Technology, Mobile | featured news

A U.S. judge rejected Apple's request to ban U.S. sales of some Galaxy smartphones and tablets made by Samsung.

Investors purchased roughly 850 calls at the Dec. 11 $19 strike for an average premium of $0.53 each, and snapped up nearly 700 of the Dec. '11 $20 strike calls at an average premium of $0.39 apiece. Call buyers at these strikes may profit at expiration next week in the event that shares in Research in Motion surge 6.7% and 11.4% over the current price of $18.30 to surpass the average breakeven prices of $19.53 and $20.39, respectively.

Carrier IQ threatens and then drops legal action against a developer who claimed that the company's code could be used to monitor smartphones.

It is true that the mobile Web is still in its infancy, but given the rate of adoption and innovation in the area, it already deserves a great deal of attention from Internet marketers, regardless of specialism.

Japanese fan site Macotakara reports Sony and Hitachi are making four-inch screens for the new phone - and have already shipped early prototypes to Apple's Cupertino HQ - hinting at a release as early as March.

When IBM projected that 15% of Black Friday online sales this year would transact via mobile, a lot of analysts and bloggers, not to mention unprepared retailers, scoffed. To many, it seemed too huge of a jump — after all, as recently as 2009 less than 1% of online sales came from mobile.

China has passed the U.S. in the third quarter to become the world's largest smartphone market by shipments, but may find it tough to hold the position in the next two quarters, according to a research firm. China's smartphone shipments reached 23.9 million units by the end of the third quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. This put the country just ahead of the U.S. where 23.3 million smartphones were shipped in the quarter.

Hewlett-Packard Co is looking to sell Palm's webOS mobile software platform, a deal that could fetch hundreds of millions of dollars but less than the $1.2 billion that HP paid last year, four sources close to the matter said.

Catherine Crump: Increasingly police are tracking our movements via our cell phones, an invasion that undermines our essential liberties

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It'll be a tough go -- Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play.