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• Motorola And Microsoft Strike A Deal To Put Bing On Cell Phones (ubergizmo.com)

At the RSA Conference held March 1 to 5 in San Francisco, Cisco Systems finally unveiled its own take on the secured borderless enterprise, which aims to provide mobile workers with seamless, always-on secured connections to protected enterprise data and applications—whether those applications are internally hosted or part of a cloud strategy. Even more specifically, Cisco wants to make clear that its technology is everything that Microsoft’s take on the borderless enterprise is not.

Based on my own experiences with Microsoft’s DirectAccess and its necessary extenders, I’ve found the technology to be interesting, innovative and pretty cool, but disappointingly limited—particularly in its native incarnation.

There’s a laundry list of problems with basic DirectAccess: It only works with Windows 7 clients (Ultimate or Enterprise SKUs); it requires critical back-end network services and applications run atop Windows Server 2008 R2 or Service Pack 2 due to DirectAccess’ reliance on IPv6; it can’t scale across multiple access servers for either performance or management purposes; its clients utilize split tunneling, which protect transmissions to corporate resources but not cloud-based applications; and it doesn’t support down-level virtualized client instances used for application compatibility.

Microsoft will issue two bulletins fixing eight vulnerabilities rated “important” in Windows and Microsoft Office products on Tuesday, the company announced on Thursday.

This represents a light Patch Tuesday, a contrast to last month when the company patched 26 holes with 13 bulletins, including critical vulnerabilities for Windows.

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• Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2010: 13 bulletins (arstechnica.com)

Redmond-based software company Microsoft announced more than two weeks ago the launch of a new mobile operating system, the Windows Phone 7 OS, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but it seems that it will indeed remain committed to the older Windows Mobile 6.5 platform too. It appears that more handsets powered by this mobile client are set to land on the market in the near future, at least this is what Oded Ran, head of consumer marketing, Windows Phone UK, said recently.

“We expect to introduce new phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 to the Windows Phone family in the coming months,” Oded Ran stated in a recent interview with Pocket-Lint. However, Microsoft seems not to be planning to deliver upgrades to Windows Phone 7 Series for existing devices powered by Windows Mobile 6.5. “For Windows Phone 7 Series we are enforcing a strict set of hardware requirements […] we cannot confirm that Windows Mobile 6.5 phones that satisfy those requirements will be upgradeable,” Ran stated.

Some of the previous reports on the matter suggested that HTC HD2, one of the most popular Windows Mobile 6.5-based mobile phones at the moment, might receive an upgrade to the newer operating system, but a Microsoft official already denied such plans. In the end, there are apparently little chances that any Windows Mobile 6.5-based device will receive an upgrade to the Windows Phone 7 OS and, the same as before, Microsoft is saying that the hardware requirements it put in place for the new devices would be the main barrier.

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• Older Windows Phones Can’t Be Upgraded to 7 Series (wired.com)
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News Analysis: Apple is suing HTC for allegedly violating several patents related to both its iPhone and operating systems. The lawsuit tells us quite a bit about Apple, its recent years of success and how it will use more than 20 years of development work to protect its current intellectual assets.

In a surprise announcement earlier this week, Apple said that it is suing HTC for violating a whopping 20 patents. The lawsuit is an important one. It could set a precedent in the marketplace and allow Apple to practically control the sale and distribution of touch-based devices around the world.

It could also cripple Google’s position in the marketplace, since it has relied on HTC to deliver several devices, including its Nexus One, to consumers.

But Apple doesn’t care. The company is trying to dominate the mobile phone industry. And it plans to take down any company trying to beat it. That said, Apple is playing coy. The company indicated in a press release this week that all his company is doing is protecting its patents. That might be true, but in the process, if it wins the lawsuit, it could easily discourage any and all competition from delivering devices that are even remotely similar to the iPhone.

For journalists and industry analysts, the lawsuit is a goldmine of information. The court documents reveal a number of interesting facts about Apple, the iPhone, HTC and Android.

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• HTC Sued by Apple Over 20 iPhone Patents (techeblog.com)
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Older Windows Phones Can’t Be Upgraded to 7 Series

Even the newest and fastest Windows phones won’t be upgradable to Microsoft’s next-generation mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series, when it lands later this year.

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• Older Windows Phones Can’t Be Upgraded to 7 Series (wired.com)
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Intel has been busily migrating to Windows 7, and embracing 64-bit computing as an internal standard, but with those changes have come some issues with application compatibility and administrative access. Intel and Microsoft have been working closely to solve these issues, with an Intel engineer insisting in a blog posting that the migration is on schedule. Intel could save as much as $11 million over the next three years by using Windows 7 in place of the aging Windows XP, formerly the operating system of choice after Intel shunned Windows Vista.

Intel’s long-planned internal move to Windows 7 and 64-bit computing involves a lot of “heavy lifting,” according to an Intel engineer in a lengthy Feb. 24 posting on the tech company’s Open Port IT Community blog.

Intel and Microsoft have been partnered through the latter’s TAP (Technology Adopter Program) to bring the operating system, which was released in October 2009, into Intel’s enterprise in a security-robust and bug-limited way. Both companies partnered in the months ramping up to Windows 7’s release to promote the operating system as offering better processor performance and battery life than its predecessor, Windows Vista, which Intel infamously refused to deploy internally in 2008.

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• Intel faces challenges in Windows 7 migration (computerworld.com)

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• Skype Pulls Its Windows Mobile Apps (mashable.com)

A posting on the company Web site implied that OpenSolaris may soon be “end-of-lifed.” However, there’s no need for app developers and IT managers to worry: Oracle says it is not killing off the freely down-loadable community version of Sun’s Unix-based Solaris enterprise operating system anytime soon.

Was a posting on the Oracle Web site published Feb. 24 entitled “End of Service Life Status for OpenSolaris Operating System” simply unclear on the concept, or was it a hint that Oracle is planning to drop the Sun Microsystems-developed open source operating system entirely?

Industry folks on Twitter, FriendFeed, Yammer, and Google Buzz admitted they were confused as they discussed the Oracle page, which talks about “the OpenSolaris End Of Service Life time line for OpenSolaris OS releases. The information covers the support status of every OpenSolaris release.”

No need for application developers and IT managers to worry, though: Oracle says it is not killing off the freely down-loadable community version of Sun’s Unix-based Solaris enterprise operating system anytime soon.

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• Over 5000 apps stricken from the Apple app store, new rules in place (mobilecrunch.com)