Cisco on Tuesday unveiled the Cisco Cius, an Android-powered tablet that targets business users. Billed as a “mobile collaboration business tablet,” the Cius delivers virtual desktop integration with access from anywhere to the full range of Cisco collaboration and communication applications, including HD video. The ultra-portable device weighs in at just 1.15 lbs. and offers multiparty conferencing, email, messaging, browsing and the ability to produce, edit and share content stored locally or centrally in the cloud.

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Sony has issued a voluntary global recall of 535,000 Vaio notebook computers after reports of a defect in the devices’ temperature control software was brought to its attention. The flaw can cause the notebook to overheat, sometimes to an extreme degree. The recalled products are from the VPCF11 Series and VPCCW2 Series notebook computers, slightly less than half of which are in the U.S. Sony has also offered a firmware patch for the defect, Stacey Palosky, spokesperson for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, told TechNewsWorld.

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Less than a month after the release of the Sprint HTC EVO 4G, many of the smartphone’s users recently found their devices rendered completely inoperable. That’s because a firmware update released by Sprint this week seems to have gone badly awry for an unknown number of the customers who installed it. For those customers, the firmware update has “bricked” their phones — a term not so affectionately used for phones that behave more like doorstops than multifunction communications devices. The screen is blank, the signal is gone, the phone is dead.

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Personal computing altered the world forever, and now the digitization of biology is poised to bring about sweeping change. Craig Venter’s recent announcement of the first synthetic genome was a huge milestone, but many outside of Silicon Valley remain unaware of the “do-it-yourself biology” movement. This movement consists of smart engineers who like to tinker in garages, basements and living rooms, hacking the genetic codes of various organisms.

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Regardless of your take on the iPad as a do-everything replacement device for laptops and netbooks, other e-book readers are gaining a substantial foothold. Devices such as the Kindle and the Nook provide access to volumes of literature and documents without having to lug a fully-functional computer around. However, EBRs do not completely replace the need for notebooks and netbooks. Depending on your specific needs, both laptop/netbook-based EBR software and a stand-alone e-book device can be indispensable for portable access to work-related and recreational reading.

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Google has begun rolling out Android 2.2 in over-the-air updates to owners of its Nexus One smartphone. Android 2.2, also known as “Froyo,” has several new features, including a few that target the business market. Updates for other Android smartphones will have to wait until their customized interfaces have been tweaked to work well with Froyo. Froyo now lets Microsoft Exchange administrators enforce corporate password policies across multiple devices. Its developers have added numeric pin or alpha-numeric password options to unlock the device.

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A set of PowerPoint slides that appear to contain details about the next version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system surfaced Monday. The slides indicate that Microsoft plans to tackle the long-running problem of Windows’ slow start-up time, in addition to placing cutting-edge technology such as facial recognition in the new operating system. Questions remain, however, about the authenticity of the material. The slides, dated April 2010, first surfaced on the Italian Web site Windosette.

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The Obama administration on Monday released a new space policy for the U.S. that emphasizes international cooperation and the advancement of the commercial space industry. “No longer are we racing against an adversary; in fact, one of our central goals is to promote peaceful cooperation and collaboration in space, which not only will ward off conflict, but will help to expand our capacity to operate in orbit and beyond,” President Obama explained. Debris and other hazards associated with satellite technology were another concern Obama mentioned.

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Sadly, it is now impossible to do a review of the iPhone 4 without mentioning the antenna and the reported issues when you hold the iP4 — which is a shame because there is so much more to the iP4 than the antenna. That is not to make light of the potential issue — I just want to point out there is much, much more to the iP4. To start, there is the Retina Display, which is “clearly” the best screen on any smartphone, period. Then there is the improved 5 MP camera with a flash on the back, and the new front-facing camera.

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These are not your grandpa’s greenhouses. Anyone familiar with common plastic-enclosed passive solar structures designed simply to hold plants over cold seasons or grow flowers and less-hardy fruits might be surprised about how these humble buildings have transformed into today’s dynamic hydroponic “bio-structures.” The modern high-tech greenhouse represents the timely convergence of some of the most sophisticated scientific know-how available from a variety of industries — agriculture, horticulture, energy, greenhouse manufacturing, hydroponics and more.

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Google is getting ready to launch a brand-new social network called “Google Me,” according to a rumor circulated Saturday on Twitter by Digg Founder Kevin Rose. “Ok, umm, huge rumor,” Rose wrote in his tweet. “Google to launch facebook competitor very soon ‘Google Me,’ very credible source.” Google did not respond by press time to TechNewsWorld’s requests for confirmation and comment. “Any time Kevin Rose speaks, I listen,” Lon Safko, social media entrepreneur and coauthor of The Social Media Bible, told TechNewsWorld.

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Intel and Nvidia are locked in a war of words over processor speed. The battle appears to have been triggered by a paper Intel engineers presented last week at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in France. That paper, entitled “Debunking the 100x GPU vs CPU Myth: An Evaluation of Throughput Computing on CPU and GPU,” asserts that graphics processing units, or GPUs are, in essence, only 2.5 to 14 times faster than central processing units, or CPUs. Nvidia makes GPUs; Intel’s focus is CPUs.

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