Nicholas Kolakowski

Research In Motion has been impacted by the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S and faces slowing sales of BlackBerry OS 7 devices ahead of its massive smartphone refresh sometime in 2012, according to a new analyst report. “With the launch of the iPhone 4S, increasingly price-competitive Android smartphones, improving Windows smartphones, and the launch of […]

Microsoft’s relatively quiet week centered on some Windows 8 updates, an indicator that its Windows Phone could be attracting more developer interest in the wake of the Nokia partnership, and some updates to that aforementioned mobile platform. “We’re now sending out Windows Phone 7.5 updates to customers with Samsung Focus 1.4 phones on AT&T,” read […]

Amazon’s Kindle Fire costs $201.70 to manufacture, according to a preliminary finding by research firm IHS’ Teardown Analysis Service. That number combines manufacturing costs with the preliminary Bill of Materials (BOM), which totals $185.60. Those materials include a Texas Instruments 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor ($14.65, or 7.9 percent of the BOM), and the display […]

At the 2011 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the annual January event where pretty much all manufacturers in the tech industry (save Apple) unleash their latest and greatest gizmos, tablets dominated the discussion. Nearly everywhere you looked, it seemed, a company had an Android-based touch-screen in some stage of development. […]

Microsoft is planning a revised Windows Update process for Windows 8. Specifically, the company plans for its next-generation operating system to consolidate all updates that necessitate a restart into a single event synchronized with the monthly Patch Tuesday. “This means that your PC will only restart when security updates are installed and require a restart,” […]

Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet now seem locked in open battle. For each company, the stakes are very different. Amazon needed to expand upon its already-successful Kindle line, which until this point had centered on a series of gray-scale e-readers, in a way that allowed it to leverage its already-considerable presence […]

Apple’s iPhone and Google Android continue to make inroads among enterprise users, outpacing both Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s smartphone efforts, according to iPass’ Mobile Workforce Report. The quarterly report is based on 2,300 responses from employees at 1,100 enterprises worldwide, according to iPass. Some 49 percent of respondents were based in North America, […]

Having been integrated into Microsoft, Skype is now moving ahead with new Facebook integration and some new features for its Mac and Windows versions. The latest versions of Skype for Mac and Windows now boast the ability to conduct Facebook-to-Facebook calls from within Skype. Starting such a call involves connecting the user’s Skype and Facebook […]

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the world’s smallest vending machine disguised as a tablet. The 7-inch device is less a tablet in the mode of Apple’s iPad or Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and more a touch-screen portal to Amazon’s online storefront, with its massive collections of streaming video, music and e-books. It also plays any music […]

Nokia has an aggressive strategy to reclaim market share lost to Android and Apple’s iPhone over the past several quarters: Give its new Windows Phone devices a price that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop thinks will generate “good volume.” At a conference in Barcelona this week, Elop told the audience that “our first competitors are the […]

Hewlett-Packard is moving into the ultrabook game with its HP Folio, a super-thin 13.3-inch laptop with an advertised battery life of nine hours and the newest Intel Core processors. Intel remains an aggressive driver of the nascent ultrabook category, partnering with a variety of manufacturers to issue devices that conform to the chip maker’s specifications […]

The Kindle Fire The Kindle Fire, which retails for $199, began shipping to customers Nov. 14. Amazon hopes customers will gravitate toward the 7-inch tablets tight integration with its online offerings. Services The Kindle Fire places front-and-center the ability to watch streaming video, listen to music via Amazons Cloud Drive and read Kindle e-books. Hardware […]