Mobile Tech

BlackBerry Storm2 Rolls In

Research In Motion has announced the BlackBerry Storm2 together with European carrier Vodafone. However, the company has not said when or if the device will be available in the United States, nor has it said which U.S. wireless carrier it may go with. European carrier Vodafone will offer the Storm2 ...

A set of supposedly leaked photos, along with a video posted on YouTube, have sparked rumors that bookstore giant Barnes & Noble plans to put out a branded e-book reader built by Plastic Logic. However, close listening to the video reveals that the interviewee, apparently a Barnes & Noble em...

The Wi-Fi Alliance is preparing a new specification designed to allow devices from cellphones to printers to connect to each other reliably, securely and wirelessly. WiFi-enabled devices can currently connect peer-to-peer in what's known as "ad hoc mode," but configuration issues and security concer...

Users of T-Mobile's smartphone, the Sidekick, suddenly found themselves without address books, calendars, to-do lists and photos -- data that the carrier had been maintaining through a subsidiary of Microsoft called "Danger," which hosts back-end services for mobile companies. T-Mobile is assessing ...

Korean device manufacturer LG, which makes everything from smartphones to washers and dryers, has unveiled a prototype solar-powered e-reader. The unit is 10 cm wide and 10 cm long, weighting in at about 20 grams. It was designed to fit the e-reader display panels LG now makes. LG's thin-film solar ...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

Attack of the Droids

AT&T has its iPhone, Sprint has its Pre, T-Mobile has its myTouch, and Verizon has ... what? A BlackBerry or something? Even though Verizon is the biggest network in the land -- and even though iPhone users think about Verizon longingly every time a call goes dead -- the company is not generally...

A society that is becoming more mobile yet more media-centric now has one more possible distraction to look forward to, thanks to a Wednesday announcement from FLO TV, the Qualcomm subsidiary specializing in live video you can take with you. The new FLO TV Personal Television sports a 3.5-inch diago...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that smartphones running the Windows Mobile 6.5 OS are ready for the market. It also announced the My Phone service, an online service similar to Apple's MobileMe for the iPhone. In addition, Redmond launched the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, its mobile phone app sto...

These days, it seems GPS units are everywhere -- built into cars, mounted on dashboards, strapped to bicycles and even loaded into the cellphones we carry in our pockets. In fact, by 2015, more than half of all new cars sold in the North America and Europe will feature either built-in GPS units or t...

Adobe on Monday released new details about its forthcoming Flash Player 10.1 application, designed for for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other devices connected to the Internet. A public developer beta of the browser-based runtime is scheduled to be released later this year. It will cov...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

ICANN Cuts the Apron Strings

According to ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, nobody but nobody controls the Internet. Not China, not Comcast, not your IT guy, not Clippy, nobody. The Final Boss of the Internet does not exist. But there does exist a nonprofit that governs Web addresses, and that's Dengate Thrush's organization...

Looking through the news, it's not hard to find a story about someone driving into a river or onto railroad on the advice of an in-car navigation system. Last year, a Seattle bus driver blamed his GPS unit after he collided with a bridge embankment, injuring several of his passengers, according to t...

The European Union has updated volume standards for portable devices that play music, such as MP3 players and mobile phones. Going forward, new products will be required to maintain their default setting at 80 decibels. The new rules upgrade EU directives CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, which require that wa...

By Autumn of 2010, Apple may be ready to introduce a line of Macs using Light Peak, an optical interconnect technology just unveiled by Intel. Intel showed off Light Peak at its developer forum in San Francisco last week. Apple approached Intel with the idea of creating a technology that could handl...

You didn't even have to open up your notebook computer Wednesday to hear the alarms and klaxons going off in the technology blogosphere: Someone had leaked images and video of a dual-screen, multi-touch tablet PC that's supposedly in the "late prototype" stages at Microsoft. Gizmodo is the lucky rec...

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