Well, this is a first, I think: Google is promoting a consumer electronics device on its front page. Surf over to Google.com right now and you’ll find this pitch plugging Droid, Motorola’s new Android phone: “The Droid is on sale now. Learn more.”
Beginning Nov. 15, Verizon subscribers looking to get out of their smart-phone contracts early will pay $350 for the privilege. That early-termination fee is double the current one, but Verizon insists it’s justified because of the higher prices of today’s phones. An interesting move for a carrier that just last year agreed to pay $21 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by California consumers over the very early-termination fees it is now increasing.
It has been about two years since Apple last released a major firmware update for its Apple TV platform, so the release of Apple TV 3.0 today will come as welcome news to those who own the device. 3.0 is largely as rumored: Adding support for both iTunes LP and iTunes Extras.
There’s a new BlackBerry Bold headed to market. This morning, Research in Motion uncrated the BlackBerry Bold 9700, a more refined verison of its popular enterprise device, the BlackBerry Bold 9000.
A quick update on the Microsoft/Danger Sidekick fiasco. T-Mobile has pulled its Sidekick handsets off the market following a back-end server failure that resulted in many users losing their personal data. Surf over to the carrier’s Web site and you’ll find that it now lists the entire Sidekick line of devices as “temporarily out of stock.” Not that you’d want one anyway.
Palm has begun rolling out webOS 1.2.0, a minor point release to its new flagship operating system, which boasts some 70 improvements. Notably absent from this update: The reenabling of iTunes synchronization, which Apple spannered when it released iTunes 9.0 earlier this month.
Asked in October 2008 why Apple wasn’t yet offering Blu-ray DVD drives as an option on machines, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the licensing issues were too complex to make doing so worthwhile. “Blu-ray is a bag of hurt,” he quipped. Well, no longer. Because Apple is planning to refresh its iMac desktop computer in the next few weeks, and when it does, it may well offer a Blue-ray drive option.
AT&T has finally completed the very important “internal system upgrades” that prevented it from supporting multimedia messaging service on Apple’s iPhone. And at some point late tomorrow morning, the carrier will release an update enabling MMS.
While the highlight 
of the week was undoubtedly Apple’s Rock and Roll event on Wednesday featuring Steve Jobs 2.0, that was only the anodized aluminum, candy-colored, video-shooting cherry on top of another week of tech sector reporting from All Things Digital.
Twitter has already had repercussions in the courtroom. Now it has had them at Microsoft’s annual company meeting as well. Employee tweets from the gathering Thursday revealed that we may see a major update to the company’s Bing search engine as early as next week.
Once again, the iPhone is safe for text messaging. Apple on Friday distributed iPhone OS 3.0.1, a point release to the operating system that addresses a security vulnerability that could have allowed a malicious hacker to seize control of an iPhone with an unusual SMS text message.
Devices “falsely pretending to be iPods” can once again sync with iTunes, whether Apple likes it or not. Palm this evening released an update to the Pre’s webOS operating system that restores the iTunes syncing ability that its Cupertino rival disabled only last week.
10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT.
That’s when Apple is expected to roll out iPhone 3.0, an update that will bring a number of long-anticipated features to the iconic device. Among them a phone-wide Spotlight Search, push notifications and the long-overdue cut, copy and paste.
Apple claims that Safari 4 is “the world’s fastest” Web browser. That may or may not be true, but certainly its speedy market share gains are impressive, particularly among Windows users. Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of the new browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by Windows users.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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