Gadgets, Smartphone | featured news

HTC’s Thunderbolt, Verizon’s first 4G LTE enabled smartphone, shipped one year ago this month. That’s pretty insane when you think about it. The Thunderbolt was laughably immature, had a battery life of about 40 minutes, and here we are, one year later, and both AT&T and Verizon have a wide portfolio of Android smartphones that can use 4G LTE in most parts of the country while also being able to last for at least an entire work day. According to the bean counters at Strategy Analytics, 6.8 million 4G LTE handsets were sold worldwide during calendar year 2011. Know how many they think will be sold this year? An astonishing 67 million.

Ranked No. 16 in the iTunes App Store's "Top Grossing Apps" is an app called "Girl With Clothes." Released March 13, we have some inkling about why this app is such an overnight success. It's probably the monster $160 price tag -- though the vague promise of "intense sexual content" probably doesn't hurt, either.

Ever find yourself frustrated with how smoothly Siri seems to work for the folks in Apple’s commercials but not for you? A New York man has filed a class-action suit against Apple, saying that the company has been “misleading and deceptive” about what the iPhone 4S virtual assistant can do.

A new system can wirelessly recharge smartphones and other consumer devices from up to several feet away — and it may eventually find use for electric vehicles and medical implants, too.

As unlimited data plans fade away, services and applications are being designed to help users manage their consumption.

AT&T Inc. backed away from an unpopular service policy after smartphone subscribers complained that the company placed unreasonable limits on its "unlimited data" plans....

With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem.”

Thought that Symbian was dead? Think again: at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia has just announced the 808 Pureview, a flagship Symbian device with a 41-megapixel camera.

Taiwan's HTC, the world's No. 5 smartphone maker, launched a new range of smartphone models on Sunday, hoping the fresh designs will help it to recover some of the lost market share. The new smartphones are crucial for HTC in a cut-throat market place -- dominated by Samsung Electronics and Apple Inc -- as lack of new, outstanding models has sent its sales sinking over the last months.