I don't want to sound like a grizzled old Lou Grant smoking a cigar and tossing back belts of the scotch I keep in my desk for the days the news doesn't go so good (which is, incidentally, every day.) but there are some stories you just toss in the wait and watch pile.

Earlier today the word on the street was that if you even opened your browser on the Android mobile phone in your pocket, you had a 1 in 10 shot of opening the gates of hell, only to be swallowed whole into a fiery and lonesome abyss seconds later from which you shall never return. No pomp, no bells, no ceremony. Just a hole opening in the earth, swallowing you and all your little 'lectric bits and leaving your friends behind to argue over who was to take responsibility for your lunch tab.

Well, rest easy kids. Skip that extra blood pressure pill before bed and even grab the bacon in the morning with both fists because there is a good reason we didn't jump on the sky is falling, OMG WTH are Teh Patch3s!!!11 insanity earlier in the day. Google's Rich Cannings, Android Security Engineer who contacted Read Write Web summed up why the Android platform is a little less of a problem in the wild than some other OSes we've been conditioned to. Rich states in an email, ""Charlie Miller, a security researcher at Independent Security Evaluators, contacted security@android.com on January 21st regarding a bug in PacketVideo's OpenCore media library", continuing, "Media libraries are extremely complex and can lead to bugs, so we designed our mediaserver, which uses OpenCore, to work within its own application sandbox."

In fact, most parts of Android are designed with this sandbox method in mind. keeping the individual programs isolated from the OS and the other programs, and allowing message passing only through subscribed methods over which the user has ultimate control. I.e. If you don't give you Media Player access to your phone-book, it can't find the phone number for your aunt Millie in Rhode Island. The privacy breaches are generally more granular and contained, when they're able to happen at all.

Google's Rich Cannings lays it down a little more succinctly, "If the bug Charlie reported to us on January 21st is exploited, it would be limited to the mediaserver and could only exploit actions the mediaserver performs, such as listen to and alter some audio and visual media."

Regardless, Google says a patch has been prepared and has been pushed to the vendor (T-Mobile) for distribution. Given the (now) less critical nature of the bug users might expect less to see a rushed weekend patch job, and might see it more appropriate to patch a known and so far unexploited issue with limited scope on a more manageable schedule for the network.

Live video streaming from your mobile phone is probably a mobile carrier worst nightmare simply because the amount of bandwidth video consumes. And leading that nightmare is Qik.

Simply put, Qik takes your mobile phone's built in video camera and transforms it into a webcam that connects to the Qik site where it will host live feeds of your video, as it happens. That's right, people can now watch you make a fool of yourself anywhere you go.

We were able to test the Qik service on our 3G connected Windows Mobile phone. The installation was quick and only required a few SMS messages be sent back and forth to authorize our account. Once configured just launch the application and your video will automatically appear on the Qik website. Video quality is acceptable and we only experienced slight delays due in part to our mobile connection and location.

Once you end your transmission the live video is then archived to the site for later viewing. Of course like any good site, they offer 2 different privacy settings for your feeds, public and private. At least this way not everyone in the world can see that you haven't cleaned up your room.

Currently in alpha, Qik supports a handful of Windows Mobile and Symbian phones with iPhone testing starting soon. We hope that future updates to the service will also include the ability to adjust video size and image quality. They do recommend an unlimited data plan and in the few days that we used the service we would also recommend it as well.

The UK's Omnifone will be the "first" company to offer unlimited, free music to all mobile handsets branded with the "MusicStation" name. LG will be the first to release a MusicStation Max phone, which will become available in the first half of 2008 to European and Asian-Pacific regions.

The new phone, announced at the World Mobile Congress, will likely include a touchscreen plus a pull-out keyboard (to hopefully compliment a decent amount of flash memory). What's unlimited music worth if you can't actually download it?

Omnifone's music selection includes about 1.6 million songs from the four major labels and other countless smaller record companies. Also, if you happen to snag one of these but happen to drop it in a pool, don't worry! Omnifone keeps a list of all the music you downloaded if you happen to damage your handset.

[via Engadget]

1. Full access to YouTube in Windows Mobile: Everyone's got a solution for playing YouTube Mobile videos on a Windows Mobile phone, but it seems no one's giving Windows Mobile users a way to access YouTube.com's full, flash video library. Oh wait, there is a solution. It only requires users to install a specific version of TCPMP and the Flash Video Bundle, an add-on to TCPMP to give it the ability to play flash video. Use Pocket IE to navigate to YouTube (a few other flash video sites are also supported). Clicking on a video will open TCPMP to play it. Easy, right?

You could also install Orb on your PC and use the Orb mobile client to find YouTube videos on the go, but that solution requires you to leave your home PC on all the time.

At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.

The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.

This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.

[via The Boy Genius]

Sprint and Microsoft have teamed up to bring users what they call "the industry's first fully integrated GPS location-aware mobile search service."

The service which launches today is available on Sprint phones and allows users to use one search box to search the web, local listings, and maps at the same time as well as use their cell phones GPS to quickly find local businesses without having to manually input their location. So next time you're on vacation you don't have to know where you are to find out where the nearest Starbucks is or where you can score a piece of pizza. One neat aspect of the new service is voice search which allows users to search by saying a business name and then have their search results show up on the screen.

Sprint's enhanced mobile search is available now on most data-enabled Sprint phones at no additional cost for data subscribers. The voice search feature is available for users on select handsets as a free download.

Scrabble is without a doubt one of the most addictive games you can play on a mobile device. Handmark's Scrabble for Palm OS and Windows Mobile has been around for a couple of years. But if you have a mobile phone with a simpler operating system you'd been out of luck. Until now.

Electronic Arts has released a version of Scrabble that plays on any cellphone with Java support. It's a bit trickier to play without a stylus or mouse, but it's surprising how quickly you can get used to arranging tiles on the board with your keypad. Rearranging the tiles on your tray is a bit more tricky, so it helps if you're good at visualizing anagrams in your head.

The game is available for $2.49 to $6.99 (we assume the price changes depending on your handset and carrier). You can also play a browser-based demo that shows how to use your keypad to play.

[via Just Another Mobile Monday]

In the annals of video game history, there is no finer an opportunity for endless explosive glee than the vertical shooter. Most vertical shooter games involve a little two-dimensional spaceship that flies only in one direction (up) and shoot lots of interesting projectiles at an abundant cache of enemies. These seemingly endless enemy spaceships apparently have figured out how to fly in many directions--including right at you, which is bad--unless your trigger finger is fast enough.

Naturally, if you've just had a stressful day at work and you're wedged between two New Yorkers on the subway as you drive home, you might have the urge to blow something up. This is when the vertical shooter is at its most valuable. Pop open your mobile phone, fire up the latest Robotech offering, a vertical shooter in every respect, and blow away thousands of virtual enemies until your stress is gone, you reach your subway stop, or your cell-phone's softkeys (the game's trigger buttons) wear out.

Think Google has a shot at creating popular software for mobile phones? Bill Gates doesn't. Gates does his best to politely trash Google's business prowess in this Reuters article.

Gates is quotes as saying, "They've introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So you're now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they're going to have the world's best phone and it's going to be free?"

Microsoft currently holds about 10 percent of the mobile phone market.

Cellphone maker Nokia has purchased Twango, a site that lets users upload and share photos, videos, and audio.

Nokia plans to use the company to make it easier for users to share multimedia content whether they're using a computer or a mobile phone.

Twango was founded in 2004, and like other social media sites allows users to share files through a central website or embed audio, video, and images on blogs and other websites.

It should be interesting to see how Nokia uses the company's assets. Hopefully you'll be able to upload content from your phone in addition to viewing shared media on the go.

[via CNet]

Verizon Wireless customers can now shoot and record videos on a cellphone and then upload them to YouTube by dialing 98823, which happens to spell YTUBE.

You'll need to add your cellphone number to your YouTube account by visiting www.youtube.com/mobile. You don't need Verizon's V CAST service to upload movies, but the $3/day or $15/month service will let you watch videos. Or you can just eat into your data minutes by visiting YouTube's mobile site.

So let's see. You can upload videos from your phone, you can update your blog from your phone, and you can make phone calls from your computer. What's this world coming to?

[via SolSie]

Zurfer is straight out of the Yahoo! Research Berkeley facility. This handheld application is a location based photo browser. What it is in basic terms is Flickr for your mobile device.

The Zurfer application is currently being developed in the Yahoo research labs, and will -- when loaded on mobile phones -- showcase photos taken around you based on current gps co-ordinates. You can also pull in the latest photos from friends, take photos and add them to your Flickr collection, and perform searches in Flickr for images using the mobile software.

The Zurfer application is in testing phases, and could quite possibly contain bugs, so download at your own risk. It is available, and has been tested on Nokia S60, Motorola RAZR V3X and a few other devices.

APC Magazine has an intriguing interview with Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker on the state of mobile web browsers and Mozilla's plans to develop a mobile version of Firefox.

Baker says developers are working on a mobile browser, but says it's a long term goal and nothing users should expect to see anytime soon. While the Minimo project is based on Mozilla, it isn't an official product and it's still a few (dozen) steps behind Opera Mobile when it comes to speed and performance.

Baker says some of the things people like most about Firefox are add-ons and the ability to customize the browser, which are things Mozilla would want to bring to a mobile version. One of the main challenges is bringing the full web experience to a small screen. An experiment, called Joey, is currently underway to look at ways to deliver information to mobile devices.

It'll be interesting to see how a mobile version of Firefox would stack up to Opera Moile, which already includes tabbed browsing, and even some AJAX support.

[via Opera Watch]

Ubuntu is quickly become the Linux distribution of choice for users looking for a desktop Windows replacement. But why stop there?

Ubuntu developers are planning to create a mobile version of the popular distribution. The mobile version of Ubuntu will be designed to run on systems running Intel's new low-power processor and chipset designed for mobile devices.

Ubuntu is planning a mobile version of its software as well as an embedded version. In other words, you could see stripped down versions of Ubuntu running on devices ranging from UMPCs to mobile phones.

The first mobile edition is due out in October at the same time as Ubuntu 7.10 is released.

[via SolSie]

Web browsers on mobile phones and PDAs are notoriously bad at rendering web pages meant to be viewed on monitors with resolutions of 1024x768 or higher resolutions. Pages can take an incredibly long time to load, and once they do, you're often presented with the least important information first as the browser puts all the navigation links from the left side of the page first, followed by the content.

Mowser is one of the latest web-based solutions for these problems. There's no program to download, just one website to bookmark. You navigate to Mowers.com, and then type in the URL of the page you want to visit. Mowser splits the page up into a series of smaller pages that will load faster. It also strips out most of the graphics.

The site also has a list of popular sites that are already designed for the small screen.

Overall, the idea is great, but the execution is so-so. For example, if you use the link to the New York Times News River, everything looks great on a mobile browser. But if you type www.nytimes.com into Mowser, the first screen you see is a page of navigation links. It's not until halfway through the second page that you start to get articles.

The developer has a video walkthrough on the company blog if you want to get a full look at Mowser's features. For a list of similar resources, check out Download Squad's roundup of mobile start pages.

[via WebWare]