Blackberry, Mobile | featured news

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.

In each of the last three quarters the company has missed its own revenues expectations. RIM’s situation now resembles the struggles that Nokia faces as both have failed to mount any credible challenge to the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone and tablet markets.

The Motorola Droid Bionic is Verizon's first dual-core, LTE phone, a $299 behemoth that wraps together everything the carrier has to offer. Techies on Verizon have been waiting a long time for this phone. Does it live up to the hype?

Google Android is opening up a substantial lead over Apple and other platforms in the U.S. smartphone market, new data from ComScore suggests. In July, Android devices accounted for 41.8% of the U.S. smartphone user base, up from 36.4% three months earlier. Apple inched up to 27%, from 26%. Meanwhile, Samsung increased its lead in ...

Verizon and Intuit announced Thursday that they are teaming up to introduce a mobile payment system that will let customers swipe their credit cards with their smartphones. Verizon will sell the Intuit Reader smartphone accessory in its retail stores. The Reader plugs into the audio jack of most Android phones, BlackBerrys, the iPhone and the iPad.
The product rollout is intended to make it easy for small-business owners and others to process mobile payments, likely boosting sales of smartphones.

Samsung's news Galaxy S II smartphone, a new entrant to take on the iPhone, won't be sold by the biggest U.S. wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless, which says it has an extensive portfolio of phones.

Samsung's chairman has asked top management to strengthen its software capabilities as Samsung finds itself embroiled in an intensifying patent battle with Apple after Google announced its acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC will stick with Google's mobile software despite the software giant's planned acquisition of rival Motorola and will continue to pursue acquisitions.