Yahoo unveils oneConnect

Yahoo on Tuesday introduced a new service called oneConnect, which will combine e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and social networking in one mobile platform, reports Information Week.

The company plans to roll out oneConnect as part of Yahoo Go 3.0, an all-in-one mobile offering, and Yahoo's new mobile home page in the second quarter of this year. In the meantime, Yahoo is showcasing oneConnect at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona this week.

One of the more impressive features of oneConnect is a socially-connected address book, which will allow users to transfer activities from social networks, professional networks, and communities to their address book.

The Symbian operating system grew 50% over 2007 and is well positioned to grow in the future, according to Symbian Software chief executive Nigel Clifford, who shrugged off Google Android, Apple iPhone and Microsoft Windows phones at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), says Computer World.

About 22.4 million Symbian phones shipped in the fourth quarter of 2007, bringing the full-year total to 77 million, with 179 million euros in royalties for the year.

However, Symbian is making its operating system cheaper in order to reach beyond the smartphone sector to lower-cost phones, which are expected to grow much faster than any other kind of device in the next few years.

Microsoft on Monday clarified that the phased roll-out of Vista's first service pack (SP1) was not due to malfunctioning drivers, but because of issues that arose when these device drivers were re-installed during the SP1 update process, says PC Mag.

Mike Nash, from Microsoft's Windows product management group, said in a blog post last week that SP1 would be rolled out gradually due to a driver problem Microsoft uncovered during the testing phase.

Nash updated the Vista team blog Monday to say that it "was an issue with the way the device drivers were re-installed during the SP1 update process, not with the drivers themselves - these drivers worked on Windows Vista release to manufacturing and they work on Windows Vista SP1. For new PCs with Windows Vista SP1 preinstalled, this is not an issue," he wrote.

Sun Microsystems has signed a stock purchase agreement to acquire Innotek, a Weinstadt, Germany-based supplier of VirtualBox virtualisation software, reports Information Week.

VirtualBox is open source code aimed at developers who want one or more virtual environments that match the target environment for their prospective application. Innotek is the company established to support VirtualBox and manage its development.

Sun said VirtualBox has been downloaded more than four million times since being made available in January 2007, and Sun moved quickly to become the acquirer as it maps out a future suite to virtualise customer environments. It plans to use VirtualBox to extend the Sun xVM virtualisation software, its hypervisor based on open source Xen.