Michelle Maisto

Strong PC sales in the fourth quarter of 2009 helped make up for a slow start, and in the end, the 2009 worldwide PC market achieved 2.3 percent year-on-year growth, according to a Jan. 13 report from IDC. Last year’s outcome was helped by a solid holiday shopping season, which saw price cuts of an […]

Though BlackBerry smartphones are the de facto mobile devices in most enterprises, many iPhone owners are still pushing for IT to support their handsets. Unfortunately for them, analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates wrote in a Jan. 13 research note, iPhone adoption in the enterprise is more likely to be a “long, slow burn […]

Skype has named Miles Flint, former president of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, its new chairman, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Flint is an adviser to the private-equity firm Silver Lake, which in September purchased 70 percent of Skype from eBay for approximately $2 billion. In his new position, Flint will coordinate activities among the board’s […]

Hewlett-Packard and Intel are strutting their stuff for the seventh season of “Project Runway,” which premieres Jan. 14 on the Lifetime channel. The duo announced Jan. 13 that the HP TouchSmart PCs and HP Touchmart tm2 notebooks, both powered by Intel processors, will be used by contestants on the show. For the first time, the […]

LG Electronics announced a few New Year’s resolutions on Jan. 13, one of which was to sell 140 million units in 2010, representing a 20 percent year-over-year increase from 2009. LG additionally announced that it is rolling out a multipart plan that will enable it to become one of the top two mobile device manufacturers […]

Smartphone use is about to surge, and enterprises should begin preparing for the deluge, states a Jan. 6 report from Forrester Research. While 11 percent of U.S. consumers, and 14 percent of the U.S. “information work force” currently has a smartphone, Forrester expects those numbers to begin steadily climbing in 2010 and not stop until […]

Motorola and Sprint introduced the ultra-rugged and appropriately named Motorola Brute i680 on Jan 11. The clamshell-style phone offers Nextel Direct Connect push-to-talk services and meets military specification 810F for resisting dust, shock, vibration, temperature extremes, low pressure, solar radiation, salt fog, humidity and blowing rain. Which is more than can be said for most […]

When it comes to pulling in electronics shoppers, Amazon.com and Wal-Mart are gaining ground on leader Best Buy, according to a Jan. 6 study from Retrevo. Retrevo polled more than a thousand online shoppers between Dec. 26 and Jan. 4 to learn how consumer attitudes toward electronics shopping shifted over the course of 2009. When […]

The Nexus One, sold by Google but manufactured by HTC, costs approximately $174.15 to make, according to a teardown performed by iSuppli. That estimated bill of materials (BOM) tally is a conservative one, the firm said in a Jan. 8 report, as it accounts for hardware and component costs but not expenses such as “manufacturing, […]

Executives at Orange were rather red in the face after one of their own appeared to have confirmed the existence of an Apple tablet Jan. 11 during an interview on French radio. According to Orange, no such confirmation occurred. St??«phane Richard, deputy CEO of France Telecom, which owns Orange, said in a statement to British […]

Dell introduced the OptiPlex XE, a durable and long-lasting desktop PC for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and retail environments, on Jan. 11. Highly adaptable, offering remote systems management and designed to withstand 24/7 operation, the OptiPlex XE promises a lifecyle of 3.5 years. “I think today what we want to tell the market is that […]

At the start of 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Verizon Wireless announced that beginning Jan. 25, it will be offering the Palm Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus, slightly updated versions of the devices Sprint first began offering in June 2009. These smartphones will be the first WebOS-based devices on the Verizon network. […]