Technology, Mobile | featured news

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.

Sony is looking to buy out Ericsson's share of Sony Ericsson, a move to gain full control and beef up development of the struggling handset unit. Japanese-Swedish joint venture, a 50-50 partnership since 2001, is the sixth-largest handset maker, but has been losing profits in recent years as it held back on smartphone development.

The iPhone 4S -- Apple's newest creation -- quietly went on pre-sale at 12 a.m. on Friday... The phone, which has been panned by some critics who say it's more of a facelift to the iPhone 4 than a new product, features a faster dual-core processor and a camera with 8 megapixels of resolution.

Apple unveiled its iPhone 4S on Tuesday to a lot of fanfare and quite a bit of disappointment. In our not-at-all scientific poll of more than 4,000 respondents, 57 percent of our readers said that they were expecting to see an iPhone 5 and 21 percent said they weren’t that excited by the new features.

Usually a cause for techno-euphoria, Apple's iPhone-a-palooza event on Tuesday had an unintended and unlikely effect: It made some corners of the Internet mad.

Apple needed to compete with Android, so it now has phones that are free and phones that cost $400.

Despite a year's worth of speculation surrounding a 5th iPhone model, Apple spent today's press event talking about a brand new version of the popular iPhone 4. It doesn't have a bigger screen, or sleek new form factor, but it does give iPhone fans a new reason to be excited.

Apple Inc. is unveiling a new, more powerful version of its wildly popular smartphone - more than a year after it launched the iPhone 4. Last week, Apple Inc. e-mailed invitations to a media event at its headquarters in Cupertino on Tuesday morning. The invite says "let's talk iPhone," implying the secretive company intends to show off the latest version of the device.

With an iPhone event scheduled for Tuesday at Apple‘s Cupertino, California campus looming, spy shots that appear to be snapped inside a Brazilian factory and an update to Apple’s iTunes software seemed to confirm an Apple update to the slablike iPhone 4. Less certain: a thin, wide-bodied handset with a teardrop shape. Case designs for a teardrop-shaped handset have already begun appearing on blogs, and, briefly, on the web-site of handset case supplier Casemate.

Following a nearly four-month trial period, Google is taking its mobile commerce application, Google Wallet, nationwide. In a blog post announcing the news, the search giant said it needed the time to extensively test the app, which lets users pay for goods by tapping their smartphones against special wireless readers, which are powered by MasterCard’s contactless “PayPass” technology.