Cell Phone | featured news

It's been hailed for its succinctness and blamed for everything from sore thumbs to the decline of conversation. Love it or hate it, the text message is 20 years old.

Poor Microsoft. People who use your search engine seem especially interested in ... Apple. Bing published its most-searched news stories for 2012, and topping the list -- ahead of the presidential election, Superstorm Sandy and the London Olympics -- was the iPhone 5, the newest version of Apple's iconic smartphone.

Analysts are talking up the RIM share price after a depressing run for the Canadian phone maker. But something else is going on. While the press and analyst were burying RIM, its popularity was already on the increase, months before the share price went up.

Bharti Airtel's mobile-tower unit plans to raise around $800 million by selling a 10% stake via an initial public offering next month... Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile-phone-services company by revenue and users, and other investors in the mobile-tower unit are looking to capitalize on improving foreign sentiment toward India. This follows steps announced by the federal government in September, aimed at encouraging foreign investment in sectors like retail and insurance.

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA.

A U.S. judge has ordered Apple Inc to disclose to rival Samsung Electronics details of a legal settlement the iPhone maker reached with Taiwan's HTC Corp, including terms of a 10-year patents licensing agreement.

Is Google in a hurry to get 2012 over with? Probably not. But that didn't stop the snarky headlines after it was discovered that a buggy app in the new version of Google's mobile operating system omits the month of December. The People app lets users bookmark friends' birthdays and other important dates on a calendar. But some users of Android 4.2, the system's newest update, are complaining they can't note December dates in the app because its calendar skips from November to January. December simply does not exist.

App developers have turned cellphones and tablets into powerful tools, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry but making huge sacrifices in the process.

Samsung sold more than 97 million mobile phones in the third quarter, besting Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone by more than 74 million units. According to Gartner (NYSE: IT), nearly 428 million mobile phones were sold during the quarter. Approximately 23.5 million of those phones were manufactured by Apple — 97.9 million were made by Samsung.

Shares of Papa John's declined on Tuesday following news of class-action certification for a lawsuit that claims the pizza chain had unsolicited text messages sent to cell phones... Papa John's faces potential damages of more than $250 million. The plaintiffs may each potentially receive $500 or more in damages for each text message.