Microsoft's new smart phone OS is evolutionary, it's faster and offers many welcome productivity improvements. Read the review here. Update: One more.

YouTube has cool video showing Windows games using DirectX running inside VMware Fusion for Mac OS X. This is demonstrating full DirectX 8.1 support inside Windows XP virtual machines.

Canonical Ltd., the sponsor of Ubuntu, and Linspire Inc. the developer of Linspire and Freespire, on February 8 announced a technology partnership to integrate with each other's Linux distributions. Linspire/Freespire will be based on Ubuntu, rather than Debian, and Ubuntu will integrate with Linspire's CNR package installer/updater.

Samsung is following Apple, MS & LG in the trend where cellphones involve "big, wide touchscreens" as their main look and feel. Their Ultrasmart F700 phone has a qwerty keyboard, 2.8" widescreen, 5 MP camera and 3G support. We are not sure at this point if this is a smartphone which allows you to develop and run native applications or if it's just a glorified "feature phone". The whole interface is based on Adobe's Flash while a recent press release along with the claim of "full HTML browsing" makes us speculate that the phone possibly uses the Opera web browser -- possibly on top of Linux.

Cosmoe is back. "Well, I couldn't stay away. My lengthy hiatus away from working on Cosmoe is now over, and I am back in full force! For those of you not familiar with Cosmoe, it is a BeOS API (or Haiku API, if you will) environment running on Linux." There's even a screenshot.

Apple plans to crank up the anti-Vista rhetoric at its international chain of retail stores later this week, the latest move in a broader bid by the Mac maker to undermine the new operating system release from rival Microsoft. The campaign, set to get underway this Saturday, will include new store displays and employee t-shirts gently mocking Vista as little more than a washed-up attempt at a modern operating system, those familiar with the matter say. In a multi-page training manual made available through the company's internal retail system this week, Apple challenged its employees to learn and tout the Mac's many existing advantages over Vista-equipped Windows PCs.

Tucson Amateur Packet Radio is sponsoring a plan to encourage and popularize the idea of open source - for hardware components. The organization released a draft of an open source license for computer hardware this month, and issued a public call for comments on the draft. The new license is already drawing criticism from prominent members of the open source community.

"The ROX Desktop is a lightweight alternative to GNOME or KDE built around the ROX-Filer file manager. The project's name is an abbreviation of 'RISC OS on X'. The ROX Desktop's performance is reminiscent of IceWM, and it's noticeably faster opening programs than GNOME or KDE. However, its speed comes at the expense of a needlessly redundant default configuration, and some users may balk at some of the assumptions its design makes about how they prefer to work."

"For several years, Win4Lin has offered a virtual operating environment whereby you can run Microsoft Windows inside of GNU/Linux. The first several generations of Win4Lin were limited to Windows 98, difficult to install, and had requirements that were difficult to satisfy, such as a proprietary kernel module and various acts of command line kung fu. Version 3.5 still has some of these problems, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be."

Red Hat today announced the worldwide availability of Red Hat Certificate System 7.2 from the RSA conference in San Francisco. A complete public key infrastructure solution, Red Hat Certificate System 7.2 provides a security framework that guarantees the identity of users and ensures the privacy of communications in heterogeneous environments. The newest release includes enhancements that simplify deployment, management and integration of certificates as a core part of the security architecture in the enterprise.

"We are pleased to present the first Qt Jambi beta to our commercial customers and the open source community for testing and feedback. Qt Jambi enables Java developers to utilize Qt: the leading framework for high-performance, cross-platform applications. This release will be followed by a second beta in early Q2 2007, with a final release of Qt Jambi 1.0 currently scheduled for early Q3."

Microsoft will not close a loophole that offers consumers a cheaper way to upgrade to Windows Vista. Users can install the upgrade version of the new operating system as a fresh installation, even if they do not currently own a licensed copy of Windows XP. The procedure is time consuming, but allows users to save about 35 per cent of the purchase price for the regular Windows Vista.

"Windows Preinstallation Environment 2.0 is a slimed down version of Windows (hence all the MiniNT references) that used to be the exclusive domain of OEM's providers. Microsoft has wisely chosen to offer this to the masses as part of the Windows AIK. USB keys can be found just about anywhere these days for next to nothing. Combine the capabilities of WinPE with the portability of a USB key and you just made a very powerful troubleshooting, imaging, and data recovery tool. Here is a quick step by step on how to do just that."

This detailed, hands-on review examines Nokia's Linux-based N800 web tablet first as a consumer electronics device, and then as a platform for open source software development. Reviewer Jerry Epplin infuses the review with humor and deeply technical insights. Our review is here.