The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.

Located at the site www.broadband.gov</a>, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers.

The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where officials said that actual speeds were estimated to lag by as much as 50 percent during busy hours.

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 in a statement.

The FCC is also collecting information about where broadband is not available. Consumers can email the FCC at fccinfo@fcc.gov or call the FCC.

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• FCC launches broadband test site for consumers (computerworld.com)

OCZ Technology Group has a new SSD, the Onyx Vertex, that at $100 for 32GB of capacity can serve as an entry point for someone curious about trying SSDs.

Home and small-office laptop or desktop users and those who run servers and/or a RAID array at some point might be interested in swapping out a disk drive for a solid-state one for performance purposes.

If that’s the case, San Jose, Calif.-based disk drive maker OCZ Technology Group has a new SSD (solid-state drive), the Onyx Vertex, that can serve as an entry point for someone curious about trying SSDs.

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Barnes & Noble plans to release an e-reader application for Apple’s upcoming iPad tablet PC, suggesting that the bookseller has truly embraced a strategy of porting its e-reader brand onto as many screens as possible even as its own device, the Nook, prepares to compete directly against the iPad. Both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble stand to be substantially affected by the iPad’s presence in the market, as Apple has highlighted its device’s use as an e-reader and has reportedly been negotiating with publishers for content.

Barnes & Noble will release an e-reader application specifically for Apple’s upcoming iPad, said an executive posting on the bookseller’s official blog. Paul Hochman, manager of content and social media at BarnesandNoble.com, wrote March 11 on the company’s Unbound: Nook and BN eReader blog:

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Investing in a high-speed Internet network would open up a new global trade route for Britain, boosting economic recovery and creating thousands of jobs, the opposition Conservative party said on Thursday.

The party, ahead in the polls weeks before a general election, plans to stimulate 29 billion pounds ($43.27 billion) of private investment in the broadband network by opening up access to infrastructure currently dominated by BT and providing loans to encourage firms to improve high-speed broadband in rural areas.

“For Britain the Internet presents an opportunity that it doesn’t present for any other country in Europe,” said Conservative culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt. “We are one of the best countries in the world at the creation of digital content … the Internet effectively opens up a new global trade route.”

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A US Court of Appeals panel has upheld a judgement that Microsoft infringed on another company’s patent with its custom XML tags in Word 2003 and Word 2007.

The judges were asked to reconsider a 2009 ruling regarding i4i’s patent, which covers a “method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other”. Microsoft lost its first appeal in December, and then lodged a second appeal for a panel hearing and for an ‘en banc review’ before the full appeals court. The Texas federal circuit panel’s decision on Wednesday is part of that process.

“The appeals court has again upheld the lower court’s decision in its entirety,” i4i chairman Loudon Owen said in a statement. “In addition, it issued a more detailed analysis in concerning the finding of willfulness in this case. The determination that Microsoft willfully infringed i4i’s patent stands.”

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Opera Software released Opera Mini 5 beta, the next version of its mobile Web browser, for Google Android on March 11. The announcement comes exactly a week after Opera announced it would release the same program for Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x smartphones, indicating that the company is committed to maintaining its mobile-browser market share in the face of ever-increasing competition from a number of manufacturers.

Opera Mini 5 beta for Android includes features such as Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, compression, and boosted speed. It can be downloaded from Android Market, the mobile-applications marketplace for Google Android, or from this Opera site.

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Motorola is the leading handset manufacturer in the United States, while BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion leads the smartphone space, according to market research firm comScore.

Google also is gaining share in the smartphone space, though Microsoft is slipping a bit, comScore said March 10 in a report detailing trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during a three-month timeframe from October 2009 to January.
 
comScore found that 234 million Americans 13 years and older are mobile subscribers, and among them, Motorola was a top mobile phone choice, commanding 22.9 percent of the market share, followed by LG, with 21.7 percent, Samsung, with 21.1 percent, Nokia with 9.1 percent and RIM with 7.8 percent.
 
The ranking order was consistent with an earlier report, with a three-month time frame ending in October 2009, though between the two reports, Motorola, LG and Nokia each dropped small amounts of percentage points, while Samsung and RIM rose slightly.

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Microsoft faces another request from seven browser companies to alter its “Web browser choice screen” for European users of Windows. Originally introduced on March 1 to sidestep concerns from the European Commission (EC), the EU’s antitrust regulatory body, about the bundling of Internet Explorer 8 with copies of Windows, the ballot screen allows those users to choose from a randomized list of browsers including Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox.

In addition to those more prominent browsers, the browser ballot screen allows users to select from offerings by small companies, including Maxthon, SlimBrowser, Avant Force, Flock, Sleipnir, and GreenBrowser. Representatives from those companies had registered a formal petition with the EC on March 3, protesting that the screen was structured unfairly, with smaller browsers viewable only if the user scrolls sideways; now, representatives from those smaller browsers apparently want Microsoft to introduce even more randomization into the ballot screen, so that their products appear as prominently as ones from larger companies.

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Google’s Gesture Search feature for Android smartphones reignited the complaint about fragmentation and inconsistency among Google’s mobile operating system platform because it only works on devices running Android 2.0 or greater, such as the Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One. Laptop Magazine’s Mark Spoonauer said this means Google is favoring newer versions of its OS, punishing owners of devices running older flavors of Android, as well as Google’s partners. Kevin Tofel tried to diffuse the situation by arguing that Google isn’t the only mobile platform maker that faces this quandary.

News Analysis: When Google released its Google Gesture Search feature for Android smartphones March 3, it fanned the flames of a long-standing complaint about fragmentation and inconsistency among Google’s mobile operating system platform.

Google Gesture Search, which lets users surface contacts and applications on their devices by tracing letters on the screen with their fingers, works on smartphones running versions Android 2.0 or higher.

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