Michelle Maisto

Apple has invited select members of the press to an event Oct. 23 at the California Theatre in San Jose. The event begins at 10 a.m., and what attendees can expect then, Apple didn’t say. Though it hardly needs to. Just as the date of the event has been long foretold by the rumor mills, […]

In June, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion posted a $518 million quarterly loss, said it would lay off 5,000 workers in a cost-saving measure and announced that the release of its much-needed, long-awaited BlackBerry 10 platform and new smartphones would be delayed again until early 2013. Then it braced for the worst. But that likely […]

Sony Vaio Duo 11 Ultrabook Using what Sony calls a “Surf Slider mechanism,” the Duo 11 can transition from an untraditional but powerful laptop into a tablet with a scratch-resistant 11.6-inch touch display. Pricing will start at $1,099.99. Sony Vaio Tap 20 Sony calls the Tap 20 a tabletop PC. It features a 20-inch display […]

The two major telecom deals announced this month—Softbank’s $20.1 billion acquisition of a 70 percent stake in Sprint and Deutsche Telekom’s merger of its T-Mobile USA brand with No. 5 U.S. carrier MetroPCS—have essentially the same major goal. Both Sprint and T-Mobile want to shrink the distance between themselves and the nation’s two largest carriers, […]

Apple and Android-running devices are making inroads with business users—The New York Times reported Oct. 16 that the BlackBerry-using President Obama likes to receive his national security briefings on an iPad—but Microsoft continues to be the “overwhelming choice” when it comes to standardizing on a mobile platform, according to ThinkEquity analyst Yun Kim. In a […]

Consumer adoption of cloud storage services is exceeding expectations, according to an Oct. 15 report from IHS iSuppli. By the end of June, the research firm found personal subscriptions to such services to have exceeded 375 million users—a figure that put the market already 75 percent of the way toward IHS’ full-year estimate of 500 […]

Amazon is deep into talks about buying chip maker Texas Instruments, Israeli newspaper Calcalist reported Oct. 15. TI makes processors for smartphones and tablets, a segment referred to as OMAP, and provides Amazon with the processor for its Kindle Fire tablet TI officials have said they plan to get out of the highly competitive smartphone […]

Sprint and Softbank, Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier, announced Oct. 15 that Softbank will buy 70 percent of the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier for $20.1 billion—a figure that far exceeds earlier estimates. Sprint’s stockholders will receive $12.1 billion, while $8 billion will go toward Sprint’s balance sheet and its efforts to roll out a 4G Long […]

Apple invitations to an Oct. 17 event in honor of a mini version of the iPad didn’t arrive in in-boxes Oct. 10, as some news outlets had forecast. That’s because they got it all wrong, All Things D’s John Paczkowski said in an Oct. 12 post. According to his sources, the unveiling of the Apple […]

Dell this week took a backseat to frontrunners Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, each of which was pleased to see it had out-muscled the other during the year’s third quarter. Gartner found Lenovo to have finally ousted HP from the global No. 1 spot, after several quarters of closing in on it, while IDC’s data put HP […]

Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile—the nation’s four largest wireless carriers, respectively—along with their millions of wireless subscribers, are likely to be affected, to varying degrees, by the news of the last few weeks. Shifts in the size, and so power, of the carriers changes their ability to compete at a national level and ultimately […]

Sony’s tablets look unlike its competitors’ offerings, and now the same can be said of its Windows 8 convertible. Sony calls the Vaio Duo 11 Ultrabook a “slider hybrid,” but by any name it’s likely to win attention. (Sales are always another matter.) The Vaio Duo 11 features an 11.6-inch full HD touch screen with […]