"Nokia has just announced an update to the Internet Tablet OS 2007 edition, feature upgrade release is now available for download. The update (version 4.2007.26-8) includes Skype client support, Adobe Flash 9 browser plug-in, improvements in online use times and single memory card support up to 8 GB."

The article 'Understanding the Common User' points that "everything should be as simple as it is... Or even simpler" and warns that converting a common user to Linux without giving him enough protection leads to a imminent failure. A rebuttal, 'Get Real or How Not To Convert Your Grandma to Linux' stresses that dumbing down is not the key to success, understanding is.

"Filesystem in Userspace has long been one of my favorite features on Linux systems. Using FUSE modules, you can mount all sorts of innovative resources - Gmail, your Flickr photos, a remote SSH server - directly into your local machine's filesystem and use their contents exactly as if they were normal files. Now you can do the same thing on Mac OS X, courtesy of MacFUSE."

A new release of the 64bit version of MenuetOS has been released, MenuetOS 0.64. "MenuetOS is an operating system in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under this license. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications."

Genesi has posted a whole batch of screenshots of the upcoming MorphOS 2.0 release on their weblog. "MorphOS 2.0 brings not only a new OS release, but a host of applications developed by a motivated group of Developers all over the world. These applications have been tested and work with the EFIKA."

Mandriva has sent out a press release to highlight NEPOMUK, the semantic framework (think metadata) being developed by Mandriva and several partners and will be integrated in the upcoming KDE 4. It includes a link to a video demonstrating NEPOMUK integration into Dolphin, the KDE 4 file manager. In addition, "aKademy 2007 has kicked off! The first weekend hosted our user conference, which brought many talks about various topics, ranging from very technical to more practically oriented, which were spread over two tracks. The tracks were interweaved with keynote talks. Read on for the report of the aKademy 2007 keynotes."

Hi-Mobile.net sent us in the Sony Ericsson P990i for our monthly phone review. This popular smartphone was released last summer, but a new firmware of Symbian's UIQ 3.0 was released just 15 days ago and this is with what we mainly tested. The P990i sells for just $340 these days, fully unlocked, and it has a barrage of high-end features.

Both the stable and unstable GNOME branches have been updated today; both GNOME 2.18.3 ("This is the final release in a series of point releases for the stable 2.18 branch.") as well as GNOME 2.19.4 ("This is our fourth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007.") have been released.

The ReactOS project has released a new newsletter. "The past few weeks have seen quite a lot of activity. At least six major blocker bugs were dealt with, ranging from the network issue to various bugs in the command line console." On top of that: "Some people aren't aware that ReactOS was one of several projects that received hardware to test on from One Laptop Per Child. Aleksey has been playing around with it, slowly coaxing ReactOS to boot."

"The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second alpha release of the K Desktop Environment. This release comes straight out of Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland where aKademy is currently taking place. For the bravehearts who want to try KDE 4.0 Alpha2, please refer to the alpha 2 info page to find ways to have a peek at the current status yourself."

"Sometimes, a service pack comes along that really makes a big difference. Take NT. Before SP3, it was garbage; afterwards Microsoft had its first server operating system that was worth anything. XP before SP2 was so-so, but after SP2, it became Microsoft's best desktop operating system ever (sorry, Vista). And, now, with its SP1 for SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), Novell has given an already excellent business desktop a real kick in the pants."

Apple posted on their developer website guidelines with instructions on optimising web-applications for the iPhone. "Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and provide seamless integration with iPhone applications and services including making a phone call, sending an email, and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using web standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security."

You might have noticed some user icons next to some comments today, this is because we enabled Gravatar support. Gravatar acts as a centralized identity pool where blogs, news sites (and recently Revver.com) can use their service and offer a universal icon for each unique email address. As long as you register on Gravatar with the same email address registered on OSNews, your personalized icon will be shown on OSNews (and on all other sites that support Gravatar) automatically. This is a testing period for Gravatar here at OSNews, and there are no guarantees whatsoever that the v4 version of OSNews will use that icon system or its own. It all depends on the kind of quality, stability and responsiveness we get from Gravatar's servers. So, upload your own icon at Gravatar.com and test away! Ability to turn off user icons will be built-in on v4.

Though we rely on them as a mainstay of modern computing, hard drives are really a mixed bag: part storage blessing and part performance albatross. The ongoing digital media revolution could never have gotten off the ground without plentiful, cheap storage, but even so, modern operating systems and programs are typically designed to rely on the hard drive as little as possible. Hard drive access times haven't kept pace with processor clockspeed increases, so computers increasingly employ sophisticated caching mechanisms (e.g. Intel's Turbo Memory tech) to minimize the need for a hard drive-based transfer. Now, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands believe they've taken the first step towards solving some of the speed problems of a traditional magnet-based hard drive system.