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Hollywood has been scrambling to keep DVD and Blu-ray sales afloat since the rise of Netflix. Their primary tool has been the delayed release: movie studios don't distribute copies to Netflix or Redbox for 28 days, giving the most impatient customers a month to buy a film. Or to pirate it. A new deal between Netflix and studio Warner Bros. doubled that delay to a longer 56 days. Apparently Warner Bros. believes the waiting period drives more movie fans to stores than torrent sites, as an LA Times blog claims that Netflix users will soon have another restriction placed between them and new releases.

The blog's source says Netflix's version of the pre-order--placing a movie in the queue before it's released--will be disabled for Warner Bros. movies when the new deal between the two companies goes into effect on February 1.

Panasonic keeps on cranking out Micro Four Thirds cameras, but with the exception of co-creator Olympus no one else is really buying into the small form factor in-betweener camera line. Finally the two companies are getting some support from Japan as lens manufacturers Kenko and Tamron hop on board. The selection of Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lenses should expand this year as those two companies begin producing glass for the miniature format.

Meanwhile, the selection of Micro Four Thirds devices will be growing, too. Along with Kenko Tokina and Tamron, a third Japanese company called Astrodesign will be joining the party with a Micro Four Thirds video camera that measure 2.5 x 4.5 x 9 inches. It shoots 4K video.

There are a lot of things to like about the Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). The interface is cleaner, there are simple new features, and the device has killer hardware. One thing that taken a lot of heat, though, is the current implementation of the Menu button. As part of the button-less Android 4.0 re-design, the hardware system buttons went away, replaced by on-screen buttons.

Unlike the Home and Back functions, the Menu button has been demoted beyond the bottom of the screen. It shows up in the new Action Bar within application UIs. In many ways, we like the Action Bar, but the Menu button has set some users' teeth on edge. Google is pushing hard for the change, but is it the best decision for users?

Steam sales are inescapable. If you thought you could get away by avoiding computers, yo were wrong: on Thursday Valve launched Steam apps for both iOS and Android, granting direct mobile access to deals and the Steam community to lucky users who receive beta invites. Anyone can download the beta app without an invite and attempt to log in--doing so will put you on a (very long) list of interested gamers.

Steam for mobile fits all of the desktop version's primary features into a slide-in left-hand navigation column, with sections for community, store, news feeds, and settings. The app is obviously still a work-in-progress, but the two most important features, chatting with friends and purchasing games, work just fine.

It was just over five years ago that Steve Jobs got up on stage at Moscone Center and announced the iPhone. Little did we know he was also announcing the death of the stylus and resistive screen input. The entire mobile market moved to capacitive touch, and finger-friendly UIs. If you ask us, this was for the best, but there is definitely an increasingly vocal niche of users that yearn for pen-based input.

Digitizers on Android devices have evolved to the point that capacitive touch and some of the features expected from a stylus can coexist. Some past attempts at adding pen-input to Android have failed, but there is high excitement for the soon-to-be-released AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note and its S Pen. Let’s look at pen input on Android and see what it’s going to take for it to work.

Google really wants to make the web faster. Between Chrome, Instant Search, Project SPDY, and a page in the Google code database located at /speed/, it's safe to say they're obsessed. Not that we're complaining: making the web faster is a worthy obsession, and Google has the resources and engineers to make an impact. A recent post on the Google Code blog criticizes the web's now-dated implementation of TCP, or Transmission Control Protocol, and suggests that we can do better.

The problem with TCP, Google explains, comes from its tiny congestion window and overly long initial timeout period. While today's web browsers open many simultaneous TCP connections to load websites more quickly, they can't do anything about the RTT (round-trip delay time) holding back TCP speeds. Here's how Google intends to make TCP faster, in four steps.