South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has sued 22 mobile phone makers over patent violations, including the world's largest mobile company, Nokia.

ETRI is accusing the manufacturers of violating up to seven patents in reference to 3G mobile telecommunications standards, including wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA).

Officials say they hope to make back $268 million USD in royalties, and have already settled some for about $16 million.

The ETRI has about 170 patents for international mobile standards and commercialized CDMA in 1996.

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A new study performed by Australian researchers has finished with some shocking results, concluding that, even with exercise, extended TV watching leads to a higher risk of death.

The researchers tracked 8800 people for six years, and found that those who watched TV for over 4 hours per day had a 46 percent better chance of dying of any cause, and an extremely high 80 percent more likely chance of dying of cardiovascular disease, over those that spent less than two hours a day.

"It's not the sweaty type of exercise we're losing," says David Dunstan, a researcher at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, Melbourne. "It's the incidental moving around, walking around, standing up and utilizing muscles that [doesn't happen] when we're plunked on a couch in front of a television." On average, most of the participants had about 30 minutes of exercise per day.

The results seem to follow the latest trend of studies which has shown that periods of inactivity can lead to slower processing of fats and other chemicals in the body.

The American Heart Association journal says Americans average 5 hours of TV a day.

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According to market analytics firm Flurry, the Google Nexus One only saw 20,000 units sold during launch week, an extremely low number under 1/10th the amount the Droid sold during its November launch week.

Flurry monitors over 10,000 applications in the Android Market and the iPhone App Store and was able to come up with the chart below from those analytics.

It is estimated that Verizon spent $100 million on marketing for the Droid, but Google has yet to make an aggressive TV push for the Nexus One, instead relying on word of mouth, Internet reviews and Google's Android phone site.

The numbers are not official, but here is what Flurry came up with:

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Anti-piracy outfit BREIN has proudly announced this week that it shut down 393 torrent sites in 2009, with the largest being massive indexer Mininova, which was forced to go legal.

Overall, the group shut down 615 "illegal websites," with the good majority being torrent trackers.

Additionally, 35 eD2K servers were taken down, 38 streaming movie stires, and 14 NZB (Usenet portals) were part of the group.

TF is reporting that the sites taken down must be very, very small since they received "a grand total of zero emails requesting information on the other several hundred closures." (Not including Mininova, TorrentVault)

As is always the case with torrent site shutdowns anyway, one goes down and at least one new one goes up to take its place.

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Google has released the Android 2.1 Release 1 SDK this week, the latest update to the Android firmware platform.

The update includes new API changes and bug fixes, and is available for download now.

Check the SDK here if you are interested: http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.1.html

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StuartHughes, the brand behind such excess as the $3 million iPhone and the £200,000 PlayStation 3 has released their latest "masterpiece," the £99,995 Nokia Supreme, clearly priced for us, the everyday consumer, unlike the previously mentioned items.

The Supreme has the following specs:
Encrusted with 12.5 cts of Pink diamonds, a magnificent circa of approximately 1225 individually set sparkling gems all of which include a 3ct single cut flawless center diamond. The TW in diamonds is a massive 15.5ct. Solid hallmarked platinum handmade veneers where made with 8 platinum screws as well as the diamond mount for the navigation buttons all weighing an immense 83 grams of platinum. The chest its housed in been crafted from Granite , colour ' Visak ' otherwise known as French Blue with beautiful leather hide interior. There is no finer relationship than platinum & diamonds. They are pure, rare, and eternal. The Nokia SUPREME is a true celebration of your individuality. Available as a limited edition of only 3 to be ever made.

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The video here is pretty straightforward, and very cool. The Nokia N900 being used a PS3 controller thanks to Bluetooth and BlueMaemo.

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Zune HD users should be pretty happy today given the latest firmware update, one that will bring native XviD support to the device as well as streaming Smart DJ.

Microsoft says the player will soon have native support for the MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP codec, and the player will playback XviD videos, which is still the codec of choice for most videos downloaded online. The format will play via your HDTV as well if you own the Zune HD Dock.

Smart DJ playlists, a "Genius"-esque song playlist creator, will also be available on the player and not just the desktop software.

If you are connected via Wi-Fi, Slash says "you will be able to to create Smart DJ playlists that incorporate streamed content from the Zune Marketplace, besides the songs already stored on the player."


Read our review here: Unboxing the Zune HD

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Beginning "in the Spring," Wii owners will finally get Netflix movie and TV streaming, the third console to receive the service.

To use Netflix, Wii owners will be sent a free disc that must be in the tray at all times, just like on the PlayStation 3. Xbox 360 owners can access the service without a special disc, but pay on average $50 a year for their XBL subscription. You must also be a Netflix subscriber, with a subscription that costs $9 USD or higher. The streaming is then free.

In the United States, Nintendo has sold over 25 million Wii units, making it the largest user base of the current generation of consoles.

Netflix has 17,000 shows and movies available via its "Watch Instantly" streaming program.

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Last October a company called Free All Media announced a service to offer ad-supported, DRM-free music. Earlier this week I got an invitation to the Beta for Free All Music. I decided to give it a try and report back to Afterdawn's reader's.

Keep in mind that Free All Music is currently in beta testing, and may change significantly, perhaps many times, by its public launch. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, and are in the US and at least 13 years old, you can sign up for the Beta waiting list on their website.

How It Works

Previous attempts to offer free music downloads, like SpiralFrog and Qtrax, have offered DRM laden Windows Media tracks paid for by standard background ads seen on many web pages. The problem is these files don't play on most portable media players - no iPods or Zunes for example. Since the DRM is tied to your computer you also have to download multiple copies if you want to listen to a song from multiple computers.

Free All Music uses a different approach. Downloaded music is in standard MP3 format. You can play it on pretty much any portable media player and make copies for multiple devices from a single download. You're limited to five downloads in a week and required to watch a short video ad before each download.

Music Selection

The selection of music was actually very impressive. It's not quite comparable to what you would expect to see in a typical online music store, but it's significantly more complete than the initial selection offered by either SpiralFrog or Qtrax.

It's difficult to gauge the interface yet. So far it's pretty simple, but clearly unfinished. In fact, aside from the video ads you must watch to download music, there are very few ads anywhere on the site yet. For obvious reasons (the closed beta) the options for sharing tracks with other people via Twitter or Facebook aren't active either. And there are no options to find similar songs or artists to whatever you're currently viewing.

But what is there is impressive because it's simply designed and works reliably. Perhaps the biggest problem I've seen with music services, commercial or free, is a tendency to get all the advertising and bells and whistles working first and somehow not have primary features like browsing for artists or searching for songs quite working correctly. Or more often they work, but aren't as easy to use as you would expect.

You can search for an artist, song or album or look at various lists of popular or genre selections. The download process involves just a couple of clicks interrupted for a few seconds by a video ad. Once your music is downloaded you can move or copy it to the computer or device of your choice just like any other MP3 file.

Free Music Tuesdays

Every Tuesday every Free All Music member receives 5 free downloads which appear to be valid only for that week. In addition I got 2 bonus downloads when I signed up. The number is based on an estimate of how much music the average iTunes customer buys, and is actually somewhat higher than what was initially announced several months ago.

Quality is also good. All the files I downloaded were encoded at either 256kbps or 320kbps, most with the LAME MP3 encoder. There's a watermark included to identify the Free All Music subscriber who downloaded it, but I couldn't detect it listening to the songs using my HTPC and home stereo.

The Price of Free Music

That watermark, along with some interesting language in Free All Music's Privacy Policy, is a reminder that the music you're downloading is still coming from the same labels that have attempted to block or privately regulate every useful digital audio technology and severely limited legal online music distribution.

Watermarking is the price for allowing the distribution of DRM-free files. It includes information to match your Free All Music account with each file you download. There doesn't appear to be any personal information embedded in the files, or at least none you can find through simple means. At the same time, the watermark will no doubt be enough to lose Free All Music at least a few potential users.

What's of more concern is a provision in their Privacy Policy which explains how the watermark could be used.

"the watermark may be linked to your personally-identifiable information in our systems to allow us to investigate or report unauthorized copies of the music file, and you agree that we may share this information with third parties in the course of such investigation or report."

On the surface this is pretty innocuous. It seems to simply lets content owners (or their legal representatives) find out who owns a file when they discover it on a P2P network.

Then again maybe not. You see there's more information collected about you than just what you tell All Free Media about yourself when you sign up. Various data about your connection, including (but not limited to) IP address and ISP information is tracked automatically. Information collected during this process would seem to count as "personally-identifiable," and therefore be fair game to release under the terms listed above.

When I sign up for a service I want to be assured they will protect all information they collect about me to the fullest extent of the law. Requiring me to meet the demands of record labels and surrender some of that legal protection seems backward - but perhaps no less than I should expect. Without more specifics about exactly what information they're willing to disclose to investigators, apparently without any real due process, this provision worries me.

Prohibition Against Ringtones

Free All Music's Terms of Service did give me a good laugh with one restriction on the use of their files. You are not licensed to use them as ringtones. How that could be enforced (without draconian changes to the ToS) or by what reasoning using downloaded music as a ringtone doesn't qualify for a fair use exemption isn't explained.

Conclusion

There's no question that DRM-free music which will play on any device you own is certainly an improvement over previous ad-supported music experiments. But there are a lot of hurdles for Free All Music to clear in order to be successful. 5 songs a week may be suitable for the "average" iTunes customer, but many music enthusiasts probably won't find it worth bothering with. Can Free All Music attract enough casual music fans to be successful?

And what happens the first time the RIAA comes looking for personal information in the prosecution of a file sharing lawsuit? Will information beyond the ownership of specific files really be turned over without benefit of legal due process? And what information?

What about profitability? It seems unlikely a single video ad will cover licensing costs for a download. Can Free All Music attract enough advertising dollars and generate enough ad views to cover their expenses?

My primary questions going into the beta have been answered. The interface is easy to use, the music selection is good and watching a very short ad before each download isn't nearly the nuisance I expected it to be. The 5 song per week limit is a little annoying, but if you just want to download the occasional song or 2 it shouldn't be a concern.

In fact as a service it succeeds rather well. The question is whether they can be equally successful attract subscribers and advertisers while keeping labels happy?

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