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Samsung and Apple are like a couple of bickering sisters. "I hate you. I love you. I hate you. I can't remember whether I hate you or I love you. I can remember suing you."

So, in the run-up to the Super Bowl, Samsung has released another ad that pokes and pokes at Apple fanboys and fangirls.

There they are waiting in line for, who knows, the iPhone 4SS. They are watching a very cool unboxing video. Then along comes one of their roommates to toss them a charger.

Oh, and look. He has turn-by-turn, voice-guided directions as standard more

I know there are many people whose eyelids are fluttering at the prospect of the new Google Galaxy Nexus phone.

There are slightly more people, though, who will never have heard of it.

Which means if you're going to produce an ad that says, roughly: "Hullo, this is the new, frightfully exciting, earth-shuddering phone from your Google buddies," then perhaps that ad should project your thought.

Instead, we are offered something that might well have been for a school, a retreat, or a local Green Party candidate.

It has pretty, caring young people enjoying their lives to the fullest, more

Let's talk money and hamburgers.

Sometimes you can spend a lot of money on a hamburger, sometimes very little. For example, at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, you can pay $18 for a very nice hamburger with exquisite french fries.

It is spectacularly better than the ones at the Golden State Warriors games, where, please believe me, the burger and fries are almost the same price as the Four Seasons and of a similar quality to the team in 2002. (And 2003. And 2004.)

These--and several other--thoughts on the finance/hamburger axis have been occupying my mind because of a fascinating speech and Q&A session yesterday at the University of Washington featuring Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

The way the Seattle Times records it, one enterprising listener asked Gates how she could become as blindingly rich as him.

Gates explained that money hadn't been his goal. He just loved what he was doing. Even better, he could involve his friends in this thing he loved. Soon, he had more money than he knew what to do with. Which he described as "a responsibility."

But here's the meat of it.

It has long been my personal dream to see Google's Larry Page wearing brightly patterned trousers and dancing uncontrollably.

I may have to make do with a man who will happily wear brightly patterned trousers and dance launching a search engine.

This is precisely what occurred today at the Web 2.0 Summit when the legend that is MC Hammer presented WIREDoo, a little engine that could go far. For its motto appears to be "deep search." (Or, perhaps, "relationship search.")

How did Hammer define deep search? Put succinctly, better search. This doesn't necessarily mean better than Google. more

Sony has unveiled the official details of the first touch-screen Android Walkman, with a Japanese release date of December 10 in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities.

The Walkman Z series comes with a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 512MB of RAM, and Android 2.3, all displayed through an enormous 4.3-inch LCD screen (480x800), according to a Sony Japan Web site (Google Translate.) Black, red, and a special Sony Store limited violet edition will float around various territories.

CNET's Stephen Shankland already provided much of this information during an exclusive reveal of the Android Walkman last month at IFA 2011.

Sony has certainly come a long way from the cassette Walkman of yesteryear.

Hardware features are impressive for a nonphone (such as mini-HDMI, DLNA, WM-Port/Mini-USB), but it is important to note the device only has Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 wireless capabilities. GPS and a gyroscope is also built-in to make the device relevant with the wide variety of games and location-aware Android apps out there. The Z series can access the full Android market. Continuous battery life is average at 20 hours for music playback and 5 hours video.

As for sound enhancements (and reasons for actually buying this over an iPod), digital noise canceling and a built-in S-Master MX digital amplifier are included. Music codec support is vast, including MP3, WMA, ATRAC, ATRAC Advanced Lossless, Linear PCM, AAC, and HE-AAC. We assume ATRAC compatibility will not happen outside of Japan, as it has been for several years now. FM radio is on board for those commercial filled broadcasts that we can't seem to live without.

Officially, we still have three weeks of summer, but we all know that after the three-day Labor Day weekend it's all but over. And it's probably a good thing. After the blistering pace of big news and wild moments over the past three months, we could all use an autumn vacation. Here's a look back at the stories that made summer 2011 so memorable:

iOS 5 and "one more thing" from WWDC: No blockbuster new device announcement came out of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Instead we got updates to Mac OS X and iOS to anticipate, as well as one more very intriguing thing. Steve Jobs announced iCloud, which rehashes a lot of cloud concepts that are already old hat for Android users, but adds that special Apple polish and iTunes Match, which syncs up users' music and media collections across iOS devices. The service still hasn't debuted, but Spotify landed in the U.S. (see below) in the meantime, creating some serious competition.

Everything's coming up tablets: The great race to catch up to the iPad continued, but no one seemed to gain ground. RIM's PlayBook flopped and HP's TouchPad... well, more on that later. But the tech world is far from giving up. Microsoft started the summer by introducing Windows 8, which is basically built to be tablet-ready with a touch interface. Of course, who knows if we'll see it before 2014--by that time tablets will probably have been replaced by nanotech thought-controlled devices. Amazon also looks to be throwing its hat in the tablet ring, with a rumored iPad-killer coming soon, maybe?

Everyone hacks everything: What's summer without a fresh Mountain Dew and Low-Orbit Ion Cannon by the glow of a flat-screen monitor, DDoSing the lazy days away? You're not anyone in this world anymore until someone hacks you. By that measure, a whole lot of people, companies, and governments finally "arrived" this year. Tongue-in-cheek congratulations to the CIA, Sony (several times over), Citigroup, Electronic Arts, Turkey, and so many more for making the long list of targets.

What do you do to dethrone the iPad?

Well, you could simply make a device that is so obviously better that people stream to your doors like raccoons to the garbage.

If that doesn't quite work, you could release a good product, call it the TouchPad, and tell people that the iPad isn't your competition at all because you're really after the enterprise customer.

Just in case that doesn't convince everyone, reach for one more resort: make them laugh.

I am grateful to the Silicon Alley Insider for revealing that HP has, indeed, gone for the more

For those who live for seeing someone rise from obscurity to reach the heights of temporary fame, seeing "American Idol" once a year just isn't enough.

In any case, it's only on two nights a week. What are you supposed to do with the other five? Pray that Simon Cowell's new show "The X Factor" will somehow be entertaining?

It seems that Justin Timberlake, he who is one of the new purchasers of MySpace, is at one with human feelings.

For, according to the Associated Press, Timberlake's manager, Johnny Smith, said after the purchase that, though more

When Sonos launched its iPhone app in 2008, it was a big deal for the company because it allowed iPhone and iPod Touch owners to buy a Sonos system without spending the extra dough on a $400 Sonos remote. That helped spur sales of the popular multiroom music wireless system, which is easy to set up without the help of a professional home installer.

Now the company hopes its new free Sonos Controller for Android app will attract a whole new batch of potential Sonos converts--or just please existing ones who happen to own Android-based smartphones.

Sonos Controller for Android, which will be available in late March as a free download from Android Market, is designed to work on any Android smartphone running Android 2.1 or later with a screen size of 320x480 (HVGA), 480x800 (WVGA), or 480x854 (WVGA). That includes most popular Android phones, such as the Motorola Droid X, Samsung Galaxy S series, and Evo 4G.

Currently, the app isn't officially supported on Android tablets, but Sonos reps said the app would potentially work on tablets but running in a smaller window. They didn't say when a true tablet version of the app would be available that would be similar to the one available for the iPad.