Users who want to watch videos on an Android tablet or phone have to download Google’s Videos application first, which can be found free on the Android Market. The user can then start viewing the chosen movie over the following thirty days. Once the viewing is started, it must be completed within the next 48 hours. As in the case of the United States, Google is making rentals available from the web directly.

Google is becoming a more and more important player in the entertainment market in the United Kingdom. It has been providing video rentals already through YouTube, and recently brought its UK e-book store, which offers itself a good position, reported to its competitors Apple and Amazon. The market is even more crowded since Sony launched the Entertainment Network, which offers seven million movies and songs.

The price of the rentals is £2.49, about $4, with tax. In the United States, Google charges $3.

Brian Waring, UK and Ireland Marketing VP, suggested that it would be useful not only for encouraging relaxation or work in stores, but this may also play an important role in the 2010 Summer Olympics taking place in London, where millions of people will be visiting and will most likely turn to a Starbucks in order to get online.

As with North American stores, British stores don’t currently have a time limit, even if those who have to stay for a long time are encouraged to buy a drink or some food out of courtesy.

It has been difficult to quantify international sales, but Pocket-lintfound that all Apple stores in London had run out. Other third parties such as PC World, Currys, Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U run out of supply themselves, although some of them had only a few devices for their initial batches.

Whether the other 23 countries that began selling the iPad 2 are still on stock is not known so far. However, lineups at flagship stores in France and Australia as well as in other major locations have been seen similar to those in the United States. For instance, according to MacBidouille, the lineup at the Opéra store in Paris had remained for thirty hours.

The results were easily predictable as there were no online pre-orders. The situation shows that Apple is still capable to maintain vivid interest in the iPad 2 abroad. It also reveals that improvements in supply in the United States are not expected too soon, as increased production is entirely matched by an increased demand worldwide.

In order to encourage competition in the wireless marketplace, the agency has considered as well to allow some of the smaller players to merge their bids against offers from larger companies.

According to a recent report in The Register, Three UK, the local carrier, has supposedly voiced worries that it may be forced out of the market if it doesn’t obtain an adequate share of the new spectrum, because it already lacks any spectrum in sub-1Ghz bands. In order to ease such issues and preserve a minimum of four main competitors in the market, Ofcom is planning to limit the spectrum ownership by any single company.

Ofcom will most likely hold the auction sometime in early 2012 (probably before the first half of the year), but it is still unclear if the agency will meet the initial objectives.

According to Nokia, using a wiping gesture to navigate content on a touch screen, or permitting access to services that constantly change with an on-device application store were both filed about ten years before the iPhone launched.

As Nokia claims, none of the patents were connected to 3G or to other standards that were the reasons for the original lawsuit filed over a year ago. Nokia has said hat all handsets using HSPA- or UMTS-based 3G were in a certain proportion based on its own technology and therefore owed patent royalties to the company. Apple was one of the few phone makers to dispute the validity of such patents in court.

The lawsuits filed in Europe are direct responses to Apple’s lawsuit in the United Kingdom and are an attempt to make Apple back down and obtain a settlement instead of going to court and support the costs of a trial. Both companies have tried to speed up the whole process by having complaints filed with the United States International Trade Commission, which could determine the validity of patents more quickly and could push one or both sides into out-of-court deals.

The Tellme speech technology of Microsoft enables users to access any function of the infotainment system by simply talking to it and reply via text messages composed through speech, in a remarkable hands-free experience. Microsoft’s software will recognize UK and US English, Canadian French and Continental French, German, Korean, Mexican Spanish and Continental Spanish.

Fiat, Ford, Kia, Nissan, Alpine and Paccar are partners of Microsoft to receive the new Windows Embedded Automotive 7 software for the cars they produce.

Earlier leaks suggested that the Windows Phone 7 device would sport a 1GHz processor and would have a 3.7-inch Super LCD display with 800×480-pixel resolution. Rumors said the device would include Audio DSP with Dolby Mobile, an eight-megapixel camera and support for European 3G networks.

The exact date for the release of the HTC Mozart is not known but is supposed to be later this month or even in November.

The utility called Windows Phone enable users to search or browse and play music chosen from a large range of sources. Selected content can be streamed over cellular networks or Wi-Fi. Offline caching is used to store musical content for playback when an Internet connection is not available.

Spotify can only be accessed by customers in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Although the service is expected to arrive in the United States too, recent reports say the company has failed to conclude deals with major labels in this country.

Bewkes also said that the new entrants should meet a few criteria, such as providing a superior TV experience to consumers, supporting or improving the overall economics which funds and produces the programming. Several people in the industry are worried about setting prices too low because it would be difficult to fund TV shows costing about $1 million or even more per episode if we were talking about high-profile entries.

Warner Bros. executive Barry Meyer also complained recently about the loss of syndication revenue and the effect that would potentially appear on season collections. TV networks have an important source of revenue in box sets and are helped by them in justifying the production costs for some shows. When asking for 99 cents per episode, it may prove to be cheaper to buy or rent individual episodes rather than pick up a whole discounted season on DVD.

All these countries will get the new version 4.7 update dedicated to the Zune desktop application for Windows in order to synchronize Windows Phone 7 devices. Basic synchronization through a third-party application has already been promised to Mac users.

Moving to other countries is the first one in a four-year history of the Zune services and could be crucial to spreading the Zune label and to Microsoft’s smartphone offerings as well. Windows Phone 7 is the only important smartphone platform, other than Apple’s iPhone, which has a significant media store associated as well as applications. Microsoft has changed the direction of its attention to the home, following years of focusing quite exclusively on workers and this happened at the expense of market share.

The presence of Zune outside of the United States has not been significant, with the exception of some Zune players in Canada. Consequently, the dominance of Apple on the portable music market was obvious worldwide.