Michelle Maisto

When Nokia sued Apple in October, it noted that it had spent $60 billion on research and development over the last two decades. A peek into such efforts is offered in a patent that has been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Nokia for a mobile device charger that harvests “piezoelectric kinetic […]

Sony is leaking customers to Apple, with gamers increasingly turning toward the iPhone and away from the PlayStation. Apple iPad users and e-reader enthusiasts, too, are expected to cut into Sony Reader profits.To combat this, Sony is developing a lineup of handheld products, which includes a smartphone capable of downloading games and a “multifunction device,” […]

AT&T, which Juniper Research named the top “green” U.S. carrier in 2009, is living up to its Earth-friendly reputation. On March 4, the carrier announced that it’s requiring slimmer packaging, and less of it, from its mobile handset partners.By improving the packaging of device chargers, cases, batteries and data cables, AT&T hopes to eliminate 200 […]

Launch your Calendar application! The Apple iPad will arrive in the United States on April 3, according to Apple.Beginning March 12, U.S. customers will be able to preorder WiFi and WiFi-plus-3G models at www.apple.com, or reserve a WiFi-only model for pickup at an Apple retail store on April 3, Apple announced on its Website March […]

Samsung will launch a new line of consumer notebooks at Best Buy stores March 7.The R80 series comes in 14-, 15.6- and 17.3-inch models running Windows 7 Home Premium and a variety of Intel processors and featuring 4GB of DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory and, in the two larger models, Nvidia GeForce graphics cards.Ethernet, […]

Gartner expects worldwide shipments of PCs in 2010 to grow 20 percent over last year, driven by rising interest in mobile PCs, including Apple’s iPad tablet, the IT research firm wrote in a March 4 report.In 2009, netbooks – or mini-notebooks, as Gartner refers to them – helped to boost flagging desktop numbers through the […]

Touch-screen smartphone sales are expected to almost double in 2010, though not everyone is happy with their devices, according to two separate reports. IT research firm Gartner expects the worldwide touch-screen mobile device market to top 362.7 million units in 2010, an increase of 96.8 percent over 2009 sales of 184.3 million units. “Touch screens […]

A pile of new netbooks were introduced at the CeBIT tech show in Hannover, Germany, including models from Acer and Asustek Computer, as well as lesser-known manufacturers such as Coby Electronics, BYD and Sapphire. In 2009, swift netbook sales helped steady an otherwise ailing PC market. While analysts expect that the netbook category will continue […]

AT&T is the latest carrier to warn that the days of all-you-can-eat data plans are coming to an end. At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference March 2, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the carrier was considering different pricing plans for different platforms, charging the heaviest users the highest fees.“For the industry, we’ll […]

Apple’s lawsuit against competitor HTC may not hurt the smartphone maker in the short term, but could have long-term consequences, straining its relationships with partners in the U.S. market, The New York Times reported March 3.The Times quoted analyst Jeff Pu, with Fubon Securities in Taipei, as saying, “From a long-term perspective, many carriers in […]

Nokia is the latest company to promote the availability of Skype voice over IP services, announcing on its blog March 3 that the application can now be downloaded free from its Ovi Store and is compatible with the latest version of Symbian. The application enables users to make free Skype-to-Skype calls, receive calls to an […]

Nvidia’s out to make a better netbook, it announced March 2, with the introduction of the Nvidia Ion graphics processor. Said to “supercharge” netbooks, it reportedly offers 10 times the graphics performance of average netbooks and up to 10 hours of battery life.A discrete GPU (graphics processing unit) with dedicated memory, Ion works with the […]