Nokia announced its first Windows Phone 7 handset at the NokiaWorld event today. The phone, called the Lumia 800, has a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 CPU, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage behind an 800x480 AMOLED display. Ars is at NokiaWorld and will get some hands-on time with the phone, but in the meantime some photos of the Windows Phone Mango handset are embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

Perhaps the most obvious limitation of the BlackBerry PlayBook, the lack of a native e-mail application, won’t be corrected until February, Research In Motion said yesterday. The e-mail update, which would have happened by now if RIM had kept to its original schedule, will come with version 2.0 of the PlayBook OS, now slated to reach customers in February. BlackBerry Messenger will not be included in that update, and RIM did not provide a timeline on when to expect a native BBM app for PlayBook.

“As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users,” RIM senior vice president David Smith said in a blog post Tuesday.

Moreover, “we have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release,” RIM said. “We are committed to developing a seamless BBM solution that fully delivers on the powerful, push based messaging capabilities recognized today by BlackBerry users around the world and we’re still working on it. In the meantime, BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to continue to use BlackBerry Bridge to securely access BlackBerry Messenger on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet’s high resolution display.”

Since the PlayBook shipped earlier this year without native e-mail, the aforementioned BlackBerry Bridge is also used to create a link between the PlayBook and a BlackBerry smartphone, bringing the phone’s e-mail, calendar, and contacts to the tablet. A beta version of PlayBook OS 2.0 has been made available to developers, bringing them a runtime to test Android apps on the PlayBook, but RIM says the developer beta “does not contain end user features such as: email, calendar contacts, video store, etc.”

It has been a rocky month for RIM. After a multi-day outage harmed its enterprise reputation, it was hit with a trademark lawsuit over the use of the name BBX for its next-generation operating system that will power both smartphones and tablets. With RIM still struggling to bring native e-mail and BBM to the PlayBook, the company has not yet set a timeline for the release of BBX.

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Apple's iPod line didn't get much in the way of updates this year for the first time in roughly a decade. During Apple's fall media event earlier this month, the company announced that just two of its current lineup of four iPods would see any kind of update at all. The iPod touch, previously only available in the traditional black, would now be available in both black and white (ooh, ahh), while the iPod nano gained a handful of clock faces and the ability to track workouts via Nike+ without the need for the accompanying shoe dongle.

It was the latter announcement that piqued my interest. As a runner and an iPod nano aficionado who has been following the development of the Nike+iPod partnership since 2006, I'm familiar with how both Apple and Nike have tweaked the functionality of the Nike+ product over the last five years. Before the iPod nano that was introduced this month, the iPod nano's built-in Nike+ functionality usually required the use of a wireless dongle that only fits into a special divot underneath the insole of a Nike+ shoe—this, the companies argued, was to ensure that the app's measurements were accurate and more precise to your own walking or running style instead of merely estimating your distance or speed.

Citrix is touting new technology to make the up-front cost of virtual desktops cheaper for businesses than physical desktops within six months, while ensuring that virtual desktop performance doesn’t lag too far behind traditional PCs. While advances in XenDesktop software and the ability to pack ever more virtual desktops onto a single server factor into the equation, a key piece is a new partnership with virtual desktop software vendor NComputing and hardware vendor Texas Instruments to create a system-on-a-chip architecture that incorporates Citrix’s own HDX high-definition virtual desktop technology directly into the silicon.

The first devices using HDX system-on-a-chip technology will be sold in early 2012, and will eventually lead to client devices that cost less than $100, Citrix claims.

“For the first time ever, nontraditional devices like network monitors, phones, smart keyboards, consumer set-top boxes, shop floor equipment, kiosks and hospital workstations-on-wheels will be able to display virtual apps and desktops directly, without the need for an a full PC at the endpoint,” Citrix said.

The HDX system-on-a-chip architecture is initially designed for ARM-based chips but will be expanded to x86. To enable access to virtual desktops, these devices would connect to customer data centers outfitted with Citrix’s XenApp and XenDesktop software. Citrix says the average first year cost for deploying physical desktops in a business setting is roughly $1,000 per device, and that virtual desktops are on the verge of dropping below that mark and will continue to decline in price while physical desktops stay steady.

Woodstock, Illinois is possibly most famous for its starring role in the 1988 film Groundhog Day. The small burg, roughly an hour northwest of Chicago, stood in for the small Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney throughout the film. The courthouse square was used to shoot the famous meeting between Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, and insurance salesman Ned Ryerson, wherein Connors steps off the sidewalk into a "doozy" of a mud puddle.

Woodstock also happens to be home to one of the greenest buildings in the entire country. That building is the current corporate headquarters for Mac upgrade and accessory makers Other World Computing. Ars recently had an opportunity to take a tour of the facility and look into some of its impressive green "features." We also spoke with CEO Larry O'Connor about how the drive to build such an environmentally friendly building is the same drive that pushed him to build OWC's Mac-friendly business in the first place, quite literally with his bare hands.

Apple has insisted on calling its Apple TV set-top box a "hobby," even though the most recent version appears to be selling well. But Steve Jobs said shortly before his death that he had "finally cracked" a way to make TVs as simple and elegant as the iPhone or iPad. And the talent he trusted to see that task through is reportedly none other than Jeff Robbin, the same software engineer Apple brought on in 2000 to build iTunes.

Jobs told author Walter Issacson during an interview for his recently released biography that he wanted to make using a TV as simple as he had made using a smartphone or music player. “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” he told Issacson. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine.”

“I finally cracked it,” Jobs said.

A software company that owns a trademark on the name BBX filed suit yesterday against Research In Motion, which is using the same name for its next-generation operating system for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets. The suit was filed by Basis International in the US District Court of New Mexico.

GigaOm reports that “Basis’ BBX is a set of tools and languages that help developers write programs for multiple operating systems. Basis has been using the BBX name since as early as 1985 and got a trademark in 1995.” While Basis spells the trademark as "BBX" in its lawsuit, the company uses a lower-case "x" on its website, which says BBx refers to Business BASIC eXtended.

In the lawsuit, Basis argues that “The parties’ respective BBX products are clearly related. By way of example only, a software application created with BASIS' BBX to run on the Android or iOS mobile devices will also run on RIM’s BBX for BlackBerry products.” Moreover, Basis says it received “inquiries from confused customers” after RIM announced its own BBX product last week. Customers and prospective customers are “likely to wrongly believe that software applications created using BASIS’ development tools are only compatible with RIM’s BBX operating system, thus impairing and destroying BASIS’ reputation for providing software development tools for cross-platform development,” the lawsuit argues.

The Basis suit demands that RIM be prevented from using the name BBX in any capacity, and compensate Basis for legal costs and damages. Basis first threatened to sue last week, at which time RIM told Reuters “we do not believe the marks are confusing, particularly since our respective companies are in different lines of business.” RIM chose the name BBX because the forthcoming OS will combine features of the traditional BlackBerry smartphone operating system with QNX tablet software.

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Ever since the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft was announced, 2012 was positioned as the "real" launch year, with only limited availability in 2011. The limits of that availability are now becoming clearer: Nokia's first Windows Phone handsets are unlikely to reach the US until 2012, according to a briefing document seen by AdAge. The company has a planned marketing spend in Europe, but is still trying to find an advertising agency in the US.

The first Nokia handset—or possibly handsets—will be unveiled at Nokia World in London this week. One design, codenamed Sea Ray, leaked in June; this model appears to be a Windows Phone clone of Nokia's MeeGo-Harmattan-powered N9, and according to leaked PR material will be branded the Nokia 800 when it launches.

In its earnings call last week, Nokia said that its initial Windows Phone launch will be in "select countries." The lack of US advertising agency makes it improbable that the US is one of those markets selected. One country that that has been "selected" is the UK: teaser advertisements for the Nokia 800 started airing at the weekend.

The US has traditionally been a weak market for Nokia, so the decision to launch in the EU first is not altogether surprising: the market is likely to be more receptive to the company's latest offering. The downside is, the Windows Phone experience works best in the US, as currently, only the US has the full set of online services, including interior maps, music and video purchases, and speech recognition. The service availability has improved with the release of Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango," and it should improve further as the Nokia partnership yields results. In particular, data from Nokia's Navteq subsidiary should allow for improved mapping and route planning, and allow a greatly expanded database of places of interest.

Waiting until 2012 to launch Nokia's Windows Phone handsets in the US also means that the platform will miss out on the all-important holiday season. That, in turn, means missing out on attractive, eye-catching handsets—precisely the kind of thing that Microsoft is trusting Nokia to bring to the Windows Phone market.

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