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BlackBerry on Friday announced that it would introduce an Android smartphone later this year. The announcement came during the company's Q2 earnings call. The device will be known as the "Priv" and will be built around user privacy, said CEO John Chen.

Samsung last week unveiled a consumer version of a virtual reality headset adapter that converts Samsung smartphones into head-mounted displays. The move represents a first strike -- ready or not -- as top tech industry players begin to push virtual reality hardware into consumer markets....

One of the ironies of my technical career is that when I first went to work for a tech company, I specifically wanted to work for a firm that was breaking the mold -- not representative of it. So, in my initial interview, I was concerned that IBM was going to buy the firm because it was the mold at that time. I was promised it wasn't, and that the...

Welcome, friends, to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that wraps up its belongings in a burlap sack and trots along the path to the latest and greatest in gadget announcements, ...

Apple on Wednesday released the first update to its new iOS 9 operating system to clean up some bugs in the original version of the software Bugs addressed in the update, iOS 9.0.1, include a system freeze on the slide to update screen, alarms and timers that would fail to go off, and frame distortion in paused videos. One bug Apple didn't address ...

The Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday revealed that the hackers who penetrated its records system stole 5.6 million fingerprints of federal employees -- five times the 1.1 million originally reported The cyberattack, which came to light this spring, compromised the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information of 21.5 million pe...

There's a rough road ahead for consumers strapped into Volkswagen and Audi diesel cars, the ones revealed last week to have been kitted out with software to fool emissions testing About half a million of the suspect cars likely will be recalled in the U.S. alone, though there are about 11 million of the questionable vehicles on the road around the ...

LibreOffice 5.0, The Document Foundation's latest open source office suite, deserves to top the list of contenders for best performance in this category.The Document Foundation last month released LibreOffice 5.0 for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It is the 10th major release since the launch of the project, and the first in the third development cy...

Google on Tuesday announced new block and unsubscribe features for Gmail that will make it easier for users to manage their in-boxes and harder for marketers to creep out of the spam folder "Sometimes you get mail from someone who's really disruptive," said Sri Harsha Somanchi, product manager at Google. When that happens, "you should be able to sa...

That trip down memory lane may never be the same. Those who feel their Facebook Timeline leaves out any important moments in their lives can call up Google Maps' Timeline to fill in the blanks. With tech tools like these, who needs enemies?...

Efforts to increase Internet access worldwide are falling short of targeted goals, according to a United Nations Broadband Commissionreport released earlier this week More than half the world's population is still offline, according to the report, and growth in the number of people with access to the Internet is slowing.

The idea of intelligent personal assistants or voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Now seems very cool -- talking to a computer and having it talk back. It should be like talking to the computer on Star Trek's starship Enterprise. If the technology worked well, these digital assistants could be game-changing. Unfortunately, it doesn't -- not yet, anyway...

Groupon on Tuesday announced plans to cut 1,100 jobs and close operations in seven countries and said it has filed a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to that effect. The biggest cuts will hit its customer service and international deals centers, as the company regroups to leverage new efficiencies.

Notices for the new iPhones have started appearing, and Apple's hardware once again is being bathed in critical acclaim, with just a few cries of discontent here and there The new capabilities in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus may appear underwhelming to some observers, but not to Re/code's Walt Mossberg.

The Apple car rumor gained some legs this week with a Wall Street Journal report that brings some interesting new insight Though a bit shy on verifiable details -- it cites unnamed people familiar with Apple's plans and vaguely refers to people inside Apple -- the report suggests the company will triple its current 600-person team to 1,800 people a...

The U.S. government spends millions of dollars on information technology systems designed to prevent cybersecurity attacks, but the attacks still occur. Government agencies are hopeful that the learning curve will improve dramatically, and breaches will be reduced In the meantime, what happens to people affected by a breach after an attack succeeds...

Russia has been a prime suspect in recent cyberattacks launched against U.S. government targets. However, Russia has been poked with the other end of the hacker stick For more than two months, hacker attacks originating in China have bedeviled Russia's military and telecom sectors, researchers at Proofpoint revealed last week....

Researchers at XeroxPARC have developed a self-destructing mechanism for microchips embedded on a hardened glass surface The glass can self-destruct upon command and could be used to secure personal data such as health and banking records. It also can be used to destroy encryption keys stored on memory chips in standard consumer, enterprise and gov...

The Internet of Things is poised to soar in the enterprise, a new survey from IDC indicates, with the planning stage rapidly shifting to deployment. Nearly 73 percent of about 2,500 respondents to the firm's IoT Decision Maker Survey said they already had deployed IoT solutions or would do so within the next year, the firm reported Tuesday....

GameStop has signaled resistance to the trend of bundling game consoles with digital downloads rather than physical copies of games. The company ships more than half of all PlayStation 4 and Xbox One software....