Michelle Maisto

As anticipated, Amazon introduced its first smartphone, the Fire, at a June 18 press event in Seattle. The Fire features a 4.7-inch In-Plane Switching (IPS) LCD HD display, “optimized for one-handed use,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. It has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera with an f/2.0 five-element lens and unlimited photo storage in the Amazon […]

BlackBerry will make Amazon Appstore apps available on BlackBerry devices running the 10.3 operating system it will introduce this fall, it announced June 18, hours ahead of Amazon’s own major announcement. BlackBerry World currently offers approximately 130,000 apps, while the Amazon Appstore offers 240,000 Android applications, including Netflix, Pinterest, Groupon and other popular favorites that […]

Huawei’s $299 Ascend Mate2 4G Is a Win for the Budget Conscious By Michelle Maisto Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G The Ascend Mate 4G doesn’t inspire great passion, but neither does it disappoint. It’s exactly what it sets out to be: an affordable, midrange phone with a very large display, a great battery life and an […]

ISIS may be having a branding issue. This occurred to me the morning last week that I clicked to Google News and saw ISIS beside the word “beheadings.” A day later, ISIS was said to have stolen $425 million and become the “world’s richest terror force,” in the words of the International Business Times. Neither […]

Apple, facing a July civil-action lawsuit over claims that it fixed the prices of ebooks, has reached an out-of-court settlement with consumers and the 33 U.S. states suing it on behalf of residents. The amount of the settlement is unknown. According to The Wall Street Journal, the plaintiffs were seeking $840 million—three times the $280 […]

AT&T will be the exclusive wireless carrier of the smartphone Amazon is expected to introduce June 18. The Wall Street Journal, which reported the news June 17, cited people familiar with Amazon’s plans. Amazon teased the event June 6 in a video showing a number of 30-something-year-olds grinning and wowing and looking down at something […]

Tim Cook, Apple’s reserved and fiercely private CEO, continues to work to put his stamp on a company that has another man’s fingerprints all over it. Part of how he’s doing this is by opening up a bit about himself, The New York Times said in a June 15 article, timed during the quiet between […]

BlackBerry has launched BBM Protected, the first solution to come out of the eBBM Suite it introduced at Mobile World Congress in February. The suite is a family of services and products that pairs BlackBerry’s BBM messaging products—its most popular offerings—with enterprise-grade security features. BBM Protected is a service that gives users in regulated industries […]

AT&T has acknowledged that its network was inappropriately accessed. In April, three employees of one of its vendors hacked in and had access to customer records, including Social Security numbers, in some instances, and call records, Dallas Business Journal reported June 13. The hack was part of an effort to unlock older phones for use […]

For some Americans, the net neutrality issue can be summed up in whether or not Orange Is the New Black streams without bogging. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler knows this, and in a June 13 statement he reminded Americans that he’s on the case. “Consumers pay their ISPs [Internet service providers] and they […]