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The first updates to current Symbian phones will appear in the first half of next year, Nokia said today.

At the Symbian Exchange and Exposition in Amsterdam, the handset manufacturer--which said yesterday that it was bringing development of Symbian back in-house--said the first updates would include the addition of split-screen text entry, a Qwerty keyboard that works when the phone is in portrait mode, integrated Swype input, and a new browser.

New Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop revealed in October that there would no longer be a sharp break between Symbian^3--the version found in handsets including the N8 … Read more

A magazine accused of publishing a blogger's story without permission has seen a dramatic rise in the number of its Facebook friends, although they're not all that friendly.

The tale of writer Monica Gaudio hit the Web on Wednesday after she reported that her story, "A Tale of Two Tarts," was apparently lifted and published by the print magazine Cooks Source with her byline, but without her knowledge or any compensation. After tracking down the editor at the magazine, Gaudio asked for an apology on Facebook and in the magazine, as well as a $130 donation … Read more

Update at 4:03 p.m. PT: This story has been modified with response from Microsoft.

The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft's much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a $2,000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer.

Kinect, which launched today, is currently available solely for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that's not enough.

And that's why Adafruit--led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip … Read more

Coverity, a company with tools to check for programming problems that pose security risks, has found 359 of them in a scan of the Android source code.

There are 88 high-risk problems and 271 medium-risk problems in the source code underlying the Android kernel used in HTC's Incredible phone, the company said Tuesday. Android uses the Linux kernel, but the Android-specific components have a higher defect rate than mainstream Linux, Coverity said.

Some good news for Google, though, is that the defect rate is still lower than the industry average of one defect per 1,000 lines of code. … Read more

News of the weird: Remi Denis-Courmont, one of the developers of the VLC Media Player app, has apparently sent Apple a "formal notification of copyright infringement" and asked that the app be removed from the App Store.

Yes, we have apparently crossed over into Bizarro World.

In the old days, it was Apple that did the app yanking, usually for obscure or arbitrary reasons. In recent months, however, the company has lifted--or at least loosened--many of its previous restrictions. Prior to that, it's unlikely the VLC Media Player would have been allowed in the first place.

As … Read more

Mozilla has pushed back the planned Firefox 4 release to 2011, a delay that's no surprise given the difficulties in releasing the first full-featured beta of the open-source browser--but that also gives breathing room for several competitors.

Mozilla had hoped to release Firefox 4 in 2010, but a newly updated Firefox 4 schedule shows the first release candidate arriving in early 2011.

"Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down, and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the 'feature complete' Beta 7 milestone against which our add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a mailing list message yesterday. "The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December. Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind."

Six beta versions have arrived in recent weeks, but Firefox 4 beta 7 hasn't appeared, despite more than six weeks of frenzied development. One big issue holding up release has been the integration of Firefox's older Tracemonkey engine for running Web-based JavaScript programs and the new JaegerMonkey engine that draws on Google's V8 engine in Chrome.

Mozilla's arewefastyet.com site shows progress matching Safari and Chrome JavaScript execution speed, but new JavaScript engines can be tough to tune. Several JavaScript bugs are blocking Firefox 4 beta 7. … Read more

California will soon lay claim to having the world's largest commercial solar thermal energy project in the world.

BrightSource Energy and NRG Energy subsidiary NRG Solar announced today that they're partnering on a 392-megawatt solar thermal project called the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.

All the other moving parts to make the plant a go also seem to be in place.

NRG Solar has signed a memorandum of understanding to partner with BrightSource, and plans to invest over $300 million in Ivanpah. Ivanpah has signed power of purchase agreements with Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric. … Read more

One Valley exec's "daunting challenge" is another's "hackalicious" Candyland, it seems.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs had some forceful words about Google's Android operating system in Monday's company earnings call--Jobs' first appearance on a quarterly call in two years--calling the open-source mobile software "very, very fragmented and [it] becomes more so every day." Android boss Andy Rubin hit back at him with a tweet full of open-source code.

Iain Dodsworth, the CEO of Twitter client manufacturer TweetDeck, joined the fray on Tuesday morning with a Tweet that read, "Did we … Read more

The first beta of Firefox 4 for Android arrived Thursday, offering users of Google's mobile operating system a browser interface with both smart new features and some weaknesses.

I tried the new beta on HTC's Google Nexus One, and I came away impressed overall--far more satisfied than with unstable and slower nightly builds for developers that I'd tried before. It's not going to be my default phone browser at this stage, but I'm not going to uninstall it, either.

Fennec background Before we get to my impressions, though, here's the background. Mozilla is trying … Read more