Mobile

The first hands-on reviews of Amazon's debut tablet device, the Kindle Fire , are beginning to appear. Their general theme is that the price is great, but the device itself could use some improvement. The Fire costs $199, approximately 60 per cent ... lower than Apple's iPad, and right on the consumer electronics price point at which mass market purchasers become more willing to try out new technology. Kindle Fire: Silky Smooth But Not Ultra Fast Most of the reviews claim that Amazon's highly promoted web browser for the Kindle Fire, Silk, is too slow. The browser actually displays web pages ... (view more)

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's fall from grace continued on Thursday as the Canadian company's stock value continued to plummet. Now, analysts wonder if the firm, which helped pioneer the smartphone device, will be able to recover. Times have ... been tough of late for Research in Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Canada-based firm whose BlackBerry handheld device was once the darling of the smartphone market. Besides a major outage in early October that affected users around the world, the company has seen BlackBerry sales slip steadily in recent years. Beyond that, RIM also flubbed in its ... (view more)

A couple weeks ago embattled BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) suffered a massive service outage that affected an estimated 10 million users around the world. The service remained down for up to 5 days. (Source: theinquirer.net ) At first, ... the problem seemed to spare North American users, with only Europeans, South Americans, Africans, and residents of the Middle East reporting problems, but soon after Canadian and American BlackBerry owners were complaining that calls were being dropped and text messaging a complete and total mess. Now, frustrated and angry BlackBerry users are ... (view more)

Microsoft has recently released the first major overhaul of its Windows Phone operating system and it's getting some generally good reviews. The revised system is powering a range of devices, including the first significant results of the ... Nokia-Microsoft partnership. Windows Phone 7, released late last year, was a much-delayed revamp of what had previously been Windows Mobile. Although the system was generally praised, it appeared to come far too late to overcome a significant loss of market share to systems such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Sales of the Windows Phone 7 handsets thus ... (view more)

The number of wireless devices in use in the United States now outnumbers the nation's human population. The figures include tablet devices but the numbers are mainly driven by cellphones. If anything, the numbers are an understatement as they are ... based on subscriptions to wireless services. That means people who have devices such as the iPad but only use them via a WiFi connection aren't considered. On the other hand, the numbers do include people who have 3G data subscriptions for portable computers. According to CTIA, the wireless industry's trade body, there were 327.6 million wireless ... (view more)

A Florida woman got the shock of a lifetime this week when she opened her cellphone bill only to find the total roughly equal to the price of a slick Ferrari sports car. Even more surprising, the bill wasn't a mistake on the part of T-Mobile, ... meaning the woman was on the hook for the full charge. Celina Aarons, a resident of southern Florida, was recently charged $201,000 for a single month of charges to a cellphone registered in her name. Aarons was stunned to find that charge because she hadn't made any phone calls over seas, and immediately contacted her cellphone provider. Phone Bill ... (view more)

Just when it seemed things couldn't get much worse for BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM), the company has been slammed by a massive service outage that has left smartphone users around the world unable to make calls or send text messages. ... Reports suggest BlackBerry users in Europe, the Mid East, South America and Africa have been the hardest-hit by the recent outage. It's estimated that about 10 million Research in Motion customers are affected by the outage, which started early Monday morning, Eastern Standard Time. The problem has prevented BlackBerry users from completing phone ... (view more)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs passed away last Wednesday at the age of 56. Although Jobs had been suffering on-and-off from pancreatic cancer for seven years, the news of his death sent most people -- techies or not -- into a head spin. Virtually every media ... outlet and Apple fan have taken considerable time to remember the popular businessman and innovator. (Source: mercurynews.com ) To get an idea of how important Steve Jobs was to the tech industry, you don't necessarily need to focus on all the nice things said about him by U.S. President Barack Obama or fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak. Just pay ... (view more)

A hardware manufacturer has revealed that applications designed for smartphones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system (OS) will work on PCs running the next edition of Windows. It's believed that this could encourage developers to ... turn their attention to the phone OS. At the moment, there are an estimated 30,000 applications available on smartphones running Windows Phone 7. That may sound a lot, but it's only around one-eighth of the number available on Android phones, and less than one-tenth of those available for Apple's portable devices. Chicken and Egg Situation This ... (view more)