Articles by Katherine Noyes

With the upcoming release of Apple's iPhone, smartphones are becoming one of the most hyped categories of consumer technology today. The combination of telephone technology with e-mail, Internet access and multimedia -- among other features -- serves many consumer needs in one tidy, sleek little packet "Top-end devices today are like mini-laptops ...

At the request of the Software Freedom Law Center, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced Thursday that it will re-examine a patent held by e-learning software company Blackboard The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), an open source software group, made its request in November on behalf of three open source educational software programs. I...

In a move sure to bring joy to the hearts of many consumers, Microsoft yesterday announced that it is extending the availability of support for users of Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition by an additional five years over what it had previously announced Since the unveiling of Windows Vista, the latest iteration of the compa...

In the ever-intensifying race to deliver the most memory in the tiniest chip, SanDisk on Tuesday rolled out its 8-gigabit, 56 nanometer (nm) NAND flash technology and promised to deliver a 16-gigabit version in the second quarter Both versions of the 56 nm chip use multilevel cell (MLC) technology to pack more capacity into a smaller space than has...

Google said Monday it will be expanding tests of its video advertising system by delivering music video clips from Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment along with advertising over its AdSense online advertising service As part of a trial during the next four weeks, Web sites that use AdSense will be able to select a playlist of songs...

Google is working on a platform to allow users to download the entire content of books in a format that they could read on their computers or maybe even mobile devices, according to a report in this week's Sunday Times Google officials confirm that the company is continuing to work on online access, but assert that they have not announced anything ...

Google plans to build a new, US$600 million datacenter in North Carolina designed to help support its online operations, the company announced Friday The site, to be located in the city of Lenoir, is expected to create about 210 jobs over time. North Carolina awarded Google a 12-year job development investment grant with incentives of about $4.8 mi...

News Corp.'s popular social networking site MySpace.com will soon offer parents a glimpse of what their teenagers are doing online The site, which is one of a group of social networking sites used regularly by more than half of American teens, has recently come under fire for inadequate security controls....

Microsoft on Wednesday announced plans to make Vista, the newest version of its Windows operating system, available to consumers online when the product is officially rolled out at the end of this month The launch of the consumer version of Vista, which has been postponed several times, is now scheduled for Jan. 30. The operating system will be ava...

Oracle on Tuesday released a new Critical Patch Update addressing 51 security flaws across a variety of its products. The release was Oracle's ninth such quarterly update, and was the first to be preannounced. The release was initially announced last Thursday Included among the patches are security fixes for Oracle Database Server, Oracle Applicat...

Research In Motion and T-Mobile on Monday rolled out a new, "pearl white" version of the popular BlackBerry Pearl smartphone Previously available only in "piano black" from T-Mobile and Cingular, the white version is available exclusively from T-Mobile. Discounted pricing is US$149 with a two-year contract....

Just five months after it issued a massive recall of notebook computers because of defective batteries, Dell on Friday became the target of yet more legal problems involving its notebook equipment A group of Canadian consumers is suing Dell over what they allege are faulty Inspiron notebook machines -- and this time, they say, Dell knew about the p...