Personal communications

Google's mobile services in China are hit-or-miss Monday, the first change in the availability of the company's various services since the announcement last week of its decision to move Chinese search to Hong Kong.

As part of that announcement, Google also created a status page where it pledged to update Internet users on the availability of its services in China. Some services, such as YouTube and Blogger, have been completely blocked since last year, but now mobile services have joined the list of services that are partially blocked.

That includes mobile search, maps, and other services designed for … Read more

An update was made to this story at 10:02 a.m. PDT: Google denied that it is sharing revenue with partners based on their usage of Google applications. See explanation in update at bottom of article.

Google's Android handset and carriers partners might have more than one reason to work with the company.

In its deals with wireless carriers and device makers, Google has agreed to share a cut of its mobile advertising revenue with those companies, according to a report from MocoNews. That's a potentially powerful incentive for those companies to adopt Android, which has grown quite strongly … Read more

In the heyday of PDAs such as the Dell Axim and the Hewlett-Packard Jornada, companies such as TomTom and Navigon offered software that ran on other companies' hardware. The low installed base of PDAs prevented that solution from becoming a runaway success and gave way to integrated portable navigation devices, or PNDs, such as those from Garmin. PNDs sold in the millions, becoming hot gift items.

Now, though, the growing screen size and touch capabilities of smartphones are making them formidable rivals to standalone navigation devices. According to NPD Group's Mobile Phone Track, four out of five cell phones … Read more

The mobile apps market has become a cash cow for carriers such as Apple but is turning increasingly competitive for developers trying to make a profit, according to a new In-Stat report.

Mobile subscribers are downloading apps in ever increasing numbers as they learn more about the capabilities of their smartphones, said the report, released Wednesday. As the company that set the standard for mobile apps, Apple and its App Store are seeing the most action, with iPhone and iPod Touch users downloading 2.4 times more apps than the other smartphone owners.

But although the news may be bright … Read more

LAS VEGAS--To no one's surprise, Sprint kicked off CTIA 2010 here by announcing its first 4G phone. The HTC Evo 4G is not only the carrier's first WiMax cell phone--previously the carrier only has offered 4G laptop cards and the Samsung Mondi--but also the first commercially available 4G handset with a major U.S. carrier. The Evo runs Google Android OS 2.1; finally, a new Android phone meets the world with the latest Android OS available.

From the outset, the Evo is an attractive touch-screen device that closely resembles the HTC HD2. We got a taste of the Evo's candy bar design when photos of the HTC Supersonic leaked in late January. And in the end, the final product doesn't stray far from those initial impressions.

The massive 4.3-inch display is quite a looker. Its rich resolution and color support make for a pleasant browsing experience. The touch screen also appeared to be accurate and responsive in our brief hands-on. Below the display are four touch controls for the home screen, main menu, search, and backing out of a page. There's physical navigation control, but that's fine since we rely on the touch screen for most navigation anyway.

… Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--One of the coolest demos at DemoSpring here is from Exaudios.

The company's new Maginify product analyzes the intonation of someone on a phone call and can tell if the person is calm, beginning to get angry, or seconds from blowing up. It also identifies other emotions, but for this product, the focus is on happiness and anger. The service is being pitched to call centers, though there is potentially more to it than that.

You may rightly note that most humans have the innate ability to tell if the person they're speaking with is … Read more

Yet more ways for the dearly departed to reach out from beyond the grave. We've seen memorializing on Facebook, even tombstones with video screens where the dead get to speak their piece in an endless loop. Now, there's yet another way to communicate with the dead, high-tech style, minus the abracadabra of seances and mediums.

A Phoenix-based company called Objecs has created the Memorial RosettaStone Tablet, which makes it possible for cemetery visitors to access text and images merely by touching a cell phone to a headstone.

Bearing the tagline "be discovered--3,200 years from today," the product is available as an iPod-size stone tablet or a coin-size stick-on polymer tag that adheres directly to the headstone. It's microchip-enabled and uses NFC (near-field communication, a subset of RFID) to stream personal information, photos, and even messages from the deceased lying beneath to any Internet-enabled mobile device. … Read more

Vodafone has discovered that malware found on several it distributed came from the memory cards, which were shipped in about 3,000 HTC and other phones, according to a published report.

Spanish language blog Movil Zona reported that Vodafone said it was immediately sending new memory cards to people who bought phones using those cards.

After malware related to the Mariposa botnet was discovered on a second HTC Magic phone from Vodafone this week, a Vodafone spokesperson issued a statement to CNET on Thursday saying it was a "local incident in Spain."

In response to questions about the … Read more

When Panda Security found malware on a brand new Android-based Vodafone HTC Magic earlier this month, Vodafone said it was an "isolated local incident." Now, a second phone has been found harboring malware, including a program that turns infected machines into zombies as part of the Mariposa credit card and bank log-in-stealing botnet, according to Spain-based PandaLabs.

After hearing about PandaLabs' discovery, an employee at another Spanish security company, S21Sec, checked his recently acquired HTC Magic and found the Mariposa malware lurking on it, according to a PandaLabs blog post on Wednesday.

"This guy had also purchased … Read more