Electronics, Mobile | featured news

A group of iPhone and iPad users have sued Apple Inc alleging that certain applications (apps) were passing personal user information to third-party advertisers without consent, a court filing showed.

If you've held off on buying a fancy new phone this year, you should cop one of these.

We check out the first phone running Android 2.3. Google's latest flagship cell phone is going to be a top holiday gift for cutting-edge geeks. Fast, smooth and elegant, the Nexus S is the new top Android phone, the first "Gingerbread" phone, and it'll be the first one to receive new updates to Android as they come out. That's going to be worth $199 (with T-Mobile contract) to quite a few people.

Qualcomm is offering to refund customers who bought its portable TV sets, ahead of shutting down the broadcasts on March 27. Qualcomm's FLO TV service is the only subscription-based broadcast TV service in the U.S. designed for portable gadgets. It's been live since 2007, but has never garnered much interest from customers.

"The Smurfs' Village," a game for the iPhone and other Apple gadgets, was released a month ago and quickly became the highest-grossing application in the iTunes store. Yet it's free to download.So where does the money come from? Kelly Rummelhart of Gridley, Calif., has part of the answer. Her 4-year-old son was using her iPad to play the game and racked up $66.88 in charges on her credit card without knowing what he was doing.

Google Mobile Platform VP Andy Rubin literally arrived with a bag full of tricks at the D: Get Into Mobile Conference, showing publicly for the very first time an Android "Honeycomb" tablet. The roughly 10-inch, Motorola device was sleek, black, thin and sported an Android interface unlike any we've seen before. There was a very clean homepage, but the app page looked almost Apple iPad-like. Plus, when Rubin brought up the Gmail app, it looked almost exactly like Gmail on the iPad.

One day, we'll all have phones that pull data from networks that are labeled "4G." But right now, there are plenty of reasons you may want to avoid it.

The BlackBerry maker has recruited web developers in several countries to blog about its new tablet

When I finally got the latest iPad and iPhone OS all loaded up, I came to realize that it only delivers on all promises if you spend a small fortune on a bunch of new stuff.