Verizon Wireless today introduced the newest Droid smartphone and the second from Motorola, but some Android fans may be disappointed to learn that it won’t ship with the latest operating system or the newest Flash Player.

The Droid X will ship with Android 2.1, which will be updated to so-called Froyo, or Android 2.2, later. That means that it initially won’t have Flash Player 10.1, the latest version of that software that became available this week for Android 2.2. Onlookers had hoped the Droid X would come with Android 2.2.

The Droid X smartphone.
The phone will become available July 15 and will get Android 2.2 and Flash Player 10.1 later in the summer, Verizon said. It will retail for $199 after a $100 rebate.

The phone has a large 4.3-inch screen, bigger than most and matching the HTC HD2, a Windows Mobile phone. It will come with a Blockbuster application that lets users download full-length feature films and, because the phone has an HDMI port, watch the movies on other devices like TVs. Users will also be able to rent movies from Blockbuster to watch on the phone or other devices.

The phone has an 8-megapixel camera and can capture high-definition video. It has a 1Ghz processor and can accommodate as much as 40GB of memory, including expanded memory.

The Droid X doesn’t come with a physical keyboard and will ship with Swype, software that offers a new way of typing on on-screen keyboards without having to lift up the finger.

Users will be required to sign up for a $29.99-per-month data plan for unlimited access. They can opt to pay an additional $20 a month for a hotspot service that lets other devices, like a PC, connect to the phone for Internet access. The hotspot service is limited to 2GB of data usage.

Any Verizon customer whose contract is up any time this year can buy the phone for the subsidized $199 price.

Speaking at the event to unveil the phone, Google’s Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering, said that the company is now selling 160,000 Android-powered devices each day and that the Android Market has 65,000 third-party applications.

He also officially announced that today Google has open sourced Android 2.2, making it available for handset makers to use. The software has already been pushed out to some review units of the Nexus One phone.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a surprise appearance at the event, where he promoted the benefits of Google’s back-end cloud applications on mobile phones. Behind phones like the Droid X are “massively parallel supercomputers that do the computations” for services like voice translation, he said. But he also said that it takes powerful hardware and networks to deliver the capabilities available in such a device.

The U.S. government says it’s lost — yes, lost — an entire hard drive full of sensitive data. The external drive, stored at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, held personal data from the Clinton era, including information about White House staff and visitors and electronic storage tapes from the Executive Office of the President.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first flub-up we’ve seen when it comes to seemingly dumb data mistakes by major government agencies. In fact, there have been several winners since just last year. Here, then, are our top four government data blunders of recent months, starting with this week’s National Archives revelation.

4. The National Archives’ Hard Drive Disappearance

The National Archives’ hard drive contained an “as yet unknown” amount of data, the office says. Home addresses and Social Security numbers are believed to be a part of the information. Some reports even suggest personal details about one of Al Gore’s daughters could be included, as could details about Secret Service security procedures used during the Clinton years.

The thing’s apparently been missing since April, even though it was just announced today. Most flummoxing, though, is the fact that quoted officials say it may have been “accidentally misplaced.” Right — because a government hard drive with this type of data doesn’t deserve, I don’t know, maybe just an extra shred of caution when it comes to its handling.

Welcome to the list, National Archives.

3. The TSA’s Lost-Then-Found Fumble

The Transportation Security Administration: protectors of our skies; guard gates of our…well, gates. Surely, an agency charged with keeping airports safe would know a thing or two about security. Right?

Not necessarily. Time to rewind back to last summer, when the TSA announced one of its checkpoint laptops from the San Francisco airport was missing. The PC was used to control a “fast-pass” security prescreening program and held unencrypted personal info on 33,000 passengers.

The media was notified, a full investigation was launched, and the prescreening program was sent into partial lockdown. A week later, the TSA found the laptop — wait for it — in its own office. Top-notch.

The TSA also, by the way, lost an external hard drive with employee data in 2007 and “maybe” mailed about 1200 former workers’ Social Security numbers and birth dates to random people a year before that.

2. The U.S. Military’s eBay Embarrassment

MEMO: Do not sell old hard drives containing sensitive military information on eBay. *

* What a U.S. military contractor evidently forgot to send out.

Throw this one into the “how not to manage security” file: Just this month, security researchers announced they’d located launch procedures for a U.S. missile air defense system on a hard drive bought off eBay. The drive, reports indicated, had detailed information about a system used to shoot down missiles in Iraq, along with security policies, facility blueprints, and the always popular list of employee Social Security numbers.

The drive has been tied to Lockheed Martin, which developed the aforementioned defense system. In its defense, though, other drives bought off eBay in the same sweep were found to contain bank medical records, business plans, and detailed information about bank accounts, among other things. So at least it has some company in the “d’oh!” department.

1. The U.K.’s Vanishing Disks. And Hard Drives. And Memory Sticks. And Computers.

Impressive as those feats are, there’s little question the U.K. takes the cake when it comes to dumb data mistakes over the past months. The nation’s top government number crunchers probably can’t even keep count of stupid slip-ups that have plagued various agencies. There were the lost laptops (45,000 citizens’ information exposed; 30,000 of them never notified), the lost CDs (3,000 workers’ data disappeared; information all unencrypted), the lost drivers’ data (3 million Department of Transport files misplaced), the lost military laptop (620,000 recruits’ info exposed), and the lost prison system memory stick (84,000 prisoners’ information set free). And that’s just the tip of the idiotic iceberg.

The BBC estimates the U.K. government fumbled about 4 million people’s personal information within a single year, from mid-2007 to mid-2008. It’s not just the small stuff, either: The government apparently was losing computers at a rate of one PC per week for a while, too, some analyses suggested.

Forget all the yammering about the forced digital upgrade on June 12: After years of gripping a wretched remote and looking at lousy menus, I’m Comcastrating my cable service. Or, at least, I’m seriously considering doing so. After test-driving one $40 app for a couple of weeks, I’m ready to chuck that crummy cable box into the trash and forget about the digital-upgrade scheme. This is the story of PlayOn, the software that could ruin everything for cable providers–if the bugs are ever ironed out.

Imagine a software package that can stream just about any show to your Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or, soon, Wii. Netflix? No problem. Major-network TV shows? Yep. Obscure stuff from Adult Swim? You name it, you can watch it. All you need is a PC and an Internet connection in the same house.

A little explanation: For years I had a pretty sweet setup. I crafted a media center PC, loaded with digital tuners, that serves as the hub in my house. It records all my shows, and it spits out whatever I want to watch over my home network to my Xboxes. Simple, clean, effective.

But over the past few months, I’ve found myself watching more of my shows online–be it on Hulu.com or countless other online sites (the legit ones, of course). I’ve already been weaning myself off of conventional TV viewing. But how do I clear the last hurdle–getting shows from that wacky Internet to a TV in my house–without piling on additional costs or ludicrous cable service charges?

That’s when I decided to give PlayOn a try. This software was in beta until late 2008, but it’s now live–and with enough kinks worked out, it’s at least worth the free 14-day trial download. First, the hardware check. Do you have:

Windows XP or Vista?
A 3.2GHz or better Pentium 4, a 2.0GHz or better Pentium M, or any multicore x86 processor?
512MB RAM?
4GB to 5GB of space on the same hard drive where Windows is installed?
Hey, I think that describes a spare laptop I bought two years ago!

Microsoft Corp. has denied that it makes money when users “downgrade” Windows Vista to the older XP, as a lawsuit filed last week alleges.

The lawsuit, submitted to a Seattle federal court last Wednesday, stems from the $59.25 fee that a California woman was charged in mid-2008 when she bought a Lenovo laptop and downgraded from Vista to XP.

“Microsoft does not charge or receive any additional royalty if a customer exercises those [downgrade] rights,” said Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster in an e-mail late last week. “Some customers may choose or need to obtain media or installation services from third parties to install the downgrade version.”

In fact, it’s computer makers, not Microsoft per se, who charge users the additional fees for downgrading a new PC from Vista to XP at the factory. Dell Inc., for example, adds an extra $20 to the price to downgrade a PC.

Microsoft, however, may profit from the way it structures downgrade rights. Only buyers of PCs with pre-installed editions of Vista Business and Vista Ultimate can downgrade, and then only to Windows XP Professional. All three editions are higher-priced versions of their respective lines, a fact that the lawsuit mentioned in passing.

“Customers have been forced to purchase the most expensive version of [Windows XP] in order to ‘downgrade’ from the Windows Vista operating system,” the complaint read.

That was the cause of some confusion last year, when Dell Inc. was accused of gouging customers by charging $150 to downgrade a new computer to XP. Dell, however, countered that although it did charge $20 to install XP on the machine, as well as to cover the cost of the additional media, the bulk — $120 of the $150 — was the price of upgrading the PC from the standard Home Premium to the more expensive Business edition.

Microsoft does not offer downgrade rights with its Vista Home Premium, the most popular of Vista’s editions.

“Microsoft mandates that customers who want to downgrade to XP must purchase the license to Vista Business or Vista Ultimate,” said Dell spokesman David Frink last December. “[That's] typically about a $130 premium, though some retail outlets charge more.”

“Downgrade” describes the Windows licensing rights that Microsoft gives users, who are allowed under some circumstances to replace newer versions of Windows with an older edition without having to pay for another license. The practice became popular last year when users, unhappy with Vista’s performance on the new PCs they bought, instead sought ways to run the leaner XP.

The lawsuit, filed by Los Angeles resident Emma Alvarado, charged Microsoft with multiple violations of Washington state’s unfair business practices and consumer protection laws through its policy of barring computer makers from continuing to offer XP on new PCs after Vista’s early-2007 launch. She claimed Microsoft’s practice resulted in customers paying more for XP than they otherwise would. “They have been forced to pay substantially more to acquire the Windows XP operating system than they would have to pay in a competitive marketplace,” the suit said.

Alvarado also named 100 “John Doe” co-defendants. “[They] are the persons, firms and corporations who have participated with Microsoft in the wrongdoings complained of and performed acts and made statements in furtherance thereof,” the lawsuit read. “The Doe Defendants acts as co-conspirators and aided and abetted, or participated with, Microsoft in the commission of wrongful acts.”

Bowermaster claimed that Microsoft had no downgrade program as such. “Microsoft does not have a downgrade program. It does offer downgrade rights as part of some Windows Vista licenses, including Windows Vista Business purchased through the OEM channel.” That, however, belies the fact that Microsoft has regularly offered downgrade rights to users. When it released Windows XP in 2001, it allowed people who had XP licenses to downgrade to Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 98, according to Gartner analyst Michael Silver.

The year 2007 has been an interesting year that brought us improved security with Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5).   But to get some perspective of how many publicly known holes found in these two operating systems, I’ve compiled all the security flaws in Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista and placed them side by side.  This is significant because it shows a trend that can give us a good estimate for how many flaws we can expect to find in the coming months.  The more monthly flaws there are in the historical trend, the more likely it is that someone will find a hole to exploit in the future.  For example back in April of this year, hackers took over a fully patched Macbook and won $10,000 plus the Macbook they hacked.

I used vulnerability statistics from an impartial third party vendor Secunia and I broke them down by Windows XP flaws, Vista flaws, and Mac OS X flaws.  Since Secunia doesn’t offer individual numbers for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.4, I merged the XP and Vista vulnerabilities so that we can compare Vista + XP flaws to Mac OS X.  In case you’re wondering how 19 plus 12 could equal 23, this is because there are many overlapping flaws that is shared between XP and Vista so those don’t get counted twice just as I don’t count something that affects Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 twice.

Nothing in cube-farm corporate America seems quite so decadent as having two monitors on your desk.

 Who is this important person who needs to work on two screens at the same time? Must be some kind of bigshot, eh?

Not so, posts the New York Times, which cites research that — on certain text-editing tasks — users were 44 percent faster using two 20-inch monitors instead of a single 18-inch screen. While there are no hard data points in the piece regarding other applications, it’s not tough to see how users in all manner of industries and all types of tasks could benefit from having the extra LCD real estate. Anyone who has to flip back and forth between multiple windows in order to access information rather than keeping it all on the screen simultaneously should be able to get a productivity boost from having an extra display.

The Times’ Farhad Manjoo put multi-monitor work to the test in his own workspace and notes that — no matter what configuration he put them in, and even if he just went to one large monitor instead of two smaller ones — he found his productivity improved significantly. The big benefit? Always being able to have your primary task visible and not covered up by off-topic windows like web pages and IM sessions. Says Fanjoo, “A huge desktop didn’t remove all distractions, but it blunted their force. Now I could keep my e-mail and the Web open on one screen while my Microsoft Word document ran on another. This kept me on task. Even if I did go off to the Web, my document was always visible, beckoning me to come back to work.”

For a total maximum investment of about $500, Manjoo says he’s convinced that the multi-monitor setup is more than worth the investment. Now let’s see what your boss thinks about the idea…