This widely anticipated update for Symbian brings a load of new features. Instead of three home screens, you now will have six. This will let you personalise even more and keep all of your favourite things a press away.

The improved Nokia Belle interface also adds HD video recording capabilities at 30 frames per second, a new notification bar which lets you see if you have any missed calls, messages emails or reminders etc, as well as the ability to turn on and off processes like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

It is with a heavy heart (and thumbs) that we must announce this: KAYAK Mobile is dropping active support and maintenance for our BlackBerry application. We are sincerely sorry to BlackBerry users, but we have regrettably come to this practical decision.

When we started KAYAK in 2004, we issued BlackBerries to the entire engineering team so we could communicate instantly 24/7. Today we've all switched, and it seems our users are doing the same. Our audience of BlackBerry users has been declining precipitously, and we can't justify the cost any longer.

RIM was a smartphone pioneer and we thank them for what they've done, and wish them renewed success. BlackBerry was (and is) an amazing messaging platform. But it's not working out to be a great channel for consumer mobile applications, which is what leads us to this sad post.

I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company's database has Mark Zuckerberg's cell phone number, Larry Ellison's home phone number and Bill Gates' cell phone number. This data is not meant to be public, and people have an expectation of privacy with respect to their contacts.

So why do carriers insist on selling the iPhone? Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all declined to comment directly on that question for this article, but the companies have said in the past that having the iPhone is a major selling point for their brands.

In an interview with CNNMoney in October, just after Sprint announced it would begin selling the iPhone, Sprint CEO Hesse said the No. 1 reason why customers had left Sprint prior to October was because it had no iPhone.

"The parties acknowledge that FB desires to enable Zynga to build the Zynga Platform on top of the Facebook Platform, and the parties desire to, amongst other goals set forth herein, work together to increase the number of users of each party’s products and services.

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform).

The first royalty payments from iMatch are in, and they got me excited – the total amount is over $10,000 for the first two months.

Online coupon distributor Groupon (GRPN), in its first report since going public, this afternoon reported Q4 revenue ahead of analysts’ expectations but reported a surprise net loss instead of the expected profit.

We care deeply about your privacy and about creating a trusted place for you to share life with your close friends and family. As we continue to expand and grow we will make some mistakes along the way. We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you, our users, first.

First of all, yes, Chrome for Android is here. Second, it’s only compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich which is currently on — wait for it — 1% of Android devices. But in an attempt to add some silver-lining to the 1% joke, I will say that Chrome for Android is of a much higher class than the previous Android browser, the aptly-named and horribly icon’d: Browser.

Developer Arun Thampi was doing a bit of hacking around with Path 2, trying to get a version of it running on OS X as an experiment, when he discovered that the app actually uploads your entire address book when it is launched. This obviously raised concerns about what the app is doing with that information and, in fact, why it needs it at all.

"Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone," the Houston, Texas-based firm told employees in an internal newsletter this month.

On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, "Pro" option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry.

No, this isn't payback, or about a grudge. This is just word from someone who's seen what this industry is capable of doing. Good, and Bad. No, I was not under contract, I was full time, offered stock (common shares, not that options bullcrap). I sympathized with contractors on how they were treated, most of the time. No, I was not some IT mangler. I worked for one of their "game studios", basically the front lines where content made it to the masses.

ZTE is now targeting 80 Million handset volume in 2012 – and 100% smartphone volume growth. ZTE Blade became the second-best selling W-CDMA phone in China last summer and is now cruising towards 10 million units sold globally. The ZTE Skate is off to an even faster start. And ZTE is actually behind Huawei in China – these two combined are likely to hit 25% share of China’s handset market by summer. By elbowing out old champs like Motorola and LG in China, Huawei and ZTE are building production scale they can leverage to undercut rivals even more aggressively in the rest of the Asia.

It would not be surprising if Google opts to wind down Motorola’s handset operations sometime over the next two years and Sony bails out entirely.

Apple is already working on what is, at least judging from acquisitions, a technically superior version of Maps built specifically for iOS devices. But you can’t build a search engine in a day, or even in a couple of years. So the only viable option is to change the default iPhone search engine from Google to Bing.

So I decided to take Bing for a spin, changing it to my default search engine for a month or two. What I found was that it actually could be a very solid alternative to Google for a large portion of iPhone users, and that it might even be a better fit for the majority of those than Google is.

Some US officials this year are expected to get smartphones capable of handling classified government documents over cellular networks, according to people involved in the project.

The phones will run a modified version of Google's Android software, which is being developed as part of an initiative that spans multiple federal agencies and government contractors, these people said.

Symantec has backtracked from assertions last week that 13 Android apps distributed by Google's Android Market were malicious, and now says that the code in question comes from an aggressive ad network that provides revenue to the smartphone programs.

how exactly does Facebook’s ad business work? We still don’t know a lot about that part.
The S-1 mentions “advertising” 123 times, and “advertisers” another 117 times. But when it comes to describing how the company actually sells advertising, it is vague.
We know that some of Facebook’s ads are sold via an automated self-serve system, and some are sold via sales teams working in 30 offices around the world. And we know that Facebook uses an auction system to price some of its inventory, and that it lets advertisers target users to some degree, based on their demographics and interests.
But Facebook doesn’t break any of that out in its filing. It simply has one big bucket labeled “advertising.” There’s no discussion of click-through rates, or the size of the average ad buy, or what percentage of ad buys come from repeat customers, or how “lumpy” its sales are.

The issue would require the user to install an application that had been specifically designed to harvest details or was uploaded to the Android Market with the specific aim of collecting information. The impact may have been small in the fact that such an app will not see the reach as a more popular app but the security risk does exist.

If you own one of the affected handsets, you may have already received the fix. If you do not, keep checking the HTC Support site for more information.

Many markets only have room for two leading players - and in the technology platform world, many have only one. On the margins the niche players are little islands. No matter how impressive WP is, if the needle doesn't move, then it too becomes a marginal player. Ecosystems can perish more rapidly than they arise. If Windows Phone is to avoid the same fate as WebOS then the dynamic has to change.

But what might this be?

ChangeWave asked 254 new Kindle Fire owners a series of questions regarding their overall satisfaction and key likes and dislikes, to gauge their reaction to the new tablet device.

Customer Satisfaction. When asked how satisfied they are with their new tablet device, better than one-in-two Kindle Fire owners (54%) say they are Very Satisfied. Another 38% say they are Somewhat Satisfied.

In previous ChangeWave surveys we've found that the percentage of tablet owners who say they are Very Satisfied with a particular device is highly predictive of future demand for that device. So how does the Amazon tablet rating match up against other tablet devices?

While the 54% Very Satisfied rating for the Kindle Fire is considerably below the 74% rating of the industry leading Apple iPad*, it is higher than the 49% average rating for all of the other tablet devices combined.

"Kinect hacks have been used for many a grand feat, from a tool that helps the blind navigate more easily to hands-free questing in World of Warcraft and virtual cat brushing.

The Mirracle system projects a CT image onto the user's reflection to give the illusion of seeing inside one's own body.

So why not integrate the powers of Microsoft Kinect with a mirror to teach such subjects as basic anatomy?

I finally had someone explain to me why Android will gain huge marketshare this year in the large-screen tablet wars (aka where iPad is dominant). It took USA’s #1 TV manufacturer, Vizio, to do it. Why didn’t Google have them on stage to show this off a few weeks back at Google IO?

Videographers were promised from the introduction of FCP X that in the near future we would once again be able to edit a multi-camera project, and Apple has delivered. With up to 64 active camera angles available, FCP X may actually shake the industry to its core with that level of multicam facility in the basic editing package. This means that you can actively edit more cameras than I have ever heard of being used for any multicam project, with the possible exception of the Super Bowl or, perhaps the bullet-time for The Matrix.

Last year, Facebook was named as a defendant in 22 lawsuits accusing it of patent infringement, double the number from 2010, according to a Reuters analysis of court documents on legal database Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters unit.

Facebook is expected to file to raise US$5bn in a preliminary IPO prospectus on Wednesday morning, which while less than anticipated could be increased to ultimate investor demand, according to sources close to the deal.

This collection of tips and tricks for Android tablets range from settings to make them run better, to special features that can be unlocked by those who know about them. They work on any tablet running Honeycomb, which is most of them, and many should work on Ice Cream Sandwich, too.

Social sound sharing startup Soundcloud is switching to HTML5 for its default widget, essentially demoting its Flash widget to become a fallback solution. Soundcloud only introduced its HTML5 widget some three months ago, but a spokesperson told me today that it’s been a hit with users: “People are eight times as likely to share the sounds after playing them (with the) HTML5 widget as compared to the Flash version,” the spokesperson wrote via email.

What’s interesting, though, isn’t that some developers plagiarized some stuff from some other developers. What’s interesting is the overwhelmingly hostile response to the theft from the wider tech community.

Do a quick search on Twitter for Curebit and behold at the self-righteous rage at the original crime and the extremely grudging acceptance of the inevitable apology. The last time we saw this kind of outpouring of rage amongst tech people was when — uh — the government tried to clamp down on copyright theft.

The amazing thing here is that AT&T actually employs bureaucrats who drive the product development of their suppliers. When AT&T wants to sell a new "differentiated" phone - that is, one with another stupid gimmick - they formally request that it be built by one of their manufacturers. Then, astonishingly, the phone makers actually comply with these ridiculous requests, and they build the phones. When you think about the implications of this process, you realize that AT&T's product managers are basically acting as phone designers by proxy.

For many handset vendors, the world has turned upside down. Nokia‘s $40 feature phones are vastly more profitable than Sony Ericsson‘s $200 Android models. This is not how the smartphone revolution was supposed to turn out.

The latest handset industry reports reveal a market still characterized by exceptional smartphone growth – and deep trouble for most vendors. Globally, smartphone volumes mushroomed by more than 50% YoY in 4Q11. Feature phone sales continued a gentle decline. But in 2012, volumes are still likely to be close to the billion unit mark. Most vendors fled this billion unit market 1-3 years ago, leaving it essentially to Nokia and a cluster of Asian white label firms.

if you really want your head to spin, think about this: according to a friend in retailing, the average Facebook woman updates her relationship status to “Engaged” within two hours of the guy actually proposing…so Facebook sells that relationship status information to retailers who have bridal registries.

Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

For some context, Apple sold 72m iPhones in its fiscal 2011, a staggering number that required all the muscle of the world's most valuable technology company, as well as a network of Asian factories pumping out the devices at a breakneck pace. The sales came from more than 100 countries.

Now Chinese consumers may want to buy nearly that many iPhones all by themselves.

That may well happen, says Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, who in a note to investors guessed that Apple may soon be selling 57m iPhones annually in China, capturing 60% of the projected market for smartphone buyers there. That would be a sixfold increase from the 10m iPhones Chinese consumers bought in 2011.

“In short, Pepper Hamilton is accusing its own client of infringement,” Mountain View, California-based Google said in the filing. “Pepper Hamilton should not be allowed to continue alleging infringement against the products and interests of its current client.”

Google, which has used Pepper Hamilton to help it apply for patents related to its Android mobile operating system, accused the law firm of disloyalty and said confidential information it shared creates conflicts of interest in the Digitude case. With so much patent litigation among technology companies there is bound to be some overlap among lawyers, said Scott Daniels, a partner with Westerman Hattori Daniels in Washington.

“Conflicts are hard on law firms,” Daniels said in an interview. “You don’t want to anger your clients.”

In more than a dozen countries Google already <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/helping-you-find-emergency-information.html">does something similar</a> for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. It may seem paternalistic, but this is the kind of nonintrusive paternalism that might be saving lives without interfering with the search results.

The capital of Wisconsin is buying 600 iPads this spring and plans to buy another 800 this fall, all paid for using funds from the state's settlement with Microsoft related to consumer lawsuits claiming the company overcharged customers for its software.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal and others are working together on a standard that can be used across the Internet for blocking phishing e-mails.

The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere. The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same.

“He had his first exit when he was 9.”

<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/19/us-government-megaupload-piracy-indictment">The government of New Zealand arrested the founders of Megaupload to send them to the US for trial</a>. They are accused of commercial copyright infringement. And many of their personal goods were seized, for no obvious reason. Here is what the US says about them.

I do not advocate in general legalizing commercial use of music without permission. (I think all works meant for practical uses must be free, but that does not apply to music, since music is meant for appreciation, not for practical use.) So if Megaupload intended to do that, I won't criticize stopping it.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has not been shy on the emailing as of late, has sent out a lengthy letter to all of his employees that is a direct response to these recent reports of factory worker mistreatment. Cook’s opening:

"As a company and as individuals, we are defined by our values. Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly. We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain…"

A lot has been said about our new privacy policy. Some have praised us for making our privacy policy easier to understand. Others have asked questions, including members of Congress, and that’s understandable too. We look forward to answering those questions, and clearing up some of the misconceptions about our privacy policies that first appeared in the Washington Post.

So, here’s the real story:

When the Windows 8 beta arrives at the end of February, it will have some widely requested features for killing Metro apps without going to the Task Manager, for navigating using a mouse rather than touch and for doing more with gestures.

You'll also be able to change that overpowering green background. But Windows 8 director of communications Chris Flores points out to TechRadar that you wouldn't want a photograph as the background of the Metro-style Start screen.

a source tells us that CEO Larry Page, who seems to be hell-bent on competing with Mark Zuckerberg whether it’s the right thing for Google or not, had this to say to employees at a Friday staff event after the Search Plus Your World launch: “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.”

The quasi-ultimatum caught our source by surprise and underscores just how important this new direction is for Page. It also helps explain why Google’s PR was so silent since evidence of the Don’t Be Evil toolbar came out yesterday. If this is the future of the company and it flies in the face of Google’s stated values, what can they say?

Do your maps look like everyone else’s? Are you paying high fees just to include maps on your website?

Switch to OpenStreetMap and discover how you can build beautiful maps from the world’s best map data. We give you the data for free; you can make any map you like with it. Or benefit from the expertise of those already using OpenStreetMap. Host it on your hardware, or elsewhere. You have control. switch2osm.org explains how to make the switch – from first principles to technical how-tos.

Does Microsoft have something against the city of Las Vegas? Late last year, Microsoft announced that 2012 would be its last year keynoting the Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place in Sin City every January.

Now, it's also pulling the plug on MIX, an annual conference for developers that Microsoft has held in Vegas for the last six years. The change probably has nothing to do with the location, and more to do with Microsoft's shifting priorities.

MIX was originally focused on Microsoft's Web technologies, particularly Silverlight and Internet Explorer.

Norwegian public sector organisations will be banned from using Google Apps after the Norwegian data protection authorities ruled that the service could put citizens’ personal data at risk.

The data protection authority said Google Apps did not comply with Norwegian privacy laws because there was insufficient information about where data was being kept. The decision came from a test case in Narvik, where the local council had chosen to use Google Apps for their email.

The Norwegian ban comes just as things were going so well for Google Apps in Europe, with the company winning its largest ever contract with BBVA, the Spanish bank.

What ICS doesn't magically change is the selection and quality of the tablet apps available in the Android Market. I have consistently pointed out the lack of tablet-optimized apps in my Honeycomb tablet reviews, and it looks like it will be a complaint that persists. While there have been some notable additions and there are some decent tablet-optimized apps (News360, Plume, and TapTu come to mind), others like Facebook and Twitter haven't been redesigned to take advantage of the higher resolution screen, making the experience flat-out disappointing.

The firm did not reveal exactly where in the business the jobs would go, and said the overseas cuts would be made “in accordance with the review of manufacturing operation”. However, its <a href="http://www.nec.co.jp/ir/en/pdf/library/120126/120126_01.pdf">financial forecast document</a> (PDF) reveals some clues.

It shows a Mobile Terminal Business in dire straits, with smartphone shipments revised down for the year from 6.5 million to 5 million units and delays to the expansion of its overseas business. The success of “foreign vendors' increasing market share in Japan” was also noted, no doubt a reference to the huge impact the iPhone has made in the land of the rising sun.

Most people (and reviewers) seem to believe that the 10.1in screens (measured diagonally) on the Android Tablets are larger than the 9.7in iPad screen – but they are actually 5% smaller than the iPad in terms of the image area of the screen, which is what really counts. This is due to both Aspect Ratio geometry (the screen area decreases as the Aspect Ratio increases) and the Android system bar, which reduces the image area.

Earlier this week Twitter put out a statement saying that they thought this new search integration was “bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

I disagree. Sure, it may be be bad for *Twitter*, but to say it’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users is wrong.

The company’s u-turn follows disappointing global results earlier this month when first quarter net profit fell 26% to $365m, its first quarterly decline in earnings for two years as it faced competition from Apple and Samsung’s Galaxy range.

HTC UK chief Phil Roberson (pictured) told Mobile the manufacturer will return to a strategy of launching a limited number of high-spec devices this year, with a focus on second quarter releases. He said: ‘We have to get back to focusing on what made us great – amazing hardware and a great customer experience. We ended 2011 with far more products than we started out with. We tried to do too much."

Because of their long lines on release days, rabid fan base and huge stacks of cash, Apple has the largest target on it’s chest for this type of expose. But Foxconn doesn’t exist solely to produce electronics for Apple. All of the largest Android OEM’s also contract Foxconn to produce their devices in factories in China, Brazil, Mexico, Poland and the Czech Republic.

HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola, ASUS, Acer, Lenovo and others contract Foxconn to manufacture products for them in the same complex where iPhones are made. Their devices are made by the same over worked, underpaid, underage workers, yet none are mentioned in the Business Insider article. None. Not one. Not even Samsung, the sometimes largest smartphone vendor in the world. Just Apple.

ComScore says there were 18.2 billion explicit core searches in the U.S. in December. Some quick math indicates, then, that DuckDuckGo’s query volume is about 0.00004 of overall search activity — or about one in every 25,000 searches.

So again, props to DuckDuckGo on the new records and for even showing query data to the public at all. (Wouldn’t it be great if Google and Bing did the same?) But wow … still such a long, long way to go.

"This is the right device for student learning," said Bryan Weinert, technology coordinator for the Leyden Community High School District in Illinois. "We plan to deploy 3,500 to students next year. Every single student will be issued a Chromebook they can use at school and at home."

The Chromebooks will replace Netbooks, he said. "We were looking for a device that can be invisible. We want teachers to focus on instruction," not technical support, waiting for laptops to boot, or making sure they're charged, he said.