It's taken more than a year, but Verizon has just officially announced that it has completed its purchase of Rural Cellular, which you may also know by its business name, Unicel. This latest announcement follows a conditional approval from the FCC earlier this week, which required one of the two companies to sell licenses in six markets in order to "improve competition" -- a compromise Verizon seems to have been more than willing to accept. All told, Verizon will be forking over $2.66 billion in cash and assumed debt for the company, which will increase its customer base by more than 625,000, and expand its coverage area by 4.7 million people, including markets in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Alabama, Mississippi, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

We can't say we're too terribly fond of purchasing movies on a proprietary set-top-box (à la VUDU), but for those with no real attachment to physical media, Apple's looking to hook you up. Aside from announcing that day-and-date DVD releases were coming to iTunes, Cupertino has also enabled its Apple TV to purchase full-length films; prior to today, users could only rent them for a window of time. Details are pretty scant at the moment, and we're not even sure if HD films can be purchased (or if a premium is added on), but feel free to fire up your box and let us know how it goes in comments below.

An unnamed Chinese company has expressed interest in purchasing an American Hard Disk Drive manufacturer, which has predictably sparked the interest of the American Government ever paranoid about technology "security." Mr. Bill "Seagate is for porn" Watkins disclosed this overture from an unnamed company, eloquently stating that "The U.S. government is freaking out" whilst saying that Seagate was not the target company -- although apparently the company would find it hard to refuse a generous offer from a Chinese company. In the end though the whole mini-ruckus seems much ado about nothing: the New York Times seems to think that the Chinese will only go through with a bid if it doesn't ruffle the feathers in Washington, and one can only imagine the resulting "ruffling" if this high tech purchase rumor transitioned from mere conjecture to the realms of possibility. And all this over something as seemingly trivial as storage.

Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Flextronics, Solectron or both -- we polled our mom on the subject, and she asked when we were going to give up this "blogging nonsense" for a real job -- but these two fairly low-profile contract electronics manufacturers churn out massive amounts of product for other little companies you might have heard of: like HP, Dell, Sony, Ericsson, Cisco, Motorola and Microsoft. Now Flextronics is ending this bitter rivalry in a Coke buys Pepsi-type shocker, forking over $3.6 billion in cash and stock for Solectron. Flextronics will operate Solectron as a subsidiary, and claims the purchase will help it expand scale and market reach, while saving on costs, with the deal to add about 15 percent to earnings, claims the manufacturer.

Joining Sony Ericsson in the growing list of cellphone-related patents unearthed today, it appears that Apple is doing a good bit of work behind the scenes to ensure that future iPhone users will be able to access and purchase tunes (and video?) from the iTunes Store. Apple's recently filed "Configuration of a computing device in a secure manner" patent lays out in a good bit of detail how users of a mobile device (wireless iPod?) could access the iTMS and perform "transactions." It goes on to speak of "digital signatures" that would presumably have to be validated before any unexpected downloads took place, and it also pictures a handset (props to Nokia candybars of days past) communicating with an actual PC, which then contacts the "content and commerce" servers on the other side of the wire. In other details, there's photo evidence that some sort of downloadable upgrades / expansions could be available, probably referring to future firmware updates that could be initiated through the iTunes application. Granted, the whole mess of legal jargon is a bit hard for the layman to truly grasp, and it seems that Apple was simply throwing out as many vague words and possibilities to encompass anything that actually gets decided, but be sure to hit the read link anyway for more textual confusion and pictorial delight.

Have you been holding off on that PC purchase, (say one of those hot Core 2 Duo laptops) in favor of waiting for Vista to come out, just to be sure that it'll work with your new investment? The official Windows Vista Team Blog announced today that: "PCs loaded with Windows XP or pre-installed with 2003 Microsoft Office software can be upgraded via the Express Upgrade to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office Technology Guarantee program." So that means if you buy a PC now and you have Windows XP MCE 2005, XP Pro, XP Tablet PC Edition, or Pro x64, you'll get to upgrade to Home Premium, Vista Business (for XP Pro and Tablet), and Vista Business 64 respectively for an additional nominal fee. Further, if you have XP Home, you'll get a 50 percent discount for Vista Home Basic / Premium. This announcement might be the second bit of Vista good news we've heard in the last couple weeks.

[Via Geekzone.co.nz]