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Along with today's launch of HTC's latest flagship phone, the powerful HTC Sensation, the Taiwan-based mobile handset maker debuted a new video marketplace called "HTC Watch." This iTunes-like store will offer TV shows, movies and trailers through a pre-installed mobile application that will ship first on the Sensation. The TV shows and movies will be available for both rental and purchase, and will be paid for via either carrier billing or credit card, depending on your mobile operator.

The service uses progressive download technology, says HTC, which means your content will start playing almost immediately. This is different from the iTunes model, which requires users to download the full file before being able to view the video.

Music aficionados know: there's a trade-off that comes with the move to digital music. Sure, you can house your entire record collection on your computer. You can fit thousands of songs on your mobile phone. But if you're downloading your mp3s from an online store like iTunes, you're often getting a file with poorer sound quality.

But a report from CNN suggests that Apple is working to improve the quality of its music downloads.

A story in yesterday's Washington Post follows a pretty common narrative of parents, kids turned loose with technology, and sticker shock when a bill for that comes in. News of outrageous phone bills from texting charges have been commonplace. But the latest furor is over in-app purchases, virtual goods that kids are buying from within iPhone, iPod, and iPad games.

The opening anecdote: 8-year-old Madison who spent $1,400 to decorate her mushroom home in the iPhone game Smurf's Village.

She didn't realize the Smurfberries she was buying were real purchases. "After all," writes reporter Cecilia Kang, "lots of children's games require virtual payments of pretend coins, treasure chests and gold to advance to levels."

Yesterday's launch of The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper, marked the introduction of Apple's new subscription model - a way for publishers to offer renewable subscriptions to their app-based content. And while Apple is heralding the move as a way for publishers to get more customers, some are uneasy about the company's efforts to channel all billing and delivery through its iTunes marketplace.

The concern comes, in part, as a response to news on Tuesday that Apple had rejected Sony's e-reader app as it allowed users to buy as well as read books from the Sony Reader store. That rejection caused immediate speculation (verging on panic) that this would have huge ramifications for other apps that do something similar - namely, the Amazon Kindle app, the Netflix app, the Barnes & Noble Nook app, and so on.

Mark this day on your calendar: a major movie studio (Sony) has begun experimenting with some cool new technologies that make purchasing movies on iTunes more appealing to potential customers, instead of simply stomping their feet, threatening downloaders with lawsuits and being generally boring.

According to a report by Andrew Wallenstein at PaidContent tonight, Sony is experimenting with the following, when you buy one of three new movies on iTunes:

"A search button allows you to input a word, and any mention of it in the script will be retrieved along with a link to the exact moment in the movie in which the line was uttered. A 'clip & share' function lets the viewer take select scenes and post them to social networks. There's also a playlist with songs from the film, which are linked to to places on iTunes where those songs can be purchased."

Consumers prefer operator billing for mobile content purchasing, according to analysts at Strategy Analytics. In a new report authored by Paul Brown, the firm asked consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe to rate their interest level for several different mobile payment options. Surprisingly, operator billing came out on top, even over the use of pre-registered accounts such as iTunes or PayPal and over the use of credit cards/debit cards.

Billboard has released the sales figures from the first week of the Beatles in the iTunes store: more than 450,000 albums and 2 million individual songs have been sold via iTunes worldwide.

The Beatles were one of the best-known holdouts whose music was not available on iTunes, and while the response from consumers may or may not be what it takes to convince AC/DC (and a few others) to make their music available, the sales figures were still eagerly watched. By comparison, sales of the Beatles' music far exceeded those of Led Zeppelin when its catalog came to iTunes in 2007. Led Zeppelin sold about 300,000 individual tracks in its first week in the iTunes store.

Yesterday, Apple teased visitors heading to its homepage at www.apple.com of a major announcement, coming this morning at 10 AM EST. "Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget," the homepage text read. Initially, people were hoping that the news was related to the long-rumored "iTunes in the Cloud" service, which Apple has been building large data centers in N.C. to support, reportedly.

However, later in the day, a number of folks had figured it out: the news was that the Beatles were finally coming to iTunes. The WSJ confirmed. As it turns out, they were right.

What's tomorrow, besides Tuesday? Oh, nothing big, you know. It's "just another day," according to Apple. Just another day, that is, "that you'll never forget".

Apple has changed its homepage to say that tomorrow morning, at 10 am Eastern time, it will have an "exciting announcement from iTunes" and like with all mysterious announcements, the pondering and speculating has begun.

Twitter announced a partnership with Apple this morning that amounts to this: you can now post links to song previews on Twitter from inside iTunes Ping.

Most of Twitter's other partnerships are very interesting. Streamed Tweets on top of Current.tv's live Presidential Debate videos. Real-time search results inside Google and Bing. Twitter-branded bottles of wine sold to raise money for needy children. But Tweeting music previews from Ping? That is not very interesting. Now you can push iTunes ads into your friends' Twitter stream from inside a social network no one uses. That's not exciting, it's depressing.