Mystery surrounds the identity of four winners in Google's $10m Android mobile applications competition, announced last November.

JavaOne provides a good barometer of the current fads hitting IT. Three years ago, Java discovered open source, two years ago it was AJAX, while last year was a non-event. But this year, the rich client’s back, baby.

Adobe Systems is throwing open its Flash and AIR file formats to speed delivery of Rich Internet Applications to billions of mobile devices with its tools and players.

Announcing its second quarter financial results today, Apple confirmed the obvious by saying a "significant" number of iPhones are being purchased from its outlets with the express intention of unlocking them. That trend, coupled with higher-than-expected demand, has resulted in inventory shortages, the company claimed.

Comment Prophets predict the mobile phone will kill the fixed line and the internet will kill newspapers.

What usually happens is the old systems shuffle up to make space. Nothing dies. Television didn't kill cinema, cinema didn't kill theatres. The internet means newspapers carry less advertising and some things, like stock prices, disappear from the pages, but they remain the favourite reading in bed on a Sunday. Very little goes the way of the LP record and the typewriter.

ReMix 08 Microsoft aims to nail deals with major handset on Silverlight in the next few months, taking the media player software beyond the beachhead it has established with Nokia.

iPhone SDKs are like buses these days, the appear so frequently. Since my introductory piece on iPhone development, Apple has rolled out an initial SDK preview, a second iteration of the SDK (Beta 2) while a third beta followed not long behind. The second beta included the much-anticipated Interface Builder application but Beta 3 actually makes it work.

Intel has given a glimpse of the software its building so mobile computers can detect and communicate with a variety of devices, reducing the size of machine you need to lug about.

On Saturday the BBC-sponsored Over The Air: the 48-hour race to create innovative mobile applications wound up with 21 teams presenting applications they had hacked together.

Keyless entry systems are ubiquitous, from locking your car to accessing the restricted corridors of government and corporate power. It's therefore troubling to learn Wikipedia reading egg heads have cracked the encryption of a device widely used in a variety of keyless entry systems. There goes the girlfriend's VW, you thought you'd locked.

CTIA Wireless Google's Android platform is designed to drive fragmentation of mobile operating systems, creating an industry in which Google's cross-platform applications will thrive.

A hotly anticipated development kit for hacking your iPhone and bypassing Apple's official application store has been released.

CTIA '08 The LiMo Foundation has announced the first version of its Linux based mobile alternative to Google's Android is "complete". Except that it isn't.

CTIA Wireless For reasons unknown, Apple's new Jesus Phone SDK won't allow apps that run in the background. As many have noted, this rules out instant messaging - or, at least, instant messaging as we know it. But it also rules out all sorts of other useful applications, including the fledgling smartphone rescue tool from remote control maven LogMeIn.

Asus has posted a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Eee PC, the better to help coders write new programs to run on the elfin laptop's Xandros Linux distribution.

In a sudden about turn, analysts at Forrester Research have decided AJAX technology is not the best solution to rich Internet applications after all.

EclipseCon The Eclipse Foundation's announcement of a runtime project got a lot of coverage, as the one-time tools-centric initiative moved deeper into runtime deployment and management.

OSGi on mobile was one area that generated particular interest at EclipseCon. And not just any mobile: we're talking Google's Linux-based Android.

Andrew's mailbag With over 100,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK, and a $100m pot of money available for developers, there's no doubt Apple's MultiTouch UI has a lot of potential.

But, er... what for? Here are a few of your suggestions:

Apple has just sent a form letter to an army of would-be iPhone developers - and no one knows what it means.

eComm Christopher Allen has some questions for Steve Jobs.