As far back as last year, Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom said it was in the process of making an exclusive deal with Apple to deliver the iPhone 3G to the East Asian island. Over the weekend, the deal became official.

Prior to the device's Taiwan launch, CHT representatives said the iPhone 3G would only work on CHT's 3G network. But according to new reports, the device actually launched unlocked, with the ability to assign networks via SIM card.

In a move designed to intentionally eliminate all surprises, Microsoft posted a detailed guide to its planned implementation of OpenDocument Format in the next edition of Office, to an interoperability Web site it launched last March.

A Palm spokesperson today disputed published reports that the company is launching a brand new online software store. Less vigor, however, was devoted to rumors that Palm will introduce its long-planned Linux-based Foleo OS at CES.

Contrary to reports stating that Palm is following the lead of Apple and Google in launching a new applications store, Palm has actually been running an online store for quite some time, a company spokesperson told BetaNews today.

The software manufacturer reported record revenue for 4Q 2008 and a sixth consecutive year of double-digit growth, making Tuesday's earnings call much more upbeat than the announcement earlier this month of layoffs.

Adobe registered fourth-quarter revenue of $915.3 million, up $4.1 million from Q4 2007 and up $23.9 million from last quarter. Net revenue was $245.9 million, working out to 46 cents / share. Annual revenues were also record-breaking -- $3.580 billion, for 13% year-over-year growth. That's in line with the company's targets at the start of the year.

It's no secret that SSDs suffer from performance penalties when it comes to small random writes. Even though more modern SSD try to solve some of these issues hardware-wise, software can also play a major role. Instead of resorting to things like delaying all writes until shutdown and storing them in RAM, SanDisk claims it has a better option. At WinHEC yesterday, the company introduced its Extreme FFS, which it claims will improve write performance on SSDs by a factor of 100.

Most of the popular browsers these days are based on one of the two open source rendering engines - khtml/WebKit and Gecko. The most popular browser, however, is based on proprietary technology: Internet Explorer. Even though IE made some progress during the past few years, it's no secret that it took Microsoft far too long to counter the success of Mozilla's Firefox.

One of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early months of being out in the wild.

Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution. It includes a fully automated remote and local application installation system and a very versatile backup and restore system which may be used with any writable media including a hard drive, a floppy drive, or a USB device.

There are reports floating around the web today that ATI is planning to refresh its RV770 (4800 series to you and me) in an effort to add additional speed to its already highly successful card line-up. This would act as a stop gap until AMD is ready to release

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