Verizon Wireless announces new prepaid plans

Verizon Wireless on Monday announced a new prepaid plan that offers unlimited talk, text, and 1GB of data for $80. The monthly plan is only being offered on the 3G Samsung Illusion, which can be had for $169.99 and will be available at Best Buy, Target, RadioShack and Walmart. Verizon also announced three different prepaid plans for its Jetpack 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot. The nation’s largest carrier is offering 250MB of data for usage for a week for $15, 3GB of data per month for $60, and 10GB a month for $90. The Verizon Jetpack 4510L will be available...

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Google online translation tops 200 mln users

Google Translate marked its sixth birthday on Thursday with news that more than 200 million people use the free online translation service monthly. "In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you'd find in one million books," Google Translate engineer Franz Och said in a blog post. "We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it's in, and no matter where it pops up." Och worked at US military research arm DARPA before joining California-based Google in 2003 to be part...

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Samsung goes quad-core for the next Galaxy S smartphone

Samsung is getting serious with the power of their Samsung Galaxy S3, as the company just announced that it'll pack a quad-core CPU.The next successor in Samsung's Galaxy S line of smartphones will be officially unveiled in May, and until then even the name is under wraps.But the company already announced that it will be their most powerful smartphone ever.The phone will feature the Exynos 4 Quad chip, built using Samsung's innovative 32-nanometer manufacturing process. The Exynos 4 Quad will reportedly run faster than Quad-core powerThe Samsung...

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U.S. House passes CISPA

The United States House of Representatives has voted to pass the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), talk of which has swept the Internet over the past few weeks. The House vote was moved up to Thursday night, and CISPA passed as 248 members of Congress voted for the bill and 168 voted against. The bill is sponsored by Representatives Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland), and it now faces further modifications in the Senate if it is to avoid being vetoed by the White House. President Barack...

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Samsung posts record $5.15 billion profit; mobile sales surge

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co, the world's top technology firm by revenue, reported a record quarterly profit on Friday, as its Galaxy smartphones and Note phone/tablet helped it win market share from Nokia and as it outmuscled Japanese rivals in TVs and memory chips. Samsung did not break out its first-quarter smartphone and handset shipments, but analysts forecast it ended Nokia's 14-year leadership of the global cellphone market, outselling the struggling Finnish company for the first time. Nokia sold 83 million handsets in January-March,...

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Huawei looks to ship 60 million smartphones this year

Huawei, the world’s sixth largest mobile phone vendor, said on Wednesday that it expects to ship more than 100 million mobile phones in 2012, including 60 million smartphones, Reuters reported. The Chinese company sold a total of 55 million handsets, including 20 million smartphones, in 2011 and is now looking to increase its global market share with a focus on key markets. “We plan to target China, the United States, western Europe and Japan as key markets,” said Shao Yang, chief marketing officer of Huawei Device. The executive also said he...

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Zune Desktop software will no longer be able to access Marketplace

Microsoft on Tuesday announced on its Windows Phone Blog two changes regarding its Windows Phone Marketplace that will “help pave the way for new store features and new apps in the months ahead.” The Redmond-based company will be removing the option to shop for Windows Phone apps from the Zune Desktop software and will now require handsets to be running Windows Phone 7.5 to buy and download new apps, or update existing ones. The Zune Music Marketplace will remain open, and the software will be used to back up music and photos, and to install...

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Final major pre-launch Windows 8 release due during first week of June

Microsoft’s Buildings Windows 8 Twitter account on Monday evening announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview will be available at some point during the first week of June. The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Japan Windows 8 Dev Days, and it comes almost two months after the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The software giant will reportedly complete work on Windows 8 this summer, and the first wave of PCs and tablets powered by the new platform will then launch in October according to rumors. Three versions of the operating system...

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Apple crushes Street targets, dispels iPhone fears

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's quarterly results beat Wall Street estimates on stronger-than-expected demand for the iPhone, especially in the greater China region where sales jumped five-fold. While iPad sales were a little lighter than expected, the overall results sent the stock up 7 percent, recouping some losses from the past two weeks that had stemmed from concerns about weakening sales growth for iPhones. Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones - which accounts for about half its revenue - in the March quarter, outpacing the 30 million...

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Facebook reveals revenue, profit slide ahead of IPO

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc reported its first quarter-to-quarter revenue slide in at least two years, a sign that the social network's sizzling growth may be cooling as it prepares to go public in the biggest ever Internet IPO. The company blamed the first-quarter decline, which surprised some on Wall Street, on seasonal advertising trends. "It was a faster slowdown than we would have guessed," said Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group. "No matter how you slice it, for a company that is perceived as growing so rapidly,...

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Taiwan's HTC sees Q2 revenue up 55 percent from Q1

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp said on Tuesday it sees a 55 percent jump in revenue in the second quarter from the previous three months, matching forecasts, while margins will also improve. The company said in a statement that it expects its second-quarter revenue to be T$105 billion ($3.56 billion) compared to T$67.79 billion in the first quarter. HTC is expected to earn T$101.46 billion in revenue in the second quarter, according to 21 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. HTC also said it expects a gross...

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How WWII codes on Twitter thwarted French vote law

Twitter users turned Sunday's French presidential election into a battle between a green Hungarian wine and a red Dutch cheese in a bid to get round tough laws banning result predictions. The #RadioLondres hashtag was the top France trend on Twitter during the first-round presidential vote, in homage to World War II codes broadcast to Resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France from the BBC in London. But French citizens have written a new codebook in a subversive bid to get round laws that mean anyone announcing vote predictions before polls...

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China's ZTE to sell 100 million smartphones a year by 2015

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's ZTE Corp, which launched its first basic mobile phone in Africa little more than 10 years ago, said it could be shipping 100 million smartphones a year by 2015, as it looks up-market to reverse a decline in its handset margins. ZTE, which sold 15 million smartphones last year and could sell up to 50 million this year, also said it would launch its first two phone-cum-tablet 'phablets' this year, hoping to branch out from China's fiercely competitive mobile mass market. ZTE, the world's No.4 handset producer and fifth-ranked...

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Motorola CEO pay package rose to $47 million in 2011

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sanjay Jha, the chief executive to Motorola Mobility, was awarded a total compensation package of about $47 million in 2011, almost four times his 2010 pay, according to a regulatory filing. The cellphone maker, which agreed to be bought by Google Inc for $12.5 billion, said on Friday that the rise was due to the successful splitting of Motorola into two companies last year to form Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Jha's pay package, including option awards, increased from about $13 million in 2010, the company said...

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Google+ trends: 'Dark Shadows' star Jonathan Frid dies, Bob Marley doc on Facebook

Google+ users are mourning the death of Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins in the original Dark Shadows TV series. Frid, who was 87 at the time of his death, died just weeks before the release of Tim Burton’s quirky Dark Shadows remake. Despite the sad news G+’ers are mostly talking about Tim Burton’s version of the vampire story, saying that with “Tim Burton and Johnny Depp..it's gonna be great.” The Bob Marley documentary Marley is the first to be simultaneously launched in theaters around the globe, for rent on Facebook...

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Microsoft may be working on a two-sided smartphone display system

The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently published details on a Microsoft patent relating to a two-sided smart device display system for phones and tablets, PatentBolt reported on Friday. The invention features an integrated second low-power, possibly E Ink, display on the back side of a smartphone or tablet that would contain certain types of information. The secondary display could provide vendors with an opportunity to move standard items like a clock off of the main display to free up space, or it could display a variety of...

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Apple in settlement talks with Proview over iPad trademark dispute

Apple and Proview have initiated talks in an attempt to resolve an ongoing legal dispute over the iPad trademark, IDG News Services reported on Friday. Earlier this week, a Chinese high court recommended the two companies find a way to mediate the ongoing dispute. The mediation talks were voluntary, however both companies agreed to meet. “I think there is some hope the talks will lead to a resolution,” Zhao Zhanling, a legal expert on China’s information technology law, said, adding that if the negotiations were to fail, the higher court will...

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Samsung asserts eight more patents against Apple in California

Despite Samsung and Apple’s chief executives scheduled settlement talks, the Korean manufacturer has asserted eight additional patents against the Cupertino-based company. Two of the patents are part of the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licenses (FRAND) because they are essential to ETSI standards, according to FOSS Patents. Five of the patents, including the two FRAND patents, were originally applied for and granted to Samsung, while three others were acquired from different owners. The two battling companies have been in a bitter...

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Developer earns over $1,000 per day with a Windows Phone game

While Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform may not be as big as Apple and Google’s offerings, it is still possible for app developers to find success on the emerging operating system. A year ago, FourBros Studio launched a free game called Taptitude on the Windows Phone Marketplace. The game, as of today, has earned the company over $100,000 in revenue and boasts more than 300,000 users, Business Insider reported on Thursday. Interestingly enough, the company’s revenue has spiked since the launch of Nokia’s Windows Phones. FourBros Studio uses...

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Nokia under pressure to show turnaround plan

..HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia's Chief Executive Stephen Elop will be under pressure on Thursday to convince investors the Finnish mobile phone company is still capable of a turnaround, after last week warning markets it expects to post losses for the first six months of 2012. Nokia is due to announce its full, first-quarter report at around 1000 GMT, and hold a conference call with investors at 1200 GMT. Since the company already warned on April 11 that its phone business would post losses in the first two quarters of this year and quarterly...

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Microsoft announces Halo 4, coming this November

Microsoft on Wednesday announced the return of Master Chief and the Halo franchise with the release of “Halo 4″ on November 6th. The franchise was originally imagined as a trilogy, with the game’s third installment becoming the biggest consumer product launch of all time when it was released in 2007. Many questions were left unanswered, however, and fans of the series wanted more. The game is set four years after the events of Halo 3, as Master Chief returns to confront his destiny and face an ancient evil that threatens to destroy the entire...

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Intel 1Q earnings fall 13 percent, revenue steady

NEW YORK (AP) — First-quarter earnings at Intel Corp. fell 13 percent as spending on research and marketing rose while revenue was flat, the world's largest chipmaker said Tuesday. The results beat analyst expectations, but failed to sustain Intel's stock, which hit a seven-year high of $28.78 in regular trading. In extended trading, after the release of the results, the shares fell 68 cents, or 2.4 percent from the close to $27.79. Intel's first-quarter net income was $2.74 billion, or 53 cents per share, down from $3.16 billion, or 56 cents...

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The Wall Street heretic who called Apple's swoon

NEW YORK (AP) — He calls himself an "Apple fanboy," owns four iPads and two iPhones, follows the company obsessively and predicts it will keep turning blockbuster profits. But whether you should own the stock is another matter. He says it's just not worth it. No one is sure why Apple's stock finally stopped rising last week, but you might point a finger at Walter Piecyk, a veteran analyst who apparently has uncanny timing when it comes to issuing critical reports on hot companies. After Piecyk published a bold attack on Apple last week, the...

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Apple iPad arriving in SKorea, 11 more countries

Apple said Monday it would start marketing its new iPad on Friday in South Korea and 11 other countries, and the hot-selling tablet would be available in more than 50 countries by the end of the month. The April 20 launch of the third-generation iPad will be in South Korea, Brunei, Croatia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Malaysia, Panama, St Maarten, Uruguay and Venezuela. By April 27, the new tablet will be available in Colombia, Estonia, India, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, South Africa and Thailand. Apple launched...

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Google’s Sergey Brin: Apple and Facebook pose huge threat to Internet freedom

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said during an interview published on Sunday that Apple and Facebook pose serious threats to Internet freedom because of their closed approaches to software. While speaking with The Guardian, Brin said there are ”very powerful forces that have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried than I have been in the past. It’s scary.” The executive pointed to the “walled-garden” philosophy that sees companies like Apple and Facebook maintain tight control over third-party software...

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Virus found in fake Android version of 'Angry Birds: Space'

Android users beware. Download the wrong version of your favorite pig-killing game and the birds won't be the only ones who are angry. "Angry Birds: Space," the latest installment of the insanely popular mobile game, is being used to mask some fairly nasty malware, according to security experts and Rovio, the maker of "Angry Birds." Graham Cluley, an analyst with Web security firm Sophos, wrote on the company's blog Thursday that they had discovered fake versions of the game on unofficial app stores. The fake games contain a "Trojan horse" virus. A...

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