Stories by John P. Mello Jr.

Verizon stores to start selling iPads tomorrow

Apple's iPad will make its long-awaited sales debut in more than 2,000 Verzion stores tomorrow. The nation's largest wireless carrier will be offering the tablet bundled with its MiFi mobile hotspot.

iPhone passes Blackberry in global shipments

In the race for worldwide smartphone dominance, Apple has finally passed Research In Motion. During this year's third quarter, 15.4 million iPhones were shipped globally compared to only 12.4 million Blackberries, the researchers at Strategy Analytics reported yesterday.

Sony ditches Symbian

Sony Ericsson announced today that it's cutting the cord with the Symbian operating system, a move that may put the platform on life support. Sony Ericsson's withdrawal of support for the mobile OS means that the only major player left building phones for the platform is Nokia, which is currently in troubled financial waters.

It's official: Windows Phone 7 will sync with Mac

After a UK exec spilled the beans, Microsoft officially announced that it will be releasing a tool to allow phones running its Windows Phone 7 software to sync some content with Apple Macintosh computers. The official announcement lacked the promise of a tweet made earlier by the exec that Microsoft was preparing a full-blown version of its Zune software for the Mac.

3D TVs at top of 'Hype Cycle'

The economy isn't the only thing that goes through cycles. Hype, believe it or not, is cyclical, too, according to the analysts at Gartner, who today released their 2010 Hype Cycle report. Technologies closing in on the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" are the 4G wireless standard and 3D flat panel TVs.

Twitter launches another scheme to make money

As it warned us last week, Twitter launched another scheme today to exploit its 200 million users for advertising purposes. In addition, it took some baby steps toward smoothing relations between itself and third-party developers.

Microsoft releases Web-based suite of apps

Microsoft's Windows Live Essentials 2011, is ready for prime time. Microsoft announced Thursday it's consumer focused suite of free applications, has moved from testing mode (beta) to the final release. The productivity suite is Microsoft's flagship bundle of Web-based productivity apps for managing and sharing images online, editing video, and sharing documents and files between PCs.

Can Yahoo pump new life into a dead horse?

It takes more than an exclamation point at the end of your name to create excitement. Maybe Yahoo! is finally waking up to that. At least there were signs of it at the company's press event held today at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Twitter fixes its 'bad' homepage: The critics weigh in

Twitter's update to its homepage, that stresses community and multimedia content, is a welcome change to the staid site. Of course, when you impose order and elegance to Twitter's current lackluster homepage, you're going to get more kudos than questions. Still, you'll be hard pressed to find a dissonant voice in the chorus of opinion about the redesign of world's favorite micro-blogging site.

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