"Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system has lured an increasing number of application developers since the software maker announced a partnership with Nokia. In the four days after the Feb. 11 deal, 4 percent of new app projects started were for Windows Phone, compared with 1 percent in the previous four days."

"Motorola is apparently sticking to its Android guns for the foreseeable future. Not in its future? Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services for Motorola, laid it out quite plainly for the press at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. 'I don't envision us using Microsoft,' she said. 'I would never say never but it's not something we're entertaining now. We're the only vendor who is 100% Android.'"

Enlightenment version 16 was one of most configurable window managers back in late nineties (and still is). For the next version however Rasterman and friends decided to create a complete desktop shell instead of just a simple window manager. Enlighenment version 17 is therefore based on a set of graphical libraries which can used for other applications as well. But do we need another set of libraries when QT and GTK+ are already mature and stable? Depending on your needs, you might find that using the Enlightenment libraries is truly an enlightening experience!

"CRUX PPC 2.7 is now available. It works on Apple 32bit 'NewWorld' G3/G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER and IBM Power Systems servers. CRUX PPC 2.7 is, as usual, released via two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree."

"Yesterday I did my last look at the past, about how the decision was made by Nokia to terminate its smartphone OS platforms etc. That is all water under the bridge. There is no going back. Time to look into the future. And while my instant reaction on Twitter may have been a bit hasty and negative about Nokia-Microsoft partnership for smartphones, I have now done my first full, comprehensive analysis of its near term potential. And I am sorry to tell you, I was too optimistic over the weekend. It is far worse. I will go through every relevant part and analyze it. So lets look at 2011 and beyond, for Nokisoft Microkia."

"While Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop has steered the company into a Microsoft future, not everyone is happy about it. Workers have walked out in Finland, and now a group of shareholders is planning a new strategy called "Nokia Plan B". The new plan has been formulated by a group of young Nokia shareholders who all have experience working for the company. None of them are happy with the decision to embrace Microsoft, and all of them plan to challenge the decision and strategy going forward."

"The name Snapdragon is fast becoming well-known among consumers as the chip to have inside your smartphone. Offering speeds of up to 1.5GHz at the moment, it's certainly one of the fastest mobile chips out there. Qualcomm doesn't want the reputation of Snapdragon to falter, though, so the chip manufacturer has just announced an update that will have smartphone and tablet users drooling. The next iteration of the Snapdragon processor line is codenamed Krait and uses 28nm manufacturing technology. It will be offered in single, dual, and quad-core versions with clock speeds up to 2.5GHz. If the huge increase in performance wasn’t enough for you, Qualcomm also boast a 65% reduction in power use over existing mobile ARM chips."

Intel says its Medfield chip, designed for low-end smartphones, is in production and will ship later this year. Tablets using Intel's Oak Trail chips will ship this year, before Medfield will appear in products. According to Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, Medfield will have the fastest processor on the market, the same standby time as chips from competitors and the longest active power use time of any chip.

"I think that the advantages to Nokia are clear. Given the scant details revealed so far - perhaps no surprise given that nothing has been formalized just yet - Microsoft is the company in the more difficult position, and it has a lot of questions to answer."

So, Mobile World Congress is going on over in the beautiful city of Barcelona, and there, Steve Ballmer held a little speech about Windows Phone 7's past, present, and future. Especially the future interests us, as a lot's been planned for this year: copy/paste, hardware-accelerated mobile Internet Explorer 9, and, yes, multitasking!

"According to the original release schedule, the final release of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narhwal" on 28th April was to be preceded by a Release Candidate on 21st April. Release Candidate has been scrapped and in its place, the Release Team has added a second beta on 14th April. The changes has been necessitated by the fact that 21st April is just before Easter and, so, many developers and testers would be unavailable during the time."

"There was a piece of news that didn't happen to get mentioned at last night's developer event. HP has made a donation to a charity on behalf of the WebOS Internals homebrew group that is valued at over $10,000. A few weeks ago, it became clear that future growth in webOS would outpace the server infrastructure that WebOS Internals currently has in place. They were going to need some beefy hardware to keep up with the demands of acting as the a central repository for webOS homebrew apps, patches, and kernels. So they asked HP's Phil McKinney, who has arranged to donate an HP Proliant DL385 2u server with 32 gigs of RAM and 8 terabytes of disk space. They made the decision a few weeks ago and the server is en route." Very welcome news. Like Palm before it, HP gets it.

GTK+ 3.0 has been released two days ago. This major release includes a large number of improvements, including a full switch from the old X11 drawing API to cairo for rendering, a switch to XorgInput2 for more flexible input device management, and a new theming API sporting a CSS-like syntax for theme configuration.

Well, well, well. The MPEG-LA is showing its true colours. After a decade of threatening to patent troll the living heck out of Theora, the company led by a patent troll has now finally put its money where its mouth is. Well, sort of. They don't actually have any patents yet, they're asking people to submit patents they believe are essential to the VP8 specification. Update: MPEG (so not the MPEG-LA) has announced its intent to develop a new video compression standard for the web which will be royalty-free. "The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC 'Type-1 licensing', i.e. intended to be 'royalty free'."