Michelle Maisto

BlackBerry’s network suffered an outage around 9 a.m. ET March 4, affecting some users in Canada and the Asia-Pacific region. Reuters reported at midday that BlackBerry had confirmed the outages. It added that BlackBerry “had identified a potential cause and was working on a fix.” Around 2:45 p.m. ET, a BlackBerry spokesperson told eWEEK, “BlackBerry […]

Verizon has refreshed its prepaid business with the introduction of AllSet, plans that acknowledge, Verizon blogged March 4, that “there is no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ wireless plan.” The plans consist of a foundation price point—$35 a month for feature phones and $45 a month for smartphones. In the case of […]

Apple has been on a hiring “blitz” the last two years, snatching up hundreds of engineers and supply chain managers in China and Taiwan, the Wall Street Journal reported March 3, citing people familiar with the matter. The iPhone maker has used LinkedIn to connect with and lure away engineers from smartphone rival HTC, and […]

Apple introduced CarPlay at the Geneva International Motor Show March 3, giving the iPhone maker a major win in the fast-growing and highly competitive connected car market. CarPlay will be integrated into the native interface of vehicles from Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo “this week,” Apple said, and vehicles from BMW Group, Ford, General Motors, Honda, […]

BlackBerry says it’s listening carefully to what customers want and has some changes planned for BBM, its most-loved app. The next release of BBM will support photo-sharing in multiperson chats (already, users can send voice notes and share files via Dropbox in multiperson) as well as the ability to share larger files. While historically the […]

As Satya Nadella finds his stride as Microsoft’s new CEO, much has been made of the new role Bill Gates will play, leaving the chairman’s role to spend time advising Nadella on products. Less has been said about the contributions of John Thompson, who has shifted from his position as lead independent director of Microsoft’s […]

The European Commission is on its second day of hosted talks—attended by Apple and Google—about the models for selling mobile apps. While the EC is pleased about Europe’s “booming” app economy, which employs more than a million people and is expected to be worth about $87 billion in the next five years, it finds the […]

BlackBerry, fresh off a row with T-Mobile, is fending off yet another rival intent on converting its customers. In a Feb. 27 blog post titled “Good is not Good Enough,” BlackBerry came out swinging against rival mobile device management company Good. During an interview at Mobile World Congress 2014, Good CEO Christy Wyatt spoke about […]

NSA revelations of the last few months have prompted new thinking about mobile-device security. (If content from the phone of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel can be intercepted, what hope is there for yours?) Two of the more dramatic examples of this are the Blackphone, from Silent Circle and Geeksphone, which became available for preorder Feb. […]

Qualcomm, Red Bend Software and Quickplay have all signed on to work with the connected car industry at the AT&T Drive Studio in Atlanta, AT&T announced at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb. 24. AT&T introduced Drive Studio at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January, calling it […]

The House has approved a bill that will make it legal again for consumers to unlock mobile phones. H.R. 1123, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, was voted on 295 to 114 on Feb. 25, “narrowly [achieving] the two-thirds support it needed to pass the House under the expedited procedure,” the National Journal […]

The global smartphone market is entering a new phase, IDC reported Feb. 26. After a 2013 in which smartphone shipments for the first time exceeded 1 billion units and the overall market grew more than 39 percent year over year, growth is expected to decline significantly. “Despite the high growth expected in many emerging markets, […]