For the most part, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has found the mobile industry willing to bow to its patent-licensing strategy. Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) decided to dig in and fight and it could be poised to score a point.

Android held on to its title as the most-popular smartphone platform in the U.S. in the last quarter, but when it comes to sales of specific devices, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is running away from the competition, with Samsung swiftly behind, according to research out from the NPD Group.

It’s a little stunning to contemplate how wrong things have gone for Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in just the first month of 2012, as the company hopes to put a disastrous January in the rear-view mirror with perhaps another tear-jerking Super Bowl ad this Sunday. Larry Page and Sergey Brin haven’t…

Even if you throw the exploding tablet market in with the staid PC market, shipments of smartphones surpassed those of “client PCs” in 2011, a milestone for the computer industry.

The U.S. government likes to do things its own way. Along those lines, it has decided to embrace Android as a smartphone platform for soldiers and other government employees because of the control it can exert over the software, which in turn underscores how much control Android partners have over…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has a dilemma when it comes to the Android Market: its permissive no-review-necessary policy means that anyone can write nearly any kind of application for the platform, including malware. The company is introducing a new service Thursday that attempts to strike a balance between protecting Android users…

Do Kindle Fire owners still like their devices now that they’ve had a few months to kick the tires? A new survey indicates that for the most part, they’re more pleased with their purchase than those who bought other Android tablets last year but less satisfied than iPad owners.

Mobile advertising may not yet be something that Facebook has explored in its strategy to monetize its massive user base, and given the growth we’ve seen in the space, you can argue that it might be missing a trick.

It was five years ago that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) executives brushed off the idea of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as “not a threat” to Nokia’s top position in mobile sales. After all, Apple was only making smartphones and Nokia was still leading in that still-niche category, as well as mobiles overall.…

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has accused Samsung of “slavishly copying” its hardware designs; but whether or not that is true, one area where Samsung is taking a note from Apple is in how it debuts its big products. The company today announced that it would not be launching its next big…

Disney (NYSE: DIS) Mobile, the short-lived U.S. MVNO that found a new lease of life in Japan through a Softbank JV in 2008, has now launched two new Android handsets in partnership with NTT Docomo, the country’s biggest carrier.

The ongoing, back-and-forth legal fight that is the Apple/Samsung patent dispute today took on a new dimension in one of its key battlegrounds, when the European Commission launched an antitrust inquiry into Samsung’s technology licensing practices.

RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) is taking a beating at the moment from handset makers like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Samsung, which have eaten into a smartphone market share that it took years for the BlackBerry maker to build on both sides of the Atlantic. RIM, however, claims that it is still…

Looks like new CEO Scott Thompson is wasting little time starting to get Yahoo’s house in order: just a few weeks into the new CEO’s tenure, the internet company is pulling support for 10 of its less-popular mobile apps.

Samsung may be king of the Android smartphone world, but it’s playing hard to get. The company declined to release smartphone sales figures late Thursday in reporting record earnings, but it is clearly faring better than some Android competitors against Apple’s iPhone juggernaut.

Having already warned investors that its fourth quarter was going to be rough, Motorola (NYSE: MMI) didn’t disappoint when the actual numbers arrived Thursday. Smartphone shipments were up slightly but the company continues to lose money on mobile sales while everyone waits for a ruling on the Google (NSDQ: GOOG)…

		EPS*	Rev. vs Q410	Net Inc. vs Q410
Motorola	Release		Flat	200%

* vs. Analysts' Estimates: Beat Met Missed

In an insanely crowded mobile apps marketplace, pricing is one of the ways to stand out from the competition: for better or worse. Distimo shared some data Thursday on app-pricing strategies as well as the old-fashioned retail concept of the sale.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other search engines “overwhelmingly” direct music fans to illegal copies of copyrighted tracks online, a coalition of entertainment industry groups has told the government.

With the tablet market now overtaking PC sales, all eyes are on which platform will dominate this next generation of computing devices. A report out today from Strategy Analytics said that for Q4 it was Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), the company that effectively created the market for tablets two years ago…