Around The World In Tech

As smartphones have become more and more popular over the last few years, so has wireless data. The more features that manufacturers add to their handsets, the more wireless data they consume. This has caused several cell phone providers to preserve their bandwidth by discontinuing their unlimited data plans. But Verizon seems to have come up with [...]

OnLive has announced its new iOS app that will allow gamers to play games over the OnLive service right on their mobile iOS devices. The app will effectively bring console-style blockbuster games, likeL.A. Noire and the Batman titles, to the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Until now, OnLive account holders were only able to view the service [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked the US Copyright Office to make legal the jailbreaking of all consumer electronic devices, including smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles. The proposal aims to remove jailbreaking, or gaining root access to a device, from being prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The EFF has also asked that [...]

In January 2011, the Pulse news reader app had 1 million users. By the end of this year, that number will reach 10 million. Pulse, a Palo Alto based startup, takes your favorite websites and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Just tap an article to see a clean and elegant view of the [...]

In newly released research notes, a pair of analysts have praise for both Apple and Amazon’s tablet efforts. They note that the Kindle Fire appears to be doing extremely well, though it is not challenging the iPad directly. In fact, Fire sales could indirectly encourage iPad purchases in the long run. Evercore Partners’ Robert Cihra writes [...]

Microsoft Corp. is rolling out a new interface for its Xbox game console users – one that allows you to navigate through music, movies, TV shows and games with the wave of your hand or the sound of your voice. The interface, first demonstrated by CEO Steve Ballmer in September, is set up similarly to [...]

An estimate based on the one-star reviews posted by disappointed customers Source: Amazon.com All happy Kindle Fire customers, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are the same. Unhappy customers, however, are unhappy in their own way. To get a feel for what makes them unhappy — and how unhappy they are — we spent some time Saturday morning [...]

Radio Shack made an aggressive bid for Apple customers on Friday, launching a promotion offering consumers up to $100 in gift cards when they buy an Apple iPad 2, and knocking $30 off the price of the older Apple iPhone 4. The offers, which begin today and run through Dec. 24, offer shoppers a nice [...]

Yahoo launched a new messaging app for Android, Hub, which appears to be the company’s answer to RIM’s Blackberry Messenger app. Hub allows users to send text messages and have group conversations with other Yahoo users for free. The app, currently in beta, complements Yahoo’s other mobile communication apps, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger. Although users [...]

HP CEO Meg Whitman recently said that Apple is poised to be the dominant PC maker in 2012. In an interview with French publication Le Figaro, Whitman admitted that Apple will likely take the lead in the marketnext year. Whitman says that HP “will try to be champion again in 2013,” and it seems clear that the [...]

An Android app developer has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users. In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how software from a Silicon Valley company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys [...]

  The Entertainment Software Rating Board, the same entity that made a big stink out of the likes Mortal Kombat in the early 90s and whose ratings you will find plastered on the front of video games to this day, wants to extend its reach into mobile software. Owners of the leading app market places, [...]

    If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. That’s the approach BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is taking with its ailing smartphone market. The company has announced that it will be offering an easy way to get iPhones and Android users plugged into its enterprise tools. The move by the once-dominant force in the [...]

EDITOR RATING Pros Inexpensive. No ads. Excellent touch-screen experience. Faster page refreshes. Access to over 2 million books, newspapers, and magazines. Cons No 3G connectivity. Bottom Line Thanks to plenty of upgrades, a new lower price, no ads, and a laser-sharp focus on the reading experience, the refreshed Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch keeps [...]

Following in the footsteps of Google, Facebook, Tumblr and other tech companies, Mozilla is taking steps to help block the passage of SOPA and PIPA, legislation that have the potential to fundamentally change the Internet. The end of the Internet as we know it may be right around the corner — but not if the [...]

An anonymous industry insider reveals that Microsoft’s next-generation Kinect will be able to read lips and accurately capture player movements and emotional states thanks to an improved data transfer connection between peripheral and console. Microsoft didn’t exactly score a home run with its Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360, but the motion-sensing camera still has plenty of untapped [...]

The $200 PlayBook seems to be vanishing from retailers as RIM faces another downgrade in its stock outlook Last week, Canada’s Research in Motion cut the price on its low-end PlayBook tablet to just $200 for a limited time in an effort to woo Thanksgiving holiday shoppers to the device just as competitors like the [...]

Microsoft’s Kinect motion and voice control system, currently available for the Xbox 360 and soon for Windows PCs, may soon be built into televisions. Microsoft is working on deals to license Kinect to TV makers Sony and Vizio, The Daily reported, noting that such technology could allow couch surfers to control their TVs with motion and voice. Currently, [...]

The European Court of Justice has ruled that ISPs cannot be required to filter their users’s Internet access to block illegal files. The European Court of Justice has ruled (PDF) that Internet service providers cannot be required to install filtering systems designed to block downloads of illegal content, finding that such broad filtering violates the [...]

It’s official: Kinect is not just a toy anymore (not that it ever was). In a statement today,Microsoft has announced that it’s responding to consumer feedback and creating a PC version of its ultra-popular device, which will be available sometime early next year. This should open up the device even more to developers to come up [...]

A lot of folks expected Apple to introduce an all-new low-budget handset this year. But instead of unveiling a completely new phone model, Apple announced that it was going to make its iPhone 3GS free (with contract) to appeal to the low-end smartphone market. The $0 handset has reportedly been doing very well for AT&T. One [...]

Smartphone and laptop batteries could soon see a ten-fold increase in both the charging speed as well as battery life. Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a lithium-ion electrode that enables conventional lithium-ion batteries to get ten times more capacity and would still run five times as efficient as current batteries after 150 charging cycles [...]

Amazon is drawing a lot of buzz with tomorrow’s launch of the economical Kindle Fire tablet. Many suggest that it will be the first rival to eat into the iPad’s overwhelming market dominance. As it turns out, Apple may be planning a new addition to the iPad line that will directly combat this new threat. [...]

Ahead of tomorrow’s full-scale launch of Amazon’s new wunderkind, panacea, and lynchpin of its continuing distribution domination, initial reviews of the Kindle Fire are starting to trickle in… and they’re not as fantastic as we — or you — had hoped. Unsurprisingly, not a single review is denying that the bright screen, solid construction, and [...]

Verizon is launching a sweet, if potentially dangerous, deal for all 4G LTE smartphone owners: for a limited time it will double your data cap. The promotion begins on Tuesday, Nov. 8, just three days before Verizon begins selling its second dual-core 4G LTE smartphone, the Motorola Droid RAZR (pictured left). The carrier hasn’t announced [...]

Google’s social network is now ready for business. The Google+ social network has grown at a decent pace with over 40 million members, but Google was slow to open it up for businesses and brands. But, Google recently made Google+ available for Google Apps subscribers, and now it has finally rolled out Google+ Pages for [...]

Barnes & Noble took the wraps off of the Nook Tablet during a press event in New York City on Monday morning. The device runs Android 2.3, has a 7-inch LG “Vivid View” display, 16GB of expandable storage, 1GB of RAM and a dual-core 1GHz processor. It also weighs under one pound and supports up [...]

Security guru Charlie Miller’s new iOS vulnerability that allows an approved App Store app to run unsigned code remotely. Miller has been hacking Apple’s products for years, and this most recent bug is a particularly nefarious exploit that could be used for all kinds of evil purposes. Charlie Miller is one of the good guys, [...]

Maybe it’s just a bit of false modesty, but chairman Eric Schmidt told a Senate subcommittee recently that he believes Apple’s Siri technology poses a threat to Google in the search market. NeoWin first unearthed Schmidt’s statements on Siri, which were taken from a response to questions originally posed during a Senate subcommittee hearing earlier [...]

Steve Jobs will be making an appearance on the sliver screen, and we’re not talking about the biopic that Sony is backing. Missing footage from the 1995 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds features an interview with Steve Jobs during a pivotal time in Silicon Valley’s history. The interview was apparently lost for many years, [...]

Sanford Bernstein’s top Apple analyst is dubious about Steve Jobs’ television dreams Analysts have been arguing for ages about whether Apple (AAPL) is ever going to enter the $118 billion/year flat-screen TV market. But two things have changed in the past month: 1. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs quotes him as saying he’s “finally [...]

Last holiday season, the tablet market was a two-horse race between the iPad and the first Samsung Galaxy Tab. It wasn’t much of a race, as the iPad cemented its status as Apple’s latest iconic product, and the overpriced Tab collected dust. After releasing two larger Galaxy Tabs during the last year, Samsung is now [...]

Unless you’re a Sprint customer—or you’re grandfathered into an unlimited data plan—you’ve only got 2GB of mobile data to play with before you go broke or get throttled. Here’s how to keep from going over your cap. The consequences of using more data than your carrier wants can be scary—and expensive. AT&T and Verizon start [...]

Barnes & Noble sent out invites to a special event in New York scheduled for Monday. It’s widely expected that the bookseller will unveil a new tablet to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Kobo’s Vox devices. There’s been talk of it for a while, and with news that Barnes & Noble has invited the [...]

Samsung is now officially the world’s largest maker of smartphones, shipping around 28 million of the devices — almost all Android-powered – in the third quarter, compared to Apple’s 17.1 million phones. This is just the latest milestone that helps put an end to the fallacy that iPhones will rule the world. When Android phones [...]

When Amazon announced the Kindle Fire last month, the device that it most reminded people of was the Nook Color. The Fire may be getting some extra competition soon, as a sequel to the Barnes & Noble’s seven inch device is expected to arrive on November 7. B&N’s eReader/tablet hybrid has been a surprise hit [...]

The BlackBerry PlayBook didn’t sell as well as hoped at the $499 starting price RIM slapped on it, so recently they tried deep price cuts to see if that would help. Even at $299 in the U.S. and Canada, the PlayBook didn’t fly off shelves. Now, RIM’s trying grocery store tactics: buy two, get one [...]

Google has always been the type of company to release a product in beta and let their audience help them fine tune it. This practice worked great when the products were all free. After all, how could you complain about something that’s free? When the products started to cost money, and not insignificant amounts of [...]

There was a glaring omission at the Samsung/Google event last night: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) was not shown on a tablet device. This omission was purposeful, because ICS will not thrust Android-powered tablets into a head-to-head competition with the iPad, and because we have seen ICS on tablets already. One could name this [...]

Samsung has admitted that the new Galaxy Nexus was designed specifically with bypassing Apple patents in mind, mobile president Shin Jong-kyun saying that the company “will avoid everything we can.” Talking to Yohhap News, Shin said Samsung “take patents very seriously” but due to the complexity of intellectual property there was no guarantee that the [...]

“You don’t have to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone,” said Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, “but you do to use an Android phone.” He was addressing the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, where we guess his audience must have included a large but silent population of Android-loving non-scientists. In any case, the [...]

The Federal Communications Commission and major wireless carriers today announced new guidelines for warning consumers when they’re at risk of incurring unexpected charges on their cell phone bills. Dubbed “bill shock” in a 2010 FCC report, the phenomenon generated hundreds of consumer complaints to the FCC that year. The unexpected charges can crop up when [...]

Sprint has issued a statement on the first day of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 sales: Fared Adib, Sprint Product Chief, issued the following statement: “Sprint today reported its best ever day of sales in retail, web and telesales for a device family in Sprint history with the launch of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. [...]

A three-day disruption of BlackBerry services spread to North America Wednesday, frustrating millions of users of the Research In Motion smartphones and putting more pressure on the company for sweeping changes. RIM [ RIMM 23.88 -0.53 (-2.17%) ] advised clients of an outage in the Americas and said it was working to restore services as [...]

                Should I go Mac or stick with Pc? That seems to be the big question on consumers minds. My answer is this once you go Mac you never go back. I was a Pc user for about nine years like any relationship it started off great everything [...]