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Amazon says buyers of its new Kindle Fire HD tablet will get the option to turn off the advertisements that appear on its standby screen for $15. The online retailer showed off the tablet last week, and said there would be no option to turn off the ads. That was a departure from Amazon's previous policies. It has shipped Kindle e-readers with "Special Offers" ads on the standby screen, but users could pay to have them turned off.

Fans of the first Note, then, may be heartened to hear that Samsung is said to be planning to bump the screen up to 5.5 inches, according to a SlashGear report citing a Korean newspaper. The newspaper also reported that the phone being introduced Wednesday will have a 1.4 Ghz quadcore processor and may be running the very latest version of Android — Jelly Bean. The phone is also expected to have an 8 MP camera and 16GB or 32GB of storage.

Google has said that it does not want the ruling in the Apple-Samsung patent lawsuit to "limit" consumers' access to Android devices... There has been speculation that the news could encourage handset makers to install the rival Windows Phone system.

Apple Inc's worldwide legal crusade against the Android mobile operating system drew toward a climax on Tuesday as the iPhone maker's attorneys accused Samsung of taking a shortcut by copying Apple's designs after realizing it could not keep up.

The latest numbers are in: Android is on top, followed by iOS in a distant second. This word comes from Gartner, a top research firm for these sorts of things. Overall, within the last quarter, Android outsold iOS devices nearly three to one while capturing 64% of the worldwide market share. Samsung was the top dog accounting for 90M handset sales.

Phandroid has announced that a hacker has recently accessed its user database, making off with usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords—and the problem looks like it could affect all of its one million-plus users.

Hours after it was highlighted by a security firm, Russian-language malware on the iOS App Store was removed by Apple and is no longer available for download. Apple confirmed on Thursday to Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that it removed the malware, an application named "Find and Call," once it was alerted to its presence on the App Store. The company said the software was pulled for violating App Store guidelines by accessing a user's Address Book data without authorization.

Nokia’s latest smartphones may be chasing the ubiquity of iPhones and Androids, but the Finnish phone maker hopes that vivid colors, simple form factor and the “instinctive” user interface on its latest Lumia range will help claw back thinning margins and faltering profits. The trick is to appeal to trend-setters, much like Apple‘s iMacs first did nearly 15 year ago. Are its designers and managers living in a parallel universe, or can they pull it off?

This will almost surely be the handset that Apple’s next iPhone will be measured against. Apple hasn’t said when the iPhone 5 will arrive, but the next version of Apple’s iOS smartphone software is due this Fall. A new iPhone will probably arrive with it.

Google has launched Google Now, a new search interface which improves the search results based on the time and location of the search. It is available as part of Android Jelly Bean, the latest iteration of its mobile OS, and works by using the time, search history and location data to provide better search results.