Nicholas Kolakowski

Apple may find itself under scrutiny by either the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission, according to an unnamed source quoted in a May 3 article in the New York Post. The newspaper suggested that the two agencies are “days away” from deciding which of them would pursue an actual investigation. The Cupertino, […]

Microsoft’s Windows 7 occupies 14.8 percent of the operating system market, according to analytics company Janco Associates, putting it ahead of Windows Vista. However, that data contrasts with findings by other companies, which contend that Windows 7 is still on track but has not yet passed Vista in the quest to win from long-reigning Windows […]

Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Palm for $1.2 billion is widely expected to change the smartphone landscape, not to mention save the Palm brand from implosion. What’s less certain is how the deal might affect the nascent tablet PC market. HP has a number of decisions confronting it, including how to best integrate Palm’s products into its […]

Microsoft’s upcoming Kin One and Kin Two phones will be made available for presale May 6, with “launches to all channels on May 13,” according to a purported internal report from Verizon. The phones are targeted at a younger demographic, with applications and hardware designed for optimized social networking. Screenshots of that report, and the […]

The most newsworthy portion of Microsoft’s week came April 27, when the company announced an intellectual property agreement with HTC that will see the phone manufacturer license Microsoft’s patented technology for use in its smartphones running Google Android. The deal has implications not only for Android and HTC, which will pay undisclosed royalties, but also […]

Apple plans to shut down Lala, the online streaming music service, on May 31. After Apple acquired Lala Media in December 2009, speculation was rampant that Apple would incorporate Lala’s streaming technology into its iTunes service; nonetheless, both Lala and Apple remained tight-lipped about any future dispensation of the company’s assets. Lala allowed users, in […]

Microsoft has killed its long-rumored “Courier” tablet PC project, eliminating a possible rival to Apple’s iPad. Although it never managed to exit the development lab, early photo and video leaks on tech blogs suggested the Courier-at least as a prototype-featured two touch screens that folded on a central hinge, like a book, and was capable […]

Opera Software announced the acquisition April 30 of FastMail.fm, a cloud-based e-mail provider. While Opera has offered an e-mail client with its desktop browser for a number of years, the new acquisition will expand the company’s messaging-product portfolio to devices such as phones, televisions and gaming consoles. “The newest generation of Web users will discover […]

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz insisted during an interview with BBC News that Google, its erstwhile competitor, could face serious issues in the future. “Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search … it is only half our business; it’s 99.9 [percent] of their business,” Bartz reportedly told the news […]

Microsoft is negotiating intellectual property (IP) agreements with unnamed manufacturers that produce smartphones running the Google Android operating system, on the heels of the April 27 announcement that HTC has agreed to pay royalties to Microsoft in exchange for the use of “patented technology” in its Android-powered phones. Since the launch of its IP licensing […]

From Pilot and Pre to HP: The Rise and Fallof Palm by Nicholas Kolakowski No Title Jeff Hawkins founded Palm Computing in 1992, based on his desire to create a palm-sized device that would make use of stylus inputs. But the company’s first handset, the Zoomer, was not a breakthrough success. No Title The Palm […]

Amazon.com plans to release a software update for its Kindle and Kindle DX e-readers, termed Version 2.5, in late May. Included will be tweaks to the devices’ user interface, and a social networking aspect that draws on Twitter and Facebook. In a post on its Website, Amazon.com said the update would be pushed “to a […]