Mobile

High-quality online video has been in high demand in China, and Chinese search provider Baidu is hoping to fulfill that need.

Baidu announced on Wednesday that it is creating an independent company to offer premium online videos to Chinese Internet users. The new entity is designed to work with content providers to supply copyrighted material, including movies, TV shows, sports, and animation, and it will generate its revenue through advertisements.

"As China's Internet industry evolves, we have seen increasing demand for high-quality video content on our search platform. By establishing this new company, we will be able to … Read more

Last year brought market share growth for all major browsers except Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications' annual industry report released Wednesday.

The year ended with Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome enjoying gains of about 3 percentage points, while Apple's Safari climbed a single percentage point. Opera stayed relatively flat with a gain of 0.23 points, but IE saw a decline of nearly 8 percentage points.

Though IE's popularity may have sunk, the Microsoft browser still boasts a greater market share than all the other browsers combined with 62.69 percent of the … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Forget about the Google Phone already: the Nexus One is merely a blip on Google's long-term strategy for the rise of mobile computing.

One could be forgiven for assuming Google was about to knock over the smartphone market--two and a half years after Apple did just that--with one quick blow going into Tuesday's Android event with a phone designed by Google and sold at retail by Google. After all, that's what the Internet said would happen leading up to the event.

But what actually emerged from Building 43 on Tuesday is just … Read more

Microsoft on Tuesday said it is investigating reports of a glitch causing some Windows Mobile devices to attach the wrong date to incoming SMS messages.

The glitch, which applies to text messages sent after New Year's Day, causes them to appear to have been sent in 2016.

"Microsoft is aware of reports that phone messages received after 1/1/2010 may be dated 2016," the software maker said in a statement. "These reports have not yet resulted in widespread customer inquiries; however, we are working closely with our manufacturing and mobile-operator partners to investigate the cause … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's first consumer phone has arrived.

You've read all the exhaustive coverage of Google's Nexus One phone over the last month. The Android-based device emerged at a company holiday party and has been the talk of the smartphone industry ever since. And at an event here at its headquarters Tuesday, Google is unveiling the Nexus One and announcing a plan to sell it directly to consumers.

This post is our live coverage of the event, which lasted about 90 minutes. You can also get a summary of today's announcement and some of my colleague Kent German's initial thoughts about the Nexus One here.

9:52 a.m.: We're awaiting the start of Google's Android event here in Building 43 at Google's headquarters in Mountain View. The event is expected to start in about 10 minutes, and the requisite pounding get-excited music is blaring inside a large conference room. There are maybe 100 people crammed into the room, and Google executives Vic Gundotra and Andy Rubin have already been spotted.

10:06 a.m.: Mike Nelson, a PR representative for Google, kicks things off by promising a series of short presentations. Mario Queiroz of Google has been leading Google's efforts in this area, and he starts off the presentation.… Read more

We knew it was coming, but we had to wait for Google to spill the news before we could talk about it with authority. And the company did so Tuesday morning at a press conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.

As expected, the Nexus One is a new Google Android phone that offers an inside designed by Google and an outside designed by HTC. According to Google's Mario Queiroz, the Nexus One is a "superphone" where the Web meets the cell phone. "It's an exemplar of what mobile phones can do with Android," he said. The handset will be available first for GSM carriers like T-Mobile, but a Verizon version will follow.… Read more

Certain Kia car owners will soon be able to play music and make phone calls, all by just the sound of their voice.

Kia Motors' new infotainment system "Uvo powered by Microsoft" will let car owners access its key features by voice as well as by touch. With an assist from Microsoft speech technology and an embedded version of Windows, Uvo will help drivers and passengers make and answer phone calls, respond to text messages, and play music from different sources, said Kia.

Using Microsoft's voice recognition, car owners will be able to direct the system by issuing short voice commands rather searching through complex menus, said Kia. Drivers and passengers can scroll through their music lists and phone books by voice or via the touch screen.

For greater accuracy, speech recognition profiles can be created and trained for two different voices from among a variety of languages. The system can even respond to questions, such as "What's playing?" so that drivers don't have to fumble or take their eyes off the road.… Read more

Apple's App Store hit another milestone Tuesday, topping 3 billion downloads.

The store, which launched in July 2008 with just 500 applications, now offers more than 100,000 free and paid apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple didn't break down how many of the downloaded apps were paid and how many were free, but the App Store does provide lists of its most popular apps in those categories.

The App Store reached the 1 billion download mark in April and the 2 billion mark in November.

The success of the App Store has forced other mobile … Read more

Was 2009 the year of the smartphone? Or will it be 2010? Either way, a new Forrester report confirmed a surge in smartphone ownership last year and expects more growth and more competition this year.

Around 17 percent of mobile phone subscribers now own smartphones, up from 11 percent at the end of 2008 and 7 percent at the end of 2007. Those numbers are even more impressive than they sound, Forrester said Monday, because new technologies typically enjoy a growth spurt in their first year and then trail off in subsequent years. Smartphones are doing the reverse.

In 2009, … Read more