Mobile | featured news

U.S. consumers have had their fill of expensive, contract-based phone plans. Figures from T-Mobile USA on Thursday, added to earlier reports from other companies, indicate that the U.S. wireless industry lost subscribers from contract-based plans for the first time in the first quarter. Contract-based plans are the most lucrative ones for phone companies. The industry default over the past several decades, they account for the vast majority of revenue at the big phone companies.

As Facebook tours the country with its pitch to investors for the social network’s initial public offering, at least one hole in the company’s plan for the future that has come up repeatedly: What is Facebook going to do about mobile?

This is a guest post by Caribou Honig, a partner with QED Investors in Alexandria, Va. In a prior post on the topic of mobile payments, I made the case that the mobile wallet will become the foundation of a new, disruptive "payment Operating System."

CTIA Wireless, the U.S. cellphone phone industry's annual trade show that starts Tuesday, is drawing heavy participation not just from the cellphone industry, but from MasterCard, Visa, and other companies in the business of moving money around.

Did "sexting" just get safer? Maybe, but probably not. A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows users to take a picture, send it and control how the message is visible – between 1 and 10 seconds.

The Samsung Galaxy S III's plastic build may not be to everyone's liking, but the quad-core processor and improved voice control feature show that Samsung's flagship Android line has staying power.

Nokia's outgoing Chairman Jorma Ollila promised a range of new products ahead of a meeting on Thursday with shareholders who are increasingly losing patience with the company's recovery efforts.

Wounded cellphone maker Nokia has turned on one of its former allies in the patent protection battlefield by filing lawsuits against rival smartphone maker HTC as it steps up its efforts to raise funds.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins today unveiled the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system at its BlackBerry World conference. Thorsten Heins took the stage here to give his first keynote as CEO of Research in Motion.

Soaring sales of smartphones lifted Samsung Electronics's profit to a record and apparently pushed the South Korean company past Nokia as the world's biggest cellphone seller—and perhaps past Apple as No. 1 in smartphones.