T-Mobile on Wednesday said that it would offer the United States’ fastest 3G wireless network by upgrading its existing 3G service to High-Speed Packet Access Plus 3.5G technology. By the end of the year, T-Mobile expects to have HSPA+ deployed in more than 100 metropolitan areas reaching 185 million people. It also demonstrated the first netbook to run on its cellular data network, a Dell Inspiron Mini 10. T-Mobile launched its HSPA+ network service in Philadelphia last fall.

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Word processing is perhaps one of the most essential uses for a computer on any platform. The Linux OS offers more obscure word processors than other OSes; however, few of these apps offer users the staying power of AbiWord. The closest competitor to AbiWord is OpenOffice Writer, and AbiWord, like many other word processing apps in Linux, lacks a fully developed suite of programs such as spreadsheet and presentation apps that rival the functionality of OpenOffice. Still, it excels at processing words and is far ahead of other Linux writing tools.

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There is now proof that a Nobel Prize-winning technology can deliver targeted therapy directly to cancer tumor cells, say a team of California Institute of Technology researchers led by Mark Davis, who published their findings in Nature. Their clinical trial showed that a specialized polymer nanoparticle injected into patients’ bloodstreams did indeed carry a genetic off-switch message to cancer cells, rendering their proteins unable to replicate.

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Cloud computing — certainly a hot topic at the RSA conference held earlier this month in San Francisco — is in some ways being eclipsed by security and accountability concerns. Who owns the data? Who is answerable if the cloud fails? Who is responsible if a virtual machine holding data from a company under strict governance is parked next to one that is unregulated on the same physical server? Why does it seem so easy for hackers to attack data that’s online, and if a corporation’s data is in a cloud that’s hacked, who has to stand up and take the licking?

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Literally every day at Betanews, we get at least one security vendor “alert” of some type, warning us to be on the lookout for the latest malware. The message is always the same: Advise users to stay vigilant, to keep patching, to upgrade their antivirus to the latest editions. However, the profiles of the malware typically look the same, too — stuff you might click on by accident, links pretending to be from your “best friend” in an e-mail message, ads for products that look too good to be true.

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I can’t bring myself to download a first-person shooter game on my iPhone anymore, just because I know I’ll get sick of it before the third level. Its icon will sit there on the screen, its data will languish on the drive. Delete it? Can’t. Might get stuck in an elevator, beat all the games I actually like, and have nothing left to do but count the minutes. Nothing against the companies that make these things; I just can’t abide any game in that genre that won’t let you touch physical buttons.

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Everyone seems to be getting into the mobile app game — but is anyone actually making any money doing it? The consensus is yes — but there is more than one way to make money. Alexander Bartfeld took a hard look at the market before launching his software development company six months ago. Everyone was trying to make money off the Internet, he said. Instead, the developers making money were the ones that realized the Web is a tool to draw customers to existing offerings and improve productivity.

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Over the past few years, it seems like there’s one technology that almost everyone is deploying: laptop encryption. All over the industry, in nearly every vertical, it seems like everybody has either just deployed, is deploying, or is about to deploy some type of encryption technology to protect laptop data. When you think about it, it really isn’t all that much of a surprise — the technology is ubiquitous and low-cost, and the rollout can be done piecemeal at a pace comfortable for each individual organization.

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The Google model survived the dot-com mess but its success seems based largely on the belief that advertising can fund everything. If the users are unhappy, well it doesn’t really matter. In fact, Google’s customers (the folks paying them money) and the folks they actually serve are quiet different, causing me to question the viability of many of their non-search efforts. Often we look at Microsoft’s struggle to expand out of Windows and Office and find the result troubling, but if we look at Google’s attempts to expand out of search, they have been pretty much pathetic.

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If a totalitarian regime uses Linux, does that mean Linux is an enemy of the state? That’s the mind-bending question of the day following some politically charged Linuxy news that emerged over the past few weeks. North Korea, it appears, has developed its own Linux-based operating system. With a strong similarity to the Windows user interface, Red Star even comes with a Readme file including quotes from North Korean leader Kim Jong-il about how important it is for the republic “to have its own Linux-based operating system compatible with Korean traditions.”

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Today’s data-storage customer has lost his voice in a sea of vendor jockeying and positioning. This glut of vendors creates a noisy industry and a crowded marketplace, where all vendors sound the same and marketing materials are nearly indistinguishable from vendor to vendor. Directly because of this confusion, many data storage customers have chosen to stick with practices that they are familiar with, regardless of whether those behaviors prove detrimental to their storage environment.

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The FCC unveiled a set of digital tools for consumers Friday to figure out the state of national broadband service in the United States. One tool, the Consumer Broadband Test, measures broadband service speed and latency and is available in online fixed and mobile app versions. The other is the Broadband Dead Zone Report. “The FCC’s new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country,” FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said.

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