Immersive Underworld Makes 'GTA IV' a Great, Gritty Ride
With the long-anticipated arrival of the next installment in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, Liberty City does little to disappoint. Car chases, assassinations and shady drug dealers still litter the landscape of Liberty City, yet this game adds an in-depth view from the perspective of the main character. The player's own choices and actions are more evident in "Grand Theft Auto IV" than in previous titles.

Mobile Applications With a Sense of Place
What do you want your cell phone to be able to do? Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google's upcoming Android mobile operating system.

Video Links: The Best Lures in the SEO Tackle Box?
Video is changing the way we use the Internet for entertainment, education, blogging, product promotion and so many other forms of content. Services like YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video, AOL Video and a host of others have created an enormous online viewing audience by making it easy for anyone to upload, search and share videos.

iPhone Supplies Dry Up as World Waits for 3G
Apple said Monday its online stores in the U.S. and UK are sold out of the iPhone, a sign supplies are being winnowed ahead of the launch of the device's next generation featuring faster Internet surfing speeds. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company confirmed that the iPhone is out of stock online.

Microsoft Opens Windows to BlackBerry
Web-based e-mail and instant messaging services from Microsoft are set to arrive on BlackBerry mobile devices later this summer. The new BlackBerry Bold, along with phones in the BlackBerry 7000 and 8000 ranges, will be the first to ship with Windows Live services, which include Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.

RIM Polishes Svelte Smartphone for a Face-Off With Apple
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion introduced its new high-end handset Monday, the BlackBerry 9000, a.k.a. "Bold." Aimed at business pros and power users, Bold updates the product line with a device aimed at taking on Apple's iPhone. It's the first new model from RIM in over a year. "They're really just trying to take the BlackBerry franchise to a higher level," said Carl Howe, a Forrester Research analyst.

Stolen MacBook Owner Logs On, Takes a Photo, Busts Thieves
When Apple created the Back to My Mac feature on its .Mac service, it probably never envisioned it as a crime-solving tool. Yet that's just what it became last week, when the service helped the owner of a stolen MacBook recover her lost computer. Kait Duplaga, a young Apple store employee from White Plains, N.Y., lost her MacBook to thieves in late April, when her apartment was robbed.

Social Net Data Portability: Too Much Information?
It seems as though everyone wants to be both social and portable these days. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace all have recently trumpeted their latest efforts at openness. Are they really the same? In some cases -- Yahoo and Google, primarily -- the OpenSocial framework is providing a set of standards to ensure interoperability among the applications themselves.

New Powerset Search Tech Gets Your Drift
Powerset, a new Internet search engine company, has launched a proof-of-concept salvo in the search engine war -- a natural language processing engine that attempts to understand the meaning behind a search phrase and the text it's searching against. Instead of returning a long list of results that simply contain the key words a user enters, Powerset attempts to unlock the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.

XP Update Ushers In Fresh Round of Bugaboos
Shortly following Microsoft's release of the third service pack for its Windows XP operating system, reports of problems regarding the SP's installation began appearing on blogs and the Windows XP Newsgroup. XP users have experienced an assortment of issues both with the installation itself and after the installation.

Gaming's Play for Social Networks
Long before social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook set up shop online, there was a social element to playing video games. Gamers have always congregated together, extolling or deriding the merits of one game over another, participating in tournaments and broadcasting their gaming exploits and accomplishments.

Can a Windows PC Really Be Cheaper Than a Linux Box?
It must have been a chilly week in hell last week, because the unthinkable appears to have happened: A Windows PC has been announced that will be cheaper than a Linux one. That's right, folks: The Windows XP version of the Asus Eee PC 900 will sell for $599 in Australia, while the Linux version will cost $649, according to APC Magazine.