The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro was online Friday, Jan. 22 at Noon ET to discuss his recent reviews and answer your personal tech questions.

Samsung Electronics reported a record profit, but executives said that may have been the peak for the year as pricing pressures are likely to overwhelm sales growth in the second half.

Motorola reported higher profit and stabilized its long revenue decline, as the company's wager on smart-phones running Google's software began to pay off.

In a quirky take on disease awareness, and to mark the official national launch, Crohn's and Colitis New Zealand (CCNZ) in association with Abbott are publishing a "Toilet Map".

Google said its Internet services in China are functioning properly after a minor overnight disruption.

CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft needs to do better in the market for tablet computers that Apple has found success in with the iPad.

If you’ve ever been snickering over the latest YouTube viral video on your smartphone in the evening and ended up frustrated by slow load times and a congested network, you’re not alone — and that’s exactly the problem.

New research from mobile web optimization firm Bytemobile shows that more and more of us are making demands of our devices, our mobile carriers, and video-hosting sites such as YouTube by consuming large amounts of video content on our phones. Our video consumption tends to peak around 10 p.m., at which point bandwidth takes a nosedive and stalling cripples our viewing experience.

In other words, we get the worst possible experience exactly when we want most to have a good experience.

This viewing experience is even worse when videos aren’t optimized for mobile devices. In these cases, for a 60-second video, the average viewer on a 3G network connection would have to deal with around 10 seconds of stalling.

Video optimization, the report said, can reduce stalling to almost zero seconds per minute of video.

End users have been dealing with stalling by choosing to view lower-quality videos in exchange for faster load times. Around 95% of mobile video viewers watch at resolutions between 176×144 and 640×480. Less than half a percent of mobile video viewers are watching what could be considered high-quality videos.

According to these findings, Flash is by far the most popular mobile video format, accounting for a full 90% of total video traffic. That’s one strike against Apple’s no-Flash marching orders. Another is the stats on adult content; four of the top 10 video sites accessed from mobile phones contain only adult content. So much for “freedom from porn.”

However, even when you include adult content sites, YouTube is the most popular video content site, accounting for 36% of mobile views. A distant second is Google Video, which grabs just 6% of mobile video views.

If you watch videos on your phone, do these finding match up with your viewing experiences?

[img credit: larskflem]

Reviews: Google Video, YouTube, video

More About: Mobile 2.0, mobile video, report, stats, video

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Cuomo launched a fraud investigation into the life-insurance industry for practices that allegedly denied families of deceased military personnel and others from collecting cash from their policies.

Panasonic said it will spend up to $9.4 billion to buy all remaining shares in Sanyo Electric and Panasonic Electric Works.

More videogame companies, angling for larger audiences for big-budget online games, are making their products free to play in the hopes they can make more money by charging players for virtual goods.

Telefónica said net profit rose 16% as revenue growth in its Latin American business compensated for a weaker Spanish market.

We’ve been reading reports tonight that the popular European music service Spotify has hit yet another delay in making an entry in the U.S. market.

According to Billboard, Spotify’s negotiations with U.S. record labels have broken down and are “back to square one.” Apparently, the startup is still aiming for a 2010/early 2011 U.S. launch, but there’s no telling how long label negotiations could take or if they will be successful at all.

When we last heard from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek at SXSW 2010, he projected a Q3 U.S. launch and the unveiling of several new mobile applications. And while the service’s social and music features just keep getting better, the company is actually farther from a U.S. debut than they were this spring.

In Europe, Spotify operates under a freemium model. Users can get unlimited streaming music in an ad-supported interface. Users can also choose to pay for an ad-free experience that also includes mobile access. But elements of this model have been sources of contention for the major record labels stateside, notably Warner Music Group, according to Billboard’s sources.

In the meantime, Spotify competitors abound — Pandora in particular stands out as having been able to navigate political and record-label hurdles to keep itself operational and profitable. And Google and Apple are both rumored to be working on streaming music solutions, too.

Perhaps the larger question is whether American music lovers will still care about Spotify once it finally comes to our shores… if, indeed, it ever makes it here.

What do you think: Will Spotify’s leadership be able to play nicely with American record labels and launch their highly anticipated app in the U.S. this year? How about next year? Feel free to share your speculations in the comments.

Reviews: Google, Pandora, Spotify

More About: music, spotify, Warner

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PartyGaming plans to merge with Austrian sports-book operator Bwin Interactive Entertainment, creating the world's largest listed online-gambling business.

Intel won a key ruling in a suit against the company on behalf of computer buyers, which found no evidence that consumers have been hurt by the company's discounting practices in the market for computer chips.

The U.S. Justice Department accused Oracle of defrauding the federal government on a software contract that involved more than $1 billion in sales.

RNP is a form of Performance-based Navigation that ensures the aircraft follows a carefully designed path that can provide navigational flexibility, such as custom-tailored, curved paths through mountainous terrain or congested airspace.

Google has indicated it’s going to be working with developers on checkins for location-based applications through its Places API.

This spring, Google announced Places as a revamping of its local and local-business listings. Originally, we saw Places as a SEM/user review mechanism, perhaps a Yelp competitor.

However, with the recent preview of the Google Places API at Google I/O, the company showed developers a whole world of geographical, commercial and social information attached to each Place on its vast radar.

In a May blog post, Maps API Product Manager Thor Mitchell wrote, “Each Place Page consolidates together everything we know about a single Place, be it a business, point of interest, or geographical feature such as a city or neighbourhood. We believe that this unified concept of Places more accurately reflects the way that Maps users see the world, and are working to bring an awareness of Places to the Google Maps API.”

Based on developers’ interest in the Places API, Google is going to begin offering access to certain apps. Mitchell wrote today that while his team has seen “applications looking to show a user Places around them and applications looking to offer a search and browse experience for Places similar to that offered on Google Maps,” what intrigued the company most were the applications that offered a checkin function — easily one of the hottest features of present-day social media.

“We are going to focus initially on check-in applications,” Mitchell continued. “These are the applications that we feel the API currently caters to well, and we are excited to work with developers building these applications to understand their requirements, and ensure that we are offering them the best possible experience… We have now begun reaching out to developers who have expressed an interest in building checkin applications using the API, including those working on client applications for the Buzz API.”

We can’t wait to see who gets to work with the Places API and what kinds of apps they build. Devs, what do you expect to come from Google’s interest in checkins?

And what do you think this new direction bodes for Latitude? Could a better, Places-based app take its place as Google’s de facto location-based service?

Reviews: Google, Google Maps, Yelp

More About: checkin, geolocation, Google, google places, lbs, location, places API

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Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said tablet computers are high on his priority list as Apple Inc. takes the lead in a market his company has tried to foster for more than a decade.

Being able to legally jailbreak your iPhone is cool and all, but think where this type of legal reasoning could take us.

#diy We've shown you how to play video games on your iDevice with a Wiimote, and you can do the same on Android, too. Some clever DIY hackers have made this experience even better by creating Wiimote attachments for their phones. More »