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Nokia will use the Linux MeeGo operating system in its flagship N-series platform in a bid to remain competitive against the iPhone and Android smartphones. However, the company will continue to use its Symbian operating system for its lower-end smartphones. The move might be seen as a bid to restor...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it has signed a patent agreement with HTC covering the phone maker's Android-based devices, and it's talking with other phone vendors as well about its "concerns" regarding Google's mobile operating platform. The deal with HTC provides broad coverage under Microso...

Word processing is perhaps one of the most essential uses for a computer on any platform. The Linux OS offers more obscure word processors than other OSes; however, few of these apps offer users the staying power of AbiWord. The closest competitor to AbiWord is OpenOffice Writer, and AbiWord, like m...

Some system utilities do a variety of things well. They come with tools to give users lots of solutions in one package. Other system apps like the Atol File Manager perform a dedicated function flawlessly without adding other specialties. Atol took a while to grow on me, but now this app is one of m...

As communication becomes more Web-centric, text editors become more essential writing tools. Blocks of text get tweaked with HTML codes to provide a more graphical appearance. So good text editors are those with many of the same features found in word processors, only without the added formatting an...

It may not seem obvious at first, but the tragic earthquake in Haiti, the historic election that put a Massachusetts Republican in the U.S. Senate and the 2010 Super Bowl all have something in common: the smartphone. During each event, billions of consumers around the globe were glued to their phone...

Google has rolled out a new version of its free Google Maps Navigation application that's compatible with smartphones running the Android 1.6 operating system, such as T-Mobile's myTouch 3G and its G1. When the app was introduced last month in beta, it could only be used by smartphones running Andro...

The Android army gained yet another recruit Monday with the release of Samsung's Galaxy Spica phone in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, or former Soviet republics. Equipped with an 800 MHz application processor and DivX support, the new device -- also known as the "I5700" -- report...

Does the mobile phone world really need yet another platform, open source or otherwise? South Korean-based electronics firm Samsung answered yes to that question on Tuesday when it announced the launch of Bada. Bada, the Korean word for "ocean," is a new open platform that Samsung hopes will become ...

There's a pieced-together monster shaking up the campus of Stanford University this fall, and it's named after the legendary, lumbering creature that Halloween nightmares are made of. Rather than parts of human corpses, however, this monster was cobbled together from a Texas Instruments system on a ...

Acer has announced details surrounding two hotly anticipated mobile devices running Google's Android mobile operating system: the Liquid A1 touchscreen smartphone, which Acer first said it was developing when it joined the Open Handset Alliance earlier this year; and the Aspire One netbook, which is...

The LiMo Foundation, a consortium dedicated to creating an open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices delivered a one- two- punch to the mobile industry Thursday. First, Morgan Gillis, executive director, announced that consortium members are "moving into full commer...

In the latest phase of its battle with Intel for the notebook and netbook markets, ARM has unveiled two new 2GHz capable Cortex-A9 dual core processor implementation. These give silicon manufacturers a way to develop high-performance, low-power Cortex-A9 processor-based devices, ARM said. However, i...

When Motorola announced its Android-powered Cliq late last week, it took what many view as a critical step toward regaining its former prominence in the mobile phone arena. "Motorola was the No. 1 handset maker in the 1990s -- they lost that position to Nokia and have been trying to recapture the ma...

Motorola's long-awaited Android phones are about to hit the market at last -- one will reportedly go to Verizon, the other to T-Mobile. None of the three companies will comment on the devices, but the blog "Android and Me" has posted what it says are tech specs on both devices. The Verizon device, c...

With Google targeting the netbook with both its Chrome and Android operating systems, which way should developers jump? Should they pick Chrome, the browser that will soon become an OS and is likely to face strong competition from Microsoft and Apple? Or should they go with Android, an OS that has s...

Microsoft made good Tuesday on a promise it made months ago to the open source community that it would not sue software developers who use its EMCA C# programming language and Common Language Infrastructure, or CLI. This announcement aims to calm growing fears that Microsoft might restrict open sour...

Nokia is denying rumors that it is about to unveil a smartphone running on Google's Android operating system. "There is no truth to this rumor whatsoever," spokesperson Joseph Gallo told LinuxInsider on Monday. "It is a well-known fact that Symbian is our platform of choice for smartphones." The Gua...

Palm will unveil its long-awaited Pre smartphone June 6, and Apple's next-generation iPhone is expected to hit the market shortly thereafter. So where are the smartphones based on Google's Android platform, which is considered a potentially serious threat to the iPhone? Rumors have it that AT&T ...

In our age of instant gratification, no one likes waiting for anything. That's why the sluggish launch time of a typical personal computer can make a consumer irritable. It's also why instant-on computing has become a sort of Holy Grail for hardware and software makers in the industry. The pursuit o...