About four and a half years after the first of its competitors began to offer wireless broadband, T-Mobile is starting to catch up. Yesterday, the company announced the start of its "3G" service in New York City.

T-Mobile's service will debut with a technology called UMTS, with speeds only about a third or a quarter of entry-level DSL--"a range of 200 kilobits per second (kbps) to 300 kbps," wrote spokesman David Henderson in an e-mail.

The carrier only offers four compatible handsets, none BlackBerry, Sidekick or Windows Mobile smartphones: the Nokia 3555 and Nokia 6263, each free after rebate; the Samsung t639, $49.99 after rebate, and the Samsung t819, $79.99 after rebate.

At the start, data rates will be the same as its slower EDGE service and therefore somewhat indecipherable, since T-Mobile charges widely varying rates--$5.99, $19.99, $39.99 and so on--depending on whether you use a regular phone or different types of smartphone. (Only the wireless-phone industry can come up with so many different ways to charge for the same service of unlimited data access.)

T-Mobile will begin selling phones compatible with a faster flavor of 3G called HSDPA later this year. Henderson said those should yield "an average data rate of 600 kbps with a peak of 1 Mbps." He also suggested that prices could change at that point, writing that "T-Mobile will continue to evaluate pricing for HSDPA services later this year."

But for several months to come, you'll have to get on the Jersey Turnpike, Amtrak, the shuttle or a bus to try out this service. Although competing carriers AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless have offered mobile-broadband access in the Washington area for over two years (with Verizon's debuting back in late 2003; see my review from early 2004), T-Mobile won't begin to offer this service outside of the NYC market until the third quarter of this year, Henderson said.

Silicon Valley printers can go back to their usual summer plans: They won't need to gear up to crank out new business cards for thousands of Yahoo staffers who would have found themselves Microsoft employees later this year. Microsoft announced Saturday that it would abandon the merger attempt it launched at the end of January.

In a "Dear Jerry" letter to Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wrote that while Microsoft's $33/share offer represented a 70 percent premium above Yahoo's closing price on Jan. 31, Yahoo had demanded another $4 a share, which Microsoft would not accept. Ballmer also wrote that Yahoo's plans to let Google handle part of its Web-advertising business would have wrecked the entire deal. And so, he concluded, "clearly a deal is not to be."

My colleague Peter Whoriskey's story today offers more details.

I was a skeptic about the odds of this deal happening from the start, but I thought it would get quashed by regulators in the U.S. or the European Union, not abandoned after a round of counter-offers.

The Microsoft that once ordered around the rest of the computer industry seems to have vanished sometime in the last decade. Microsoft had a chance to solve its problem by throwing money at it but declined to. It threatened a hostile takeover, in which it would get its own slate of merger-friendly directors installed on Yahoo's board, and then called off those plans.

This leaves Yahoo with the same problems it faced at the start of the year--a slate of often lackluster homegrown Web products, a failure to make much use of such high-profile acquisitions as the Flickr photo-album site and the Del.icio.us bookmarks-sharing site, and some outright gaps (hey, Yahoo, ever heard of hosting people's blogs?) in its lineup. Yahoo's staffers may feel a reinvigorated sense of purpose, as Yang wrote on the company's corporate blog, but what's to stop Google from eating still more of this company's lunch?

So a lot of people see Yahoo as the loser in this deal (see, for instance, TechCrunch's reaction this morning). But what about Microsoft?

In many cases, it's provided more effective alternatives to Google than Yahoo has. Its Live.com home page, unlike Yahoo's confused, cluttered front door, doesn't look like a throwback to the kitchen-sink design of Web "portals" of the late 1990s. Its Live Maps site offers visual details that rival both Yahoo Maps and Google Maps (and it's the only site I trust to guide me on Interstate 66 inside the Beltway).

Let me put it this way: If one of these two companies had to get wiped off the Web, I would miss Microsoft's work a little more than Yahoo's.

But Microsoft can't seem to pick one Web strategy and stick to it. Instead, we've seen a confusing shuffling of brand names over the past decade. It's also had trouble deciding if some of its Web services, such as Hotmail--er, "Windows Live Hotmail"--should exist first as Windows accessories or as standalone attractions.

A Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft wouldn't have fixed these things. Perhaps, without the distraction of digesting this transaction, each company can focus on putting its own Internet house in order. Or--and this may be more likely--Yahoo's shareholders, having seen the payoff they would have gotten from a Microsoft purchase of the company, will push it to accept a buyout offer from some other Internet company. And in that case, whatever identity of the successful suitor (News Corp.? IAC? A newly-spun-off AOL?), the post-merger turmoil would hinder meaningful progress in Yahoo's Web portfolio anytime soon.

What's your reaction to the end of this deal: relief? anger? apathy?

I often spend Friday afternoons packing up old review hardware to send back to whatever PR agency originally shipped it my way. (In case you were wondering: No, I don't get to keep any of the stuff I write about.)

This routine comes with two challenges.

The first is erasing whatever data I'd loaded on the machine, just in case the people running the company's product-loan program forget to do so and so wind up sharing my address book, calendar or e-mail with the next reviewer. With computers, that's not too hard. (See this Help File item from December for the details.) With smartphones and other gadgets, it can take some tinkering and digging into manuals, as I wrote last summer.

The second is going through all the cables and chargers on my desk to figure out which ones belong to the device I'm shipping back. This can be a much bigger problem, because I am a total slob when it comes to my desk at work, and because most electronics vendors include generic, lookalike data and power cables.

As I type this, for example, I have to pack up a TomTom Global Positioning System navigator that I reviewed for National Geographic Traveler a few months ago. It's all ready to go, but I can't find the USB cable that came in the box--most likely because I mistakenly shipped it back with some other device a few weeks back. And looking for that cable has revealed that I have at least one unidentified power brick and one USB cable floating around my desk.Oops.

Beyond inconveniencing product reviewers, these anonymous accessories also advertise how much of a product was sourced from the lowest bidder available. When you open the box and a set of no-name parts spill out, it's easy to wonder how many other corners were cut in less visible places. It's also likely that the nameless power adapter in the box was not the most efficient model available at the time.

I'd like to think that more companies would be willing to spend a few more pennies per product to come up with more distinctive components (even if it simply means getting the USB cable in a different color, like Sony's distinctive purple, or stamping the company's name on the power brick). But looking at a lineup of boxed products in the store, how would you know that one hides the same old generic accessories and the other will reveal this extra touch of refinement?

I don't think this problem's getting better anytime soon...

This morning's column, like an increasing number of my Thursday pieces, started out as a blog post.

I thought I'd write a short bit about the art of writing a clever Facebook status update. I'd seen this form of concise creativity take off on that site (especially after this Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network stopped requiring status updates to begin with the deadening verb "is"). I'd been both amused by my friends' wordplay (how much time does Amy Argetsinger put into finding song lyrics to quote?) and challenged to come up with my own.

Then I realized how a sort of collective conversation could emerge out of these little snippets of text after The Post won six Pulitzer Prizes this spring. One after another, co-workers changed their status messages to some variation of "I'm proud to work at the Washington Post." (My next update: "Rob loved reading his fellow Postal workers' ecstatic status updates.")

Not long after, I finally decided to make some serious use of the Twitter account I'd opened last summer. And once I latched onto the (possibly insane) concept of writing a column in Twitter-compatible 140-character paragraphs... I had no choice but to go ahead with the idea.

So there you are.

In case you're curious about the Twitter users I noted in the column, here they are:

* The marriage proposal
* The affirmative response
* The briefly-imprisoned Twitterer
* "Darth Vader"
* "Metro"
* JetBlue
* Barack Obama
* Hillary Clinton
* And then there's me

(It is not true that I wrote this entire post just to drum up more followers for my Twitter feed; if you do choose to follow me, I just hope you're not too bored!)

Do you post status updates anywhere online? How often do you write new ones?

Let's talk about this during my Web chat today, starting at 2 p.m. If you forget to add that to your schedule, don't worry--I'll post a reminder about it on Twitter.

After recently writing a column that noted how many different third-party programs in your Web browser can pose security risks for you -- and then being prompted yet again by Major League Baseball's MLB.com site to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in to watch a video -- I thought I'd take a moment to inventory all the stuff running inside my browsers on various machines.

Here's the list:

* Flash: This one's the most essential one of the bunch, running the vast majority of the animations and videos I come across on the Web (along with, sadly, most of the more annoying ads). Too bad keeping up with Adobe's security fixes for Flash is such a chore.

* Java: This runs the interactive features on many advanced sites. But creator Sun Microsystems has inflicted one of the most horribly broken auto-update systems I've ever seen -- notwithstanding repeated promises to fix it. Not having to deal with Sun's nonsense on a Mac, where Apple provides its own Java software, is an underrated benefit for Mac users.

* Adobe Reader/Preview: Speaking of Apple advantages -- being able to use its compact, fast and reliable Preview plug-in to view Portable Document Format files instead of Adobe's Reader is another plus for the Mac. Adobe Reader has become a little quicker in recent releases, but it still takes too long to update itself.

* QuickTime: Apple's multimedia-playback software is needed to play back many movie trailers. It's painless to update on a Mac, but not so in Windows, where Apple insists on dumping useless program shortcuts on your desktop.

* Windows Media: It surprises me how rarely I run this, considering Microsoft's overall influence. (On a Mac, I use the Flip4Mac QuickTime add-on to play Windows Media file. That's right, a plug-in for a plug-in. Complicated enough?)

* RealPlayer: RealNetworks' multimedia software is a granddaddy of browser plug-ins, but I run this even less than Windows Media these days. Its most recent release adds the ability to download many audio and video streams to your computer--in addition to being far less intrusive than its often-loathsome predecessors--but I have yet to find myself making any use of that feature.

* Silverlight: Despite some initial promise, this Microsoft plug-in doesn't seem to have gotten much traction in the market. So I've yet to install it on my primary desktops at home and work. But if its presence pushes Adobe to improve the Flash update mechanism, I'm all for it!

Looking over that list, Silverlight seems skippable, and both Real and Windows Media look expendable too--although since a lot of Web radio stations only stream in one of those formats, I might only be able to vote one of those two off the island. In that case, I suspect Real would lose out.

If only Web-site operators could stop using Windows Media or Real entirely, in favor of Flash (for audio and video) or streaming MP3 (for audio).

What about you? Can you prune any plug-ins from your browser?

It only took some three decades of personal computing, but when Apple's Time Machine software arrived as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, we finally had a backup program easy enough for anybody to use.

But as I noted at the time, Time Machine requires a second, high-capacity hard drive, which many people still don't own. So in January, the company introduced Time Capsule, a box that combines a fast 802.11n WiFi router and a massive external hard drive in an enclosure no bigger than a regular AirPort Extreme router.

This two-in-one design allows you to back up every Mac in the home over your home network, eliminating a great deal of clutter and complexity. The pricing is also pretty good, if still higher than the cost of a separate hard drive and router: A 500-gigabyte model Time Capsule sells for just $299, while a one-terabyte unit goes for $499.

Apple loaned a 1-TB review model in March (note that its actual capacity was 929.5 GB, according to Mac OS X), and since then its primary trait has been a near-complete lack of drama.

The initial 92-GB backup took much longer over a wireless connection than when I had the Time Capsule connected via an Ethernet cable to the Mac--although I didn't sit there with a stopwatch, the job took at least a day and a half. But afterwards, it worked the same over a wired or wireless link.

(My colleague Liz McGehee, however, wrote that she returned a Time Capsule that wouldn't finish an initial backup session in multiple tries: "I'd get exactly 38.1 MB into it, and then it would get interrupted." I could not duplicate this problem on the review hardware.)

The only obvious cue of the Time Capsule's existence was noise. Its cooling fan made a distinct, if subdued, whine when beginning each backup session, as if a very small jet engine were spooling up behind the computer, and then smoothly whirred to a stop a few minutes later.

It also drew a little more power than the combination of a regular AirPort Extreme and the older FireWire external hard drive: 22 watts during backup sessions, 14 at other times.

For a single-Mac home, Time Capsule is probably overkill (although if you keep your router in a separate room from the computer, it might spare you the agony of having your computer and your backup drive stolen in the same break-in). For a home with more than one Mac running Leopard, though, I can't think of a simpler, easier backup system than Time Capsule.

In March, Apple provided another way to backup multiple Macs to a networked hard drive. A set of updates for Time Machine and AirPort Extreme routers issued then enabled a feature once promised for the first release of Leopard: the ability to plug in a hard drive to an AirPort base station and use that "AirPort Disk" as a Time Machine backup.

To test that, I connected an external hard drive to the Time Capsule's USB port (which can also be used to share a printer) and set Time Machine to back up my data to that volume. Apple has called this option unsupported," but it appeared to work just as well as Time Capsule's own drive.

If you've been using Time Capsule or an AirPort Disk to back up your Mac, how has that been working? What combination of hardware and software would you suggest to provide some of the same features in Windows?

At the start of this month, the social-networking site Facebook began adding an instant-messaging application. It's not a separate program, or even a separate Web page that you need to launch to start zipping notes back and forth in real time. Instead, this little Web widget pops in and out of the bottom right corner of the Facebook page.

Like the instant-messaging feature in Google's Gmail, Facebook's chat widget wisely emphasizes simplicity and speed. You can't choose between dozens of different emoticons to telegraph your mood, but you can start and end a chat session with just a click or two. If you need to check something else on the site in mid-chat, clicking the dash in the top of the widget's frame collapses it into the status bar at the bottom of the Facebook page, where a little red badge counts how many new messages pile up.

And yet I'm not going to use this capability. Unlike most of Facebook's features, this one doesn't let you limit your exposure to certain groups of people. The site's documentation notes that once you set your status as online, anybody can ping you:

At this time you cannot prevent a friend from chatting with you on Facebook Chat. We are working on this feature.

I realized the problem on Friday afternoon, when a well-meaning publicist started chatting me up. Considering how many tech-PR types already use Facebook friend requests and messages to get my attention, things could get out of hand in a hurry.

That won't work for me. I don't mind good friends bugging me for a moment if they have a question that can't wait for e-mail, but I don't care to grant that level of access to everybody I know on Facebook. My workday is sufficiently interrupt-driven already.

Have you tried Facebook's chat? Is it worth your time, or more distraction than you need?