Earlier this week David Rivas, VP of Technology Management at Nokia, showed off a demo of the interface for the Symbian^3 (S^3) smartphone OS at a demo in San Francisco. The first Nokia phones running the now completely open source platform will be available later this year.

During the presentation, which primarily demonstrated customizing the interface, Rivas talked about the features that will set it apart in the smartphone market. Of particular note were his comments about multitasking.

He pointed out that Nokia has had multitasking on their smartphones for several years, and indicated it will be "coming much more front and center."

You can see the demo in this video posted by PhoneDog.com's Noah Kravitz.

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The cloud gaming service OnLive, first announced last year, finally has a set launch date.

Starting June 17th in the U.S., users can pay $15 a month to play games from major publishers EA, THQ, 2K Games, Warner Bros., and Ubisoft in the "cloud."

"This marks a huge milestone for both OnLive and the interactive entertainment landscape as a whole, changing the way that video games are developed, marketed, accessed and played," says Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO of OnLive. "We are opening the door to incredible experiences for gamers and enormous opportunities for developers and publishers."

The service includes standard features such as voice chat, profiles and gamer tags and will allow for pausing and resuming of games. OnLive is available for PC and Mac users.

"The OnLive Game Service creates a new opportunity for consumers to play the latest games without spending hundreds of dollars on a hardware system to make it happen," adds Mike McGarvey, COO of OnLive, via Gi.biz. "As a Mac user myself, I'm excited about the opportunity to help bring high-end gaming to this new and significant market."

New and popular titles that will be included are Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age Origins, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands, Borderlands, Assassin's Creed II, and Metro 2033.

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Google has launched Google Reader Play, a "new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that's easy to use and personalized to the things you like."

Making it different than Google Reader is the fact that Reader Play does not require any set-up, it uses the users feeds.

Try the experimental project here: http://www.google.com/reader/play/

Press release:

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Reader Play adapts to your tastes -- as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you more items we think you'll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we'll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don't even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we'll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.

You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you're following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you've previously liked, starred, or shared.

Since Reader Play is an experiment, it's launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn't intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It's designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you've read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking "View in Reader Play" from the feed settings menu.

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Sony has launched their highly-anticipated motion controller, the PlayStation Move, a system that should rival the Wii and Microsoft's upcoming Natal motion system.

Says Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment: "The migration path from the Wii household to the PlayStation 3 household is a pretty natural path, partly because of the experience that you can get on the PlayStation Move but also because of the content that we find on PlayStation 3."

As viewed in the demo video, the Move is used in conjunction with the PlayStation Eye camera and allows for real-time tracking of the player's body movements. As for accuracy?

"Nothing has ever been this precise," say Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Electronics Worldwide Studios.

Standalone prices were not revealed but Dille says that a "starter bundle" including a game, the PS Eye and the Move will retail for under $100.

Big-time publishers such as Activision, EA and Square Enix are already creating games for use with the Move, among 36 developers that have already signed on.

Vids via Engadget:

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Motorola and Microsoft have announced a new deal today that will make Bing search and maps the default for the smartphone maker's Android-based phones.

The phones will now come with a search widget pre-loaded.

The company signed a similar deal with Baidu last week, to make Baidu the default Web search engine for Android phones sold in China.

The moves come as Google continues its dispute with China over censorship, a fight that has yet to be resolved, and one in which Google threatened to pull its search engine service from the country entirely.

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