Nicholas Kolakowski

Dell’s Venue Pro, its newest entry in the smartphone market, looks a lot like the BlackBerry Torch 9800. It features a 4.1-inch capacitive touch screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The Gorilla Glass makes the screen highly scratch-resistant, and Dell’s engineers have ever-so-slightly curved the device’s front-supposedly to give it a more elegant feel. The […]

The first Windows Phone 7 smartphone will launch Nov. 8 on AT&T, followed a few weeks later by two other devices. Microsoft is also rushing to push out a cut-and-paste feature for the smartphones by early 2011. “We knew it was going to be a winner,” Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T’s […]

NEW YORK-Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7, its latest attempt to regain market share in smartphones, with a colorful New York City event Oct. 11. Windows Phone 7 will debut in the United States in November, on nine different devices from manufacturers such as Dell, LG Electronics and Samsung. As with Windows 7, whose success Microsoft […]

When Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in a high-profile New York City event Oct. 11, executives demoed features designed to appeal to both consumers and businesspeople: The smartphones include not only tight Xbox and Facebook integration, but also easy access to mobile productivity applications and email. “We focused in on the way real people really […]

Windows Phone 7 is launching Oct. 11, and with it Microsoft’s hopes to reclaim some ground in a smartphone arena dominated by the likes of the Apple iPhone and Google Android. So much of the chatter surrounding Microsoft this week has to deal with the company’s prospects with its new mobile platform. Will it succeed? […]

Mozilla has released its Firefox 4 beta 1 for Android and Nokia’s Maemo. The mobile-optimized browser can be downloaded from this Mozilla Website. It includes features familiar to users of Firefox’s desktop version, including Add-ons and the cheekily named Awesome Bar, which displays frequently visited and bookmarked URLs. By tapping the Awesome Bar, users can […]

Microsoft has licensed 74 patents from Acacia Research Corp. and Access Co. Ltd, giving it legal access to technology once used in Palm’s smartphones. The move could also fortify some of Microsoft’s legal flanks against the increasingly endemic IP lawsuits flying around the tech industry. The Wall Street Journal quoted Acacia CEO Paul Ryan as […]

Microsoft has no comment on rumors that it’s interested in acquiring Adobe Software, but that hasn’t stopped some analysts from mulling over the implications of such a move. “Microsoft and Adobe have been around for a very long time, and their software products can be found on just about every PC, but of late these […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likely isn’t the world’s biggest fan of “The Social Network,” the new David Fincher movie that portrays him as lacking a few niggling attributes, such as tact and ethics. But he probably wouldn’t deny that buzz over the flick is raising Facebook’s public profile just as the social networking site rolls […]

Will Windows Phone 7 fail? That’s the question likely keeping more than one Microsoft executive awake late into the night. As the company prepares to launch its newest smartphone platform Oct. 11, the stakes could not be higher: a successful line of devices will give Microsoft some much-needed momentum in its long-term smartphone battle against […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen reportedly met at Adobe’s headquarters to discuss the possibility of Microsoft acquiring Adobe, according to a new report in The New York Times. The two companies’ executives also discussed the best way to battle Apple in the mobile-devices market, according to unnamed sources paraphrased in an […]

Apple iPad rumors are circulating yet again across the Web, focused this time on potential features for a second generation of the device. Much of the fuel from those rumors comes from Mission Repair, a tech-repair company that blogged an image of an iPad rear cover equipped with dual docking ports. By late afternoon Oct. […]