It’s official: The Motorola Droid 4, that slender beast of a smartphone, is headed to Verizon’s speedy 4G LTE network on Feb. 10.

As you might already know, the gadget is skinny — it’s less than half-an-inch thick — and offers a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, a five-row QWERTY keyboard, a 4-inch qHD display (made of scratch- and scrape-resistant glass), an 8-megapixel back-facing camera, and a front-facing camera for video chats.

NEW YORK — Phone company Verizon Communications will challenge Netflix and start a video streaming service this year with Redbox and its DVD rental kiosks.

Verizon and Coinstar Inc., Redbox’s parent company, said Monday that the service will be national and available to non-Verizon customers as well. It adds another dimension to Verizon’s quest to become a force in home entertainment, and it looks set to compete to some extent with the cable-TV services it already sells.

Unlike competing services from Amazon.com and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the new service will combine Internet delivery of movies with DVDs, the way Netflix does. Dish Network Corp. also offers a similar bundle through its Blockbuster subsidiary.

Specific details and pricing of the new plan weren’t announced.

A new report analyzing app usage purports to show that, in just three months, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has dethroned the Samsung Galaxy Tab as the top Android tablet — at least when it comes to people actually spending time on their devices.

Flurry Analytics compared application sessions among all Android tablets before and after the holiday season and found “that strong adoption of Kindle Fire, combined with significant downloads driven from the Amazon App Store, resulted in a massive surge in session usage that just edges out the Galaxy Tab. Unrounded, Kindle Fire represents 35.7 percent of sessions and Galaxy Tab represents 35.6 percent.”

(Mashable) — App appeal is obvious. The barrier to entry? So low!

The upshot of producing the next Angry Birds or beer-chug simulator? So high!

Heck, with just a small investment of time and cash, it’s not hard for would-be mobile moguls to turn a concept into a steady stream of cash. And thanks to today’s app stores, it’s never been easier to try your hand at becoming the next tech tycoon.

Here’s (almost) everything you need to know before you get started on your own app — and what I wish I knew before I got into the game.

LONDON (AP) — Trading jokes and swapping leads, investigators from the FBI and Scotland Yard spent the conference call strategizing about how to bring down the hacking collective known as Anonymous, responsible for a string of embarrassing attacks across the Internet.

Unfortunately for the cyber sleuths, the hackers were in on the call too — and now so is the rest of the world.

Anonymous published the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call on the Internet on Friday, gloating in a Twitter message that “the FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

The humiliating coup exposed a vulnerability that might have had more serious consequences had someone else been listening in on the line.

Laguna Niguel, California (CNN) — Apple’s ambition to improve the fidelity of music downloads has diminished since the death of founder Steve Jobs, according to singer-songwriter Neil Young.

Apple consulted with the influential musician, along with many others in the music industry, for a project to develop electronics and distribution channels for high-definition music, Young said in an onstage interview at News Corp.’s D: Dive Into Media conference Tuesday.

CNN first reported a year ago that Apple, along with other digital music retailers, were talking with executives in the record industry about selling high-fidelity tracks in iTunes and retooling iPods to be compatible with them.

PHILADELPHIA — Singer Nancy Sinatra may have had boots made for walking, but she never attended Pottstown Middle School.

Starting Monday the Philadelphia suburban district is banning the wearing of fuzzy open-top boots, including the popular Ugg brand, to middle school classes because students have been stashing cell phones in the loose footwear, according to district director of community relations John Armato.

“Cell phones are a problem for obvious reasons,” Armato said.

Superintendent Reed Lindley said the school principal asked for the boot ban “because of the classroom disruptions that are resulting from ringing cell phones.”

Bloomberg recently ran a piece called “The Real Cost of Being a Video Gamer.” The query was answered by calculating the expenses that a gamer will accumulate, as part of a family of four living in San Francisco. Turns out, the final price tag is $17,077.

The article lists everything a gamer needs in his or her arsenal, which are broken down by category. You have hardware plus software, naturally, along with accessories, like controllers and displays. Even furniture and attire are accounted for. The asking price for each item is listed, and everything is combined at the very end, for the aforementioned grand total.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — AT&T handily beat Verizon in the battle for iPhone customers last quarter, but the company lost $6.7 billion in large part due to its failed merger with T-Mobile.

The nation’s second-largest wireless company said Thursday that it sold 7.6 million iPhones during the holiday quarter, which bested arch rival Verizon’s (VZ, Fortune 500) 4.2 million. Despite the fact that Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone has been available on multiple carriers for almost a year, AT&T (T, Fortune 500) has continued to outpace its rivals every quarter.

Sprint Nextel (S, Fortune 500), which began to sell the iPhone last quarter, will report its sales figures on Feb. 8.

The upgrades to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich continue with the entire Sony Xperia line of smartphones, starting this spring, according to reports. Those say updates may be applied to applied to Sony’s Android tablets as well.

According to The Verge, sources say that Sony’s Tablet S and Tablet P “are already running ICS and are being tested behind the scenes, though Sony wouldn’t be drawn on giving any more specific a release window than the spring.” Sony also acknowledged the imminent upgrades on a UK-based Sony forum.

Optogenetics has been hailed as a breakthrough in biomedical science—it promises to use light to precisely control cells in the brain to manipulate behavior, model disease processes, or even someday to deliver treatments.

But so far, optogenetic studies have been hampered by physical constraints. The technology requires expensive, bulky lasers for light sources, and a fiber-optic cable attached to an animal—an encumbrance that makes it difficult to study how manipulating cells affects an

(WIRED) — We love documenting our lives. If we didn’t, well, there probably wouldn’t be a hugely successful online behemoth called Facebook. And smartphone photography wouldn’t be the thriving phenomenon that it is today.

Smartphones accounted for more than a quarter of all photos shot in 2011, according to research from NPD. The iPhone has even been called the “snapshot camera of today” by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Handset manufacturers identified image capture as a key application for mobile devices early on, and have been iterating the sub-webcam-quality cameras that graced the original cellphones ever since.