"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'."

It's official. Dismissed as a silly rumour by many, Nokia and Micorsoft have just announced a very comprehensive partnership in which Windows Phone 7 will become Nokia's prime smartphone platform. It goes a lot deeper than that, though. Update: Qt will not be available for Windows Phone 7. Qt will remain the development platform for MeeGo and Symbian. Update II: During its Capital Market Day event, Elop confirmed Nokia will not make a comprehensive MeeGo product line. It will be a platform to learn from, but it won't become a competitive platform. Update III: Android was not an option because it would be difficult to differentiate there. Update IV: There will be 'substantial reductions in employment' in Finland and around the world. Also, before I forget, thanks Engadget for the live-blogging where I get this stuff from!

After an already long development path, Microsoft has just released the release candidate for Internet Explorer 9, their attempt at turning the tide. They've looked at an impressive 17000 pieces of feedback for the release candidate, and they made lots of changes.

"Microsoft has informed close partners that SP1 has hit the Release to Manufacturing milestone. MSDN and TechNet customers will receive the bits on February 16, followed by a general web release on February 22. According to sources close to the matter, Microsoft sent out internal announcements to mark the RTM of Windows 7 SP1 in January. Russian site Wzor confirmed the RTM too and has leaked several versions of Windows 7 SP1 for various languages."

And, of course, just as I decide to leave the live blogging to play a game of Left 4 Dead 2, HP drops the big bombshell right at the end of their press event: webOS is coming to PCs!

Here's some very interesting analysis of why dropping Symbian or MeeGo for Android or Windows Phone 7 would be the closest thing to brand suicide which Nokia could do now.

Peppermint Ice is a Linux distribution whose main claim to fame is its use of a 'site-specific browser', dubbed Ice, which is based on Google's Chromium browser. This lightweight Linux distro is designed for netbooks and has a strong focus on Web applications.

Speaking of Nokia - Engadget got their hands on what is supposedly an internal memo sent to Nokia employees by the company's new CEO. It's... Brutal. As in, brutally honest. There's no sugar-coating here, no unicorns, no glitter. "Nokia, our platform is burning." Update: Android is probably out of the question. Will it be Windows Phone 7, after all? Damn; Palm tonight, Nokia Friday - what a week for mobile! Update: The "Communities Dominate Brands" blog published an in-depth analysis of the memo, which claims with sound arguments that it might well be a hoax.

"Sprint wants you to believe that two screens are better than one. Its new Android-powered smartphone, the Echo, will feature two touchscreen surfaces in a hinged design. Made by Japanese electronics manufacturer Kyocera, the phone’s dual 3.5-inch WVGA screens can be operated independent of one another or combine in 'tablet mode' to add up to a single 4.7-inch integrated display (albeit one with a hinge in the middle)."

"A new report suggests that Apple may be planning to eliminate retail boxed software from its Apple Stores, instead focusing on promoting the Mac App Store for software sales. This is indeed a trend that Apple has been pushing for a while, but not all the software that Apple sells would necessarily be a great fit for pure digital distribution."

"A recent survey by Gartner found that more than half of organizations surveyed have adopted open source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions. However, the survey revealed that only one-third of responding organizations had a formal OSS policy in place."