This is a short test message. We’re testing the updated system.

Alarm Master is a utility that helps to manage personal alarms on your Windows Mobile smartphone. If you want to have reminders for a variety of purposes from daily alarm-clock to friends’ birthdays and monthly bills, this tool may be an ideal solution. You can view, change, delete and create alarms fast and easily. Status icons, headers history, sorting, filtering and other options significantly simplify your work with multiple alarms.

A Microsoft spinoff plans to release an open beta of a new mobile browsing user interface in mid-December. ZenZui, the Seattle spinoff, was also set to announce on it is changing its name to Zumobi.

Zumobi is offering a piece of software, currently only compatible with Windows Mobile phones, that works in connection with a back-end server and is designed to make mobile Internet use easier. The user interface is made up of 16 tiles on which users can easily zoom in and out. Each tile represents a Web page.

Apple has pushed out its iPhone 1.1.2 firmware update to users of its mobile phone, fixing a widely publicized bug in the iPhone’s browser.

Apple made the software available for download last Thursday, but on Monday, it began pushing it out automatically to users via its iTunes updating mechanism. The iPhone uses iTunes to scan for security updates once per week, so users will gradually be offered this new firmware over the next seven days. The update fixes a bug in the way that the iPhone renders TIFF images.

If you bought one of Seagate’s Maxtor Basics consumer hard drives recently, check it for viruses. Especially if you’re a gamer.

Seagate is warning that a “small number” of its Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives recently shipped with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus, malicious software that “searches for passwords for online games and sends them to a server located in China,” according to a note posted on the Seagate Web site. Only drives purchased since August 2007 are affected, Seagate said.

The hard drive maker is blaming an unnamed subcontractor, located in China, for the problem. Seagate said it learned about the problem from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab. According to published reports, Seagate has had problems with Maxtor Basics drives sold over the past few months in the Netherlands and Taipei.

Google has released an SDK (software development kit) that programmers can use to create cellphone applications for the company’s Android mobile platform. In addition, Google will award $10 million to developers whose applications are deemed “innovative and compelling” by the Open Handset Alliance, the organization in charge of overseeing the Android platform.

Last week, Google unveiled the OHA and Android, ending months of speculation over the company’s plans to simplify and reduce the cost of developing mobile applications. Android is built on the Linux 2.6 kernel, includes a virtual machine called Dalvik to maximize application performance and will come with a core set of applications including email client, SMS (Short Message Service) program, calendar, maps and a browser based on the open-source WebKit engine. The entire Android platform will be made available for free under the Apache Version 2 open-source license in 2008, according to Google.

Here’s a heads-up for those of you who subscribe to the ZATZ RSS news feed: ads will be coming shortly. We know some people won’t like ads, but the simple reality is we have to pay the bills and a larger and larger percentage of our readers are getting their news and information from us through our feeds. So there will be ads.

The reason I’m telling you this now is that we’re starting the beta testing of the ad process. So, you may find the feeds to be a little finicky, on and off, for the next few days. Hopefully, things will stabilize by the end of the week (and hopefully the coding will be done by then as well).

As the system works now, an ad will be dropped into the feed every few items. We’re also going to intersperse different kinds of ads: graphics, short text ads, and more full-bodied ads. Every ad we show will be relevant, and probably useful to you. For example, only ads related to Lotus Notes and Domino will show in the DominoPower feed, and only ads related to Outlook, Exchange, and email will show in the OutlookPower feed.

For now, please hold off on telling me if something’s not working right. As we go through the testing process, we’re going to find a few things that need fixing. Once we think we’ve got it deployed properly, I will ask for bug reports.

Oh, and do us a big favor. Please click on these ads and buy stuff from our advertisers. You’ll help support a vibrant aftermarket and help us continue to bring you more and more great resources and information. — David

The argument over what the PS3’s Blu-ray laser is better for, watching movies or playing games, has been rendered moot by this hack which uses it to make a super sweet Star Trek (original series) phaser. The modifications don’t look all that hard for someone who is mechanically inclined.

Motion Apps has released a new version of mOcean, its iPod emulating digital music player for the Palm OS. mOcean is one of the most feature rich multimedia programs with support for Internet Radio streaming, podcasts, audiobooks, visual effects, card reading, skin support and iTunes music synchronization. New in this version is improved support for the latest devices (Palm Centro and Treo 755p), improved UI responsiveness, faster font rendering and other internal stability improvements.

Apple’s iPhone debuts in the UK, but with less fanfare than in the United States. Only a handful of people bothered to sleep outside Apple’s flagship UK store on London’s Regent Street last night, awaiting the moment when at 6.02 p.m. the long-awaited iPhone would go on sale.

Apple has struck a similar deal to the AT&T deal in the United States with UK operator 02 (hence the 6.02 p.m. launch time). An O2 spokesman said the operator will have 430 stores selling the phone, in addition to the retailer Carphone Warehouse and Apple stores. All together about 1,300 retail outlets will be selling the iPhone. More than 1.4 million iPhones have already been sold in the United States.