Will it be a "tweak" of Windows 7, or a radical overhaul? Will it be small and light, or massive and bloated? Will the interface be more like Windows 7, or Windows Phone 7? Will it come with Skype?

Of all the unknown unknowns, to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, here are the 5 biggest questions. (Read)

We heard about a new scandal this week. iPhones, we discovered, keep a record of every place you've been, or, at least, every place your phone's been. That data is stored in a file on your phone, unencrypted. Shock! The data could be subpoenaed in a divorce case. PCs and phones could be hacked, and the could be data exposed. The horror! Here's why the storage of location data on your own phone should be the least of your privacy worries. (Read)

So is that giant, flat-screen 3D TV and tablet you bought in the past year. It's trash. All trash.

Of course, everything ends up broken, obsolete and unusable at some point. The trouble is, the companies that make our consumer electronics are deliberately or carelessly decreasing the useful life of our gadgets so they can sell us another one sooner.

The strategy is called "planned obsolescence" -- or "designed for the dump," as one organization colorfully puts it. (Read)

Starting today, you can walk into a Starbucks and use your phone to pay for your Skinny Caramel Macchiato, extra hot, extra whip with room for sugar.

Prognosticating pundits (including Yours Truly) have predicted for years the dawning age of the mobile "eWallet," where everything in your wallet, including money, goes digital and lives inside your cell phone.

Despite all our blather, most real people haven't actually been using phones to pay for much. But I think that will change, starting today, thanks to Starbucks. That's just one of four major culture shifting innovations that Starbucks can be credited for. (Read)

For their coverage of the 2010 holiday season, major news media are now reporting on the iPad-for-kids phenomenon, and several picked up my column, including USA Today. A lot of that coverage centers around whether gadgets in general, and iPads in particular, are good or bad for parents to give to children as gifts.

My column merely predicted that the iPad would be massively popular. I took no position on the wisdom of giving gadgets to kids. So I'll do that here: It's generally a bad idea. (Read)

That pronouncement came this week from the world's youngest billionaire and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

In talking about new Facebook "mobile" applications, he was trying to make a distinction between cell phones and touch tablets from a usage point of view.

The audience laughed when he said it, because people instinctively know that the iPad, of course, is a mobile device. There were people in the audience taking notes on them, for example. We iPad business travelers often take them on trips instead of laptops.

Some of us carry them everywhere. It gets 12 hours of battery life. Of course it's mobile!

In reality, Zuck is trying to draw a distinction that no longer exists. The "mobile" idea is dead. Here's why. (Read)