There’s no doubt that you’ve seen the top-notch Windows 7 launch party videos by now (and if you haven’t, do your self a favor and get on that!), and sure – while they may be pretty painful to watch as is, there is a light at the end of that tunnel of misery.

Enter Cabel Sasser, the founder of software company Panic Inc, who remixed the “Hosting Your Party” video in a way that made it far more entertaining (and believable). But, don’t let me hold you up any longer – check out his version here. And, as long as we’re on the subject, are there any other remixes out there that we missed? Let us know in the comments.

There’s been loose talk of a Zune phone for some time now, and it looks like we’ve finally found out what it might be. According to some scoop from the folks over at Gizmodo, Microsoft’s reported Pink phone is the device at large, and it’ll come in two forms.

The two models, which are known as the Turtle and the Pure, look an awful lot like a Palm Pre and a Sidekick respectively. The phones will be made by Sharp, who will share branding with Microsoft. The phones are reportedly aimed at a younger audience, which explains the perpetually round aesthetics.

It’s expected that they’ll feature Zune services (hint: Zune phone) and have their own app store, making it an obvious competitor to Apple’s iPhone. No word yet on pricing or availability.

For some time now Apple has stolen all the thunder when it comes to the idea of a tablet – but it appears that we’ve been looking in the wrong place. In a very real announcement, Microsoft has revealed their Courier tablet concept, and it looks absolutely divine.

The Courier (which can be seen in conceptual video form here), is reportedly in the late stages of development and despite its appearance, is a tablet, not a booklet. The 7-inch screens will support multitouch, writing, flicking, and drawing with a stylus or your fingers. A hinge that houses an iPhone-style home button, which you can use to bookmark pages, connects them both. The back cover will sport a three megpixel camera, and the lights that display status (wireless signal, battery life, etc.) will line up on the bottom.

No word yet on pricing or availability, but there’ll be plenty of news to come in the next few days.

Upon the release of version 3.0 for their web browser, Chrome, Google has stated that they’ve got some pretty sizeable goals for the fledgling application.

Google has reported that Chrome currently holds less than three percent of the browser market, but they expect that a year from now that number will grow to five percent. But, in two years Google is planning on that number growing twofold, and jumping up to ten percent. If it doesn’t, Google’s own Engineering Director of Chrome Linus Upson will be “exceptionally disappointed.”

Sure, the goals are a bit lofty, but between the advertisements running on both the Internet and TV and the soon to be released Mac version, Google should be able to make up some ground.

The Zune HD may only be a couple of days old, but the app store for the device is already up and running.

A “Marketplace” which offers nine free apps is already shelling out software to Zune HD users across the land. The apps, which include calculator, weather, Texas hold ‘em, Sudoku, Space Battle 3, Shell Game… Of the Future, Hexic, Goo Splat and Chess will appear in a new “Apps” menu on the main screen once they’re downloaded.  Reportedly, the apps look and act pretty solid, but feature adverts during startup that cause the boot time to exceed 30 seconds in some cases.

Either way though, they’re free – so you get what you pay for.

After a long seven years of development and tweaking, the IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard.

The new standard, which is reportedly capable of throughput of 300Mbps, has been changed six times since its first conception. And, according to the IEEE, all existing WiFi certified 802.11 Draft N wireless products will work with the final standard.

No word as to when the standard will make its way to market.

Both Samsung and Toshiba recently announced that they’d be among the first to release 2.5-inch 640GB hard drives for the mobile market.

Samsung’s new 640GB 2.5-inch Spinpoint M7 internal drive has a density of 516-Gigabit per square inch for each of the 320GB platters, which is a 28 percent increase per platter over it’s previous record setting 500GB internal drive. The density change allowed Samsung to up the storage capacity without adding additional platters.

On September 2nd Toshiba began shipping out their new sample 640GB 2.5-inch drive to OEMs and distributors. Given its density of 817.0 Mbit/mm2, the new drive will bring performance improvements over their previous generation of 5,400RPM drives, and will lower energy consumption by 28 percent.

For many, TweetDeck is the desktop app of choice when tweeting and keeping track of other’s updates. And, with the latest version about to release, the Adobe AIR program will add some support for everyone’s favorite forgotten social network, MySpace.

The new version will also come with stronger bit.ly integration, automatic and instant conversion of long links into shorter ones as you type them, the ability to drag photos directly into TweetDeck and post them to Facebook, and even the capacity to click a hashtag and then open up a new column showing what folks are saying.

TweetDeck version 0.30 is set to release today.

To the surprise of few, Microsoft is gearing up to dominate the airwaves with Windows 7 ads in preparation for their October 22nd launch. And, while there hasn’t been a lot of time to shoot the concepts for said adverts, the bar has been set quite high.

The ads, which show off 7’s personalization, aero shake and the life of a carefree teenager, were all shot during a strict 3-day deadline using a Canon 5D Mark II. All things considered, these commercials are pretty impressive.

No word as to when Microsoft will start running the new spots.

If you’re the type of person that likes to rock Windows Mobile on your smartphone, but you’re not a fan of the models that are currently available, you won’t have to wait much longer.

According to the Windows Mobile Blog, there will be a new crop of Windows phones to choose from, all of them sporting plenty of improvements. “74% [of people we talked to] listed productivity as the top feature they value in their smartphone. We took this feedback to heart, making the user interface more touch friendly and improving notifications and updates from e-mail, text and calendar items,” wrote Stephanie Ferguson on the Windows Mobile blog. “We also included the latest Internet Explorer Mobile browser and added free services like My Phone to help protect data in the event of a lost phone and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for access to a wide variety of applications for direct download.”

If you’re here in the states, be sure to watch AT&T, Bell Mobility, Sprint, TELUS and Verizon Wireless for some of these fancy new Windows phones. For a list of other regions (including Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific), be sure to check out the blog post in its entirety here.

Google Wave has become an object of desire for many ever since its unveiling back in May. And, while a majority of us will have to wait to use it, Google will open up a preview for some schools and businesses starting this fall.

Since May, Google has been hard at work developing Wave. Having enlisted the help of many developers, they hope to tweak the product before they release it to the public. “While the product, platform and protocols are still being developed, we're extending access to some of the highly collaborative people and communities we hope to benefit in the future – businesses and schools,” wrote Matthew Glotzbach and Stephanie Hannon on the Google Enterprise blog.

If you’re someone that’s hoping to get your school or business involved with the open preview, be sure to sign up here.

Thanks to the inherent irresponsibility that comes with singing up for any social network, the IRS has been tracking down tax evaders thanks to people’s Facebook, MySpace and Twitter habits.

Mining through posted information such as relocation announcements, professional profiles and financial gains, agents with the IRS have been able to collect all sorts of bucks from would-be tax dodgers. One Nebraska agent was able to collect $2,000 from a disc jockey after he advertised on MySpace that he’d be working at a big public party. “These new supplements are often far more efficient than the older ones, such as reading the local newspaper or making inquiries at barbershops and church meetings,” said Jim Eads, director of the Federation of Tax Administrators. Another agent was able to collect $30,000 of unpaid taxes after a Google search lead him directly to his target.

So, if you’re the type of person that likes to boast about income that hasn’t been reported on Twitter, think twice. The IRS could be, and probably is, watching.

Thanks to a prominently featured 24-inch touchscreen, the Medion X9613 HTPC promises to be a welcome addition to anyone’s home theater.

The X9613, which has currently only been announced for Europe, will come with Windows 7, a Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor, Nvidia GT240M graphics, 4GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive and a second Slideshow monitor (speculated to be the small screen in the middle of the sensor bar). All in all, pretty generous stats for an all-in-one.

The expected price is anywhere from $2,100 to $2,700 – but that’s after conversion. No idea if/when it’ll be made available to us here in the states. If you’re interested in seeing more though, check out a video if it in action here.

Thanks to some intrepid reporting by our friends over at Gizmodo, we can finally see just what the rumored gScreen Spacebook will bring to the table.

The gScreen, which has been created by Gordon Stewart and his Alaska-based cronies, will offer about 30-inches of screen space when you’ve got both screens active, and is aimed at professional designers, filmmakers, photographers and others that hunger for screen real estate.

These beasts will run Windows 7 and will be powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It’ll also pack 4GB of RAM, a high-end Nvidia GF900M GT discrete GPU and a (planned) 7,200 RPM HDD.

No word yet on an official price, but Gordon hopes that he can keep it under $3,000 and they plan to have it sell on Amazon by December.

According to some recent news, one of the first companies creating silicon for USB 3.0 is claiming that one of their USB 3.0 systems on a chip can be used in concert with external storage devices to provide transfer rates of up to 500Mbit/second.

USB 3.0 has been designed to handle transfer speeds of to 5Gbit/second, a sizeable increase when compared to the 480Mbit/second that USB 2.0 offers. “You’re pretty much communicating through a straw,” stated Gideon Intrater, vice president of solutions architecture with Symwave. “USB 2 was good as long as you had 100GB on your hard drive, but now it’s just way too slow.”

The new system on a chip, which was developed with external storage in mind, can supposedly offer performance faster than SATA. According to reports, said chip will allow speeds as high as 500Mbit/second thanks to its RAID 0 support. System builders will be able to take advantage of this feature by installing two external drives that can be addressed at the same time, offering faster data reads.

Still, we’re going to have to wait for USB 3.0 to make its debut.

According to a recent report, Qualcomm is looking to launch a new personal television device called FLO TV. While it won’t have a station dedicated to our very own Ms. Florence Ion, it will support broadcasting of Qualcomm’s terrestrial digital TV service.

While the FLO TV service is already included with a handful of cellphones from Samsung, Motorola and LG, the idea behind the device will be to get better video through a terrestrial broadcast, rather than using the bandwidth of a 3G wireless network. This way, there shouldn’t be any network congestion or buffering to worry about.

It’s reported that the device will come with a capacitive touchscreen that will take advantage of a swipe and gesture-driven UI, 4GB of built-in memory, stereo speakers, and enough battery life to watch five hours of TV, or listen to 15 hours of music.

No word yet on pricing or availability.

According to a recent study by Mozilla, the number one reason for users not upgrading from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 was the new location bar, and the fact that it went deep into people’s bookmarks to suggest sites as they typed. More than 25 percent cited this as their reason for keeping the last generation of Firefox as their browser of choice.

“When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn’t really want to have displayed,” said Firefox’s principal designer, Alex Faaborg. “In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarrassing things that Firefox can do to you.”

On a related note, Mozilla has introduced a private browsing mode in Firefox 3.5. So, you know, if this is the sort of thing you need to have – it’s safe to upgrade now.

The US remains very behind in broadband speeds for industrialized countries, with an average speed of only 5 Mbps. This compares to South Korea’s 20.4 Mbps and Japan’s 15.8 Mbps.

Within the US though, speeds vary greatly. According to a recent study average speeds range from Delaware’s 9.91 Mbps all the way to Montana’s 2.32 Mbps. California, perhaps one of the most tech friendly states, ranked only 11th with 6.64 Mbps.

“Every American should have affordable access to high-speed Internet, no matter where they live. This is essential to economic growth and will help maintain our global competitiveness,” said Larry Cohen, the president of the company that conducted the study.

Still though, it should be noted that the study is not perfect. Some states were blessed with more data points to draw from than others, and it did also include US territories such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, where notably slow speeds lowered the average. But, at any rate, we’re still quite behind our Asian friends.

In an attempt to save some face, Microsoft has come out and publicly apologized about changing the race of a person used in a promotional image.

The picture in question shows three businesspeople, one black, one Asian and one white for a pitch of Microsoft’s business productivity software. The same image on Microsoft’s Polish site had a white person’s head placed over the black man’s, but the hand remained its original color.

“We are looking into the details of this situation. We apologize and are in the process of pulling down the image,” said a Microsoft representative.

Earlier this week Yahoo announced that it would be tweaking its mail and messenger services to be more social by letting users update their status, share photos easily and partake in video calls.

Along with the new and improved mail and messenger programs, Yahoo plans to overhaul its search engine with a new results page that will let users retrieve the content they’re looking for, without leaving the safety of the results page.

The idea behind these upgrades comes in two flavors: firstly Yahoo hopes to bring in more people who are not already familiar with the inner workings of their products, as well as to entice those that are already using Yahoo products to spend more time on their site. “Our user base grows when things are simpler and more delightful,” said Elisa Steele, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Yahoo.

There was also an acknowledgement that Yahoo’s new hope page was being worked on, but wasn’t done just yet.