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The New York Times reported that Amazon will roll out a Kindle Fire update "in less than two weeks." The cause for the update? Fixes for problems that have concerned many early users.

Hewlett Packard donates its mobile system software, WebOS, to the open source community and says it will continue to invest in the project. The tech company acquired the software when it bought the smartphone maker Palm for $1.2bn (£767m) last year. HP used the code to power its short-lived range Touchpad tablet computers before it abandoned the product line.

Google‘s long-awaited answer to Flipboard, the “social magazine” exclusively on Apple‘s iPad and iPhone, just debuted today. Google Currents offers a similar appearance, except it works on Android devices as well as iPads and iPhones. It’s the latest in a long string of applications, most recently Yahoo‘s Livestand, that seek to turn online content into something resembling print magazines, but without all those dead trees and with 20th century innovations like, say, video.

For two years, Apple has told the world that phones running on Google Android operating system are iPhone rip-offs. Now Apple is about to learn whether a U.S. trade agency thinks its claims have merit.

A U.S. judge rejected Apple's request to ban U.S. sales of some Galaxy smartphones and tablets made by Samsung.

Amazon’s ultra-cheap Kindle Fire has already shipped between 3 and 4 million units and combined with news of excellent Black Friday sales last week, the Fire may already be the number two tablet after the Apple iPad.

The discovery has added to rumours that the iPad 3 will launch in March and feature a fractionally thicker design and a significantly higher resolution display.

After more than a year of missteps by Apple's tablet rivals, at least one viable competitor, Amazon's Kindle Fire, appears to have surfaced for the popular iPad. Amazon.com Inc. on Monday trumpeted the success of its recently launched Kindle Fire tablet, part of a family of Kindle products that include low-priced e-readers. The company said it sold more than four times as many Kindle products on Black Friday last week as the same shopping day in 2010.

Does $199 sound like too much for the BlackBerry Playbook this holiday season? RIM seems to think so, but only for its employees. According to multiple sources, the 16GB 7-inch tablet is now available to RIM employees through a special corporate portal for $99. The 32GB version is $149 and the 64GB model for $199. We have also been told that employees can only order up to eight models.