Fri, November 20, 2009 - Two competing approaches to equipping mobile phones with contactless communications capabilities vied for supporters at the Cartes exhibition in Paris this week. Either approach could turn phones into self-service electronic tour guides, travel tickets or secure payment terminals.

Fri, November 20, 2009 - You can now buy the brand-spanking-new Palm Pixi smartphone for just $25. Onlie reports say Amazon and Wal-Mart have slashed the original retail of $100 by 75%, less than a week after Palm's second webOS phone went on sale at Sprint, which still holds to the original price.

Fri, November 20, 2009 - iPhone owners charging Apple and AT&T with breaking antitrust laws asked a federal judge this week to force Apple to hand over the iPhone source code, court documents show.

Fri, November 20, 2009 - Cisco has made available a free iPhone app that can be used to receive over a dozen security-related information feeds in customizable form related both to Cisco products and to general security topics, such as newly detected threats.

Fri, November 20, 2009 - RIM's latest addition to its consumer-oriented BlackBerry Pearl lineup has been revealed. The new device, the BlackBerry Pearl 9100, is the first 3G, GSM Pearl, and though it sports the same-style SureType keyboard as earlier Pearls, it also has a number of enhancements, including the new BlackBerry trackpad.

Thu, November 19, 2009 - Chrome OS is lauded by Google as a completely new method of personal computing and it does have a number of features that are intriguing. On the other hand, a Chrome OS device is really another incarnation of a thin client mobile Internet device.

Thu, November 19, 2009 - Today, Google released the source code for Chrome OS and promised that devices will be shipping in about a year, in time for the 2010 holiday season. Chrome OS will run only on devices specifically manufactured for it and Google is dictating to manufacturers the hardware specifications. For instance, Chrome OS devices will be netbooks, will not include a hard drive, will have only solid state disks, will rely on specified WiFi chipsets/adapters for connectivity and must have full-sized keyboards, says Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management.

Thu, November 19, 2009 - Click here to watch this week’s World Tech Update.

Thu, November 19, 2009 - The first Dell Mini 3i smartphone to go on sale anywhere in the world will be available in China this December for 4800 Chinese yuan (US$704) without a mobile phone contract, China Mobile representatives said Thursday.