Rubin claims the releases will come from 8 or 9 manufacturers with faster adoption seen in Europe as US carriers try to "create highly distinctive versions of the Android phone to give themselves an edge." Sure, edge, if that’s what you want to call the US cartel of hoops and handcuffs then go right ahead. Interestingly, Rubin also further clarified the three flavors of Android which break down as follows:

• Google-free: Free to download version of Android without Google applications like Gmail or Google Calendar. Access to Android applications is at the whimsical fancy of the manufacturer.
• Strings attached: Same as above but manufacturers sign a distribution agreement with Google and pre-install the Google applications. Of Rubin’s possible 20 phones, 12 to 14 fall into this category
• The Google Experience: Phones featuring the Google logo with all Google apps installed and includes unrestricted access (neither the carrier nor handset maker can block applications they find objectionable) to the Android market. 5 or 6 of the 20, Android phone mentioned by Rubin will deliver the full Google Experience as god and Sergey designed it.

18-20 Android phones Coming soon

Jitterbug sells bare-bones handsets and no-contract service plans geared toward seniors and other consumers who don’t make heavy use of cell phones. One of its phones, the Jitterbug OneTouch, has dedicated buttons for the Jitterbug operator, one preset number, and 911 in place of a numeric keypad. Jitterbug has service and roaming agreements with many CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) operators around the country.

That phone, as well as the standard Jitterbug phone with a keypad, have been recalled because they can’t be used to call 911 emergency lines in some areas where they should be able to. Manufacturer Samsung Telecommunications America is recalling about 160,000 of the phones for a free software upgrade that can’t be done over the air, according to Jitterbug Founder and Chairman Arlene Harris. There have been no reported accidents or injuries caused by the phones, according to a notice by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Users would only run into the problem in rare circumstances, according to Harris. In an area where there is a CDMA network but Jitterbug doesn’t have a roaming agreement with the carrier, the phones can’t be used for regular calls and users receive an "out of range, try again later" message on the handset’s screen. While the phones should still be able to reach 911 through the local network, the recalled handsets cannot.

Customers could only encounter this problem in a few small areas of the country, Harris said. Samsung is conducting the recall voluntarily and is helping Jitterbug reach its customers by letter. Phones purchased from Jitterbug today don’t have the flaw, Harris said.

Samsung recalls 160,000 Jitterbug phones

Until relatively recently, buying music meant going in to a shop and picking up a CD. Now, all you need is a computer, an internet connection and an MP3 player to instantly download any song you like.

The revolution in the music industry has been driven in part by the success of devices such as Apple’s iPod, which made it easy to download music from iTunes and transfer it on to a device.

Amazon has been leading the charge with its Kindle range in the US, which have won plaudits from the likes of Oprah Winfrey. A large-screen Kindle, dubbed the DX, was launched last month, and is aimed at students who can load electronic textbooks on to a single portable device.

None the less, for some people, the dog-eared paperback cannot be bettered. Many ebook readers are expensive, and getting novels on to the device can be tricky for the less technically minded.

That’s where a British company is hoping to change things. Interead, based appropriately in Reading, has launched a range of colourful, easy-to-use readers that might just persuade people to start dabbling with electronic books.

At £189, its Cool-er is substantially cheaper than Sony’s Reader, which costs around £220. It’s also available in lots of funky colours, and even has its own bookstore, meaning purchasing books and loading them on to the device is as easy as dragging and dropping a file on your computer.

The Cool-er looks rather like a giant iPod, is available in many of the same stylish shades as Apple’s music players, and has a familiar click wheel to flick through pages and navigate menus. It’s thinner than an iPhone, and, at 178g, it’s half the weight of many other ebooks, including Amazon’s Kindle.

Neil Jones, Interead’s founder, believes this portability could be the key to its success: “We have created a reader that is light enough to fit into a jacket or a purse and attractive enough to be reading it publicly.”

Jones says the idea for the Cool-er was born from the frustrating experience of getting a book published. He found himself caught up in endless bureaucracy, and believed not only that there must be a quicker way for authors to get work published, but also that there was a more elegant way to deliver that content to readers.

It took just six months to take the Cool-er from drawing board to production line, but Jones believes it meets the needs of ”normal’’ people, not gadget fiends. “Cool-er has been designed to fit the requirements of a reader. They want it to be portable, light, to fit in a jacket pocket or purse, and they want it to do what they want to do in a simple manner.”

This, he confidently says, could be the “iPod moment that ebook readers have been waiting for,” while he believes that over the next year, his company will be able to build a significant user base that will see behind only Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader in terms of sales.

In time, says Jones, Cool-ers will boast wi-fi, so that users can download books straight on to the device, rather than transferring them by USB or memory card. Likewise, the price, too, should drop.

In fact, he believes the Cool-er could be the start of a new chapter for the publishing industry. “This is not just about technology,” says Neil Jones. “It’s about being a lifestyle accessory.” Well, it worked for the iPod; who can blame publishers for taking a leaf out of Apple’s book?

Cool-er ebook reader: is this the iPod for books?

But Microsoft’s ads won’t take on Google, Yahoo, or even Ask.com directly by name. Instead, the Bing ads will try to convince you that by using "today’s search engines" you’re missing out on all that your search experience could be. To back up this assertion, Microsoft offers some internal data indicating 42 percent of all searches need to be refined after the first query, AdAge reports. Furthermore, Microsoft has found 25 percent of all post-search clicks hit the back button instead of a Website link when looking at a search results page.

The inability to find what you want on the first try may be where Microsoft believes Bing has an edge. In March, when screenshots of Microsoft’s new search engine leaked online under the codename Kumo, the photos showed a "related categories" feature on the results page. If you were looking for a set of new stereo speakers, for example, you would see links to reviews, manuals, prices, and so on related to the specific product you were seeking. There were also examples of Kumo/Bing yielding different related categories in a search for entertainers with related categories like biographies, song lyrics, and albums. The ability to refine your search with directly relevant categories could be a very helpful search tool, as opposed to starting all over from scratch with a new query if you don’t find what you’re looking for.

If Bing’s "related categories" feature can offer results directly relevant to your query each and every time you hit the search button, then Microsoft may be able to peel off some, but definitely not all, of that Google mojo. However, Bing’s competitors may already have features comparable to related categories in their arsenals. Google rolled out its own set of tools to help you refine your search at its recent Searchology event, and Yahoo will launch search refinement tools in the coming months.

Whether Bing’s features are a huge jump forward over Google’s new tools or Yahoo’s upcoming overhaul is hard to know, since no one outside of Microsoft has had a chance to try Bing. This week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to demonstrate Bing during the D: All Things D conference, which runs from May 26 through 28. It’s not clear if Ballmer will announce a launch date for the new search engine from All Things D; however, once Bing is finally available to the public, I have no doubt many people will want to test drive the new search engine. But even if Bing can win over some early converts, the true test will be whether those users are still ‘Binging’ instead of ‘Googling’ a month or two later.

Service is not the only obstacle for a challenger to Google’s dominance, either. To keep users coming back for more, Microsoft must dislodge the idea from the public consciousness that the name Google is synonymous with Internet search. Will 100 million greenbacks be enough to convince people that ‘to Google’ is not actually a verb? Microsoft may think so, but what do you say?

Microsoft May Rename Live Search ‘Bing’: Massive Ad Campaign Planned

Astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis are preparing to return to Earth after an ambitious and risky mission to re-fit the Hubble telescope.

There are two chances to land on Friday: one at 1500 BST (1000 EDT) and a second at 1639 BST (1139 EDT).

If bad weather scuppers either of those opportunities, the shuttle will try to land on Saturday in Florida or at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

The mission was intended to give a new lease of life to Hubble.

The orbiting observatory is regarded as one of the most important scientific tools ever built.

The fifth and final mission to service Hubble has been hailed as a great success.

Over five spacewalks, astronauts installed new instruments and thermal blankets, repaired two existing instruments, replaced gyroscopes and batteries.

The only disappointment was the failure to restore the high resolution channel (one of three) on Hubble’s main camera - the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

Cloudy skies and stormy weather could yet pose a problem for Friday’s landing attempts, Nasa has said.

The shuttle has enough supplies to remain in orbit until Monday.

The US space agency has cleared Atlantis for its fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere following in-flight inspections of its heat shield by the crew.

The Hubble telescope was released from the shuttle’s robotic arm on Tuesday.

Atlantis ready to return to Earth

The lemur-like fossil, thought to be a missing link between today’s primates and distant relatives, is on show at New York’s American Museum of Natural History after being launched amid great fanfare by the city’s mayor.

The skeleton is so good that it still has an outline of fur and there are traces of its last meal.

The female animal lived during the Eocene Period, when early primates developed.

The investigation of the fossil’s significance was led by Jorn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.

He said the fossil creature was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and described its discovery as "a dream come true".

Dr Jens Franzen, an expert on Germany’s Messel Pit, where Ida was found in the 1980s, said: "She belongs to the group from which humans developed, but my impression is she is not on the direct line."

He explained this meant she was more of an aunt than a grandmother. Other experts are sceptical, making them anti-Ida…

The Missing link?: Scientists unveil lemur-like fossil at New York’s American Museum of Natural History

As a result, Europe will hold a scientific and technological lead over the United States in some key areas of cosmology, at least for a while.

On Monday, NASA will send a crew of astronauts to install greatly improved instruments on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. Just three days later, the European Space Agency will launch two even more advanced telescopes, named Planck and Herschel.

The American and European launchings will be ”right on top of each other,” said Jon Morse, the director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division.

If all three instruments work as planned, scientists will be able to look back almost to the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. They could detect the first stars and galaxies, and prove — or disprove — theories about what happened in the first seconds after the ”big bang,” when cosmologists think that everything began.

DIFFERENT VIEWING

Each of the three telescopes ‘’sees” things in a different wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s like looking through different windows on the cosmos.

Hubble sees mostly in optical light, the narrow band between infrared and ultraviolet that’s visible to human eyes. Herschel will collect photons — particles of light — in a much wider infrared wavelength. Planck detects even longer microwaves, which carry photons left over from the big bang.

The three telescopes will study ”different pieces of the universe,” said Ray Villard, Hubble’s news director. “They’re complementary.”

Herschel will have the largest mirror ever put in space, 11.5 feet across, half again as big as Hubble’s mirror. Planck will have the sharpest vision, detecting differences as small as two parts in a million. Hubble, meanwhile, is better able to study galaxies, stars and planets beyond our solar system.

To save money, ESA will launch Planck and Herschel atop a single Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana, on the coast of South America. They’ll travel separately to a point 900,000 miles away, where they’ll enter a yearlong orbit around the sun.

THREE-YEAR PERIOD

Herschel, named for British astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, will sweep the entire sky every six months over a three-year period. It will build the most accurate map ever made of the cosmos.

Because light from very old and distant objects is stretched out toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, Herschel’s infrared vision will let it see stars and galaxies as they were forming billions of years ago.

The best American infrared telescope, NASA’s 5-year-old Spitzer Space Telescope, has a much smaller mirror — 2.8 feet — and a narrower viewing range than Herschel’s.

”Herschel is big brother to Spitzer,” Villard said. “Herschel does everything Spitzer does, but does it better.”

The Planck satellite is named for Max Planck, a famed German physicist of the last century. Because it detects microwaves, Planck will study tiny ripples in the cosmic microwave background, a curtain of hot plasma shrouding what happened before the universe was 380,000 years old. Astronomers think that these irregularities formed the seeds of future galaxies.

”Planck will provide the deepest, clearest, sharpest and least obstructed view of the beginning of the universe ever seen,” said Benjamin Wandelt, a Planck scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It will be “a quantum leap in our ability to address fundamental questions about how the universe began.”

Planck is 10 times more sensitive and has three times the resolution of the best American microwave telescope, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which was launched in 2001. Planck can detect temperature differences as small as one 10-millionth of a degree.

In space, Europe gets ahead of U.S.

The Book Search settlement, announced in October, followed a three-year battle over Google’s right to display copyrighted books on its Web site. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers claimed Google was violating copyrights by doing so. Google eventually agreed to pay $125 million to ensure authors and publishers could register to receive payments anytime their books were viewed within the service.

The deal is proving to be quite divisive, and now, with the Justice Department’s reported antitrust investigation, things could get even more dicey. Here’s a look at five key arguments from both sides of the debate.

The device, according to published reports, will be a kind of miniature tablet computer. Like the iPhone, it would be able to access the Internet over cell phone data networks, allowing users to surf the Web just about anywhere. And analysts expect that, like the iconic smart-phone, the retail price would be subsidized by wireless carriers.

Those rumors have heated up amid the growth of the netbook market. Recent reports suggest that Apple will announce at least two new devices, including an updated iPhone, at its June developer conference in San Francisco. It’s unclear whether Apple will also unveil the new, larger touch-screen device.

Netbooks are small, low-cost laptops that are the fastest-growing category of PCs. They’ve become popular replacements for standard notebooks for travelers and families looking for a second or third computer in the house.

Netbooks sell for about $500 retail, but wireless providers offer them for as little as $100 upfront. They market them like cell phones, selling them below cost and making up for it with a monthly subscription fee from consumers.

Apple’s new product for the Netbook Market

Although McAdam would not say what the two companies discussed, two people familiar with the subject said talks covered the new smaller iPhone-like device under development. Representatives of Verizon Wireless and Apple declined to comment. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel says: “We are delighted with the iPhone and our partnership with Apple.” The company declined to make an executive available.

AT&T by the way, has been the only carrier of Apple’s iPhone in the U.S., adding more than 7 million subscribers as a result of the arrangement; the company is reportedly in talks with Apple to extend the partnership, due to end as soon as next year. An agreement to distribute Apple communication devices via Verizon Wireless may cost AT&T some of the business it has gained as the sole Apple carrier. Even if Verizon Wireless and Apple fail to strike a deal, talks between them increase pressure on AT&T to accept partnership terms favorable to Apple.

Now it’s not surprising for Apple to launch a smaller and cheaper version of it’s popular products, The ipod with it’s ipod shuffle, the Mac with Mac mini, Why not iPhone? as competitors trying to get a slice of the market with similar products. launching a cheaper version of it’s product would surely make it harder for the competitors.

A Cheaper iPhone, Why Not?