Mobile

HP buying Palm for $1.2 billion

Palm, the company that invented the PDA but has struggled to stay relevant in recent years, will be acquired by computing giant Hewlett-Packard.

Palm's history The company, which took the handheld computer into the mainstream, has traveled a bumpy road. Date Event November 1998 Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky leave Palm to start Handspring February 1999 Palm introduces the slimmer Palm V November 2001 Palm announces plans to split into two public companies June 2003 Palm buys Handspring Sept. 2005 Palm introduces its first Windows-based Treo June 2007 Palm introduces the ill-fated Foleo June 2007 Palm announces it is … Read more

Patent fights could change Google's Android pitch

Microsoft has now joined Apple in a guerrilla war against Google's Android, and Google's next steps are far from certain.

The smartphone industry is still in its infancy, but its strategic importance to computer companies big and small can't be overstated. Recent moves from Apple and Microsoft show that the big guys are not going to be shy about deploying their array of patents as competition increases.

HTC's lawyers have had a busy couple of weeks, responding to a wide-ranging patent lawsuit filed by Apple and negotiating a patent licensing deal with Microsoft. The common thread? … Read more

Google cloud APIs lead mobile developers

The results of research firm Ovum's latest mobile application developer survey show that Google's server-side APIs are preferred to mobile operators' own services by more than two to one.

Ovum reports that 60 percent of mobile developers are using or plan to use Google's server-side APIs when building applications, leaving the mobile operators behind at 25 percent of the developer audience.

When selecting partners for application development, the top requirements were (in order):

Ease of development Breadth of platform functionality Good-quality SDKs Flexibility/innovation

Google and Apple have done a tremendous amount of outreach to make their … Read more

Customer growth boosts Comcast sales, earnings

Comcast can thank a rise in Internet and voice customers and a rebound in ad spending for helping sales and earnings grow higher than expected in the first quarter of 2010.

On Wednesday, the cable company reported a net profit of $866 million, or 31 cents a share, for the quarter ended March, a 12 percent rise from the $772 million earned in the year-ago quarter. Sales climbed 3.8 percent to reach $9.2 billion.

Results inched past the expectations of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who were eyeing earnings per share of 30 cents on revenue of $9.… Read more

Google: Numbers favor Android over iPhone

The more you roll the dice, according to the law of large numbers theorem, the more likely you are to hit an expected average of 3.5.

And according to Google VP Andy Rubin, the more the search giant blankets the industry with competing Android-droid based mobile handsets, the more likely Google is to hit its expected value of market dominance over Apple's iPhone.

"It's a numbers game," Rubin said. And the numbers look increasingly rosy for Android.

Consider AdMob's new report (PDF), which pegs Android as accounting for 25 percent of mobile ad requests … Read more

Sprint improves, but still sees losses

Sprint Nextel's road to recovery is paved with many potholes.

The company did beat analysts' expectations for the first quarter of 2010, but high-value customers continued to depart, albeit at a slower rate. And its financial losses in the first quarter widened.

Sprint lost 578,000 postpaid customers who are on a contract and pay monthly bills. This beat expectations, as analysts had expected the company to lose about 623,500 customers, according to Reuters. A year ago, Sprint lost 1.25 million postpaid customers.

The company's net customer loss, including prepaid customers, was 75,000. A year … Read more

On iPhone, beware of that AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot

A security researcher has discovered that any wireless network can pretend to be an AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot and thus lure unsuspecting iPhone users to an untrusted network connection.

Samy Kamkar, who created a worm that garnered him a million friends on MySpace overnight in 2005, said in an interview this week that he can hijack any iPhone within Wi-Fi range in what is often dubbed a "man-in-the-middle" attack because of the way the devices are configured to recognize AT&T Wi-Fi connections merely by the name "attwifi."

Typically, an iPhone will look … Read more

TomTom to offer real-time traffic info in Europe

TomTom's Go Live 1000 navigation device, set for a European launch this summer, will offer real-time connection for traffic, weather, and fuel info on the continent.

The connectivity across 33 European countries will come via Vodafone. That service will be free for the first year and cost 50 euros (about $67) annually after that. The GPS device itself doesn't have a price tag or exact launch date yet.

The Go Live 1000 will feature a 500MHz ARM 11 CPU, 4GB of storage, 128MB of RAM, and a new user interface based on the open-source WebKit browser engine.

With … Read more

Verizon adds more Net content to Fios

The battle for the 21st century TV viewer is heating up as Verizon Communications adds more Internet content to its Fios TV service. But cable may not be the only competitor Verizon faces as more consumer electronics devices such as Blu-ray players and game consoles add similar Net-based services without an expensive TV service subscription.

Starting Tuesday morning, Verizon Fios TV subscribers will be able to watch YouTube videos and listen to Internet radio from iHeartRadio on their big screen TVs via their Fios TV service. The upgrade, which adds to a growing catalog of Web content available through Fios … Read more