Nicholas Kolakowski

Hewlett-Packard’s decision to keep its PC business rather than spin it off as an independent entity could end up benefitting it greatly-at least, according to the first analysts commenting on the company’s latest move. “Despite being a commodity business, with a lower profit margin than most of its other businesses, PCs will benefit HP greatly,” […]

Hewlett-Packard, with its market-leading PC business back in the fold, is still in the tablet game. “I think we need to be in the tablet business,” HP CEO Meg Whitman told analysts and reporters during an Oct. 27 conference call. “We’re certainly going to be there with Windows 8, and we’re going to make a […]

Research In Motion dealt with its global outage that left some BlackBerry users without services for days. Now, it seems, the company will need to deal with the inevitable lawsuits from that incident. In a lawsuit filed Oct. 25 with the Quebec Superior Court (No: 500-06-000583-118), a petitioner is looking to institute a class action […]

Nokia might have lagged as a significant smartphone competitor in the U.S., and internationally Google Android was chewing into its market share, but Microsoft nonetheless sees the Finnish phone maker as a vital part of its Windows Phone strategy. “Other handset vendors, in general, are looking at us as part of a portfolio that focuses […]

Sony plans on buying out Ericsson’s stake in the two companies’ mobile-device concerns for $1.5 billion, according to reports. “It’s the beginning of something which I think is quite magical,” Sony Chairman Sir Howard Stringer said at a London news conference, according to Reuters. “We can more rapidly and more widely offer consumers smartphones, laptops, […]

Lumia 800 Nokia is betting big that the Lumia 800 (and its other Windows Phone devices in the pipeline) will appeal to consumers who want a high-end smartphone. It will offer the device in three colors: cyan, magenta and black.??í Body The Lumia 800 consists of a 3.7-inch active-matrix organic LED (AMOLED) curved screen integrated […]

Hewlett-Packard will keep its Personal Systems Group, reversing a decision that would have potentially spun off HP’s profitable PC-manufacturing division. “HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG,” Meg Whitman, HP’s CEO and president, wrote in an Oct. 27 statement. “It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP […]

SAP’s strong fiscal quarter suggests an appetite for business software among enterprises, particularly in “hot” areas such as mobility, cloud and business intelligence. For the third quarter of 2011, SAP reported software revenue of $1.18 billion, up 28 percent year over year. Total revenue (including service revenue) hit $4.8 billion, up 14 percent from the […]

Nokia’s pair of new Windows Phone devices offers a snapshot of Microsoft’s coming strategy for the platform. At the high end of the market is the Lumia 800, a smartphone packed with some powerful hardware: a 1.4GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor, an 8-megapixel camera that uses Carl Zeiss optics, 16GB of internal user […]

Nokia rolled the dice on its big Windows Phone bet Oct. 26, unveiling two smartphones running Microsoft’s software: the high-end Lumia 800 and lower-cost Lumia 710. If that bet succeeds, and those two smartphones mark the beginning of a successful line of Nokia-Windows Phone devices, then the Finnish phone maker will have revived its fortunes […]

Research In Motion’s long-awaited software update to the PlayBook isn’t due to arrive until February 2012, according to the company. “We expect to deliver the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS to customers in February 2012,” David Smith, RIM’s senior vice president of BlackBerry PlayBook, wrote in a post published on RIM’s official BlackBerry blog Oct. 25, […]

Microsoft’s Windows XP is 10 years old. In human terms, 10 years is nothing; a child that age is regarded as little more than a tadpole. In software terms, 10 years makes Windows XP the operating system equivalent of Lee Marvin: grizzled, wrinkled and (thanks to countless patches and updates) tougher than a stick of […]