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Google on Thursday announced WebM, a royalty-free media file format for online video. With WebM, Google has thrown the gauntlet to H.264, the codec backed by rivals Apple and Microsoft, among others. Buried within the new format's FAQ was news about another Google project: Android. The next iteratio...

The Garmin-Asus partnership Wednesday announced the new Garminfone, an Android-based smartphone that will be available on the T-Mobile USA network. This 3G device has a 3.5-inch screen and will be available later this year. The Garminfone follows last year's release of the Nuvifone G60, which was no...

The much-anticipated "Google TV" may be in the works, but a Swedish company has already won the race to the proverbial finish line with the world's first Android-based TV. Due to hit stores this fall, People of Lava's Scandinavia is a fully interactive Internet TV that combines the functionality of ...

You need spend only five minutes with Motorola's Devour smartphone to realize how appropriate its moniker is. It's an information gourmand's delight. What sets Devour apart from other Android phones is Motorola's MotoBlur software. The phone, which is offered by Verizon Wireless, allows you to funne...

The Boxee video-on-demand software maker aims to change the way consumers get free movie and TV entertainment from the Internet with its first hardware venture, called "Boxee Box." The open source software company debuted its new hardware device at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y., o...

Three months after Nokia announced its N900 smartphone, the device has arrived in the United States. The N900 runs on the Linux-based Maemo platform, and Nokia's hype around it raises questions about whether the company plans to replace its older Symbian platform with Maemo. Meanwhile, rumors that N...

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...

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 ...

Sprint is adding another Android phone to its lineup -- the Samsung Moment. The Moment, which has an 800 MHz CPU, will be available from Nov. 1. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that Android installations will surge, putting it in second place after Symbian by 2012. The Moment runs Android 1.5 Cupcake. I...

Apple's iPhone may have legions of enthusiastic followers, but there's no denying that fans of Google's competing Android platform already have more options. Case in point: Samsung and T-Mobile on Monday announced the Samsung Behold II, the latest of many Android handsets to come to market in recent...

Google sent shock waves through the Android community late last week by launching a cease-and-desist order at well-regarded modder Cyanogen for bundling some of its closed-source applications with his CyanogenMod ROM. CyanogenMod is a free, heavily optimized build of Android 1.5r2 that focuses on pe...

Motorola unveiled its much-anticipated first Android phone on Thursday, together with a new service it calls "Motoblur." The phone, to be called the "Cliq" in the United States, will be available from T-Mobile later this year. It will be marketed as the "Dext" abroad. Motoblur is a system that syncs...

It has been said that a great user experience in mobile phone offerings is a combination of good engineering, marketing and graphical and user interface design. More importantly, it is about keeping the balance between all these elements. This is why the term "trade-off" is a recurrent one in the mo...

Crowdsourcing may be killing a lot of jobs. True, it's still a nascent business strategy that works well only in certain scenarios, and it can't be lumped in with outsourcing as the cause of mass layoffs. As is the case with outsourcing, though, it can be particularly difficult to quantify crowdsour...

Application creators can get an early look at the software developer kit for Android 1.5, the next version of the mobile operating system, according to Google. Based on the "Cupcake" branch from the Android Open Source Project, the SDK has application programming interfaces for new features, includi...