Gadgets, Mobile | featured news

Apple Inc said on Monday it sold 4 million iPhone 4S in the new smartphone's first three days on the market, setting up a strong December quarter for the world's largest technology company. Helped by availability in more countries and on more telecommunications carrier networks, the iPhone 4S, which went on sale on Friday, October 14, managed to outshine the iPhone 4, which sold 1.7 million over its first three days.

The iPhone 4S and its new iOS 5 operating system offer a host of new features, including Siri voice control, a Cards app for sending paper greetings in the mail, Reminders that help keep you up-to-date, and Find my Friends for tracking people down.

Early reviews of the iPhone 4S may have been uniformly great, bordering on glowing. But the best part of Wednesday’s coverage of Apple’s latest has been reviewers’ transcripts of their conversations with Siri — the personal assistant.

If you're reading this story on your iPad or iPhone, perhaps searching for "iOS 5 release date," well -- it's now, says Apple. Apple has reinvented its operating system, promising 200 new features, and, in the process, changing the way users relate to the online world.

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Blackberry, which has been plagued by service outages in Europe, the Middle East and India this week, reports that disruptions have spread to Latin America.

Large numbers of BlackBerry users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been cut off from Internet and messaging services, phone companies in the affected regions said Monday. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. gave few details beyond a brief statement saying that customers were “experiencing issues,” but telecommunications companies in the Middle East and Europe laid the blame at the Canadian company’s door.

Apple Inc received orders for more than one million iPhone 4S phones in the first 24 hours, topping the previous record of 600,000, the company said on Monday.

If you had any doubts that Apple (AAPL) would be able to beat the record 1.7 million iPhones sold in three days in June 2010, you can put them to rest.

Samsung and Google have agreed to delay the public announcement of a new mobile-phone product following the death of Steve Jobs.