Mobile | featured news

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

Microsoft, struggling to dent the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone market, is aggressively courting app developers for its Windows Phone.

A 22-year-old woman in San Bernadino County, Calif., is being praised for using her cell phone to take pictures of a man who allegedly tried to snatch her off the street, then hiding inside a fast food restaurant after the man chased her, police say.

Nokia and Microsoft joined forces to make the Lumia 900, a top-of-the-line device. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people will flock to it.

HTC’s Thunderbolt, Verizon’s first 4G LTE enabled smartphone, shipped one year ago this month. That’s pretty insane when you think about it. The Thunderbolt was laughably immature, had a battery life of about 40 minutes, and here we are, one year later, and both AT&T and Verizon have a wide portfolio of Android smartphones that can use 4G LTE in most parts of the country while also being able to last for at least an entire work day. According to the bean counters at Strategy Analytics, 6.8 million 4G LTE handsets were sold worldwide during calendar year 2011. Know how many they think will be sold this year? An astonishing 67 million.

Here are six easy, inexpensive DIY solutions for creating apps for iOS and Android devices.

Mobile technology appears to be increasing the public appetite for news but it's far from clear whether the news industry will profit from that, a study issued Monday concluded.

Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app that turns almost anyone into an artful photographer, is growing at an astonishing rate.

Bright, outgoing college teen Taylor Sauer proved in the last minutes of her life she knew right from wrong — but still committed a fatal mistake. Sauer was making a late-night, four-hour drive from the Utah State University campus in Logan to visit her folks in Caldwell, Idaho. She passed the time along I-84 messaging a pal on Facebook about the Denver Broncos football team. But she stopped short, writing in her final missive, "I can't discuss this now. Driving and facebooking is not safe! Haha."

As unlimited data plans fade away, services and applications are being designed to help users manage their consumption.