SystemShock

The Symbian mobile operating system is getting a second life as the Symbian Foundation makes the smartphone platform open source. The lifeline will revitalize the platform, and has benefits for Nokia, smartphone developers, Symbian handsets, and smartphone users.

With all of the hype and attention devoted to the iPhone, it's easy to forget that Symbian is actually the leading smartphone operating system in the world. Symbian has nearly as much market share as the rest of its competitors combined--including the iPhone, with more than 330 million Symbian smartphones in use.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Facebook marked its sixth birthday by simplifying its home page and holding an all-night "hackathon" to craft new software for the social networking website.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the online community is hitting another milestone with membership climbing to 400 million this week.

"So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most -- building and launching products for people," Zuckerberg said in a blog post on Thursday.

Amazon.com has reportedly purchased a leading touchscreen innovator in an apparent bid to add more functionality to its Kindle e-book reader. With Apple set to begin shipping its highly anticipated iPad tablet computer in less than two months with an iBooks application and multimedia capability, Amazon is under pressure to keep its share of the market.

Amazon has also announced an application store and this week produced a software development kit for "active content" that includes sample code and a simulator. The company plans to add puzzles, games and travel guides to selections that readers can download.

Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it would shorten the time it stores Internet users' addresses from Web search queries from 18 months to six months following a request from a European Union data privacy panel.

It said the change would make its Bing search a better choice for privacy-conscious users than the world's leading search engine Google Inc., because Microsoft will delete the entire Internet Protocol address from search queries — the string of numbers that shows a computer's location.

"We believe that the balance between privacy and efficiency is very much in the mind of consumers," Microsoft's associate general counsel John Vassallo told reporters. "Getting the balance right does make the search engine more attractive."

Remember when Apple promised that Boot Camp would be updated to officially support Windows 7 in late 2009? It turns out that promise was a few weeks off, but the company has finally delivered, only one week after Microsoft's beloved Patch Tuesday.

Boot Camp 3.1 for 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows, recommended for all users of Boot Camp 3.0, finally brings official support for the Apple wireless keyboard and everybody's favorite Apple Magic Mouse. There are also a few bugs fixed for the Apple trackpad, and the infrared sensor on all MacBooks now turns off on when it's not being used, to help conserve battery power.

But wait, there's more. For ladies and gents planning to do a straight upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows Vista instead of a clean install, there's this lovely Boot Camp Utility upgrade. It fixes an error that occurs because the Windows 7 installer foolishly tries to write to your computer's read-only Mac OS X partition. Just download the file while you're in Windows Vista, follow the rest of the directions in this tech note, and you're good to go.

An intriguing new rumor suggests that Windows Mobile 7 may come in two different flavors: a business version and a media version. The mobile OS may come with a variety of different features including an impressive mobile version of Office, online collaboration, high-definition video, Xbox Live, and streaming TV, according to WM Experts, a Windows Mobile news site.

WM Experts is prefacing its report with a hearty disclaimer, noting that its information comes from anonymous sources, and has not been confirmed by Microsoft. So we can't know for sure that it's true. But it certainly is interesting.