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PlaylistMag: mini madness : By Christopher Breen "My colleague over at MacCentral, Peter Cohen, recently reported that the iPod mini was going great guns on eBay, with sellers asking up to $400 for one of the little aluminized buggers. While I don’t normally think in acronyms, a hearty WTF!? welled up from somewhere inside the gray matter. To regain some sense of reality, I ventured over to Amazon to see how minis fared there. Refurbs were going for $230 for the 4GB mini—$31 over the original retail price. One third-party seller had the chutzpah to demand $590 for a 4GB iPod mini. While I’d normally pass this off as an isolated incident of outlandish greed (P.T. Barnum would be proud of ye, lad), seeing the mini commanding these kinds of prices on both eBay and Amazon made me wonder if perhaps I was missing something. Is this simply a matter of the mini attaining some bizarre fetishistic status or is there some real value to the thing that compels people to buy one rather than th

Mobile email start-up Visto has sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on three of its patents related to how information is handled between servers and handheld devices such as cellular phones. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction to stop the infringement, was filed late on Wednesday - the same day Visto announced that NTP had acquired an equity stake in the start-up and signed a patent licensing deal. Visto's allegations against Microsoft and its Windows Mobile 5.0 are similar to NTP's against Research In Motion, which now faces the possible shutdown of its popular BlackBerry messaging service in the United States. "Windows Mobile 5.0 is an infringement of Visto's intellectual property of a technology that our firm created, patented and successfully sells on the market today," Visto chief executive Brian Bogosian said on Thursday. Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, said the company had not been served with the lawsuit