Microsoft has unveiled some important elements for the Windows Phone 7 Series development platform. Most importantly, the software giant has confirmed what we’ve been expecting the company to announce for a while now. “For Microsoft, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. “For example, previous Windows Phone content will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.”

Charlie Kindel, Microsoft Partner Group Program Manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform & Developer Experience, went into a little bit more detail on his blog, Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone Development. “To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past,” Kindel writes. “To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series. To be clear, we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come, so it’s not as though one line ends as soon as the other begins.”

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Perhaps stirred by Apple’s claim of being one of the biggest mobile device companies in the world, Sony is planning a number of new devices and services to compete with Apple’s iTunes Store, iPhone, and iPad. That strategy will revolve around what’s currently being called Sony Online Service, along with smartphone and tablet-like devices meant to connect to it, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

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Perhaps stirred by Apple’s claim of being one of the biggest mobile device companies in the world, Sony is planning a number of new devices and services to compete with Apple’s iTunes Store, iPhone, and iPad. That strategy will revolve around what’s currently being called Sony Online Service, along with smartphone and tablet-like devices meant to connect to it, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

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Market research firm Gartner is forecasting a much better year in 2010 for PC shipments worldwide than last year, expecting a 20 percent increase year-over-year. However, mobile computing will be the main impetus behind that growth.

Mobile PCs accounted for over half—55 percent—of all PC shipments in 2009, but Gartner expects that percentage to climb to 70 percent by 2012. Apple in particular has seen most of its sales of Macs come from MacBook and MacBook Pro models for some time, leading the industry in this trend for the last three years.

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Palm has released v1.1.0 of its webOS Facebook app. You can grab it via the update function for the time being.

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Engadget

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The folks behind the scenes at MacHeist are at it again, this time with a promotion they call the nanoBundle 2. The software bundle includes five Mac apps for $19.95 with the possibility of two more being unlocked if certain sales figures are met. The retail value of all the applications, including the two that are currently locked, is over $260. Once again, the team is giving a portion (25 percent) of all sales to a charity of your choice. You can choose from a list of 11 at checkout.

The bundle is what we have come to expect from the folks at MacHeist: a couple apps you may never use, one or two that you will use once, and two or three that may find their way into your everyday workflow. Included this time around are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, and Flow. Tales of Monkey Island will be unlocked when 50,000 bundles are ordered, and RapidWeaver will be unlocked at an undisclosed number of sales (which will be revealed after ToMI is unlocked). Each one of the included applications retail for more than the $19.95 asking price for the bundle.

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Women use mobile devices about 10 percent more often than men when it comes to social networking. The 35-54 age group seem to be the most active.

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Nielsen

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Long-time Apple executive Pablo Calamera has left Apple in favor of a CTO gig elsewhere, while former Mozilla security chief Window Snyder started work at 1 Infinite Loop on Monday. Pablo will become the CTO at Thumbplay, a company specializing in ringtones and streaming music, while Snyder will work as a senior security product manager at Apple.

According to the Thumbplay announcement, Calamera served as director of MobileMe service while at Apple. Despite the service’s less-than-stellar reputation during his time there. Thumplay saw fit to scoop up Calamera. The newly branded CTO spent time at Danger Inc. and WebTV Networks, among others, before joining Apple.

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Parents of Internet- or TV-addicted teens finally have confirmation of something they have long suspected: the more screen exposure teenagers get, the more detached they are from those around them. Those are the findings of a paper set to be published in the March issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which examined the relationship between adolescent screen time and social involvement with parents and peers. Though the paper doesn’t quite say that Internet and TV are the cause of the detachment, it’s clear that the two are related.

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Web analytics firm Quantcast has recently published some usage statistics for operating systems, broken out into geographical regions. The company’s data shows that 10.9 percent of online users in North America are using Mac OS X, an increase of nearly 30 percent over the past year.

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