Smartphone | featured news

Apple Inc and HTC Corp announced on Saturday a global patent settlement and 10-year licensing agreement that ends one of the first major conflagrations of the smartphone patent wars.

Samsung may have lost big to Apple in the courtroom, but it’s just scored a victory in the marketplace. The Samsung Galaxy S III has stolen the title of the world’s most popular smartphone from the iPhone for the third quarter of 2012, according to data from Strategy Analytics.

With only sporadic access to text messaging and the Web, many in Hurricane Sandy's no-power zone quickly cobbled together systems for passing along information and arranging when and where to meet.

Microsoft is working with Asian suppliers to test its own smartphone design, suggesting the computer-software giant is increasingly adopting a similar business model to that of rival Apple.

The latest quarterly report from IDC on mobile phones shows that Google is the undisputed king of the smartphone world. Out of 181 million smartphones shipped last quarter, 75 percent were running Android.

A new study finds that teens who had access to the Internet on their cellphones were more than twice as likely to engage in sex with a person they met online compared with those without access to the Internet on their phones.

Hurricane Sandy may have stopped Google's Android event, but it couldn't stop the Google website. There will be no swanky event in downtown New York City, but Google's Android team has taken to a blog post to announce the latest Android devices, including the long-rumored Nexus 4 phone made by LG and Nexus 10 tablet made by Samsung.

Blackberry is still a very respected brand across the developing world - but it is undeniable that it has lost its cachet in the US and Europe. Turning that around and pulling the company out of its death spiral all depends on a new operating system, Blackberry 10.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can't afford to be wrong about Windows 8. On Thursday in New York, Microsoft unveiled a dramatic overhaul of its ubiquitous Windows operating system. It will go on sale Friday, fused into more than 1,000 PCs and other devices. If it flops, the failure will reinforce perceptions that Microsoft is falling behind competitors such as Apple, Google and Amazon as its stranglehold on personal computers becomes less relevant in an era of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

The phone once coveted by the elite and the powerful is becoming an object of ridicule as Androids and iPhones corner the smartphone market.