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 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

Contrary to popular opinion, the competition between e-reader hardware manufacturers is nothing compared to the competition between e-book retailers. Tuesday, second place book retailer Borders revised its aggressive strategy for e-reader sales, slashing the price of its two e-ink readers before the arrival of its Android-based tablet readers from Velocity Micro.

In June, Borders unveiled its 9.99 Kobo e-reader, which was met with considerable consumer interest due in large part to its low retail price. After Kobo’s launch, both Barnes and Noble and Amazon reduced the prices of their respective e-readers from 9.00 down to 9.99.

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 Tim Conneally, Betanews

Two weeks ago, Dell announced it would be acquiring virtualized storage company 3PAR for .5 billion. Dell’s announcement, however, represented only a preliminary agreement between the companies, and HP wanted to acquire 3PAR as well.

Friday morning, just a matter of hours after 3PAR announced it had signed the second amendment to its merger agreement with Dell, competitor HP made its third bid for 3PAR, which upped the total value of the company to billion.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

According to a survey given to Hulu Plus testers, the streaming web TV service might consider offering ad-free content packages on top of the existing Hulu Plus subscription.

The options Hulu is considering include: movie packages that feature classic movies, indie and foreign fims, documentaries or “back catalog” studio films; Premium Channel add-ons like HBO or Showtime; or On-demand premium TV with the option to rent or buy like Amazon On Demand.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Just hours after Dell announced its revised offer to acquire memory company 3PAR for .6 billion, HP announced a new counter-offer for .8 billion.

HP’s last counter-offer caused Dell to raise its bid by a little under 34%, the most recent offer raises it by another 11%.

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.