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Bloomberg Businessweek  just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia, pre- and post-Elopcalypse. We've long wondered how MeeGo, an OS that Stephen Elop himself said "inspires both confidence and excitement" in October 2010, could be cast aside so quickly in favor of Windows Phone, an OS still struggling to find traction in the heated smartphone market. Well, now we know.  Bloomberg recounts a January 3rd meeting between Nokia's Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö and Nokia's freshman CEO. After Kai expressed his concern with MeeGo's ability to effectively respond to Apple's iOS and Android operating systems, the two decided to interview two dozen "influential employees" about MeeGo, ranging from execs to engineers. Here's how Bloomberg recounts the events that followed: Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, the...

If you were religiously awaiting the fruition of last month's Intel leak, brace yourself: we've got another one. Although Intel's updated roadmap hasn't changed anything per se, it does offer a few specifics. Whereas the previous schedule only suggested we'd be crossing the Ivy Bridge in the first half of 2012, the new roadmap shows the 22 nanometer processor penned in at the end of the first quarter. The Sandy Bridge E series is still on schedule for Q4 however, so unless you just  have  to have native USB 3.0 andDirectX 11 support, you still have plenty to look forward to. Otherwise, we'll see you in April. Electronista ZOL

As rumored, T-Mobile overhauled its individual and family plans today and simplified your options to just three tiers of voice service. Individuals can choose between 500, 1,000 or unlimited minutes, with unlimited text messaging adding $10 and data add-ons ranging from $10 for 200MB to $60 for 10GB. Family plans come in 1,000, 2,000 and unlimited minute varieties while the sharable data and text services cost twice as much as their individual counterparts. There are some odd restrictions, such as the inability to add texting or data to the mid-tier plans and no choice for unlimited voice service without SMS tacked on. We do, however, like the overage-free data options that simply drop to 2G speeds when you reach your plan's threshold instead of shocking you with huge fees at the end of the month. We can also confirm that restocking fees have been bumped from $10 regardless of device to $50 for smartphones, $75 for tablets, and $25 for USB modems and "basic phone devices....

GoldenEye 007  is certainly a fun way to waste your childhood...but is it art? According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, yes. The game was one of 80 selected for an upcoming exhibit,  The Art of Video Games , and the venerable museum drew on fan expertise, using online voting to winnow the field of 240 nominees. The selections span the last four decades (!) of gaming, from the days of the Atari VCS and ColecoVision all the way to today's modern time-sinks like  Portal  and  The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess . The exhibit won't open until next spring, but in the meantime check out the source link to argue about who got left out. Kotaku Smithsonian American Art Museum

Other than saying Gingerbread will be forthcoming for its dual-core Optimus 2X Android handset, LG has been pretty mum on the subject of software updates. It's good, therefore, to finally extract a timeframe out of the company, albeit from a somewhat obscure source. LG's Danish support site tells us that the P990 (the internal code number for the 2X) will be updated to Android 2.3 "in June-July 2011." That's a fair bit later than we might have expected or hoped for the upgrade to happen, particularly given the various software foibles that the device we reviewed suffered from, but the summer of 2011 will always be preferable to the summer of  never . A final warning is perhaps merited here to say that LG hasbeen a bit inconsistent when it comes to software roadmaps, so consider this one scribbled down in pencil until we hear more concrete confirmation from the company. Update:  LG's marketing chief for Denmark and Iceland, Morten Aagard, has  ...

Intel has just announced it will soon be making development kits available for its new Thunderboltinterconnect. The cable that can carry 10Gbps (in both directions!) has so far only seen itself installed in Apple's MacBook Pro computers, but storage and other peripheral manufacturers are starting to unveil their lightning-scorched offerings this week at NAB and this announcement is sure to give Thunderbolt an extra spur of momentum. What's going to be intriguing going forward is to see whether manufacturers take it up  instead of  USB 3.0 or install the DisplayPort lookalike alongside the latest and greatest from the USB camp. If you ask us, we can never have enough high-speed interconnects... how does SuperSpeed Thunderbolt sound? IDG News (PCWorld)

Good news for anyone feeling left behind by the broadband revolution just because of their post code:Fujitsu has just announced a joint venture to deliver fiber optic connectivity to neglected rural homes in the UK. Built on hardware provided by Cisco and supported by Virgin Media and TalkTalk, this network will focus on channeling fiber directly to the home, which is said to provide symmetrical 1Gbps bandwidth with up to 10Gbps speeds considered possible down the line. Best news of all, perhaps, is that the cabling will be available on a wholesale basis to all ISPs, not just the ones involved in the project, so the UK may finally get a decent taste of what competition in the internet service space feels like. Alas, there's a key line in the press release that notes the new venture is dependent on BT providing "access to its underground ducts and telegraph poles on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," which it apparently isn't doing at the moment. Ah well, ...

So yesterday we learned that Samsung's planning to speed up the dual-core Exynos processor inside its Galaxy S II to 1.2GHz, but there was also word that the handset may suffer a setback in terms of release date. Today, the company has tweeted out a two-part notice assuring us that that will not be the case and things are proceeding "as planned." April will see the first retail appearance of the 8.5mm-thick Android phone, though Samsung does advise that "it will be gradually rolled out in each market according to the local launch timetable." That sounds to us like whatever April availability we get will be in the highest priority markets and / or limited in quantity, but we'll take whatever we can get. @samsungtomorrow (Twitter) (1) , (2)

Dell's Windows 7 Rosemount tablet may not make it to the beach with you this summer, but that doesn't mean the company won't have an Android alternative when it's time to start applying sunblock. According to Forbes , the 10-inch Android-powered slate we got an oh-so-quick glimpse of at CES should be ready to hit the market somewhere around mid-June, just a little bit later than we'd previously heard. The publication also hints that the tablet heretofore referred to as the Streak 10 may not retain that moniker when it's time to launch, but it will most definitely be running Honeycomb, though we're not sure if it'll keep the Stage UI. Either way, summer 2011 is shaping up to be the season of Honeycomb, and we're excited to see just what each manufacturer will do to differentiate themselves in the increasingly-crowded space. Forbes

Dell's Rosemount tablet is similar to the HP Slate in that it's a 10-inch, business-centric Windows 7 tablet whose launch has been bumped back further than originally expected. To be clear, this isn't an explicit delay, since Dell has never given official indication for when in 2011 it'll launch the slate device, but a leaked tablet roadmap back in February suggested it would be with us in the warm and breezy days of June. Now, Forbes is reporting insider info that states the Rosemount won't be hitting shops until fall, September at the earliest, meaning it'll miss the back-to-school sales period but arrive with plenty of time for the holiday shopping rush. Let's hope all this time taken leads to a finger-friendly software overlay for Windows 7 -- we love the OS' multivariate functionality but it was never designed for control with the imprecision of fleshy digits. ...