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An employee of the U.S. Department of State was sentenced Wednesday to 12 months of probation for illegally accessing more than 125 electronic passport application files, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Kevin M. Young, 42, of Temple Hills, Maryland, was also ordered by Judge Alan Kay, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to perform 100 hours of community service. Young pleaded guilty on Aug. 17 to one count of unauthorized computer access.

Young has worked full time for the State Department since February 1987, and he has been a contact representative for the Passport Special Issuance Agency for the past eight years, the DOJ said.

Young had access to official State Department computer databases, including the Passport Information Electronic Records System (PIERS), which contains all imaged passport applications dating back to 1994. The passport applications on PIERS contain applicants' names, dates of birth, current addresses, parent information and other personal data.

PIERS access by State Department employees is limited to official government duties.

Between March 11, 2003, and Dec. 21, 2005, Young logged onto the PIERS database and viewed the passport applications of more than 125 celebrities, actors, comedians, professional athletes, musicians, models, a politician and other individuals identified in the press, the DOJ said. In his guilty plea, Young said he had no official government reason to view these passport applications, and his reason for doing so was "idle curiosity," the DOJ said.

Young is the eighth current or former State Department employee or contractor to plead guilty since September 2008 to charges related to passport snooping. Most of the other defendants have received sentences of probation, community service, or fines.

A group of State Department employees and contractors were targeted for prosecution after March 2008 news reports of employees there accessing the electronic passport files of three presidential candidates, Senators John McCain, Barack Obama, now U.S. president, and Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state.

The inspector general's office at the State Department later found that there had been widespread breaches of PIERS.

The inspector general's office looked at the passport files of 150 politicians, entertainers and athletes, and found that 127 of those passports had been accessed at least once between September 2002 and March 2008. Those passport files were accessed 4,148 times during that time frame, and one person's passport was searched 356 times by 77 users.

The just-released beta of Google Chrome for the Mac follows the same design principles that Google uses for its own site design -- the browser is stripped-down and fast, with few features to get in the way of the Web pages you browse. It is nearly identical to the PC version, but because it is in an earlier phase of development, it lacks some significant features.

The browser's name provides a hint as to what takes center stage here -- an application's user interface is sometimes referred to as its chrome, and as with the PC version, Google has reduced as much of the browser's "chrome" as possible. That leaves you with a browser that's all display. Those who prefer bare-bones browsing will be pleased; those who like a fuller feature set may stay away.

Keep in mind that this first beta of Chrome for the Mac is still a very early work in progress. In fact, it feels more like an alpha release than a beta release -- even its bookmark manager doesn't work. You should not download it expecting to get work done.

Interface and features

The first thing you'll notice about the Chrome interface is that its tabs, unlike those in Safari and Firefox, sit above the address bar instead of underneath it. Google calls the address bar the Omnibox, and it's true to its name -- it does double-duty as a search bar.

Type in your search term and Chrome performs a search. It uses Google by default, but you can change the default to other search engines, including Bing and Yahoo. As with Safari and Firefox, when you type in an URL instead of a search term, it displays your bookmarks and Web pages from sites you've already visited as you type. It also makes its own suggestions based on the popularity of Web sites.

The Omnibox adds another nice touch: When you're on a site, the domain is highlighted so that you can easily see what domain you are currently visiting, even if your current page has a lengthy URL.

When you open a new tab in Chrome, a page appears with thumbnails of your nine most-visited Web pages, along with a recent bookmark list, and a search box for searching through the history of sites you've visited. It's not nearly as nifty-looking as a similar feature in Safari.

On the other hand, in Chrome, each tab is essentially its own browser, so if that tab crashes, the entire browser doesn't (or at least shouldn't) crash. You can also easily tear off tabs into their own browser windows, and recombine separate browser windows into a single window with multiple tabs.

As with other Mac applications, options and features are available on a separate menu, although if you want, you can display two icons -- a page icon and a tools icon -- at the upper right of the browser screen, which give you access to many Chrome features via menus. For example, you can set your overall Chrome options, clear your browsing history, import bookmarks, and so on.

Chrome, like Safari and Firefox, can generate a separate window for keeping your browsing session private; here it's called Incognito mode. There's also a pop-up blocker.

What's missing -- and a few bugs

When Google calls a service or a piece of software "beta" you never know what you're going to get -- sometimes you'll get an application that most companies would consider a final release, and other times you'll get a work in progress. With Chrome for the Mac, you get the work in progress.

In addition to the non-functional bookmarks manager -- it's grayed-out on the menu and doesn't work -- there's also no full-screen mode as of yet. Unfortunately, the Mac version also doesn't yet support extensions, which are now part of the PC and Linux versions.

The Mac version also lacks Chrome's geekiest feature -- the Task Manager. The Task Manager is a kind of techie's heaven. It displays every separate process in the browser, and shows the memory and CPU taken up by each. It also lets you free up RAM or CPU by ending a process, and there's more as well. Chrome for the Mac also doesn't support Google Gears, which is required if you want to use Google's Web-based applications in offline mode.

Also not available are what Google calls application shortcuts, which let you run Web-based applications from your desktop. On the PC version of Chrome, when you start an application shortcut, it runs in a browser window with no controls such as tabs, buttons, or the address bar. It's designed for a world in which you run many applications via the cloud rather than on your local computer. Given that application shortcuts are generally flaky on the PC, not having them available yet on the Mac is no great loss.

Mac-specific goodies

Chrome may be missing extensions and several other features available on the PC, but even in this beta version, it does offer Mac OS X-specific features. It supports multi-touch gestures, such as the three-fingered swipe for moving forward and back in a browsing section. And it integrates with the Mac OS X spelling and grammar checker, which is good news for bloggers and anyone else who writes online. It also ties into the sandboxing security technology built into Mac OS X.

The bottom line

Chrome for the Mac is still an early beta, so if you're looking for an everyday browser, this isn't it. It's missing so many features that it simply isn't ready for serious work. However, if you want a chance to see Google's vision of a browser for the Mac, it's well worth the download.

At this point, because the browser is still incomplete, it's hard to gauge how well it stacks up to Safari and Firefox. Safari is a blazingly fast browser, and Firefox offers an enormous ecosystem of add-ins. Chrome is built for speed and will eventually support its own extensions as well. So it's clearly trying to combine the best of Safari with the best of Firefox. We'll have to wait for a more polished version of the browser to see whether it succeeds.

1020 Placecast, a San Francisco location-based advertising company, has released a list of seven predictions for mobile advertising in 2010. Among them: Augmented reality will begin (but only begin) to take off, while Apple will solve the battery issues that put a hamper on location-based advertising on the iPhone.

Since Placecast is a mobile ad company itself, it’s not making these predictions aren’t exactly objective. Still, the company seemed to be pretty accurate in its predictions for 2009.

Anyway, here’s the list. (The bolded portions are a direct quote from Placecast’s predictions, while the rest of the text is my summary.)

1. Augmented reality gets traction, but will remain a bell and a whistle compared to map and list view — This technology, where location-based data is overlayed on images of the physical world, will start showing up more frequently on mobile phones, but consumers will still prefer regular maps, and marketers won’t have any big success.
2. The iPhone will solve the GPS battery drain problem — Apparently, location-based advertisers feel hamstrung on the iPhone because users can’t run GPS in the background, so advertisers can’t automatically deliver messages about nearby deals as a consumer is out and about. Apple will solve the battery issues next year, though the company may not decide to let advertisers take advantage of this.
3. Geo-fencing goes mainstream — This technology creates a “virtual field” around a location. If a user steps into the field, they get a marketing message. In 2010, marketers will really start using geo-fencing.
4. Smart retailers will link CRM databases into mobile marketing to deliver a new experience — By linking data about past customer behavior with mobile marketing, stores can deliver more personalized deals and messages.
5. Carriers will open up location to brands — Specifically, Placecast predicts that “at least one Tier 1 and one Tier 2 carrier” will allow users to share their location data (which the carriers already have) with marketers.
6. Smart-coupons will incorporate time and context — The recession has spurred new interest in money-saving coupons, and we’ll see more customized coupons delivered to mobile phones next year.
7. Location data emerges as a new mine for marketing insights — Marketers will start using rich location data — not just where you are, but also the weather, traffic, and demographics of that location — to tailor advertising messages.

1020 Placecast recently raised  $5 million in funding.

Following through on plans announced a few months ago, Facebook is rolling out changes on Wednesday to its privacy settings intended to make them simpler to adjust and understand by its 350 million end users.

In addition to consolidating some privacy options and grouping them in a single interface, Facebook will also provide new tools designed to walk end users through the settings.

Also, Facebook users will now be able to establish a privacy setting for every item they post on the site via a drop-down menu.

"We believe people should have the ability to share information with only the people they want. We also believe the best time to make this decision is at the very moment the person is sharing something, not months or even years before on a settings page far away," said Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of communications, public policy and marketing, in a press conference. "We want to make privacy something that is considered in context of what's being shared, so that users have more control every step of the way."

As part of this initiative, all Facebook users will be prompted to review and confirm their privacy settings. The page will list the items with privacy that needs to be confirmed and give users the option to retain their existing setting or change it to a setting Facebook recommends. Depending on the item, the Facebook suggestion may be either to relax the privacy control or tighten it. In that page, some of the Facebook suggestions will be preselected for the users, who will have to manually pick the old setting if they don't agree with the Facebook suggestion.

Facebook had indicated its intention to make these changes back in July, when it publicly acknowledged that its privacy controls had become scattered across multiple settings pages and that they lacked consistency. This resulted in confusion among many end users, who then didn't take proper advantage of Facebook's very granular privacy settings.

"Numerous settings and complicated options can make it harder for people to make informed decisions about their privacy or about the Facebook experience they want," Schrage said.

As previously announced, Facebook has done away with its regional network option, which let end users make their profile viewable by others located in their same geography. Many regional networks had become too big and don't necessary reflect a common interest among their members. Regional networks has been replaced with four options: friends; friends of friends; everyone; and customized. People can still choose to make their profile open to others in their work and school networks.

"We're moving away from our outdated regional network-based model to a new simpler model based on contextual privacy, where users control the privacy over every single thing they share at the time they choose to share it," Schrage said.

Social network startup Gowalla has defied the conventional wisdom that there’s no venture capital available, and that businesses today need to prove a profitable revenue model to attract investors. The 11-person Austin-based company, which makes a free iPhone app that lets users share their location and identify things they’ve spotted at the site, has secured an $8.4 million second round of funding atop the $2 million the company raised in 2008.

The round was led by Greylock Partners. David Thacker of Greylock has joined Gowalla’s board of directors. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is joining as a board observer. Other investors include Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, plus angels Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Shervin Pishevar and Gary Vaynerchuk.

Gowalla,founded in 2007, takes the “where are you now?” factor of, say, Foursquare, and turns it into a more blatant game. In a demo video on the company site, one of the staff checks in at an Austin barbecue joint. Should he spot one of several items to find onsite — someone wearing a cowboy hat, or a plate of ribs — he can add those to his Gowalla profile. The game is, of course, a way to prompt members to announce their locations.

Why are investors betting on Gowalla despite its lack of a revenue model? Because the company, which wisely debuted at Austin’s annual South by Southwest conference earlier this year before launching, claims to have acquired more than 50,000 members in 7,500 cities worldwide. Like Twitter on a smaller scale, it’s seen as a people magnet that, if blown up bigger, will eventually provide a way to make money from a gathered, engaged user base.

Greylock principal David Thacker told the New York Times, “For having launched ten weeks ago, it has a lot of momentum, both in the virality of the product and the number of highly engaged users.”

UPDATE: CEO Josh Williams emailed me: “While it’s true that Gowalla, as a product, has $0 revenue — as a company, we have more revenue than you might realize. Our first product, a social game on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/packrat) generates significant revenue for the company. Read: We know how to make cash.”

Apple this week has taken another step toward better communicating with iPhone developers, launching an RSS feed for iPhone app news.

Developer News subscribers will receive the latest Apple App Store submission tips, such as the importance of App name and icon consistency, plus data on App Store submission approvals (92% approved within 14 days as of this writing), program updates and testing techniques.

Apple said in November that iPhone developers have created more than 100,000 apps for smartphones and market research firm IDC says there will be 300,000 by 2011. Apple roared past the 2 billion app download mark in September. Yet Apple has been knocked by App Store developers and buyers for imperfect management of the App Store submission and oversight processes.

10 iPhone apps that could get you into trouble 

Some developers have argued that Apple makes it too tough for them to get their apps onto the App Store, such as when Apple rejected a Google Voice app earlier this year. Others decry apps like the notorious Shaken Baby app that slip onto the App Store. Then there’s the recent scandal involving bogus iPhone app ratings that led Apple to scuttle 1,000 previously approved apps. 

Buyers have complained about a “no refund” policy that makes plunking down increasingly higher amounts for apps a tougher purchase decision.

The new RSS feed is Apple’s latest attempt to get a better handle on its booming App Store. The company recently introduced ways for developers to gain more visibility into exactly where a submitted app stands in the process. 

While Apple's App Store is in a league of its own, other smartphone makers, such as Windows Mobile maker Microsoft, are boosting theirs as well.

SAP is hoping to build a platform of third-party SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications to complement its own emerging wave of offerings.

The vendor has been building a series of on-demand products with a Java-based platform it acquired through the 2006 purchase of Frictionless Commerce, maker of e-sourcing applications.

At some point, SAP plans to allow others access to the Frictionless platform, according to John Wookey, the SAP executive vice president heading up the company's on-demand software strategy for large enterprises.

But SAP has no desire to force those developers into a proprietary box, Wookey said in an interview this week during SAP's Influencer Summit in Boston.

"Our intent is not to go out and be a tools provider. We want to build good tools to build great applications and we want to open those up to third parties to use," he said. "But we're not going to actually prescribe that you have to use those tools."

"One of the biggest things people want to be able to do is to connect to our data sources or to connect to [SAP] Business Suite data sources," Wookey added. Therefore, SAP is developing the platform as a set of on-demand services, he said. "So you want to go connect to a certain customer's implementation of the Business Suite ... you can use these on-demand services to connect to it, get access to master data, and so on."

"People may choose to build on [Frictionless] which would be great," he continued. "But they may also decide they want to use Python or Ruby or anything else. We still want them to connect to our system in a standard way. So packaging up those services to get access to Business Suite, our data and our services is really what we're focused on in terms of when we talk about a platform."

SAP won't open up access to the platform right away. "We want to focus on getting our own applications out before supporting other people," he said.

The company's large enterprise on-demand strategy initially targets SAP's own customers, with applications positioned as extensions to an on-premise installation of Business Suite. An initial wave focuses on areas such as expense management and HCM (human capital management).

But down the road, SAP plans to also market its on-demand applications as stand-alone offerings, Wookey said.

"The first thing we have to do is win over our installed base and then use that as the right launching pad to go more aggressively into the open marketplace," he said.

Meanwhile, the periodic but high-profile service outages suffered by some SaaS vendors over the past couple of years have not been lost on SAP. The company has developed a "ramp plan" for scaling up its technology and support infrastructure as SAP adds more on-demand customers, according to Wookey.

"I worry about [reliability] all the time, but I get good answers to all my hard questions so I think we're in a good position to serve our customers," he said.

Wondering why thin and light laptops with monster battery life haven't been a smashing success? Acer chairman J.T. Wang says Dell and HP are to blame.

According to DigiTimes, Wang says HP and Dell aren't pushing the ultra-thin category hard enough, particularly in the United States. Instead, they're slashing prices on mainstream notebooks, selling them for as little as $400.

As a result, Intel's not seeing good enough sales on its consumer ultra-low voltage, or CULV, processors, Wang argued. In 2010, the chip maker plans to mainly push mainstream notebook platforms, possibly investing less in ultra-thins.

Ultra-thin laptops, such as Acer's Aspire Timeline 3810T and Asus' UL30a, tend to measure an inch thick or less, can last an entire work day on a charge and forgo an optical drive to trim down on bulk. They're larger and more powerful than netbooks, but they can struggle with gaming and 1080p HD video, partly because many ultra-thins lack dedicated graphics cards (Asus' UL80vt, on which I'm typing this, is an exception).

Wang believes that interest in ultra-thin laptops is stronger than HP and Dell would have Intel believe. At a recent trade show in Taiwan, ultra-thins accounted for half of Acer's laptops sold. Wang didn't say how Acer ultra-thins fared in 2009, but expects that they'll account for 30 percent of sales next year, backed by new models in March or April.

Wang's take on the ultra-thin market seems convoluted to me. HP and Dell aren't totally ignoring the category, with HP's ProBook 5310m and Pavilion DV2 (using AMD's Athlon Neo processor) and Dell's Inspiron 11z and the new Vostro V13. But Wang is essentially saying the competition isn't focusing on the laptops he wants to compete with, but that's of course their prerogative. And just last month, Wang was hinting at faster Intel chips on the horizon, presumably to power Acer's upcoming models, so the situation doesn't sound all bad.

In any case, Acer is the second-largest PC maker now. If ultra-thin notebooks haven't flourished, it could just be because Acer's offers haven't been attractive enough.

Google finally released the beta version of its Chrome browser for Mac on Tuesday. As expected, the new browser is lacking some features that its Windows counterpart has, such as bookmark sync, a bookmark manager, and offline capability.

I've been using the developer version of Chrome for Mac for several weeks, and have been fairly impressed with how the browser has performed. This first beta version fixes some annoying bugs that had plagued earlier versions of the browser, and overall stability is much better. However, this is still a beta version of Chrome so be prepared for a few unexpected hiccups and snags along the way.

Here are a few observations about Google's new beta version.

No Extra Goodies

Although there have been rumors for several weeks saying Chrome for Mac would lack features like bookmark sync, I was hoping those reports would be proven wrong. Unfortunately the rumors were dead on, and all that fun stuff like Chrome extensions, bookmark sync, and offline capabilities for Google applications like Gmail and Google Docs are not available for Mac users.

Google has said that HTML 5 specifications will be replacing its offline features that currently use the Google Gears browser add-on, so offline access should be coming to Google Chrome's Mac users in the future. As for the other extras like bookmark sync and extensions, I would bet they'll be coming sooner rather than later.

Bookmark Tricks

Chrome for Mac allows you to import and export your bookmarks from Safari and Firefox, but the browser lacks a bookmark manager, which makes it very difficult to keep new bookmarks organized. However, there are a few tricks you can use to get at least some control over your pages.

If you want to delete a particular bookmark, you just open that Web page, and then click on 'Bookmark This Page' or press 'command + D'. This will open a small pop-up window where you can click on "remove" to erase the page from your bookmarks.

You can also use this trick to create a new folder on your bookmarks bar. When the pop-up window appears click on 'Edit' and that will take you to another window where you can create a now folder. However, every folder you create will be pinned to your bookmarks bar, you don't have the option to create a folder that appears only in the bookmarks menu.

Tip: If you don't want to see your bookmarks bar while you're browsing, open a new tab and click 'command+shift+B.' This will remove your bookmarks from the browsing window, and pin the bar to the start screen that you see when you open an empty tab.

Loopy Tabs

I found that, from time to time, a new tab can get stuck and won't render the Web page you've asked for. If this happens, you can try to refresh the tab or just close the tab down and try again. In my tests, I also found that Gmail was sometimes slow to open. If that happens to you, wait until you can click on Gmail's "try reloading this page" link, and that should clear it up.

Video is good, but not great

While Chrome doesn't usually have a problem with video, you might run into a snag from time to time. For example, I wasn't able to see CBS News videos with Chrome, but had no problem viewing those same videos with Firefox. Chrome also had a problem with an online premium video service I subscribe to, so be prepared for the odd snag like this from time to time.

Stuff to Love

Chrome is pretty fast, although I wasn't particularly blown away with its speed as some others are reporting. In fact, Chrome is a little bit slower than Safari but twice as fast as Firefox, according to Computerworld.

One of the top features of Chrome is that you never have to worry about waiting for your browser to install an update. Chrome handles all updates in the background and these changes never once interrupted my Web browsing. In fact, you will probably never notice when the browser updates unless some new features suddenly appear. But if you ever want to check that your version of Chrome is up to date just click on the 'Chrome' menu item and click on 'About Chrome.'

Chrome is all about search

If you're new to Chrome, a great little feature you might like is the ability to quickly search select sites and use any search engine you want without adjusting your preferences. Just start typing the URL for the desired search engine or Website into the address bar (Google calls it the Omnibox), and, once auto complete fills in the complete address, press the tab button. This will bring up a prompt to let you know you are using the alternate search engine instead of Google. You can use this function to search Amazon, Ask, Bing, eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia (to trigger Wikipedia I had to type in en.wikipedia.com), and more. If the search trick doesn't work, watch the auto complete bar below the Omnibox, Chrome should give you an option to search the specific site you're looking for.

Although it's is missing some key features, overall, Chrome is a great browser and well worth checking out.

Connect with Ian on Twitter (@ianpaul).

As promised, Facebook has begun rolling out new privacy options to its 350 million users.Watch out for the "Everyone" setting.

On Wednesday morning, users began seeing a message offering a new, simplified privacy settings page and the ability to set specific options for every post made to Facebook.

The changes, first announced this summer, again promised last week, and available today, give users much tighter control of who sees what, down to the individual reader, if desired.

Especially important is the new "everyone" setting that determines whether a Facebook post will be seen on other services, such as in Google search results.

Other settings include "only friends" and "friends of friends." A "customize" option allows users to show or hide a post from specific individuals or user-created lists.

The options are available by clicking on a new "lock" icon that appears next to the "share" button when a Facebook user updates their status. Any setting may be chosen as a default and the default option may be changed as desired.

Facebook also today updated its privacy policy to reflect the changes.

Here is how the "Everyone" setting is described (this may be important to you):

"Information set to 'everyone' is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations.

"The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to 'everyone.' You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete 'everyone' content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook."

As of 8 a.m. Pacific Time today, not all users have been upgraded to the new privacy options. Others were upgraded months ago when Facebook began testing the new options.

My take: Facebook should add even more granularity to the "everyone" option, giving users the ability to opt-in or out of their posts being shared with specific services. It should also include links making it easier to for users to learn what the settings mean.

The description quoted above is complete and reasonably understandable, but is not easy to find. Not difficult, but it requires some looking.

I strongly encourage all Facebook users to visit all the privacy settings pages, especially those for applications and advertising, and make desired changes.

Facebook seems candid about what it does, provides privacy options for users, but it is still up to the individual to make the changes they desire. Not surprisingly, some Facebook defaults are more "open" than many users might desire.

David Coursey has been writing about technology products and companies for more than 25 years. He tweets as @techinciter and may be contacted via his Web site.

Packard Bell is recalling the batteries in four models of laptop computers sold mostly in Europe due to possible overheating or fire, the vendor said Wednesday.

Packard Bell said the models are in its EasyNote line and include the MX36, MX37, MX51 and MX52. Those affected were produced between July and December 2007. The units were mostly sold in Europe, and none of the affected ones were sold in the U.S.

Packard Bell advised that the batteries be removed the computers be run with the power cord. The batteries could short circuit and cause the battery cells to overheat or catch fire. Packard Bell said there is no risk of electrocution, and it had received no reports of injuries so far.

Users can call the company's service line on a U.K. phone number (0871 467 0008) to check if their models are affected. The company will replace the batteries.

Australia's patent examination process is set to be revamped following the announcement of a new trial which uses Web 2.0 technology to improve the quality of patents issued.

IP Australia, in partnership with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have called for qualified people from industry, government and academia to volunteer and take part in the Peer-to-Patent (P2P) initiative.

The trial will attempt to draw on the expertise of members of the public, and pool their knowledge via an interactive website to support IP Australia's patent examiners.

Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry, Richard Marles, said in a statement, the initiative will result in stronger patent rights for innovators.

"This 12 month P2P trial shows how receptive the Australian Government is to innovation and extracting the benefits of Web 2.0," he said.

"It makes good sense to use technology to add a layer of checks and balances in our intellectual property system so it can meet the challenges of the future," he said. "P2P will be trialled in business methods and related applications."

This week, the Government 2.0 Taskforce released a draft report into its use of Web 2.0 technologies.

It said Federal Government agencies "must do better" to achieve the Government 2.0 goals and that agencies have not pursued "Government 2.0 in a co-ordinated way that reflects a whole of government position".

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Mobile browsers are replaying the browser wars of the 1990s.

With no clear better-than-the-rest winner, phone owners are trying everything available. Opera, Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox for mobile (codenamed Fennec until its formal release) and several others have a fighting chance. Even on the iPhone, indie browser iNetDual one-ups the phone’s built-in Safari browser by adding split-screen capability so you can see two Web pages at once.

On Windows Phones — technically, they run the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system — the Skyfire browser one-upped other browsers this year by playing streaming videos within Web pages, so that they look just like they do on a desktop. Other browsers launch a separate player. Even the iPhone, which can play YouTube videos but not others, hands off video to a separate player.

Skyfire Labs, the Mountain View company that makes Skyfire, will formally release its free Skyfire 1.5 browser for Windows Phone later today. The new version’s features very much play catchup on missing touches: Text is much sharper and scrolling much smoother than the previous versions. There’s a menu bar at the bottom of the browser that includes familiar buttons to zoom in and out, or to star (bookmark) a page. The browser can go full-screen, hiding its frame of user interface controls.

With the Mozilla Organization constantly improving Firefox for mobile, designed to mimic Mozilla’s game-changing Firefox except where there are different needs between a handset and a laptop (think: touchscreen), is there any reason to bother with Skyfire now?

Yes, because Firefox for mobile is focusing on the Nokia N900 as its first platform. Windows Mobile development is “still under active development,” according to Jay Sullivan, vice president of Mozilla’s mobile arm. Translation: Firefox for Windows phones won’t be out until next year.

Once released, Firefox will be tough to compete against. Besides the brand name, it will sync bookmarks and other data with users’ desktop Firefox browsers. It will support Firefox add-ons, small software plug-ins that can add powerful features such as language translation for Web pages. Sullivan says it will also play Flash content in-line. “YouTube performance is good,” he said, but for now the under-development Fennec browser will only support Flash on Nokia’s smartphone. Support for streaming media — Flash, Silverlight, Real — will come from plug-ins created by the makers of those technologies rather than from Mozilla.

CEO Jeffrey Glueck told me that on Windows Phones, Skyfire 1.5 has two advantages over other browsers: Its ability to play video within a page, and its ability to handle large Flash applications such as the homepage of Disney.com, a 50 megabyte Flash app. Skyfire does this by converting the application from Flash to Skyfire’s own format somewhere in the cloud, and serving the converted video in its correct position on its hosting page.

“Everything plays” is one of Glueck’s unofficial slogans. “Go to any site that has Flash, Silverlight, RealPlayer,” he told me in a phone call. “Skyfire plays it on the page, just like on a desktop. Other browsers — iPhone Opera, IE, Safari — give you a plugin error. Google spends millions of dollars to re-encode some YouTube videos from Flash to support some smartphones, but it’s not the full live site. Usually ‘we support Flash’ means ‘we get out of the way’ and launch a separate player.”

Glueck claims Disney’s site and the M&Ms homepage at mms.com are perfect for browser shootouts against Skyfire. “Disney.com is a 50 megabyte Flash animation. That will load in seconds in Skyfire. It won’t load on any other browser in the world.”

Is he right? Let me know (paul@venturebeat.com or @paulboutin) if you’ve got another phone browser that can handle these sites.

One more question I had: Where’s the part where Skyfire gets paid?

“Search revenue share is our current model,” Glueck said. When a Skyfire user searches the Internet, Skyfire gets a cut of the money Google makes by serving ads on the result page. “Rumor has it Apple splits $100 million a year with Google for iPhone queries.” Skyfire has nowhere near that volume of traffic, but the company claims the number of search queries in November was double that of two months before. Since a year ago, according to Glueck, users are up more than threefold, and pagefiews are up sixfold.

“In the future,” he added, “we hope to get revenue through ads on the start page. We also hope to get pre-loaded on Windows Phones. Microsoft lets you set the default to our browser, as long as IE is also there.”

Almost needless to say these days, Skyfire has built-in interfaces and support for Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and RSS feeds.

Skyfire was founded in 2006 and has raised $22.8 million in three rounds of funding. Investors include Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

AT&T is moving even closer to charging special usage fees to heavy data users, including those with iPhones and other smartphones.

Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, today came the closest he has so far in warning about some kind of use-based pricing. He spoke to attendees at a UBS conference in New York.

"The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data and...we're improving systems to give them real-time information about their data usage," he said. "Longer term, there's got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the [heavy] users."

AT&T has found that only 3% of its smartphone users -- primarily iPhone owners -- are responsible for 40% of total data usage, largely for video and audio, de la Vega said. Educating that group about how much they are using could change that, as AT&T has found by informing wired Internet customers of such patterns.

"With landline capabilities, we used that concept and customers didn't know how much data they were using -- including parents who didn't know how their children were using [video and audio]," he said. "Once alerted, they reduced their consumption without anything other than being told that data was being used in an inordinate fashion."

De la Vega's comments on data use were previewed in a keynote he gave in October at the CTIA , but he went beyond those earlier comments today: "We are going to make sure incentives are in place to reduce or modify [data]uses so they don't crowd out others in the same cell sites."

Focus groups have been formed at AT&T to figure out how to proceed; AT&T is already setting up its systems to give smartphone users real-time data on their data patterns, he said.

"What's driving [high] usage are things like video or audio that plays around the clock," he added. "We have to get to those customers and get them to recognize they have to change their patterns, or there are things we will do to change those patterns."

He said he also felt that whatever AT&T does will conform with Net neutrality regulations already in place or under consideration by federal regulators, including the Federal Communications Commission.

Before taking questions, de la Vega also used a 20-minute address to defend AT&T's network, though he did not mention a series of TV ads used to rebut those from Verizon Wireless. Nor did he mention a lawsuit AT&T filed, then dropped, on the matter.

He noted a recent third-party study using driving tests showing AT&T's network outperforms Verizon's on throughput speeds. The study also found AT&T had only slightly more dropped calls than Verizon, with just two additional dropped calls per 1,000 than Verizon.

But his major focus was on network improvements that are under way, including an 850MHz spectrum overlay and installation of HSPA 7.2 software. The HSPA 7.2 improvement will double network throughput speeds with a theoretical maximum download speed of 7.2 Mbit/sec, something that will be complete in six cities by the end of this year, with 25 cities online by mid-2010, de la Vega said.

While he didn't name the six cities -- and a spokesman wouldn't either in a follow-up question -- faster HSPA 7.2 speeds would be noticed "immediately" by iPhone 3GS users. It "...will be smoking," he said.

De la Vega conceded there have been slow network issues for AT&T users in Manhattan and the financial district of San Francisco, problems already noted by many analysts. Networks in both areas have performed "below standards" he said.

In Manhattan, the use of a new 850Mhz channel has helped AT&T "turn the corner...and you'll see gradual improvements," he said. "You'll see this is going to be fixed. We'll do a lot better." The signal on that 850Mhz spectrum travels further than on some other channels and penetrates buildings better, he said.

In the financial area of San Francisco, de la Vega conceded that cell tower antennas "need to be replaced" since they were really designed for older networks. That upgrade has "gone slower than we wanted."

Using HSPA 7.2 will be a good interim step for data customers until LTE technology is installed, de la Vega said. While Verizon is moving ahead with some rollouts of LTE in 2010, de la Vega argued that that coverage will only be in pockets; AT&T customers will have wider access to HSPA 7.2 technology.

AT&T is planning LTE trials in 2010 and commercial availability in 2011, he said.

Ever since I got my Google Voice account, I have had to repeatedly explain to friends and colleagues what Google's free phone service is and (more importantly) what it isn't. If you, like them, have heard about Google Voice but still aren't completely clear about how it works and why you should care, here are some quick answers.

How it works

You can't just sign up for Google Voice: you need an invitation. To get one, you can go to the Google Voice invitation request page and fill out the form. Once you have Voice service on your Google account, you can invite others to join the service.

Once you have your Google Voice number, you can associate your other phone numbers--work, home, mobile, whatever--with it. You can still make calls from those handsets using your regular phone service; their individual numbers will show up on the receiver's caller ID screen. But you can also choose to have your Google number show up instead.

What it is

In addition to having one number that can reach all of your physical handsets, Google Voice offers some intelligent phone features that your existing handsets and services might not.

For starters, you can get intelligent call forwarding, by setting up rules for how you want your calls routed. You might, for example, want calls received before 5:00 pm sent to your office phone, calls after that to your cell phone; Google Voice can do that. You also get customizable ringing: Calls from some callers might ring only at home, while those from others would go straight to voicemail; you can schedule when those ringing rules take effect.

Google Voice also gives you a Web interface to your phones and services. Among other things, that means you can manage voice messages online, filing and archiving them much like Gmail. It allows you to customize greetings by caller and by group. You can also dial from any of your associated phones using a Web interface or helper program. If you have numbers in Google Contacts, Google Voice offers some powerful speed-dialing tools. (Google Contacts can be synced with OS X's Address Book and the iPhone.)

The service also allows you to record calls (after you've received permission from the other party, of course); it can automatically generate transcripts, too.

One final benefit: Google Voice offers cheap international calling and free SMS.

Note that Google recently introduced the ability to get some of these features on your existing numbers. But those features are awfully limited compared with what you get when you use a Google number.

What it isn't

Google Voice is not, however, the be-all and end-all of telephone services.

It isn't a Voice over IP (VoIP) service like Skype or Vonage. You still need a standard phone connection (cellular or landline) to and from Google Voice.

Nor is it fully integrated (yet) with the iPhone. As I write this, Apple does not allow Google Voice iPhone apps. There is however, a very good iPhone-optimized version of the Google Voice web application. Google's native Voice applications for Android and BlackBerry phones are very capable, and the federal government has expressed concern, so there is hope that Apple will approve a Google Voice iPhone app.

The bottom line

In many ways, Google Voice turns your "dumb" phones into smart phones. You can understand why cell phone vendors and carriers might not be too thrilled about it: the service allows Google to insinuate itself between you and your carrier, and provides free replacements for many of their premium services.

Dell's Vostro line has traditionally been geared towards small businesses, doling out drab, low-powered notebooks and desktops for organizations that need PCs on a tight budget. But the V13, the latest notebook in the Vostro lineup, hopes to shake things up a bit. Weighing in at 3.5 pounds and a svelte 0.65 inches thick, this brushed-metal bijou promises to turn heads, without emptying your corporate warchest. We recently had a chance to sneak a peek at one, and came away fairly impressed.

The basic model runs for $449, and comes equipped with a 1.2GHz Celeron ULV 743 processor, 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM, a 250GB, 5400 RPM hard drive, and Ubuntu Linux. Connectivity options include 802.11 b/g WiFi, Gigabit ethernet, and Bluetooth 2.1 on every model. The 13.3 inch LED-backlit screen is also standard on every model. Klutzes will appreciate a Free Fall Sensor built into the motherboard, while road warriors can opt for a Mobile Broadband Module.

There aren't too many expandability options to speak of -- you'll find one USB 2.0 port, one USB 2.0 / eSata combo port, and a VGA display port. Ponying up for the $649 model will also net you Windows 7, a larger, faster hard drive, a webcam, and a 1.3GHz Core 2 Duo ULV SU7300 processor.

Now that we've got those pesky numbers out of the way, let's talk design. The V13 takes the ever popular brushed aluminum route, with zinc hinges. The chassis feels solid, despite being just about light enough to tote with one hand. There's a bit of plastic on the lip of the case to house the WiFi antenna, but nothing too egregious. While our typing-time was limited, the keyboard is full sized, and performed amicably. The trackpad also supports gestures, which could be a nice touch for users who opt for Windows 7.

Of special note is the battery: the 6-cell Lithium Ion battery is integrated directly into the case, much like unibody Mac notebooks. While it does allow Dell to shave off considerable girth, it means that should you ever need to replace the battery, you'll have to get your machine serviced. Like all machines in the Vostro line, the V13 comes with a year's worth of access to a plethora of business-friendly services, including 10GB of online backup, automated PC tuneup, and the DellConnect remote-troubleshooting service.

If your inner business mogul is enticed, you can hop on over to Dell's website and order your Vostro V13 today. And stay tuned for mote V13 coverage from PC World in the coming days.

Follow @ geektech on Twitter for more news on hardware, hacks, and cutting-edge tech.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience is on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris. I’m live-blogging as we go:

Michael Arrington asks about the search announcements earlier this week (namely Google Goggles, local search and real-time search).

Mayer: We think of search as having four main components. Modalities — how do you search? Most people now type in search queries, but we think people will talk to their phone and they’ll take photos. The other piece is media — as the web has gotten even more and more rich, we’ve gone from text to a very rich web with video, blogs, books, product search and now real-time. Bringing all that together really enriches the result section. Then the other two components have to do with language, translations and personalization. We think the searches in the future will be better because they understand you, who your friends are and where you are.

Arrington asks about Google Goggles (the image search the company launched earlier this week).

Mayer: With Google Goggles, they’re looking at image recognition. Sometimes location doesn’t help. The example that Vic used earlier this week was with a wine label and it picked it up and gave tips on its flavors. As image recognition gets further along, so will the type of indexing you’re talking about.

It seems like voice-to-text, looking at a audio stream and turning it into words is farther along. There’s good progress being made both in academia and at Google. Google Goggles is the first example of something that’s available for consumers.

Arrington asks about the rumored phone Google is launching.

Mayer: I don’t comment on speculation.

Arrington asks about the volume of mobile searches.

Mayer doesn’t reveal exact figures but says its growing.

Arrington asks about Chrome and Chrome OS.

Mayer: There are tens of millions of Chrome users and we’re excited about its growth.

Arrington: We all understand the dire situation of the print media in general. What I want to talk about is how do we fix this. Eric Schmidt talked about this in the WSJ last week. Can you talk about how you see the future of news?

Mayer: We’ve thought a lot about this. We really think about engagement — how do you increase the engagement of users online with news? If we invented news as a delivery vehicle — how does it get delivered on the web. If we reinvented it from scratch, it would look very different from what we’ve had. We released a prototype yesterday with the New York Times and the Washington Post called Living Stories. For a long time, news has been the print article on the web page. But what if that story was alive? You could come back to it, add to it, and get alerts on it? I basically think whenever a media changes over to a new delivery vehicle, it puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. It happened with iTunes with the album moving to the song. It happened with YouTube with long-form standards of video to short-form. Now it’s happening with news. People can come in and read one story from the source and then move on. That’s the atomic unit.

Certainly, some readers will follow brands more attentively. If you follow that line of thinking, a lot of things need to change. If you look at Wikipedia, it will beat a lot of news articles on search placement. They’ll have one page. And then newspapers will have hundreds of articles that are competing with each other. If you have one URL, it can really rise up. If you look at engagement and a lot of factors — 1) Personalization and 2) What to do next.

In a newspaper you have a lot of columns and your eyes jump around. If you look at the bottom of an article, where the most engaged reader will reach, there’s nothing there — no ads, nothing to do. And of course, the reader will go somewhere else to be entertained.

Twitter and Facebook have popularized this notion of the stream. So why can’t I have a portable stream of news that I can take with me everywhere? Why can’t it take into account my preferences, my location, the veggies so to speak of news that I should know? I call this the hyper-personalized news stream. What form it takes is unclear.

Arrington: Do you expect the New York Times to understand what you’re saying? Are they going to get this and move fast enough to stay alive?

Mayer: I think so. They’ve been very progressive in their thinking. They want to know how to reinvent themselves in this medium.

Arrington: What about Murdoch?

Mayer: We do partner with Murdoch. As part of our real-time search announcement, we partnered with MySpace. They’re giving us their public updates.

Arrington: Do you think they’ll actually pull their content out of Google?

Mayer: I hope not. We want to be comprehensive. But we have to respect the copyright owners. That’s what Google is based on. Without content, we don’t have the search engine. I hope for the sake of comprehensiveness and the quality of the search engine, that won’t happen.

Arrington: Would you pay to index content exclusively?

Mayer: That’s hard to say. But we’ve developed a lot of products that help with the monetization problem. Google AdSense paid about $5 billion out to publishers. We also have an Ad Exchange and the display advertising network. We’re very excited about those things. Search and news deliver itself literally billions of clicks to these sites each month.

Arrington asks about music.

Mayer: We did this very interesting computation over all our searches and lyrics was actually our number two most searched term of all time. Music was number 9. We did see a big user need. When someone has something like iTunes or Rhapsody open, the most common concurrent activity is searching for lyrics on Google.

Arrington: I wrote a series of posts about scammy ads appearing on Facebook. Have you ever played Farmville?

Mayer: I haven’t.

Arrington: There’s like 60 or 70 million people on Farmville. But there were really scammy ads and people being ripped off. But all of those companies advertise on Google and I haven’t looked at it too much. What are you doing about it?

Mayer: I can’t comment on it a lot. But we did launch a lawsuit on the scammy ads that use our brand and logo.

Arrington: Because it’s litigation you can’t talk about it. [Asks about Twitter]. I click on a lot of links people share on Twitter and nine times out of 10 that’s really interesting. It’s about discovery. How are you going to evolve your search engine to accommodate that?

Mayer: We had two announcements. One was social search — where you can search something like “New Zealand” and you get the 10 best links about the country but also photo logs and posts written by your friends about that. We definitely think using your social circle is really useful. Search can help social networks that way. People ask questions like, “Is this movie good?” “Where should I go for dinner?” And instead of shouting that out to the world, search can be a part of that.

The second part of that is real-time search, which we launched earlier this week. I was using Twitter search to find out about snow conditions.

Arrington: These aren’t even necessarily your friends.

Mayer: Yes, because someone on the hill is telling the truth. They’re there. They’re taking the time to tweet. If you combine that notion with search — you’d want to see the public updates and the private updates from your friends. The perfect search engine would credential you and then show you updates with privacy considerations taken into account.

While one of your friends give a status update on a particular topic, it might not be useful to you now. But three months later, when you’re going to that movie or to that place, it will be.

Arrington: The biggest problems around real-time search have to do with authority and authenticity and filtering. Can you solve these problems?

Mayer: We’ll have a lot of fun with this. The backbone of Google has long been PageRank. With real-time search, you don’t have that. We’re looking at 12 factors at things like query volume and other things like — does a person get retweeted a lot? Do they get replied to a lot?

I’m an expert at Google, but not on Paris, for example. So that notion of authoritativeness should be weighted into search. We want to avoid something false getting posted and being propagated very quickly.

Arrington: I remember terrorist attacks and CNN was pulling Twitter. There was so much retweeting and it was hard to figure out what was going on and who was really there.

Mayer: That’s true, but when you find them it’s magic. The Bay Bridge had a cable snap. We actually had the Twitter firehose at that time and we had a user post a twitpic. And they beat the news source by 18 minutes. And the first news source was the San Francisco Chronicle, and they were asking about something happening at the Bay Bridge.

Arrington asks about the Wave.

Mayer: Well we’re launching early and iterating fast. The important thing is critical mass. It’s useful when there are more people on it.

Arrington: Are you using it internally?

Mayer: It varies from team to team. We have some teams, like the one that did the new fade home page, they’ve used it almost exclusively.

Arrington: It seems to be with the Google Phone. If it didn’t exist, you’d just say it.

Mayer: Laughs.

Photo from Blogowski Consulting

Twitter announced the organization of its first official developers conference, Chirp, in San Francisco.

Ryan Sarver, Twitter director of platform, said Wednesday morning during the Le Web 09 conference in Paris that Twitter will hold its first official developer's conference in 2010.

Named "Chirp," the conference intends to gather developers responsible for creating the more than 50,000 applications already registered by Twitter since 2007.

According to a posting at The Next Web blog, Sarver said that most Twitter users access the service via third-party sites.

The Chirp site does not go provide a specific date or agenda for the conference, but includes a form for gathering e-mail addresses of interested participants.

The world is not only losing the war against spam, the situation might be about to get a whole lot worse with the emergence of a new type of automatic botnet able to thrive without direct human control, Symantec's MessageLabs division has warned.

Ironically, according to the company's 2009 Security Report, the emergence of what might be termed the 'autobot' has been driven by attempts to tackle the current generation of botnets by shuttering ISPs associated with the global flow of spam.

The best example of that was the closing of ISP-gone-bad, McColo, towards the end of 2008, which dramatically and instantly reduced spam levels in a way that nobody thought was possible. During 2009, further ISPs have been shut, including Real Host last summer, but the effect has been much less pronounced.

MessageLabs reckons this is a sign that today's botnets have been modified to more quickly adapt to the loss of a particular nodes, transferring traffic through different channels in a matter of days or even hours. The speed of response necessary requires self-healing behaviour, including the use of encrypted channels for control based on P2P principles.

"You don't have to have a person looking after it, the botnets can now look after themselves," says MessageLabs' Paul Wood, who notes that the McColo shutdown had affected spam levels for up to seven weeks, a hiatus that would be extremely unlikely now.

Woods predicts that during the coming year, botnets will migrate to a design based on "inbuilt self-sufficient code" able to adapt to anti-botnet activities and so improve their survival chances. The company has detected 5 million PCs that are now working on behalf of the botnets.

Elsewhere in the spam ecosystem, 2009 has seen defences such as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) being eroded to the point of near uselessness. Previosuly considered a way of foiling the mass creation of email account to channel spam and get around reputation services based on trusting a whitelist of domains, CAPTCHA was now being defeated by individuals in sweat shops paid small sums to manually create accounts.

MessageLabs predicts that this will see CAPTCHA replaced by more complex systems based on recognising images, which will at least increase the amount of time it takes for a paid CAPTCHA-beater to create a bogus account.

Other Internet crime hotspots for the year have included a range of smaller innovations such as social engineering attacks exploiting the trust relationships implicit in social networking, and specific attacks such as the hijacking of short URLs to hit people with malware.

So what do reports such as this tell us that we might not have known a year ago? An important underlying theme is that criminality has now burrowed deep into the fabric of the Internet in ways that make tacking problems such as spam almost impossible.

As the takedown of various ISPs has shown, service providers are now being set up specifically to distribute malware and spam right under the noses of the authorities in countries such as the US. Similarly, the de-regulation of the domain registration system has allowed crooked registrars to spring up which exist solely to bend that system to criminal needs. Telling these apart from legitimate Internet businesses is often difficult.

Woods in unconvinced that there is an easy solution to this problem. Simply striking at these ISP and registrars could actually hamper police investigations that rely on the accumulation of evidence trails and deeper associations over longer periods, he said.

The full report (a 10MB PDF file) can be http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/intelligence.aspx ">downloaded from MessageLabs' website.

Q. What is the Apple Tablet?A. Rumour points to Apple working on a large iPod touch device with extended computing functionality. This would make it similar to the PC Tablet devices.

Q. Why are there so many rumours about an Apple tablet?A. The mythological Apple tablet has a long and distinguished history in Apple folklore.

In May 2001, Kevin Fox, a lead designer at Google said on his blog: "at least five times in the past 10 years engineers at Apple have worked on initiatives to bring a full sized tablet-based computer to market. Though the previous four attempts never saw the light of day, Apple has saved the best for last. This July: Meet iPad".

That was over eight years ago, and rumours and myths of an Apple tablet have been circulating ever since. If true Apple has been working on a tablet PC in some form or another for 18 years now.

Q. Why would Apple want to release a Tablet now?A. The tablet rumour really returned en-masse when netbook-style computers arrived on the scene. Ever since Asus kicked off the market with its EeePC, Apple has been under pressure from its customers to create a lower cost computing option than the MacBook for lightweight work (email, surfing the web, and so on).

Apple has been quite dismissive of netbooks, and Tim Cook, Apple COO, did comment that the iPod touch was a great way to go about these things. However, demand for a netbook-alternative has never really abated.

There's no denying that customer demand for cheaper computing is driving down the price of laptops, but that doesn't mean Apple has to follow suit. Steve Jobs dismissed netbooks saying "we don't know how to make a sub $500 computer that isn't junk" but also tellingly said: "We'll wait and see how that nascent category evolves," he said. "And we've got some pretty interesting ideas if it does evolve."

The rise of the netbook is coupled with a rise in the popularity of ebook readers (another device that Steve Jobs was famously dismissive of).

Although these remain relatively niche, Apple may believe that it can build a tablet that out-performs both netbooks and ebooks.

Q. What does Apple have to say on this?A. It's fair to say that all the rumours have come from every source but Apple itself. In 2003, Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal, "There are no plans to make a tablet people want keyboards. We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail."

But Steve Jobs' protestations have never stopped the rumour machine grinding its corn. Not least of which because Apple continuously applies for patents regarding touch screen interfaces, gesture controls, and devices without keyboards. As recently as last month an Apple patent involving online media distribution additions to iTunes (effectively books, magazines, and newspapers) have kept the Apple Tablet rumour alive.

Q. Could it all be smoke and mirrors?A. When the iPhone launched in 2007 (and the iPod touch shortly afterwards) it was generally felt that the tablet rumours were off the mark after all. All the patents and planning had really been geared towards the iPhone, and subsequently the iPod touch. You didn't have to look far to find Apple's touch screen computer. It just turned out be pocket-sized.

It's still possible that all these rumours and patents are off the mark and that Apple sees the iPod touch and iPhone as its tablet. It's also possible that Apple is testing out ideas, and patenting products, but may decide not to launch a device after all. But there's no smoke without some fire, and reasonably informed sources, such as this article in BusinessWeek, claim that Apple is at least testing devices out.

NEXT: What you will be able to do with an Apple Tablet

Disclaimer: All of the following is based upon rumour and hearsay. We've heard nothing even remotely concrete from Apple regarding a tablet and with such a heritage behind it the Apple Tablet rumour waters are muddy to say the least.

Q. What will it look like?A. Nobody outside of Apple really knows. If rumours of a late 2010 launch are true it may be that Apple itself hasn't decided yet. In terms of styling most people are envisioning an oversized iPod touch. Reasonably thin with a silver bezel and black plastic case. Some concepts also envision it to appear more similar to the unibody MacBook Air, with an aluminium backing and thin tapered sides.

Q. How big will it be?A. Most rumours point to a screen either 9.7 or 10in in size. Given that the smallest MacBook screen is 13in and the iPhone screen is 3.5in it would make sense for it to be between these two amounts.

Having said that most ebooks have a smaller screen at 6.5in and Apple could conceivably go for a smaller more pocket-able (or at least handbag-able) device. We think it's unlikely to go any larger than 10inch, but as with all these things you'll find out if Steve Jobs stands up on stage with one in his hand.

Q. What will the screen resolution be?A. In terms of screen resolution we are expecting it to support 720p HD movie downloads from iTunes, so that would be at least 1280 x 720p, although we have also heard the number 1440 x 1050 bandied around.

As with the iPhone and iPod touch, the screen is expected to feature multi-touch technology and the fingerprint resistant oleophobic coating. Unlike the iPhone it is also expected to react to stylus-input. This will enable more accurate work, especially when using creative applications such as image and video editing.

Q. What's this about an OLED screen?A. OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screens are a relatively new technology that Apple is rumoured to be looking at for the Apple Tablet (and we also presume for the next iteration of iPhone). These screens aren't cheap, but they are capable of completely switching off black pixels. The result is a screen with noticeably greater contrast with solid black areas, and much brighter colours as a result.

The only devices we've seen using OLED technology so far are a 11in Sony XEL-1 Television ($2,499) and the Samsung H1 which sports an impressive 3.5in OLED touchscreen (and at £30 per month on a 24 month contract it matches the iPhone). If Apple does include a 10in screen OLED screen it could increase the price dramatically though. Although by the time the Tablet comes out the price may have fallen enough to be palatable.

Another advantage of OLED technology is that it enables displays to be incredibly thin. The Sony XEL-1 is only 3mm thin, for example.

Q. What processor will it have?A. The iPhone 3GS and 16GB iPod touch are both running a 600Mhz ARM CPU, and we'd expect the Tablet to be more powerful than that. It should be at least 800Mhz (which is where we expect the next iteration of iPhone to be) but it may edge towards the higher specs found in the MacBook.

While Core 2 Duo technology would probably be overkill, Intel's Atom architecture (designed for low power netbooks) goes up to 2GHz clock speed.

Another possibility is that it will make use of the NVIDIA Ion platform. This combines an Intel Atom CPU with a GeForce 9400 graphics card. The result is device that is relatively good value, energy efficient, and capable of running high-definition video. Apple could also implement Snow Leopard's OpenCL technology to harness spare GPU power.

However, the ARM Cortex A8 chipset is taking ARM towards netbook speeds (while Intel is also working its way into the smartphone space). The Arm Cortex A8 is apparantly more power efficient than the Intel Atom as well. Our sister site Computerworld says: "Some ARM chips routinely use 10-20 times less power than Intel for similar operations. Battery usage with ARM chips in prospective netbooks could be measured in days, not hours - much like smartphones."

Yet another option is something completely unknown. Apple proved in the launch of the original MacBook Air that it could get Intel, and other manufacturers, to create completely bespoke chips for them. It is also possible that this will see the introduction of a new chipset designed by PA Semi, the company that Apple bought last year.

NEXT: What OS and software will it run?

Q. Will it run Mac OS X?A. We don't think so. It's more likely to run a variation on the iPhone and iPod touch software. Of course, this is all based on OS X but in terms of visually identifiable features and core functionality we expect it to be more like an iPhone than a MacBook.

Although the lack of full Mac OS X may be disappointing to some, we imagine the iPhone interface to be a much better fit for a touch screen device. And if the CPU is relatively lightweight running iPhone software quickly would be more appropriate than running Mac OS X slowly.

Q. Will you be able to install Mac software?A. Again, we think it's more likely to be akin to an iPod touch or iPhone than a MacBook, so we'd expect it to be able to run iPod touch and iPhone software, but not Mac OS X software (although rumour has pointed to Apple testing a device that runs all Mac software).

We expect software to be downloaded from the iTunes Store in the form of apps. Apple has too much invested in the iTunes ecosystem to move back to allowing third-party installation of software.

Having said that, if Apple does produce a device more powerful than an iPhone or iPod touch, and with a pen-input screen it would be a shame not to be able to run really high-end software such as Photoshop. Although we imagine if the Tablet is successful, companies such as Adobe will code specific versions for the device.

Q. What about Apple's own software?A. Again, we don't know. The presence of iMovie, iPhoto, and GarageBand would make for a much more interesting device. Even more so if it ran Final Cut Express and Logic Express alongside pen-based input. Much of this depends on how powerful the device is, which in turn would affect the price (more on that later). We're sure these are questions Apple's thought long and hard about.

Q. What about other media?

Recent Apple patents show that Apple is considering an all-encompassing digital publishing arm to iTunes that pushes digital versions of books, magazines, newspapers, alongside the current offering of television shows, podcasts, and films. Current ebooks aren't powerful enough to handle this kind of versatility, and laptops aren't handheld. A tablet would be necessary to bring about this kind of digital revolution.

The Apple Tablet could take on both the ebooks and netbooks at the same time, while simultaneously enabling Apple to push forward the iTunes store into new areas.

Of course, we fully expect the device to run all media sold in the iTunes Store such as movies, TV shows, and music.

Q. Will you be able to multi-task between apps?A. We certainly hope so. Mind you, we're hoping for this functionality soon on the iPhone as well.

Q. What other controls will there be?A. Much depends on the design. It could feature the home button, volume controls, and sleep/wake up button from the iPhone. We're not sure how much sense these make on a tablet device, especially the Home button which really is to enable you to traverse between apps without the presence of multi-tasking or a dock. In some ways changes to the physical design depend on how much is changed to the interface design.

Q. What will the interface look like?A. Macworld has mocked up iPhones to a 9 and 10in screen and you'd be surprised how big and ungainly the regular iPhone interface looks when oversized. Especially the keyboard (which we'll come to next). So we wouldn't be surprised to find a redesigned and slightly different interface.

Something between an iPhone and Mac interface would be likeable, although we don't think the multiple windows and Menu bar style-design of Mac OS X would sit comfortably on such a small screen. We're imagining an iPhone style interface with a vastly improved virtual keyboard.

Q. Will it have a physical keyboard?A. Almost certainly not. That would make it a laptop or netbook and Apple has referred to netbooks as "junky" because they have cramped keyboards.

Q. What will the virtual keyboard be like?A. The iPhone / iPod touch keyboard is designed to work effectively in a small space. If you size it up in Photoshop it suddenly looks a tad ridiculous with too many gaps and not enough keys. If it has a virtual keyboard we expect it to be a bit more similar to the regular Mac keyboard.

Having said that, we doubt if you'll find it an effective enough replacement for the physical keys on the MacBook. Whatever else the Tablet may be amazing at, we doubt if it'll be good for intensive text-based work (such as writing up papers, or articles such as this one). For that sort of work you'd be better off investing in a MacBook.

Q. Any other interface tricks?A. Patents point to a device that will recognise pen input, as well as finger input. This will transform image editing apps and ensure that more detailed work is a possibility. But whether this translates to handwriting recognition is another matter. Apple introduced handwriting recognition on the Newton (the project Steve Jobs famously canned immediately upon his return to Apple). Handwriting recognition was commonplace on PDAs, but was never really accurate enough to be a beginner-proof system (you really had to learn special squiggles to get it working effectively).

Update: One of the patents has handwriting recognition manager on it it, so maybe it will have handwriting recognition after all.

Q. Will the interface be haptic?A. This Apple patent shows Apple is clearly looking at haptic feedback for the next iteration of iPhone, so the inclusion of haptic tech in the tablet would be a good differentiating factor.

We've seen more haptic interfaces appearing on other mobile phones, so it may be that Apple introduces this technology. Haptic feedback, incidentally, is the small buzzing sensation that some screens make when you touch them.

Well implemented haptic technology has the ability to simulate the real feel of keys. It has been suggested that the technology can be implemented at a much better level than currently displayed by market devices, and that it can simulate the real texture of physical buttons on a virtual screen.

Q. What if I like the touch of real keys?A. Then perhaps a MacBook may be really more for you. One thing this device really isn't going to be (or at least isn't by all accounts) is a low-cost MacBook. If you want a MacBook but can't afford one, we suggest looking for an old model on eBay, or checking Apple's refurb store rather than place your hopes on this device.

Q. Any other special features?A. Even though there aren't any rumours, we're expecting this device to feature an iSight and be capable of video chat.

Q. Will it have a camera?A. We don't know. The device seems a little large to act as a regular camera, but the ability to run more powerful image-editing software on it would make a camera an appealing inclusion. Then again, the more features Apple puts in; the greater the price will be.

Q. What about GPS?A. We're not really sure but it's unlikely. It could make use of Location Services via WiFi triangulation though, so you should still be able to tag items with location information.

NEXT: How much is the Apple Tablet likely to cost?

Q. How much will it cost?A. Most reports place it between $800 and $1,000. The easiest way to do a comparison to the UK is to look at a product that is $800 in the US (the 2.53GHz Mac mini), and a $1,000 product (the white MacBook); then check the corresponding prices in the UK.

So that would give it a price between £650 and £800. To our minds even a £650 price seems a tad high, although we certainly wouldn't rule out a device with an initial premium price point. Anybody who remembers how expensive the iPhone was at launch (or for that matter the original iPod ($400) can testify that Apple starts off high, and works its way down the consumer food chain.

There have also been rumours that the inclusion of an OLED screen will push the price even higher, up to the $1,500 mark (£1,199). Mind you, other reports have put the price at between $500 and $700 (approximately £400). This would put it between the iPhone and MacBook, which is where we expect it to sit.

Q. So where does this leave the rumoured MacNetBook?A. It's worth noting that Apple's refrain from creating cheap laptops with low profit margins has been rewarded financially. On 19 Oct 2009 Apple reported record Mac sales and a $1.67b quarterly profit.

Whatever your stance on netbooks (and most people, understandably, want cheaper laptops not more expensive ones) they haven't been particularly profitable for makers. And most netbooks now are pushing the £300 mark (despite offering lower specs than equivalently priced laptops) as manufacturers try to increase margins.

Apple said it was watching the market, and we presume it continues to do so.

Q. How likely do you think it is that Apple is actually going to release a tablet?A. The thing that struck us during researching this feature was how many people in 2002 were absolutely convinced that an Apple tablet was due at any point, such as this eWeek Article from 2002 titled Waiting for the Mac Tablet.

And somebody somewhere has stated - with absolute conviction in their hearts - that an Apple Tablet is absolutely, definitely, and without doubt, coming to market every single year ever since.

We think it's coming out in 2010.

(Note: It's possible that developers will be the first to see the Apple Tablet in June 2010 at Apple's WWDC event).

FINALLY: A brief history of the Apple tablet rumour

A brief history of the tablet rumour

May 2001 Kevin Fox, a highly respect lead-designer for Google writes a blog entry called "The Next Big Thing" that claims Apple is bringing a tablet PC called the iPad to market in July.Fox Fury

Nov 2001 Bill Gates demonstrates a Microsoft Tablet PC at COMDEX, leading to rumours that Apple will soon enter the market.Microsoft.com

Sep 2002 Steve Jobs tells International Herald Tribune "We're not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It's turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your e-mail? We have all the technology ourselves to do that - we just don't know whether it will be successful."Intomobile

Nov 2002 Despite Steve Jobs' comment to the Inernational Herald Tribune, Apple Tablet rumours continue to do the rounds. At least eWeek.com admits there's "no smoking pen"eWeek

April 2003 The Register reports on an Apple contract with Quanta to build a device they are referring to as the "Wireless Display".The Register

August 2004 The Register re-ignites the Tablet rumour by reporting on an Apple handheld computer trademark registered in Europe.The Register

April 2005 Tablet PC Review reports that the iPad is due in June 2005, even claiming that Apple was demonstrating the device to select journalists at the Apple Store in Las Vegas.Tablet PC Review

Jan 2006 A US Patent and Trademark Office patent reveals an Apple handheld device based upon an accelerometer. (Hindsight is a wonderful thing though, and the patent clearly referred to the iPhone). Even so it continued to fuel the tablet rumour at the time.Accelerometer Blogspot

Jan 2007 Steve Jobs reveals the iPhone at the Macworld Expo. This explains the accelerometer and touch-input patents and puts most tablet rumours to rest... for a while.Macworld UK

Sep 2007 Apple launches the iPod touch.BBC

July 2008 In a earnings call Steve Jobs promises "many wonderful new products in coming months" sparking netbook and Apple tablet rumoursMacworld UK

Dec 2008 First rumours of a large-format iPod touch device similar to a tablet surface on Web site Tech Crunch, who cite three different sources.Tech Crunch

April 2009 In a conference call, Apple COO Tim Cook says: "People looking for a small device that has Internet access might consider an iPod Touch or an iPhone" adding that "if Apple finds a way to make an innovative product, they'll do that".Wall Street Journal

Sep 2009 Gizmodo reports that Apple is in talks with media companies rooted in print (specifically the New York Times) about content for a "new device navigated without keyboard or mouse."Gizmodo

Nov 2009 Apple patent for a handheld computer system with both pen and touch-based input appears on the US Patent and Trademark OfficeMacworld UK

Nov 2009 Chinese newspaper Digitimes reports that Apple is waiting for OLED displays and that the Apple Tablet will not launch until second half of 2010.Macworld UK

Dec 2009 Time Inc demos Mac Tablet friendly concept of Sports Illustrated. An Apple patent appears that outlines the process of "Generating a Media Package" that is widely believe to relate to an iTunes Media Store used to sell digital books, magazines, and other media.Macworld UK