Over at TIME.com, I’ve written about my experience with Samsung and Google’s new Galaxy Nexus phone–and in particular its operating system, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Overall, I’m impressed. Lots and lots of little refinements add up to the best Android handset to date. And while Ice Cream Sandwich doesn’t utterly eradicate Android’s geeky, ungainly feel, it makes it far more pleasant. If you like big screens and want LTE, this is the Android phone to get.

Google’s Gmail app, which was briefly available a couple of weeks ago before being felled by a nasty bug, is available again. Better news: Google says it’s working on a version with more features.

I use my AIM instant-messaging account every day, but I can’t remember the last time I used the AIM software. Instead, I use iChat, Meebo, Imo.IM, and other third-party clients that work on AIM’s network. AIM’s app itself has long felt like software that goes all the way back to 1997 and has been getting more bloated ever since. Which it has.

Until now. AOL is launching a preview of an all-new AIM today, and it has very little to do with the creaky old one except that it works on the same IM network. It’s so all-new that AOL even dumped its venerable “running man” stick-figure–who, let’s face it, screams “Old AOL that used to send us trial discs”–in favor of a hip little bot as its mascot.

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I’ve been thinking of the “Ultrabook” category of laptops–devised and named by Intel–as being pretty much synonymous with “MacBook Air  lookalikes that run Windows.” But HP’s new Folio (no relation to the Foleo) is an Ultrabook that isn’t that Air-like. It aspires to be practical and portable, not super-sleek and sexy.

The Foleo 13 is a 13″ system with an Intel Core i5 processor. It’s pretty thin (.71″) and pretty light (3.3 pounds) but thicker and heavier than the Air and Toshiba’s Portege Z830. It has, however, a fuller complement of ports than the Air, including Ethernet, HDMI, and USB 3.0, with no dongles required. HP claims up to 9 hours of battery life vs. Apple’s 7 hours; that’s impressive if independent testing backs it up. And the price–$899.99 for a machine with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of solid-state storage–undercuts the most comparable MacBook Air by $400.

Buyers of Windows laptops have historically had a limited appetite for systems that emphasize portability rather that offering as many specs as possible at a low price. I don’t think it’s a given that Ultrabooks will catch on–HP’s press release for the Folio quotes IDC saying that it expects sales of 95 million Ultrabooks a year by 2015–but I like the compact form factor and am happy to see PCs with solid-state disks getting affordable, so I hope the category thrives.

A startup called ReDigi wants to let you resell music you bought from online stores such as iTunes. This isn’t going to end well:

A legitimate secondhand marketplace for digital music has never been tried successfully, in part because few people think of reselling anything that is not physical. But last month a new company, ReDigi, opened a system that it calls a legal and secure way for people to get rid of unwanted music files and buy others at a discount.

The service has already drawn concern from music executives and legal scholars, who say it is operating in a gray area of the law. Last Thursday the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record companies, sent ReDigi a cease-and-desist letter, accusing it of copyright infringement.

On November 15th 1971, Intel introduced the 4004–the world’s first single-chip microprocessor. The 4-bit chip was a breakthrough, but it didn’t change the world instantly. In fact, some of the first products with Intel Inside–including a pinball machine, an electronic voting machine, and Wang’s first word processor–didn’t make much of an impact at all. Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with an illustrated look back at this landmark component and some of the 1970s innovations it made possible.

View “4004!” slideshow.

Even an Apple cynic like myself must admit that Steve Jobs drastically changed the world we live in, and mostly for the better. I’m writing this on a Windows computer, I have a Creative Zen music player, and my smartphone is powered by Android. Yet I doubt that any of these would be in existence today without innovations for which Jobs played a significant role.

He was also a charismatic leader and public figure, who held people in thrall with his product announcements and presentations.

But does that mean you would enjoy watching a 16-year-old, 70-minute, videotaped interview, visually consisting of one continuous close-up of his face?

Surprisingly, the answer is Yes. That charisma, combined with the simple fact that Jobs had some interesting things to say back in 1995, make Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview–a film playing in special theatrical engagements around the country this week–a reasonably interesting and informative film. But it could have been much better.

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I haven’t tried Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet for myself yet, but the first reviews are out. For the most part, they’re neither raves nor pans–they praise the value provided for the $199 price and say the device is full of promise–but also point out that it has more than its share of meaningful rough spots. (The tone reminds me a bit of reviews of the original 2007 Kindle).

Google Music screen shot as shown on TecnoDroidVE.

Android, meet your not-so-shockingly exposed dance partner, Google Music, and Google, meet another Google Music store rumor roundup, this one bolstered by screens that may indeed depict the upcoming Google-powered online music boutique.

We’ve heard rumblings about a Google Music store all year, since before Google launched its Google Music cloud service last May. But Google Music arrived, ironically, music-free—a blank online storage locker into which Google hoped users would pour unlocked tunes ripped direct from personal media or rival services. The theoretical reason: Google hasn’t been able to shore up relations with labels, prompting it to forestall Google Music’s “store” component. Until now, the service has looked the online equivalent of a Self Storage acreage.

That may all change this week. The Wall Street Journal said as much weeks ago, citing music executives in the biz, who claimed Google would launch a music store at some point between late October and early November. What’s more, the service is said to include Google+ integration, giving it a social networking one-up. For instance, users of the service would have the option to recommend songs in their online library to Google+ contacts, giving those contacts the option to listen to the songs once for free. After that, the MP3-format songs would cost in the vicinity of 99 cents each.

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In an excellent story, Ben Austen of Businessweek confirms that the death of Borders had more to do with bad decisions on its part than e-books rendering dead-tree books obsolete anytime soon:

Nashville’s story is not unique. When Borders declared bankruptcy in February, more than 200 of its 400 outlets were still “highly profitable,” says its final chief executive officer, Mike Edwards. There’s no question that the book industry is in flux, with digital sales last year making up about $900 million of the $28 billion-a-year market and increasing fast. But a sizable portion of the book business is still taking place in actual stores. Barnes & Noble (BKS), the nation’s largest book retailer, hasn’t been forced to close its 700 locations. Thus, it wasn’t Amazon (AMZN) —or Amazon alone—that sank Borders. “When there’s a massive transition in an industry, the strong players make it through to the other side,” explains David A. Schick, a retail analyst who covers booksellers for Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research (SF). “What gets caught up in the change are the weaker players.”

At the Windows World conference in 1991, an alarmingly youthful Bill Gates recaps the history of DOS and Windows to date and previews Windows 3.1:

If you’re not sick of thinking about the end of Flash on mobile devices already, people are still writing stuff about it that’s worth reading:

Adobe’s Mike Chambers gives several reasons for mobile Flash’s death, but the first he mentions is Apple’s rejection of it:

This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

And Mobile Opportunity’s Michael Mace–thoughtful as always–says that greed did Flash in:

So here’s what Adobe did to itself:  By mismanaging the move to full mobile browsing, it demonstrated that customers were willing to live with a mobile browser that could not display Flash.  Then, by declaring its intent to take over the mobile platform world, Adobe alarmed the other platform companies, especially Apple.  This gave them both the opportunity and the incentive to crush mobile Flash.

I agree that there were a bunch of reasons why mobile Flash never amounted to anything, but I still think one of them trumps all others: It didn’t work. If it had been fabulous, even Apple might have had to reconsider the situation.

Nvidia’s third quarter earnings are in, and apparently, quite good, with a revenue increase of 4.9 percent over last quarter. While you might expect the company’s Tegra smartphone and tablet processors to be the stars of the show, Nvidia’s actually attributing much of its revenue growth to desktop graphics cards for PC gaming.

That’s right, the gaming platform that conventional wisdom loves to declare dead is actually a big money-maker for Nvidia right now, with revenue growth of 23 percent over last quarter. And Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is not surprised:

“This happens every major game console cycle toward the second half of its product life, because PC technology advances on a regular basis instead of once every seven to ten years,” Huang told investors.

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Yesterday, I attended GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco and got to check out Tesla’s upcoming Model S sedan. It’s an electric car. That’s neat. But the thing that got me excited was the fact that it sports a built-in 17″ touch screen right where you’d expect to see conventional gauges and knobs. More thoughts and photos over at CNET.

Yesterday, after writing about Android fragmentation, I ran into a friend at a conference. He began ranting about a particular type of fragmentation: The way wireless carriers muck up Google’s operating system with junkware, promotional stuff, pointless tweaks, and general bloat that makes the operating system less usable. He got pretty worked up about it. I agreed it was a problem.

I wondered why no company has taken up the challenge of building…well, the iPhone of Android phones. Something that’s elegant, approachable, uncluttered, and respectful of the consumer’s intelligence. Any bundled services would need to be beautifully integrated rather than just shoveled onto the phone indiscriminately, as the apps on Android handsets often are.

And then it hit me: Why not Amazon?

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