In the United States, we are mainly a postpay mobile market.  That is, around 70-80% of US mobile customers are pay a fixed monthly cost for a bucket of minutes and SMS messages each and every month.  Also, we are happy to have subsidized handsets that are either free or very cheap.  In exchange for signing a 2-year agreement, most Americans are happy getting a $0-$100 handset that they will have on contract for a 24-month period. With the economic recession, more and more folks are ditching this practice and going with a pre-paid phone whereby you pay for a fixed set of minutes and typically buy phones without subsidy.  Increasingly, Americans are enjoying the freedom and flexibility that the pre-paid system provides them.  However, for the longest time, pre-paid customers have only had the choice of basic and feature phones to choose from.

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has spent considerable time and energy refocusing Final Cut Pro for a more general audience, and away from the Pro market. Reportedly, Apple laid off several Apple employees working on Final Cut Pro, then reorganized the entire team and handed it to Randy Ubilos, the same developer who redesigned iMove in 2008. AppleInsider is now reporting that Apple s aiming this new version to be “more appealing and useful to the needs of prosumers.” Currently, Final Cut Pro is targeted at advanced professionals with a scaled down, less expensive Final Cut Express version sold to users who don’t need all of its high end features.

Apple has released Beta 4 of iPhone OS 4 and it’s accompanying Software Development Kit. This of course is the fourth incremental release of the developer tools and OS that Apple introduced to developers in early April . The final product is expected to released sometime this summer for all but the earliest iPhone and iPod touch models.

World of Apple is reporting that Apple has seeded another build (Build 10F54) of Mac OS X 10.6.4 to developers. This release comes just days after the previous seed , and little seems to have changed, with the exception that this build now has no known issues. Not a major revelation considering that the last build had only one know issue

The 32-inch, 1080p Viera TX-L32S20B LCD TV isn’t exactly brimming with features, but it does offer good picture quality with both standard- and high-definition material. With the World Cup just around the corner, its Freeview HD tuner will also come in handy if you’re a football fan

The 52-inch, 1080p, LED-backlit Aquos LC-52LE700E LCD TV is a good option if you mainly watch high-definition material — it delivers inky blacks, intense colours and impressive sharpness. Its standard-definition performance is less impressive, but this set is fairly cheap considering its size