Michelle Maisto

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has improved on one of its most-loved offerings with a BlackBerry Messenger 7 with BBM Voice. The feature enables BBM users—about 60 million people—to place free voice calls over a WiFi connection to other BBM users. A split-screen feature makes it possible to talk and text at the same time, […]

Samsung’s strategy of offering a varied smartphone portfolio with multiple price points continues to be a winning one. In a global phone market that declined 3.1 percent during the third quarter, Samsung grew by nearly 19 percent year-over-year, shipping 98 million mobile devices, Gartner announced Nov. 14. Rising smartphone sales kept overall mobile phone totals […]

HTC and Verizon Wireless introduced the Droid DNA Nov. 13 and with it a boost to the fading Droid brand. “This is Droid like only HTC can do. It’s about bringing Droid back to its original roots,” Jason Mackenzie, president of HTC, said at a New York City event where, with executives from Verizon, the […]

Apple and Microsoft strangely paralleled each other the evening of Nov. 12, when the latter announced the departure of Steve Sinofsky, its president of Windows and Windows Live, effective immediately. In recent weeks, both companies made long-awaited product introductions that were quickly followed by the departure of a key executive behind the launch. Apple announced […]

Droid DNA by HTC The Droid DNA, like the rest of HTC’s Droid franchise, will be exclusive to Verizon Wireless, at least through the holidays. It features a 5-inch display with 440ppi, a quad-core processor, and brag-worthy camera and audio features. It measures 5.5 by 2.78 by 0.38 inches and weighs 4.9 ounces. Wireless Charging […]

The Nokia Lumia 920 and 820, the first Lumias to run Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8 operating system, became available on the AT&T network Nov. 9. The same day, Verizon Wireless began taking preorders for three new Windows Phone 8 devices, the Lumia 822, the Windows Phone 8X by HTC and the Samsung ATIV Odyssey. […]

President Obama gave a seven-minute speech in the East Room of the White House Nov. 9, establishing his position on addressing what has become known as the “fiscal cliff” and readying the country for likely more bipartisan sparring. Obama reiterated his position that wealthier Americans should pay “a little more” in taxes to help reduce […]

AT&T has announced that in the next eight to 10 weeks it will support the use of Apple’s FaceTime video-conferencing application by subscribers with devices running Apple’s iOS 6 on a Long Term Evolution (LTE) device, whether those customers are on tiered data pricing plans or AT&T Mobile Share plans. The gesture is a reversal […]

Samsung’s Galaxy S III was the best-selling smartphone model in the world during the third quarter of 2012, according to a Nov. 8 report from Strategy Analytics. Telling yet another story of Samsung’s smart use of the long stretch between Apple’s iPhone releases, the research firm found that Samsung sold 18 million of the pocket-busting, […]

Randall Stephenson AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson opened the event by acknowledging Hurricane Sandy, which paralyzed much of the New York region the week before. “We compete and go hard at each other every single day,” he said of the wireless industry, “but in a moment of crisis, I’m really pleased how we all worked together […]

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has taken a new step toward retaining the interest of its key users, and it hurries to get its long-overdue new BlackBerry 10 platform to market. On Nov. 8, RIM announced that BlackBerry 10 had received Federal Information Processing Standard certification, making it the first BlackBerry product to be FIPS-certified […]

T-Mobile continues to suffer the consequences of having neither an iPhone nor a 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network—though it has hopes for the former and plans for the latter. During its fiscal 2012 third quarter, T-Mobile announced Nov. 8, that revenues fell by 6.4 percent year-on-year and 492,000 postpaid subscribers took their business elsewhere. […]