TNW Quick Hit: Bad news if you live in the UK and were hoping to snag a Venue Pro handset: you are going to have to wait a bit longer. The phones, now with a software issue relating to MMS, will not be out until mid February. Wepreviously reportedthat they would go on sale January 6th. The Venue Pro has beenplagued with problemsever since its launch with faulty hardware and other problems leading to delays not just in the UK, but around the world....

The great Microsoft led patent purchase is back on, and it’s nearly as if nothing has changed. There was a veryconfused news storythat made the rounds a week ago that claimed that the Microsoft headed consortium called CPTN Holding was not going to buy hundreds of millions of dollars in Novell patents, surprising industry insiders. We dug around andcalled shenanigansnearly right away, and have now been vindicated. Microsoft and the rest of its CPTN Holdings crew are back at the buying table....

Another screenshot of Apple’s upcoming speech-to-text feature in iOS 5 has surfaced from an Apple employee,reports 9to5mac.The screenshot appears to confirm that the feature, based on speech recognition company Nuance’s technology, is being tested in live internal builds of iOS 5 as we speak. We originally were tipped to a screenshot of the ‘text-to-speech’ button and evidence of the feature in Apple’s iOS 5 firmware back in July. At that time, the feature was in placeholder status, but this one has been taken on a live device, while the feature was in use....

Ever wanted to know the gender demographics of the world’s most popular tech blogs? Well, you’re in luck. Theresultsare out, and it seems that The Next Web has more female readers than your average tech blog, though we are tied with ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat in having a 72%/28% split between males/females. So how did everyone do overall then? And which blogs are really popular with the ladies and which sites are all man?...

Kevin Rose? Yes. Kevin Rose. The Digg creator posted onhis blogtonight that, apparently, he has some inside information about the iPad 2. What he doesn’t tell us is his source, which isn’t very surprising. What he did tell us is, essentially, what we already knew: Now, I said essentially. The reason for that? Wepostulated, back in late November, that the refresh would actually come in January. We were told that Apple had 2 events to be held in the first quarter of 2011, and we figured that an iPad refresh in January would likely fit the timeline....