There are rumors that Apple’s iPad launch has already run into some rough patches that are uncharacteristic for the company, but how much substance is actually behind them? One frequently mentioned challenge is having a sufficiently impressive array of available content that’s compatible with the device. The company reportedly has reduced the number of top-level categories in its iBookstore from 35 to perhaps as few as 20. That could mean that Apple is consolidating some categories to avoid displaying any that would appear understocked with iPad offerings.

Sony demonstrated its Move motion controller for the PlayStation 3 console at the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, following up on its first demo at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last June. Together with the Move, Sony will release the Move sub-controller, a one-handed controller that’s similar to the Nintendo Wii “nunchuck” and is an optional accessory for some games. Sony said the Move and its sub-controller will be launched worldwide this fall. It says 35 game publishers and developers have signed up to support the Move.

When Apple enabled in-app purchases for iPhone applications, it seemed as though the days of “free” and “paid” versions of any given app were coming to an end. Soon, I thought, everything in the store would start out free as a teaser and then charge for an upgrade. That hasn’t exactly panned out universally, but Vlingo’s new voice application does charge in the way I thought all apps would charge by now. You can download it for free, but getting to the premium features costs $10. Vlingo is a speech-to-text app that can use that text in any of six general ways.

The first rule of Apple’s App Club is: You do not talk about App Club. Any developer who writes an app for the App Store is forbidden from making any public statements about the iPhone Developer Program Licensing Agreement. Second rule of App Club is: Said developers also can’t sell their apps to other app stores, even if that app is eventually rejected by Apple. Third rule of App Club: You can’t reverse engineer anything having to do with the App Store software development kit or the iPhone OS.

Valve one of the largest distributors of online games, has announced that it will make its Steam online gaming service and proprietary gaming engine, Source, available on the Mac. The service, Steamworks for the Mac, comes equipped with Steam Play, a feature that allows play on either a PC or Mac at no additional charge. It also supports Steamworks APIs. The inclusion of WebKit into Steam and of OpenGL into Source gives the company a lot of flexibility, according to John Cook, director of Steam Development.

Gaming companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft ask a lot of their customers. Every few years, they are encouraged by the companies to spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade to a fancy new console. But as far as I can recall, only Sony has ever asked its fans to not play those consoles. It happened Monday, thanks to a bug that kept those with older PlayStation 3s from accessing the PlayStation Network. An item on a company blog described the glitch as a problem with the console’s internal clock, which apparently thought it was a leap year.

This isn’t to ask whether it will be successful. Apple is a master at setting goals and then exceeding them, and a lot of folks are clearly excited about the iPad — but the first generation iPhone was kind of a mistake that got corrected in later versions. As I look at similar products that seem better thought through, I’m increasingly thinking that Steve Jobs’ initial concerns with this offering were well founded and that, at least initially, the iPad will have trouble reaching its potential.

With the demonstration of its newest mobile platform Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft vastly extended its mobile platform and at the same took it in a new direction, at least from a naming and branding perspective. It’s dubbed the new platform “Windows Phone 7 Series.” For the new platform, Redmond is bringing together Xbox Live games, the Zune music and video experience, social networking, mobile apps, access to Microsoft Office and photographs.

As the 2010 Winter Olympics kick off, the games are on everyone’s radar, including the cybercriminals who are looking to capitalize on this world event. Spam campaigns featuring breaking news stories filter through to in-boxes faster than ever before, as automated scripts scrape headlines and the text of news stories from hundreds of Web sites. This year, cybercriminals are going one step further, sending sinister emails using the Olympics as a guise to distribute malicious content in highly specialized, targeted attacks.

It’s not every day that a major operating system gets opened up, never mind one that leads the global market in its category. So, when the news came out last week that that’s just what the Symbian Foundation had done — and four months ahead of schedule, no less! — it was hard not to get excited. Android is no longer the only big kid on the open source mobile block, it seems, and the scales are now tipped considerably more in FOSS’ direction.

Even while calling Chicago home, Laura Hawkins Grimes is a country bumpkin. Her scenic rural spread has three dairy farms, two ponds and a log cabin, all skirted by a white picket fence as scarecrows stand sentry over her blackberries. The best part is the 40-year-old sex therapist never has to leave her computer to tend to it all. She’s one of tens of millions of occupants of “FarmVille,” a near-utopian, wildly popular online fantasy game where folks rush to another neighbor’s aid, ribbons readily come as rewards, plants don’t get diseased and there’s never a calamitous frost.

“It” is finally here. Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad tablet device at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to a packed house amidst thunderous applause Wednesday. After months of speculation, which reached a fevered pitch over the last two weeks, it was absolutely imperative that Apple’s iPad live up to the hype. And it does. Jobs characterized the iPad as a third device category between a notebook and a smartphone; and given the features and the form factor, that is a credible claim.

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