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.

Why Microhoo Couldn't Work and How Google Helped It Fail
I'm often fascinated by mergers, or I should say I'm fascinated by how often they are attempted and how rarely they succeed. While it may appear that smaller mergers are more successful than larger ones, the reality is smaller merger failures are vastly easier to cover up. Very few mergers actually deliver the benefits that were promised by their advocates.

Engineers Salvage Data From Disc Mangled in Columbia Disaster
Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes. Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003. "When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn't even tell it was a hard drive."

Juice Pack iPhone Battery Extender: Almost Perfect
The Juice Pack iPhone battery extender provides an additional 250 hours of standby time, eight hours of talk time, six hours of Internet use, seven hours of video playback, and/or 24 hours of audio playback, according to Mophie. After using this puppy for close to a month, I can't confirm that those numbers are 100 percent accurate, but my gut feeling is that they're not far off the mark.

User Names and Passwords: How to Manage the Keys to the Kingdom
Creating and remembering strong passwords -- like backing up our computers' contents -- is something many of us know we should do, but don't. And can you blame us? Having to come up with user names and passwords for virtually everything we do on a computer is enough to make anyone use "Magic123" over and over. I've even heard of people who keep lists of passwords taped to their computer screens.

Google Speaks in Tongues
Teaching a computer to understand languages isn't rocket science -- it's not nearly that easy, said Peter Norvig, director of research at Google. It takes a limited number of calculations to send a spacecraft to the moon, Mars or other planets. And while the calculations aren't so simple, they are fairly easily managed by a computer, he said.