Google, Mobile | featured news

Nokia and Microsoft Corp took the wraps off the struggling European company's most powerful smartphone on Wednesday, in what may be their last major shot at reclaiming a market lost to Apple, Samsung and Google.

It looks like one of the iPhone's signature default applicaitons is about to dissapear, with Apple telling the press Monday that its "license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended," after developers found the video app had vanished from the beta version of Apple's latest mobile operating system. [...]

Since clinching the Republican nomination two months ago, Romney advisers have significantly stepped up their digital campaign, hoping to catch up with President Obama in an arena he dominated in 2008. Romney has hired data analysts and mobile-app developers from places including Google and Apple, unwilling to concede the traditionally liberal-leaning Silicon Valley talent pool.

Google has launched Google Now, a new search interface which improves the search results based on the time and location of the search. It is available as part of Android Jelly Bean, the latest iteration of its mobile OS, and works by using the time, search history and location data to provide better search results.

On most days, Twitter is now generating the majority of its revenue from ads shown to its users on mobile gadgets, rather than from ads on Twitter.com, company executives said. One key reason: People who see a Twitter ad on their phones are more likely to click or interact with it in some way, which is how Twitter gets paid for advertisements.

Apple's patent case against Google's Motorola Mobility unit in Chicago was dismissed on Friday with prejudice, keeping both parties from refiling claims against one another.

A federal judge in Chicago, Ill. has thrown the Apple-Motorola Mobility smartphone patent case out the courtroom window and locked the window behind it, making sure it never finds its way back inside his court.

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."

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

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.