC video content and play it on your TV with a remote control-enabled cradle.

Launched this morning, the TakeTV unit consists of a USB drive with 4 or 8 GB of space, a USB dock with video outs, and a nested remote. Supported formats include DivX, XVID and MPEG-4.

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