A software glitch shut down email service for some BlackBerry users Friday, and delays were still being felt hours after the problem was fixed.

Research in Motion, the company that makes the ubiquitous mobile device, said no emails were lost in the shutdown that affected an unspecified number of customers in North America who subscribe to the BlackBerry Internet Service. Phone service and text messaging were unaffected.

VITO Technology announced a new version of VITO AstroNavigator II for Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone. It comes just in time to watch the Solar Eclipse on September 11, 2007 at 12:44 pm GMT.

The partial Solar Eclipse will be visible to the lucky minority from South America, specifically Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Do not give way to despair because with VITO AstroNavigator II you may gaze at any Solar Eclipse. VITO AstroNavigator II allows you to choose the exact time and the location where the eclipse is expected to be seen, and there you have it in front of you.

Viigo is a way of accessing content services on your mobile device like you’ve never before experienced. Using Viigo, you have instant access to breaking news, sports, entertainment, weather, markets, blogs, or any RSS feed you want, at the touch of a button on your Windows Mobile Smartphone device. Always live, always on, always available.

Palm has just announced that they’ve cancelled their ill-advised Foleo laptop wannabe before it will ever ship. And we say “about time”.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Rob has an AT&T 8525. It came with two cheap plastic styli, one of which broke while still in the phone. Now Rob can’t get the stylus out of the phone.

Other than that small inconvenience, the phone is fine. He called AT&T for help and they told him his warranty was void, then laughed at him.

Apple has shipped iTunes 7.4 for Mac and Windows systems. The new version of the software offers support for the new iPod generation, including the iPod nano (3G), iPod classic and the iPod touch. This new version allows users to create and buy custom ringtones for their iPhone for US$0.99 (plus the cost of the original song).

The update also allows users to watch videos at a larger size in the iTunes window as well as introducing support for playing videos with closed captioning (when available). iTunes users can also now rate albums from one to five stars.

Toysoft has released a new Treo utility. SMSPager is designed to replace the traditional pager. It features a simple easy to use design that lets you define custom filters for all the senders that you wish to receive text messages from. Messages that SMSPager does not receive will be passed to the default Messaging application or you can assign SMSPager to receive all the text messages. Each custom filter you design can have a unique alter, picture or audible notification.

Sony announced the launch of its Memory Stick PRO-HG product line-up earlier this year and started the first shipments at the beginning of August. The “Memory Stick PRO-HG” is an extended format of the “Memory Stick PRO” format, offering high performances to meet the stringent demands of end users using digital entertainment equipments.

Memory Stick PRO-HG media come in “Duo” size and will be available in 1GB, 2GB and 4GB capacities. Offering 30MB/s Read/Write speed (240Mbps), it allows large amount of data to be quickly transferred, as well as the real-time recording of high-resolution video and still images. The Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo is ideal for Digital SLR, high-end digital camera, or digital video camera users who need to handle large capacity data. Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo media are fully backward compatible with Memory Stick PRO host devices, and will also allow the user to achieve Read/Write speeds of 13MB/s (104Mbps) with conventional Memory Stick PRO compatible devices.

Sony Europe announced the launch of three high speed (300x) CompactFlash cards to meet the capacity and speed demands of professional D-SLR photographers and ambitious amateur photographers. With UDMA (ultra direct memory access) support, the new media achieve data transfer rates of 45MB/s during write operation. The new Sony CompactFlash 300x card, which complements the existing line-up of 66x and 133x cards, will be available with capacities of 2GB, 4GB and 8GB. They will be branded as part of Sony’s Alpha D-SLR camera system.

Hewlett-Packard unveiled two new cell phones Wednesday, pushing deeper into the lucrative mobile phone market and broadening the array of equipment it can sell to large companies.

The phones were launched during a celebrity-studded gala in New York highlighted by one of the Palo Alto company’s most ambitious product rollouts, for the iPAQ brand of handheld devices.

Besides introducing several new HP laptop and desktop computers and a high-performance gaming PC, the launch included more than 55 products, including services, the two new phones and new personal digital assistants, or handheld computers.