Global sales of mobile phones dipped slightly in 2009 overall but did stage a fourth-quarter recovery, according to new figures from Gartner.

Last year, consumers worldwide bought 1.21 billion cell phones, a 0.9 percent decline from the prior year. However, a surge in smartphones from the likes of Apple and Research In Motion and in low-end devices boosted fourth-quarter sales to 340 million units, an 8.3 percent gain over the fourth quarter of 2008, the market researcher said Tuesday.

Selling prices also took a hit last year. Intense competition forced cell phone manufacturers to keep prices low, … Read more

Google's new Buzz social-networking effort proved a privacy headache for the Web giant.

After an outcry of criticism from annoyed users and commentators, Google said it would make radical changes to the Buzz start-up experience. Along the way, Google confessed to being taken aback that people were rather upset to be already set up with a group of people to follow and be followed by.

Buzz was just tested inside Google before it launched to the general public. Perhaps those insiders didn't bring up the privacy concerns that Buzz users raised immediately following its launch. Maybe Google didn'… Read more

The iPhone and competing mobile gadgets are chewing up stock of NAND flash memory, which will lead to shorter supply and higher revenue for NAND manufacturers this year, according to a report Wednesday from iSuppli.

Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone and the launch of a slew of other portable gadgets, the number of mobile handsets with NAND flash memory will rise 13.8 percent this year to 732 million units from 643 million last year. The growth rate was 1.6 percent in 2008, said iSuppli.

NAND, a type of nonvolatile memory that retains its data even when the device is powered off, is commonly used in cell phones, MP3 players, USB drives, and memory cards. It is also found in solid-state storage drives, which are increasingly being used in notebooks. NAND stands for "not and" and describes the type of logic circuit used in these chips.

Apple has traditionally been one of the industry's heaviest users of NAND. Recently, one analyst said he'd heard estimates that about 20 percent to 30 percent of the world's NAND supply goes to Apple. The company has also cut deals with NAND suppliers such as Toshiba to prepay for more flash memory than it currently needs in anticipation of rising prices.

Combine the 35.2 gigabytes of NAND used in each iPhone with the fact that iPhone shipments are likely to hit 33 million this year, and the industry is facing periods of NAND undersupply this year, noted iSuppli. Such demand is good news for manufacturers and suppliers, who may see global NAND flash sales rise to $18.1 billion this year, up 34 percent, from $13.5 billion last year. In 2009, revenue was up 14.8 percent.… Read more

Google could be earning some $497 million a year from the registered owners of Web site addresses that mimic typographical errors in existing sites, according to a new study.

Harvard University researchers Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman estimate that Google could be making millions from the practice, known as "typosquatting," because its network of display ads--from which it receives a cut of the profits--run on the typo'd sites.

If it's a frequently misspelled site address--for example, zddnet.com instead of yours truly--the tactic could pay off handsomely.

Read more of "URL typos earn Google $497 million per year, study says&… Read more

Continuing its effort to expand the e-book business beyond its own hardware, Amazon.com on Thursday released a Kindle application for BlackBerry phones.

Amazon got its start as an online book seller, expanded to electronics and other retail categories, then returned to its roots with its own Kindle reader devices. More recently, though, it expanded with Kindle applications that let people read books on the iPhone and iPod Touch and on Windows computers. After purchasing rights to read a book, a customer may read it on any of those devices.

That device list now includes BlackBerry phones, and according to … Read more

In a move to marry its old-school Office product with the newer trends of the Net, Microsoft issued beta software Wednesday that brings social-network information into Outlook.

The product, called Outlook Social Connector, has been available in the Office 2010 beta. According to the Outlook Social Connector download site, the new version works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 and connects with social-network partners, which wasn't the case with the earlier version.

Outlook Social Connector will let people see updates from a person's social-network contacts. LinkedIn announced in November that it would become the first actual partner in the Microsoft program. … Read more

Make sure there are no kids in the room if you plan on trying out the Chatroulette video chat service. While I was able to have a couple of very nice conversations with fully clothed polite individuals, I saw some things I would rather have avoided as I tested this relatively new service.

When you first enter the site you'll see two large black boxes and a blank area for text chat. As soon as you click "play," you'll see a stranger's picture in the top box and--at least on my machine--a notice asking if … Read more

Adobe Systems, hard at work bringing its Flash technology to mobile phones, announced Monday that it's also working on making the same move for a related programming foundation called AIR.

AIR, short for Adobe Integrated Runtime, is a foundation for standalone applications that use Flash or Web technology. Examples of AIR applications include the New York Times Reader and the TweetDeck for advanced Twitter usage.

Adobe plans to release AIR for Google's Android operating system for mobile devices in 2010, the company said at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. Also at the show, Adobe announced that it's joined the LiMo Foundation to bring Flash to Linux-based mobile phones. … Read more

I know this isn't the most important issue affecting the world right now. But I can't take it anymore. It's a really good time for TV right now, and Twitter is totally ruining it. "Lost" is back on, "Survivor: Heroes and Villains" is one episode in, the Olympics are not even one night old as I write this. And Twitter, bless its little heart, has spoiled each and every one of them for me at some point this week.

The straw-breaker for me came from the CNN Breaking News Twitter feed, which delivered … Read more