Week in review: Wireless in Las Vegas

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The service will roll out gradually over the next three to four months and offer free streaming music, unprotected MP3 downloads, ringtones, and e-commerce offerings such as merchandise and ticket sales. The goal is to make MySpace a one-stop shop for everything music.

The verdict's still out, however, on whether MySpace Music will be a legitimate challenger to wrest away some of the bargaining power Apple has wielded as the No. 1 online music seller. That status, incidentally, was confirmed by Apple this week.

Among the top four music companies participating in MySpace Music, EMI was the lone holdout. Perhaps that has something to do with EMI's incoming chief of its digital unit, Douglas Merrill, who left his job as Google's chief information officer, it was learned this week, and might just save the industry.

In other music news, the troubled SpiralFrog music service signed a deal with Warner Music this week, but it may be awhile before it can actually feature music from Warner artists.

Hardware and hard times
In other news this week, the low-power, low-cost Atom chip played a central figure at IDF Shangai, but it was by no means the only processor on the agenda. Also at Intel's developer event, 10 hardware vendors--from Panasonic to Lenovo--showed off their takes on Intel's notion of portable computing.

IBM was added to a list of "excluded" federal government contractors after the Environmental Protection Agency alleged serious wrongdoing. The ban, however, was later lifted, a relief for a company that last year generated nearly $1.43 billion from federal government contracts.

Meanwhile, in a sign of some trying economic times, several technology companies announced plans to scale back operations and lay off employees. Dell is closing its flagship factory in Austin, Texas, amid hard times--and history isn't on its side. Motorola, which has seen its handset market share plummet, announced it's laying off 2,600 employees and will take a $104 million tax charge for the first quarter to cover severance costs. And Google is laying off about 300 employees in its newly acquired DoubleClick ad business.

Also of note
Adobe Systems' Lightroom 2 beta broadens editing horizons...Open XML passes, but challenges are coming to vote...Homeland Security ended up the first to blink in Real ID staring match...There's no shortage of social network aggregator sites...Google Docs getting offline access...Sun Microsystems close to buying Intel would-be competitor Montalvo.

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Week in review: iPhone gets even less appealing

With the announcement of Samsung Instinct and Windows Mobile 6.1, the dumbphone gets even more dumb among its smart classmates, LOL.