Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.

The number of apps in the Android Market has almost doubled in just three months, Google confirmed today in an update. Where it had officially reached 16,000 apps by mid-December, the search company now says the official marker has jumped to 30,000. Its figure includes both free and paid apps, although it wouldn't tell MobileCrunch what the ratio might be.

Two steps forward, one step back. That seems to be an emerging trend for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform. The snazzy user interface, support for the XNA Framework/Silverlight/Adobe Flash 10.1, Windows Phone Marketplace, and plentiful device manufacturers to choose from are certainly pleasing to potential buyers. However, we're starting to learn a little bit more about the platform at MIX10 and it isn't all rosy.

There were speculations about the hardware requirements of Windows Phone 7, which phones will get the upgrade and now at the MIX10 Microsoft finally gave answers to those nagging questions.

Microsoft's second day of MIX10 has seen the launch of the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, its first readily available version of the next-generation browser. The test version is described as rough and uses a bare frame but is the first version of IE to support HTML5, bringing it up to the level of Chrome and Safari as well as certain newer versions of Firefox.