Technology, Mobile | featured news

CTIA Wireless, the U.S. cellphone phone industry's annual trade show that starts Tuesday, is drawing heavy participation not just from the cellphone industry, but from MasterCard, Visa, and other companies in the business of moving money around.

Did "sexting" just get safer? Maybe, but probably not. A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows users to take a picture, send it and control how the message is visible – between 1 and 10 seconds.

The Samsung Galaxy S III's plastic build may not be to everyone's liking, but the quad-core processor and improved voice control feature show that Samsung's flagship Android line has staying power.

Soaring sales of smartphones lifted Samsung Electronics's profit to a record and apparently pushed the South Korean company past Nokia as the world's biggest cellphone seller—and perhaps past Apple as No. 1 in smartphones.

The evidence continues to mount that the mobile phone business is evolving into a two-horse race. It’s Apple, Samsung, and a host of desperate hangers on. In the first quarter, according to Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt, Apple accounted for about 80% of all profits in the mobile phone business, with Samsung accounting for the rest. The two companies combined, he figures, had 74% of mobile handset industry revenues.

Standard & Poor's has cut its credit rating on Finnish cellphone maker Nokia to junk on expectations of lower sales, following a similar move by Fitch Ratings earlier this week.

Global Tel Link, which supplies state lockups with pay phones, will install technology to disable cellphones, which have been used by inmates to run criminal enterprises, intimidate witnesses and organize attacks on guards. A private company has agreed to pay millions to install technology in California prisons to block Web searches, text messages and phone calls by inmates using smuggled phones.

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

Here are six easy, inexpensive DIY solutions for creating apps for iOS and Android devices.

Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app that turns almost anyone into an artful photographer, is growing at an astonishing rate.