Apple, Mobile | featured news

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday rejected Apple Inc's request to revive its bid for a sales ban on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone, dashing the iPhone maker's attempt to recover crucial leverage in the global patent wars.

The slump in Apple Inc's share price from its September high has badly dented the returns of hundreds of mutual funds that had maintained outsized holdings of the stock. But some went sour on the iPhone-maker just in time.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Global Marketing, said in an interview to a Chinese newspaper that “cheap smart phones will not be developed in order to grab market share away”. There have been a number of analysts, especially over the past few days, and the Wall Street Journal who have speculated that Apple will come out with a lower priced iPhone in potentially a smaller format.

Developers told the Next Web that they’re seeing some activity on their user logs that indicate Apple may be testing its next-generation smartphone and mobile operating system. According to a Monday report, some app developers have logged activity from a device called the “iPhone 6,1” that also appears to be running a new mobile operating system.

Motorola engineers working on a handset to be released next year, that parent Google hopes will provide more potent competition for devices like Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy phones.

Here’s a tech stock pop quiz: Who has had a better quarter on the stock market? Apple? Or Research in Motion? The answer may surprise you. Apple’s stock, which peaked at more than $700 per share in September, has lost nearly 25 percent of its value. But Research in Motion, due to report earnings Thursday afternoon, has seen its stock more than double its abysmal September price of $6.30 per share. On Thursday morning, the stock was trading at $13.63 a share.

Google Maps have found their way back to the iPhone. The world's most popular online mapping system returned late Wednesday with the release of the Google Maps' iPhone app.

Australian police are warning the public that errors in Apple's much-maligned mapping application are leading drivers headed to the southern city of Mildura to take a potentially "life-threatening" wrong turn into the middle of a remote state park.

At least one former Apple exec wasn't surprised or sad to hear the news that iOS chief Scott Forstall is leaving the company... Several reports since then have suggested that Forstall didn't get along well with some other key players on the team and angered CEO Tim Cook by refusing to apologize for Apple's maps application.

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.