Research in Motion on Monday partnered with T-Mobile to announce the first BlackBerry flip phone.

According to Leslie Grandy, vice president of product development at T-Mobile, the flip phone remains the preferred design for mobile phones in the United States. The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 offers the same core features other Pearl models offer, but adds a few new bells and whistles.

Beyond the flip design, the new model also boasts advanced multimedia capabilities through video recording and playback, a 2.0-megapixel camera with digital zoom, stereo Bluetooth support, and an external memory card slot.

The phone sells for $349.99, but T-Mobile customers can buy the phone for $149.99 after a $150 instant discount and a $50 mail-in rebate.

Google Inc., owner of the world's most popular Internet-search engine, lost two copyright lawsuits in Germany over displaying photos and artworks as thumbnails in a preview of search results.

Google's preview of a picture by German photographer Michael Bernhard violates his copyrights, the Regional Court of Hamburg ruled, his lawyer Matthies van Eendenburg said in an interview today. Thomas Horn, who holds the copyrights on some comics that were displayed in Google search results, won a second case, court spokeswoman Sabine Westphalen said in an e-mail.

``It doesn't matter that thumbnails are much smaller than original pictures and are displayed in a lower resolution,'' the court said in its ruling for Bernhard. ``By using photos in thumbnails, no new work is created,'' that may have justified displaying them without permission.

Microsoft announced, as expected, on Monday that the second version of its Silverlight browser plug-in is done and will be available imminently for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. An Apple iPhone port is not in the works, due to Apple restrictions, the Softies said, but the new plug-in works well now with Google’s Chrome browser, currently in beta.

Microsoft officials said Silverlight 2 will be available for download from the company’s Silverlight site starting on October 14. They also said that anyone using a beta version of Silverlight 2 or Silverlight 1 will be “automatically upgraded”

said by qworster :

The Sprint guy before Dan Hesse, (Gary Forsee) got $40 million over 4 years. Can you imagine getting paid ten million dollars a year to run a company into the ground? Heck, I would have done it for only $500,000 a year!!

The CBS shows will play in YouTube's new "Feature View" format, which, presumably, will be of a much higher quality than the grainy user-generated videos we're used to seeing at YouTube.

In terms of programming, the really good CBS shows like CSI and Survivor will not appear at YouTube initially, but rather some less popular stuff like Star Trek and Beverly Hills 90210. The big titles might come later.

Fine, but there may be a downside: CBS and Google may now scour the YouTube servers for any and all user-generated CBS video, and either remove it or wrap ads around it

Instead of having a big, loud and complex computer on your desk, what if you could have a quiet, thin machine that rarely needed an upgrade or a fix?

Rather than relying on their innards for handling work, these so-called thin clients send it out over the network to much larger servers that hold all of the necessary software and handle data-processing jobs.

The thin-client model places the burden of managing computers on professionals monitoring servers in a large warehouse.

Perhaps best of all, the users’ data is stored on the network. If the machine on your desk breaks, you just get another one and connect to the data warehouse, and off you go.

Most significantly, the pool of programs thin clients can use has grown thanks to so-called virtualization software, which lets companies package up an entire operating system and all of its applications. Instead of picking and choosing certain software to send over the wire, companies can ship entire “virtual desktops.”

Samsung will ship the 19-inch SyncMaster 930ND monitor, which relies on Teradici’s chip. Business customers can plug an Ethernet cable into the monitor and turn it into a full-fledged computer by connecting back to their data centers.

Customers of the Silicon Valley start-up Pano Logic plug their monitors, keyboards and mice into a small device that manages connections with servers holding full virtual desktops. The Hot-E from the Australian company ThinLinX is similar. One longtime player in the thin-client business, Wyse, manufactures an array of slim hardware, including laptops, that handle much the same work.

Wall Street firms looking to make things easier for employees and save money, especially in these tight times, are driving some of the early tests.

“Financial services companies in the U.S. are very interested in using thin clients,” said Scott Woodgate, director for the Windows business group at Microsoft.

Looking ahead, the thin client model could creep into the home, with PC-like functions arriving via TV set-top boxes or through devices that plug into the back of televisions. Internet service providers have started to explore the idea of selling these products to consumers and then offering monthly subscriptions to computing services.