Gadgets, Mobile | featured news

A U.S. judge has ordered Apple Inc to disclose to rival Samsung Electronics details of a legal settlement the iPhone maker reached with Taiwan's HTC Corp, including terms of a 10-year patents licensing agreement.

Samsung sold more than 97 million mobile phones in the third quarter, besting Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone by more than 74 million units. According to Gartner (NYSE: IT), nearly 428 million mobile phones were sold during the quarter. Approximately 23.5 million of those phones were manufactured by Apple — 97.9 million were made by Samsung.

Apple Inc and HTC Corp announced on Saturday a global patent settlement and 10-year licensing agreement that ends one of the first major conflagrations of the smartphone patent wars.

With only sporadic access to text messaging and the Web, many in Hurricane Sandy's no-power zone quickly cobbled together systems for passing along information and arranging when and where to meet.

Microsoft is working with Asian suppliers to test its own smartphone design, suggesting the computer-software giant is increasingly adopting a similar business model to that of rival Apple.

A new study finds that teens who had access to the Internet on their cellphones were more than twice as likely to engage in sex with a person they met online compared with those without access to the Internet on their phones.

Hurricane Sandy may have stopped Google's Android event, but it couldn't stop the Google website. There will be no swanky event in downtown New York City, but Google's Android team has taken to a blog post to announce the latest Android devices, including the long-rumored Nexus 4 phone made by LG and Nexus 10 tablet made by Samsung.

The Librarian of Congress announced new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Oct. 25 that will impact what consumers are and are not allowed to do with smartphones, tablets, game consoles and e-readers for the next three years. The new rules, which go into effect Oct. 28, will let consumers jailbreak or root their smartphones, but not tablet computers and home gaming consoles. Digital-rights activists had sought exemptions for the latter devices as well.

Blackberry is still a very respected brand across the developing world - but it is undeniable that it has lost its cachet in the US and Europe. Turning that around and pulling the company out of its death spiral all depends on a new operating system, Blackberry 10.

Google has just set an Oct. 29 event in New York centered on its Android mobile software. "The playground is open" is all it says, so we are left to figure out what might land on that playground.