Mobile | featured news

...It’s an echo of the so-called browser wars of the 1990s, when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator fought for dominance on the personal computer. This time, though, the struggle is shaping up to be over which company will control the mobile world — with browsers on smartphones and tablets. Entrenched businesses are at stake. Google’s browser-based business apps, for instance, threaten Microsoft’s desktop software, and mobile Web apps threaten Apple’s App Store.

The Federal Communications Commission says the nation's four largest wireless carriers have agreed to relay text messages to text-enabled 911 call centers by May 2014.

It's been hailed for its succinctness and blamed for everything from sore thumbs to the decline of conversation. Love it or hate it, the text message is 20 years old.

At least one former Apple exec wasn't surprised or sad to hear the news that iOS chief Scott Forstall is leaving the company... Several reports since then have suggested that Forstall didn't get along well with some other key players on the team and angered CEO Tim Cook by refusing to apologize for Apple's maps application.

Poor Microsoft. People who use your search engine seem especially interested in ... Apple. Bing published its most-searched news stories for 2012, and topping the list -- ahead of the presidential election, Superstorm Sandy and the London Olympics -- was the iPhone 5, the newest version of Apple's iconic smartphone.

Analysts are talking up the RIM share price after a depressing run for the Canadian phone maker. But something else is going on. While the press and analyst were burying RIM, its popularity was already on the increase, months before the share price went up.

Bharti Airtel's mobile-tower unit plans to raise around $800 million by selling a 10% stake via an initial public offering next month... Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile-phone-services company by revenue and users, and other investors in the mobile-tower unit are looking to capitalize on improving foreign sentiment toward India. This follows steps announced by the federal government in September, aimed at encouraging foreign investment in sectors like retail and insurance.

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA.

A U.S. judge has ordered Apple Inc to disclose to rival Samsung Electronics details of a legal settlement the iPhone maker reached with Taiwan's HTC Corp, including terms of a 10-year patents licensing agreement.

Is Google in a hurry to get 2012 over with? Probably not. But that didn't stop the snarky headlines after it was discovered that a buggy app in the new version of Google's mobile operating system omits the month of December. The People app lets users bookmark friends' birthdays and other important dates on a calendar. But some users of Android 4.2, the system's newest update, are complaining they can't note December dates in the app because its calendar skips from November to January. December simply does not exist.