Technology, Smartphone | featured news

If you're reading this story on your iPad or iPhone, perhaps searching for "iOS 5 release date," well -- it's now, says Apple. Apple has reinvented its operating system, promising 200 new features, and, in the process, changing the way users relate to the online world.

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Blackberry, which has been plagued by service outages in Europe, the Middle East and India this week, reports that disruptions have spread to Latin America.

Large numbers of BlackBerry users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been cut off from Internet and messaging services, phone companies in the affected regions said Monday. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. gave few details beyond a brief statement saying that customers were “experiencing issues,” but telecommunications companies in the Middle East and Europe laid the blame at the Canadian company’s door.

Apple Inc received orders for more than one million iPhone 4S phones in the first 24 hours, topping the previous record of 600,000, the company said on Monday.

If you had any doubts that Apple (AAPL) would be able to beat the record 1.7 million iPhones sold in three days in June 2010, you can put them to rest.

Sony is looking to buy out Ericsson's share of Sony Ericsson, a move to gain full control and beef up development of the struggling handset unit. Japanese-Swedish joint venture, a 50-50 partnership since 2001, is the sixth-largest handset maker, but has been losing profits in recent years as it held back on smartphone development.

The iPhone 4S -- Apple's newest creation -- quietly went on pre-sale at 12 a.m. on Friday... The phone, which has been panned by some critics who say it's more of a facelift to the iPhone 4 than a new product, features a faster dual-core processor and a camera with 8 megapixels of resolution.

Apple unveiled its iPhone 4S on Tuesday to a lot of fanfare and quite a bit of disappointment. In our not-at-all scientific poll of more than 4,000 respondents, 57 percent of our readers said that they were expecting to see an iPhone 5 and 21 percent said they weren’t that excited by the new features.

Usually a cause for techno-euphoria, Apple's iPhone-a-palooza event on Tuesday had an unintended and unlikely effect: It made some corners of the Internet mad.