Mobile Technology News

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

While the over-the-top (OTT) streaming entertainment category has not made a big dent in the mainstream home TV viewing market yet, it’s a hot business, and service providers, software makers, and hardware manufacturers are all jockeying for the biggest piece of the pie.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Apple’s September 1 music event ended on a sour note. Coldplay’s Chris Martin gave a tepid and pitchy performance that would have sent him packing from an American Idol audition. Michael Stanclift aptly tweeted: “This guy could have practiced before this gig.” Martin, whose daughter is named Apple, seemed like the right performer for what was otherwise an outstanding event. While Martin muffed, Apple — the company, not his child — hit every key. Not since the first iPod nano launched five years ago has Apple delivered such spectacular new music products.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Microsoft announced that the highly anticipated Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system has been released to manufacturing on Wednesday, a major milestone for the project.

Following the release of its developer toolkit, Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 technical preview to its developer, carrier and manufacturing partners in July. Since that time, the mobile OS has been updated in a number of ways, such as including intelligent Facebook contact filtering (only real friends show up,) and the ability to “like” Facebook posts from within the People Hub.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google continued its reinvention of the Gmail inbox Tuesday with the introduction of Priority Inbox Beta, a new mail filtering system that prioritizes emails based upon the user’s viewing and responding habits.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Early Tuesday morning, a new version of Mac OS X-based media center software Plex was released, called Plex/Nine, and with it came a new app for iOS.

Plex is a fork of open source media center software XBMC, which has recently risen to prominence for being the software that powers Boxee and the forthcoming D-Link Boxee Box. It organizes multimedia content on a local media server, adds online content from more than 150 video and entertainment sites, and makes it available on client devices in the home network.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

As school districts across the country open their doors for the 2010-2011 school year, a remarkable shift in thought is taking place: cell phones, once regarded as distractions or liabilities are coming to be viewed as viable learning tools.

This fall, Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Public School district will let students use their mobile phones in classrooms as long as it’s for an approved educational purpose. 

By Ed Oswald, Betanews

Microsoft co-founder and former executive Paul Allen filed a suit against 11 tech companies on Friday, accusing them of infringement over patents he acquired from the now defunct Internal Research. While Allen had invested in the company, he never participated in the development of the patented technologies.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Network hardware company Netgear has taken the wraps off of a new set-top media player called the NeoTV 550 Ultimate HD, which will go on sale in North America this October for 0.

Betanews first started paying attention to Netgear’s set-top boxes in 2009, when it first unveiled a BitTorrent-enabled box called Digital Entertainer Live EVA2000. That device, while useful for connecting devices within the home network to the user’s television, was only capable of 720p output, and had only moderate support for streaming video services. It received pretty mediocre reviews, and didn’t stand out tremendously from the crowd of similar products from Netgear’s competitors.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Popular social link-sharing and bookmarking site Digg on Wednesday made its new, redesigned site available to all users after testing in an invitation-only mode for roughly four months.

By Ed Oswald, Betanews

In an age where just about anything is shared on Facebook, employers have turned to it and other social networking sites to ensure its employee’s behavior is on the up and up. In Germany, that practice may become illegal.

German news outlets are reporting that Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière is working on new privacy legislation that would outlaw corporate snooping on social networking profiles. It would restrict the amount of information that current as well as prospective employers could gather and use.