Michelle Maisto

These are dark days for BlackBerry, once the global smartphone leader. Two days after BlackBerry signed a $4.7 billion letter of intent to sell the company to Fairfax Financial Holdings, the investment firm run by former BlackBerry board member Prem Watsa, BlackBerry’s smartphone supplier, Jabil Circuit, announced it is bringing its partnership agreement with BlackBerry […]

MakerBot Digitizer 3D Scanner Turbocharges the Printing Process by Michelle Maisto Meet the MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner Want to jump-start a design project? Want to make a 3D replica of something but have no design skills or experience with CAD? MakerBot says no problem: Meet the Digitizer. How It Works To scan an object, […]

Amazon continues to prove itself a serious contender in the tablet space. On Sept. 25, Amazon introduced its third generation of Kindle Fire tablets, the 7- and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX. They feature double the memory and triple the processing power of their predecessors, boast resolutions that out-do Apple’s Retina display and are the only […]

Samsung this morning announced plans to woo and court enterprise customers, introducing the Samsung Solutions Exchange. It wants to combine its SAFE (Samsung Approved for Enterprise) and Knox-enabled smartphones and tablets with “holistic,” vertical-specific solutions. Since I spoke with Tim Wagner, vice president and general manager of Samsung Mobile’s Enterprise Business Unit, in advance of […]

A Samsung executive has confirmed that the company will soon introduce a smartphone with a curved display. D.J. Lee, Samsung’s mobile business head of strategic marketing, said the phone will launch in South Korea in October, Reuters reported Sept. 25. While older smartphones, including the Samsung-made Google Nexus S and Nokia Lumia 920, have featured […]

Samsung bought up eight commercial slots during the Sept. 22 Emmy Awards to tell the story of an imaginary game company readying its biggest new title, Unicorn Apocalypse. The staff is young and clever; Galaxy S III and Note 2 devices are brought in and shown off as superior to (and more secure than) the […]

Microsoft Surface 2 Tablets: Faster With Longer Battery Life by Michelle Maisto Meet the Microsoft Surface 2 The Surface 2 is, in every regard, the lighter-weight of new options. Like the original Surface, it weighs 1.5 pounds and measures 10.81 by 6.81 inches, though it’s 0.35 inches thin, to the original’s 0.37 inches. The Surface […]

Apple, without fanfare, announced an update to its line of iMac desktop computers Sept. 24, 11 months and a day after introducing its last batch. The updated iMacs feature the fourth generation of Intel’s quad-core processors, new graphics, next-generation WiFi and faster PCIe flash storage options. Like the old iMacs, however, they run OS X […]

BlackBerry founder Mike Lazaridis, who gave up his co-CEO position in January 2012 and in March 2013 stepped down from the BlackBerry board, is considering taking over the company again. Lazaridis has approached private-equity firms Blackstone Group and the Carlyle Group about “possibly mounting a joint bid for the struggling phone maker,” the Wall Street […]

BlackBerry, which in August announced it was open to being purchased, among other options, has received a $4.7 billion offer. The smartphone maker announced Sept. 23 that it has signed a letter of intent (LOI) with a consortium led by private equity firm Fairfax Financial Holdings, which would purchase BlackBerry, subject to due diligence. The […]

Apple proved to rivals this weekend that it’s still got it. The iPhone 5S and 5C went on sale Friday, Sept. 20, and on Monday morning Apple announced that it had sold a “record-breaking 9 million new iPhone 5S and 5C models.” In September 2012, Apple made the iPhone 5 available for preorder and sold […]

Sprint, as anticipated, joined T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and AT&T in making it simpler for subscribers to upgrade their smartphones more frequently. On Sept. 20, in sync with the launch of Apple’s newest iPhones, Sprint introduced One Up. The upgrade program offers unlimited talk, texting and high-speed data (while on the Sprint network), and the ability […]