Internet, Cell Phone | featured news

Facebook's Home app for Android phones has been downloaded more than 500,000 times from the Google Play store since its release on 4 April. But it has received mixed reviews from users, with an average rating of 2.2 out of five stars.

Online professional networking service LinkedIn is dressing up its mobile application to impress people who are increasingly scrolling through content on smartphones....

Douglas Rushkoff says Facebook's new app just increases disorientation and isn't getting rave reviews from users... And when I looked up Facebook Home online to try to find out just what it was, the first search results that came up were from users sharing how to disable it. This way, consumers can buy the discounted phones on which Facebook Home ships, and turn them back into a regular Android smartphones, where Facebook is just another app we can use in our own good time.

Yes, this again. Facebook on Thursday sent out invitations for a press event that promised to show off the company’s “new home on Android,” which naturally led to fresh speculation about the company’s intention to produce its own Facebook-centric smartphone.

...It’s an echo of the so-called browser wars of the 1990s, when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator fought for dominance on the personal computer. This time, though, the struggle is shaping up to be over which company will control the mobile world — with browsers on smartphones and tablets. Entrenched businesses are at stake. Google’s browser-based business apps, for instance, threaten Microsoft’s desktop software, and mobile Web apps threaten Apple’s App Store.

Poor Microsoft. People who use your search engine seem especially interested in ... Apple. Bing published its most-searched news stories for 2012, and topping the list -- ahead of the presidential election, Superstorm Sandy and the London Olympics -- was the iPhone 5, the newest version of Apple's iconic smartphone.

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA.

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.

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.

India is becoming a critical testing ground for Facebook as it strives to capitalize on growth in emerging markets and better target mobile-phone users—two increasingly pressing goals for the social-networking firm.