Why wait for Redmond?

Review No, you can't run Microsoft Office on your Apple iPhone or iPod touch. But you can edit Word and Excel files, including docs and sheets saved in Redmond's current .docx and .xlsx standards.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Not to be confused with HTC's Android-based Tattoo, which was known as "Click" before it was released, Motorola today debuted the latest T-Mobile Android called Cliq.

As expected, Cliq is an HVGA touchscreen QWERTY slider with quad-band GSM, WCDMA/EDGE/GPRS and HSPA 7.2, A-GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity. It offers up to 32GB of storage via microSD, but the speed of processor and amount of RAM were not announced today.

Central to the Cliq is Motorola's new Android UI known as Motoblur, an interface which pulls content from disparate social networks and merges them with texts, emails, and other in-phone communications into a single management system. Motoblur actually fulfills a rumor from nearly one year ago, which suggested that Motorola was working on a "social Android device."

Motoblur integrates services such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and syncs all content (feeds, updates, and contacts) into a single Android-based interface. Status updates across all social networks can be done with a single update, and the 5 megapixel, 24fps video camera is equipped with the ability to directly upload and geotag content on Picasa, Photobucket or YouTube.

Though Motorola was expected to unveil two devices today, it still made a landmark announcement in that it's now the second manufacturer to release an Android device in the US, and the fourth internationally (behind HTC, Samsung, and Huawei).

With Sanjay Jha at the helm of Motorola's handset division, Android has taken on greater importance in the company's mobile device revitalization. However, many considered today's Android launch to be a "make or break" moment for the company.

"It is an important launch, but I think it is possible to overstate the importance of it," Jha told the Chicago Tribune yesterday, "We're not anymore in a phase where one product will either make or break this company. What we're trying to do is build a portfolio of products."

Jha reiterated this point today, saying that Cliq is not the single solution, but the beginning of a process.

The device will be launched in Fall 2009 on T-Mobile, and will be released internationally on Orange, Telefonica, and America Movil later this year under the name "Dext."

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz strongly, if indirectly, criticized former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for turning down Microsoft's $40 billion buyout offer last year, in essence calling his decision "stupid." Given that Yang is still a Yahoo board member, that should make for interesting board meetings.

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Microsoft is donating $1 million in initial funding for a non-profit foundation launched Thursday with the goal of enabling exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.

Called the CodePlex Foundation, the organization is intended to provide a forum where open source communities and the software development community can unite for the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects, according to a statement on the foundation's formation.

Ning, the popular online service that allows users to create their own custom social networking sites, launched Ning Apps today. Ning Apps gives users the ability to embed over 90 new apps and widgets on their social networks. Given that Ning Apps is based on the OpenSocial standard, however, developers will surely create a lot more apps in the near future. Ning added basic OpenSocial support to its service last year. At that time, however, Ning only supported about 30 applications and users could only add OpenSocial applications to their own profiles but could not publish them on their network sites so that everybody could see them.

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Now, Ning Network Creators - that is, users who administer their own social network on Ning - can finally embed these apps and make them available for all the users on their custom social network. Among the apps launched today are a service that allows artists to sell merchandise from Sellit, a BlogTalkRadio app for podcasters, Huddle workspaces, PollDaddy polls, as well as WordPress apps to display blog posts and a Ustream app for live video streaming. A complete list of existing apps is available here.

While other social networks have obviously provided their users with access to these kinds of apps and widgets for a long time already, this is a major step forward for Ning. Ning, according to its own stats, currently hosts over 1.5 million different social networks (how many of these are active is a different question, however) and has about 33 million registered users. If Ning wants to continue to compete with Facebook and other social networks, it simply needs this kind of open development environment to provide its users with the right set of features, though it also looks like Ning actually has an Apple-like approval process for new apps in place.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin has a message for Microsoft: he wants the software giant to stop attacking Linux. Zemlin contends that Microsoft is engaged in a covert war against the open source operating system and that the company's hostile behavior is detrimental to the growing number of Microsoft customers who deploy mixed Windows and Linux environments.

Zemlin's comments about Microsoft are a response to a patent auction carried out by Microsoft to sell a number of patents that the company allegedly said were related to Linux. The patents, which were originally obtained by Microsoft from SGI, were sold to Allied Security Trust (AST), a patent-holding group that grants its members perpetual licenses before reselling the patents.

AFP - China has announced that all songs posted on music websites must receive prior approval and foreign lyrics must be translated into Chinese, in a new push to control online content.