Avanquest Software announced mobile content creation and storage enhancements to its Ringtone Media Studio cell phone multimedia customization software. Ringtone Media Studio 2 expands on Avanquest’s popular all-in-one software suite for mobile ringtone creation and image-editing, with the new My Locker Studio component providing users online storage of personalized mobile content and easy over-the-air download to mobile devices. My Locker Studio provides up to 5MB of online storage for personal media files and gives mobile subscribers anytime, anywhere access to their customizable ringtones, wallpapers, video clips and other mobile content by sending a simple SMS message link for direct download of content to the mobile device.

Facebook.com, the No. 2 U.S. social network site that is quickly expanding beyond its college student base, has been met with a sudden privacy backlash by users after it made design changes this week. More than 500,000 of Facebook’s 9.5 million members had signed an online petition calling for the company to back off a feature called “News Feed” that instantly notifies members when friends update their own sites.

MobiMate, provider of travel services for mobile devices, announced the release of WorldMate 2006 Professional Edition for BlackBerry. The new generation of WorldMate for BlackBerry features a whole new user experience and new services including a real-time flight status service covering over 80 leading airlines worldwide. WorldMate 2006 Professional Edition is a suite of content and application services serving business travelers’ needs while on the road. Services range from Flight Schedules and Flight Status through weather forecasts to world clocks. These are packaged as a highly usable mobile application available on BlackBerry and many other Smartphone platforms, and sold as a subscription to business travelers and corporations.

Word Monaco, the newest Palm OS game from Smart Box Design is an interesting twist on solitaire. Instead of using a standard deck of cards, the game uses letter tiles. The object of the game is to create words using those letters. When all of the letters have been combined into words, you win. It’s a lot tougher than it sounds! Read Contributing Editor Heather Wardell’s review to find out if this is the vacation you’ve been waiting for!

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Brayder Technologies, developers behind Jack Flash and Jack Sprat, two utilities that opened up additional flash ROM memory for use on older Palm handhelds, has closed shop. Now that devices routinely come with 64 megabytes and secure digital cards can offer 2 gigabytes of RAM, products like those sold by Brayder have become marginalized.

Sprint announced a first of its kind pay-per-view offering called Sprint Movies for mobile phones. Sprint Movies features more than 45 titles out of the gate, with many newer ones like “National Treasure,” “Spider-Man 2,” “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector,” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as well as popular standbys such as “Scarface,” “Jaws,” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” You can stream a film all at once or divide it into chapters, so as to play, pause, and skip forward or backward between them, and resume a movie at the exact point where you left off as well.

T-Mobile and Research In Motion announced the BlackBerry Pearl, an unbelievably small, smart and stylish BlackBerry phone that’s as perfect for staying close to your friends and family as it is for a busy day at work. Available in the United States exclusively from T-Mobile beginning September 12, the BlackBerry Pearl is the sleekest BlackBerry yet. The end-to-end BlackBerry wireless email solution continues to shine with support for both personal and corporate email accounts, allowing consumers to stay connected to family, friends and work at their convenience. Web browsing is fast and easy thanks to the BlackBerry Pearl’s powerful device platform and T-Mobile’s fast EDGE network. Voice features and quality are first-rate and the BlackBerry Pearl incorporates a digital camera, multimedia capabilities and an expandable memory slot for the first time.

A worm that can move from a Symbian phone to a PC has been reported by security experts F-Secure. The Mobler worm doesn’t have an automatic cross-platform spreading mechanism, but could be loaded by unwary users. It attempts to copy itself to all available media including USB drives and memory cards. On a Symbian device, it creates a Windows-executable installation package on the memory card. This can be seen by Windows Explorer when the device is connected to a PC.

Electronics manufacturer SanDisk is facing a legal fight over its use of popular MP3 compression technology. German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk’s booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction against the company. Italian patents company Sisvel alleges that SanDisk refuses to pay licensing fees it needs to playback MP3 files. SanDisk has recently launched new MP3 players based on flash memory, with capacities of up to 8GB, in an attempt to challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPod nano.

iambic has released the Premier edition of Agendus for Palm OS. This new version of its personal information manager for Treos and other Palm OS-based handheld devices includes the new Agendus Attendees Module, an intelligent and efficient way to leverage the Over-the-Air capabilities of Treo smartphones to get meetings scheduled.