Over yonder in Abu Dhabi, the Finnish firm Nokia held its presumed last phone hardware event before the phone unit melds into Microsoft. As for Microsoft, the company’s next generation of Surface 2 tablets arrived in stores earlier this week. Last week saw the arrival of Windows 8.1, which will hopefully bring some relief to people who were hating on 8. Download Day was not without its problems, however, including installation errors and the unceremonious yanking back of the Windows 8.1 RT update for what Microsoft termed “a situation” and several users called “the blue screen of death that won’t let my tablet boot.” Microsoft released a Surface RT recovery image two days later.

Code explorers poking around version 4.4 of Google Play think they’ve found signs that Google is planning its own Android-based Newsstand in the near future. And as we’ve seen with other products, Android’s not just for tablets anymore. Lenovo, maker of giant 29-inch desktop computers, also has a new Android-based convertible laptop/tablet. No word on if the Lenovo A10 will hit the US yet, but is available in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asian Pacific countries.

Facebook had a case of the Monday Morning Blahs this week — the site was acting erratic and refused to let its users post comments or photos, update their status lines, send messages or “like” posts. “Network maintenance” was eventually blamed for the issues.

The hardware may have tanked, but BlackBerry was able to put out Android and iOS versions of its popular BlackBerry Messenger software that was formerly constrained to BlackBerry devices. The company reported that six million people signed up for information about the app before it was released.

Also in app news, Google has added free voice calling to its Google Hangouts app for iOS. The updated version of the iOS app arrived last Friday and brought with it free in-app voice calling to numbers within the U.S. and Canada, plus incoming call support to a user’s Google Voice number.

On the entertainment front, Netflix announced that it now has 40 million subscribers worldwide and announced that its quarterly earnings had quadrupled. Orange Is the New Black, the women’s-prison drama that arrived in July, is the company’s most-watched original series ever. And the Hollywood Reporter and Variety are both reporting that Tim Burton and Michael Keaton are in talks for a sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice.

Feeling hungry? A mathematician at the University of Sheffield in England has calculated a formula that is supposed to create the “perfectly proportioned margherita pizza.” Dr. Eugenia Cheng’s equation factors in the volume of dough, the constant volume of toppings, and the ratio between base to topping to find the “optimum mouthful.”  (Who cares about P versus NP when the optimum mouthful problem has been licked?)

Oh, yeah. Apple had an event on Tuesday. It announced some stuff, namely the release of OS X Mavericks, new MacBook Pro laptops, more information on the tubular Mac Pro, new free iLife and iWork software and, oh, new iPads. Time to start guessing when the iPhone 6 will arrive!