Internet users throughout the world, and particularly in the United States, have long been chastened to hear of South Korea's legendary broadband penetration. The urbanized, technologically-advanced nation has been famous for rolling out ultra high speed network for the majority of its citizens, and many of us have looked on with envy. However, it turns out it's not all good news. An OSNews reader gives us the skinny from the trenches in Korea.

Mobile-Review took on the exhausting task of reviewing the new Symbian^3 Nokia system, an evolution off of their touchscreen-based S60 5th Edition. A new system at a time when Nokia announced that their high-end N-series phones won't run Symbian anymore, but MeeGo.

About 20 percent of third-party apps available through the Android marketplace allow third-party access to sensitive data, and can do things like make calls and send texts without the owners' knowledge, according to a recent security report from security firm SMobile Systems. There's no indication that any of the highlighted apps is malicious, but the report does underscore the inherent risks of a more open ecosystem as opposed to Apple's oppressive yet more controlled environment, with every app being vetted before availability.

Born out of the demise of Loki Software in 2001 was Linux Game Publishing, but now a decade later the fate of LGP is not looking good for the company that has ported about two dozen game titles to Linux.

After weeks of concern about the "catastrophic state of its finances" and an indefinite delay in the release of version 2010.1, the French website LeMagIT is reporting that Mandriva has been saved by new investors.

Ars reports: The developers behind openSUSE are drafting a new "community statement" as part of a broader effort to define a technical strategy for their project. The purpose of the community statement is to describe the kind of collaborative environment that the project wants to create as it refines its technical focus. The full text of the community statement is published in the openSUSE wiki. Additional details about the strategy proposals and community review process are available from the openSUSE News site.

Following the previous article on the Mandriva situation, the various users communities, notably the French and German ones ( among others, as there is more and more people who express their support with the initiative ) have issued an open letter to Mandriva SA about the future of the distribution, asking for clarification about the possible deal, and their impact on the community.

A Computerworld editorial takes note of some interesting changes Dell made to the Linux page we linked to last week. They watered down some of their pro-Linux claims, but not as far as you might think.

In a move out of nowhere, Toshiba just announced the limited release of a "concept" device with almost the exact same form-factor as the Microsoft Courier. The Libretto W100 features dual 7" multi-touch screens that fold out flat or clap together like a book. Those wanting the full Courier experience, be prepared for disappointment, however: no pen support is present, and the OS is stock Windows 7 Home Premium--albeit with the addition of some pretty slick-looking touch-friendly widgets.

With Windows XP SP2 support ending in three weeks, a new report highlights the security risks that come with running an unsupported service pack.

"For three years son Ben, and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC. Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming." Looking beyond the immediate fear-inducing acronym BASIC, this article delves deeply into what it means to simply be in control--via a basic understanding of under the hood--of your own computer, and how our whiz-bang world of technology today is failing to bestow this understanding on this generation of would-be hackers.

So, I might not be able to do much work on OSNews due to my internship (I always wondered what tumble weeds looked and sounded like on a website - now I know), but I did know one thing: Monday, June 21, is iTunes day. This means launching that horrid mess to go through the painstakingly archaic backup/update iTunes/update iOS routine (and yes, they still try to cheat you into installing Safari) - because Apple released iOS 4.0 today, adding a number of welcome features to bring the iOS up to par with the competition.

Hardware companies don't tend to have their own Linux distributions. IBM uses Linux everywhere, but they don't have their own Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you notebooks and netbooks with Ubuntu or a workstation or server with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). But, no major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has had a house-brand Linux... until now. HP has recently bought not one, but two Linux distributions. Surely HP is not getting into the Linux distribution business? Are they?

Microsoft has Windows Mobile 6.x (on the way out) Windows Phone 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7, Windows Embedded Compact 7 and then Windows 7 for tablet PCs and netbooks. What this bevy of systems is missing is a coherent answer for the tablet form factor. Windows Embedded Compact 7, which is the OS aimed at the mobile sector, isn't yet released, and when it is, it won't have a uniform UI, but will depend on hardware vendors to customize. It's an appealing strategy from the vendors point of view, I guess because they get to differentiate their products from their competitors, but it's not a recipe for success.