My favourite media centre software, Boxee, has just launched the highly-anticipated new beta version of its XBMC-based media centre, complete with a redesigned user interface. On top of that, Boxee launched its very first piece of hardware during CES, the Boxee Box, together with D-Link. It's an impressive little device.

Quite a bit of enthusiasm seems to be building for ARM's upcoming processor for netbooks and other lightweight computing devices. The Cortex-A9 is promised to have substantially better performance than the current crop of AMD processors, and a video released by AMD ARM gives a pretty convincing picture that the Cortex-A9 will have comparable performance to the Atom. Watch the video after the jump.

Microsoft's CES keynote is behind us, and before the thing even started, it was rumoured that Microsoft would unveil a tablet PC together with HP. Well, they did, but to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement. Instant update: El Reg has a nice list of figures presented during the keynote.

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman writes that the main potential game-changing attribute of the Nexus One - that Google is selling the device direct - does nothing to move the industry past carrier lock-in. "At first, I wanted to credit Google for making a tentative step in the direction of smartphone freedom. But that step is so tentative and ineffectual that frankly I think it's a cynical fig leaf covering the usual practices," Gruman writes. At issue is a political battle regarding walled gardens in the U.S. cellular market, a fight that will take years to result in any true consumer freedom. "The only way we'll ever get the ability to choose a smartphone and carrier independently is for the platform providers that count - Apple, Google, and RIM - to first develop only multiband 'world' smartphones and then refuse to sell their devices (or in Google's case, use its Android license to forbid the sale of devices) to carriers that block or interfere with device portability."

The Apache Software Foundation has arguably been the leading force for open-source software over the last 10 years and promises to continue being a force in the new decade. During a visit to the organization's corporate headquarters in Forest Hill, Md., Jim Jagielski, chairman of the ASF board of directors, told eWEEK that ASF has indeed had a "huge impact" on the industry.

Even though CES hasn't even officially started yet, the gadget news is already coming in at a very steady stream. We can't report on all of them, obviously, but we can make a selection of the most interesting ones we've seen so far.

Late last year, news got out that an infamous Chinese pirate has moved beyond pirating Windows, moving on to creating an Ubuntu distribution that is almost a pixel-perfect copy of Windows XP, called Ylmf OS. Ars Technica contacted Microsoft about possible legal actions, but it seems Microsoft isn't really bothered by all this.

Microsoft has revealed Office 2010 pricing for Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional, and Professional Academic editions. Office will come in both boxed versions and "key card" versions that have no media.

After days of wild speculation and ridiculously fast-growing threads on AmigaWorld.net, we finally know most of what we need to know about the new Amiga. This is not just a random PowerPC evaluation board that you can stuff in a generic case - no, this is an all-new system with a custom motherboard, and some very, very interesting innovations - like a fully customisable co-processor. Twenty-five years after the introduction of the first Amiga, this is one heck of a machine.

The GeeXboX project has announced the first stable release of Enna (version 0.4.0), an open source media center application. It features a simple user interface, based on the Enlightenment Foundations Libraries for its graphical user interface and the GeeXboX libraries for multimedia playback (libplayer) and information retrieval (libvalhalla and libnfo).

"Responding to Apple's vehement countersuit against Nokia, in which it leveled 13 patent infringement allegations against Nokia's 10, last December 29, Nokia added 14 more to the mix, including for concepts that may perhaps be as integral to the construction of modern telephones as power-conserving voltage-controlled oscillators, and a sensor that de-activates touchscreens while the phone is held against the ear."

A petition launched in December by MySQL creator Michael 'Monty' Widenius to 'save' the open-source database from Oracle has quickly gained momentum, collecting nearly 17,000 signatures. Widenius on Monday submitted an initial batch of 14,174 signatures to the European Commission, which is conducting an antitrust review of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL's current owner. The petition calls for authorities to block the merger unless Oracle agrees to one of three "solutions", including spinning off MySQL to a third party and releasing all past versions and subsequent editions for the next three years under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

For some months now, independent developers have been working on a Qt4 port for eComStation, and it's almost ready. Some Qt4 applications have been ported to eCS, as well. This project is funded by donations from the eCS-OS2 community and currently they have 82% of the needed sum.

"Apple's Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is aimed squarely at small businesses that, for any number of reasons, need or prefer to host their core Internet services in-house without breaking the bank. Ars kicks the tires on the new combo to see if Apple has another hit on its hands."