Everything's fine over at Verizon, folks, and you can still expect 4G wireless service to materialize sometime later this year. Or so says Dick Lynch, the company's executive vice president and CTO.

Speaking during a press conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Lynch reiterated that Verizon Wireless is on track to launch its commercial LTE (long-term evolution) service later this year. There's good chance it will come to fruition sooner rather than later, as Lynch said his company is in the final testing phase, otherwise known as "Phase 4," of its LTE technology. Within the next two months, he expects testing to be completed in Boston and Seattle.

Verizon hopes to launch its service in 25 to 30 markets throughout the U.S. by the end of the year. First-run solutions will consist of offering laptop owners USB air cards that access LTE. Later on, expect to see mobile devices with embedded LTE trickle into the market.

The biggest challenge, says Lynch, has been getting voice to work over LTE, and while more work remains to be done, he said the issue is getting resolved.

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You're not likely to find the Solar Egg on any Denny's menu, nor would you want to put one in your mouth anyway. Feel free to toss it out into low sunlight, however, where developers XPAL and Intivation claim the Solar Egg's internal 500mAh battery can reach over 90 percent charge in just 4 hours of exposure in "average charging conditions."

"Solar power is a huge unrealized energy source particularly in the Western world which tends to have fewer hours of sunlight than developing markets," says Christian Scheder, President, XPAL. "As personal devices demand more energy and solar charging technology improves, we are making solar power available to more consumers and changing the way people power their portable devices."

The two companies are touting the Solar Egg as the world's first high performance solar charger. They say it's built to power a range of devices, from phones to MP3 players.

This one will start shipping next month in "select regions," followed by a global rollout later this year. No word yet on price.

Image Credit: XPAL via Engadget

If OLED's the future, where does the technology fit into the present? Not anywhere, according to Sony, at least when talking about high definition television sets. Sony announced plans to end sales of OLED sets in Japan until costs come down.

Probably a good idea too, considering the only model Sony released was an 11-inch set that commanded roughly $2,222. That's barely larger than most netbooks, but a whole heck of a lot more expensive, to state the obvious.

This doesn't mean that Sony is turning its back on OLED technology in general, the company just wants no part in selling obscenely overpriced displays. Instead, Sony said it will focus on research and development, and may even dabble in overseas production.

"We will continue to consider new products and applications including OLED TVs," Sony spokesman Shigenori Yoshida said.

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Intel's Pine Trail platform has already hit the netbook scene, so where's the next-gen Nvidia Ion graphics? Glad you asked, says Acer, the first company to show off a netbook outfitted with Nvidia's Ion 2 chipset.

Looking to set a "netbook trend in the digital world," Acer's just-announced Aspire One 532G sports all kind of higher-end goodies, at least in the realm of netbooks. The 10.1-inch unit comes with an Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and Nvidia's Ion 2 with 512MB of dedicated memory to give the integrated GMA3150 graphics a boost when needed.

"Enjoy smoooth and flawless 3D computing, mainstream PC gaming, boost the performance of editing and converting videos, face-tagging photos, and hi-def video playback up to 1080p via HDMI-output to HDTV," Acer explains.

Acer also wants to put to rest any concerns of sub-par battery life, claiming you can expect up to 10 hours of run time.

The Aspire one 532G will start shipping at the end of the quarter and come in Sapphire Blue, Ruby Red, and Pearl Silver.

YouTube Video Demo

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