Articles by Mike Pearson

Sony Ericsson has announced a mid-range addition to its Xperia smartphone series targeting European entertainment-hungry consumers looking for a small, stylish Android device The Experia X8 sits between the company's X10 and X10 Mini models; its 3-inch capacitive touchscreen has a pixel dimension of 320x480.

Microsoft used its annual TechEd Conference to pitch its forthcoming mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7, to business users The platform will feature the kind of tight integration with Office applications that only the manufacturer of those applications can provide, the company insisted, along with a package of features commonly sought by cons...

Motorola on Wednesday announced a new Android-based smartphone targeted squarely -- pun intended -- at the social networking crowd The square-shaped Flipout is built on the Texas Instruments OMAP 3410 low-cost 600 MHz processor with 512 MB of RAM, 150 MB of available internal storage, and an included 2 GB MicroSDHC card. The phone supports up to a ...

Leading what is likely to become a cavalcade of imitators, Asus debuted a tablet computer aimed squarely at the iPad market during the Computex computer conference The Asus Eee will sport 10- and 12-inch models running Core 2 Duo processors. The 12-inch version will run Windows 7 Home Premium, while the 10-inch version is based on Windows Embedded ...

Amid all the controversy over online privacy, one thing has been treated as an almost universal given: Young people don't care about privacy the way their cautious, conservative elders do As it turns out, the meme is kind of wrong....

Google said Tuesday that it plans to buy Global IP Solutions, a company that provides processing capabilities and other video and Voice over Internet Protocol services to companies such as Yahoo, AOL and WebEx The US$68 million deal, contingent on shareholder approval, represents a 142 percent premium over the closing price of GIPS stock the day be...

At least one U.S. Senator wants the FTC to investigate. Notable leaders in the tech sector have begun talking about dropping out. Millions belong to groups complaining about it. Now, European privacy advocates are on Facebook's case, arguing the company's latest round of privacy adjustments are not only wrong-headed, but may run afoul of European privacy laws...

Borders, the national bookselling chain, launched its plan to sell the Kobo e-book reader and open its own e-book store on an increasingly crowded market Monday, apparently pinning its hopes on a slim price to mark out its territory ...

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has released a sneak peek of its upcoming new operating system refresh and appears to be taking pains to suggest just how fresh and hip it is To the pounding beat of "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas, the brief video features three characters dancing -- two wearing business attire and the third dressed casua...

Saying they've grown increasingly impatient with online companies that pay too little heed to national privacy laws and expectations, data protection commissioners from 10 countries on Tuesday launched what they promised would be an ongoing effort to match worldwide enforcement with the growing global market in social network information "We've see...

Facebook may be preparing to roll out a "universal Like button" that Web site owners can place on their pages to share content with other members of the social networking site, according to reports in two media outlets Monday However, an even more significant rollout may still be in the offing, according to Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray, who...

Moving slowly and deliberately, a pair of white-gloved hands reach out, grasp a white cloth and carefully pull it back, revealing a manila envelope. The hands then deftly move to the envelope, pick it up and present it to onlookers The scene is from a NASA video, and the hands belong to a character known as "R2," or Robonaut 2 -- a startlingly huma...

With a name like "Incredible," you'd better be good Based on leaked documents published on Tuesday, phone enthusiasts are buzzing over prospects that what's rumored to be Verizon's next big phone will live up to its name and more....

Google is rolling out an update to users of its Docs service allowing them to do more real-time collaborating and making a variety of speed and service enhancements Elements of the update began rolling out Monday, with others scheduled to filter out to users over the next few days, according to Google....

Egged on by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, the Federal Trade Commission may be considering an effort to block Google's US$750 million purchase of mobile advertising firm AdMob The FTC is assembling a team of attorneys to handle a possible antitrust action against the acquisition an...

The expected spinoff of subscription music service Rhapsody from parent company RealNetworks has arrived, and it could be a good thing for both parent and child The formal decoupling, announced in February, was completed March 31 but announced in a regulatory filing released on Tuesday....

The Asus U30Jc isn't going to generate long lines at retailers. It won't touch off a best-ever/wouldn't touch it war a la that *other* recently released computing device What the US$899 machine does do, though, it seems to do pretty well, if initial reviews are to be trusted.

Spend a few minutes at Microsoft's Hohm Web site, enter a few details about your house, and it will spit out a series of recommendations about how best you can reduce your energy consumption, and maybe save some money in the process Next year, it will be able to help some car owners to manage the power consumption of their vehicles, as well....

It's been a couple of years since AMD had to delay shipments of its buggy quad-core Barcelona server chip to manufacturers, costing the company market share, stock value and reputation Now, the No. 2 chip vendor hopes to come roaring back with the world's first 8- and 12-core x86 processors and a host of new relationships with manufacturers....

Cablevision broadcast the first high-def 3-D television program in the U.S. Wednesday night, a hockey game from Madison Square Garden The broadcast was largely symbolic -- almost no one is watching TV in 3-D in their homes yet as television sets equipped to decode the signals are just beginning to move through production....