Electronics, Gadgets | featured news

Alibaba seeks to weaken Google's dominance of the Chinese smartphone market with subsidies and other support for its rival Amos operating system. The firm has set up a one billion yuan ($162m; £105m) programme to support app developers and is offering monthly payments to handset makers for every phone using its platform they sell.

Research In Motion said it will ask regulators to review "materially false and misleading comments" made Thursday about retail return rates for its new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone.

Shares of BlackBerry slipped about 8 percent on Thursday as analysts questioned whether the handset maker's turnaround plan would succeed in the brutally competitive smartphone market.

Fortune reporter Philip Elmer-Dewitt compiles sell-side and independent analysts forecasts on Apple.  He has gathered 56 projections that have an average of 18.4 million iPads sold from the Street analysts and 17.7 million from the independent analysts.  The median for all of them is 18 million, which would be 53% growth from last year’s 11.8 million and down 21% from December’s quarter.

Fresh off its partnership announcement with Facebook last week on the Android-based Facebook Home, HTC had news of a more troubling nature to share with investors Monday — its quarterly earnings report. The company, reported profits had fallen 98 percent from the same period last year to $2.83 million. The Associated Press reported this was the firm’s lowest quarterly profit on record.

Readers know I am a huge fan of the HTC One and rather than go with a carrier version I decided to pre-order the Developer Edition that is fully unlocked and comes with 64GB of integrated storage. At $649.99, it is also priced lower than most carriers, when you buy without a contract.

Samsung Electronics is giving Apple a run for its money by setting up mini-stores inside 1,400 Best Buy stores in the U.S... The Samsung mini-stores, which will open inside Best Buy locations by the end of June, will showcase smartphones, tablet computers, cameras, laptops and TVs, and will provide customer support similar to the “Genius Bar” at Apple stores, the New York Times reported.

Word is that iOS 7 will bring a significant design overhaul to Apple's mobile operating system. That's potentially good news, but there's also some bad: The new software might be behind schedule. According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber— who has a decent track record when it comes to Apple rumors — "iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it."

Justin Bieber’s phone may never ring and texting and messaging may have started to take the place of voice calls, but back on April 4, 1973 a man named Marty Cooper wasn’t taking the voice call feature on the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x for granted. On that day, 40 years ago, Cooper, who was a Motorola engineer, placed the first public call from a cellphone.