Corporate & legal

Correction 5 p.m. PDT: The Nokia N97 is not yet being sold in Europe, and AT&T sells the E71x with a two-year contract. The E71 is an unlocked version of the phone. The article has been changed to reflect this.

Clarification 5 p.m. PDT: See below for more information about data plans that can be used with the N97 through AT&T.

For a company that has said it wants to be a player in the U.S. market, it doesn't look like Nokia is trying very hard.

On Tuesday the mobile phone giant said its flagship smartphone, the N97, which was announced in December, has gone on sale in the U.S. at the whopping price tag of $699. This price isn't that shocking considering the phone will also be offered in Europe for a comparable price. But in the U.S. where consumers are accustomed to paying $200 for a smartphone, it seems a bit ridiculous.

The reason the price of the N97 is still so high is that Nokia is not selling it through any particular carrier. Instead it will be sold to U.S. customers in Nokia flagship stores in New York and Chicago as well as online.

Nokia has made other phones for the U.S. market and has also sold them without carrier backing. The N95, the previous generation N-series Nokia phone sold in the U.S., retails for about $369 to $468, according to Nokia. In April of 2007, when the phone was first introduced, it sold for about $750 to $800. But a phone priced at $700 in the U.S. market is likely to be too high for U.S. consumers, especially when most devices sell here for $200.

Nokia also couldn't have picked a worse time to debut the N97 in the U.S. market, which happens to be just days after two of the most anticipated smartphones of the year have been launched. On Monday, Apple announced its latest phone, the iPhone 3G S, which will go on sale next week. And on Saturday, Palm started selling the much-hyped Pre.

Each of these devices can be bought for far less than the Nokia N97. The 16GB iPhone 3G S will sell for $199. And the 32GB model, which has the same amount of built-in memory as the N97, will cost $299 when the phones go on sale next week. Apple has also cut the price of its 8GB iPhone 3G, introduced last year, to only $99. The Pre, which also has a slide-out QWERTY keypad and a touch screen like the N97, is $199 with a $100 mail-in rebate.… Read more

It's been almost a week since the Federal Trade Commission had the allegedly rogue Pricewert ISP shut down, and it seems like the Internet has indeed been a safer, or I should say slightly less dangerous, place.

The FTC charged that Pricewert's distribution of illegal, malicious, and harmful content and deployment of botnets that compromised thousands of computers caused substantial consumer injury and was an unfair practice, in violation of federal law.

According to Symantec, the Cutwail botnet--one of the most notorious botnets, accounting for up to 35 percent of all spam in May across the globe--experienced a … Read more

Sprint Nextel executives said Monday that the launch of the much anticipated Palm Pre on Saturday hit a new sales record for the company.

Neither Sprint nor Palm is discussing specific sales figures, but Tim Donahue, vice president of business marketing for Sprint, said that the launch exceeded the company's expectations.

"We experienced our best one day of sales and single weekend sales for any phone we've launched in our history," he said. "We sold out of the device over the weekend in most of our store locations. And it happened at a much faster rate than we had planned on. "

While the crowds that showed up on Saturday morning to buy the Pre at Sprint stores and other retail locations where the phone was offered were small in number compared to the crowds that have gathered for the past two iPhone launches, analysts are calling the launch of the Pre a success. A J.P. Morgan report estimated that more than 50,000 phones were sold in the first two days the phone was available. The Wall Street Journal cited analysts who said that between 50,000 and 100,000 Pres had been sold.

Now Sprint and Palm must wait to see if the momentum will continue.… Read more

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PST with security source comment.

T-Mobile USA is looking into claims that a hacker has broken into its data bases and stolen customer and company information.

Someone anonymously posted the claims on the security mailing list Full Disclosure on Saturday. In that post, the hacker claims to have gotten access to "everything, their databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009."

The poster said he had offered the information to T-Mobile competitors, but they supposedly didn't show any interest. Now he says he is offering … Read more

Tune in on July 16 to see whether Oracle actually becomes the new parent of Sun Microsystems.

Sun's board of directors has set up a special shareholder meeting for that date to vote on the proposed merger with Oracle, according to a statement Sun released Monday. Sun's board, which has already okayed the merger, is urging stockholders to approve the deal--a majority vote is needed to push it through.

Shareholders can vote on the merger in person, at Sun's Web site, or through a proxy card received by mail. Assuming approval, it expects the merger to be … Read more

Rambus has asked the International Trade Commission to terminate an investigation of Nvidia relating to four patents as part of a November 2008 complaint.

Rambus provides high-speed memory interface technology, though in recent years the company has become better-known for intellectual property litigation practices. Rambus has sued many of the world's largest chip manufacturers.

The Los Altos, Calif.-based company conceded before the ITC that Nvidia products do not infringe on its four patents, and also asked for termination of several claims from a fifth patent in the ITC action, according to an Nvidia statement.

"We are pleased … Read more

NEW YORK--The much-anticipated Palm Pre may have gotten almost as much hype as the Apple iPhone over the past six months, but its opening day fell short of the attention iPhones grabbed on their first days.

Unlike the huge crowds of people that formed long lines and camped out in front of Apple and AT&T stores days in advance of the iPhone's launch, crowds for the Palm Pre were much smaller and tended to arrive in the morning just before stores opened.

Neither Sprint nor Palm have released official figures about how many devices they hoped to sell on the Pre's first day. But Sprint representatives had been trying to downplay expectations for iPhone-like crowds ahead of the launch. Sprint spokesman Mark Elliott told The New York Times earlier this week that the company not only didn't expect long lines for the Pre at its 1,100 stores, but that it didn't want them.

And it looks like the company got its wish. Salespeople at Sprint stores in New York City said a handful of people gathered outside their locations early Saturday morning. But most lines didn't even come close to the madness experienced on iPhone launch days.

Crowds tended to be bigger at Best Buy stores, which were offering the device for the $199 price without the $100 mail-in rebate. Customers buying a Pre from Sprint, the exclusive carrier of the device, pay $299 at the time of purchase and can get $100 back with a mail-in rebate. According to Rich Pesce, a Sprint spokesman, most new phones offered through the carrier have the mail-in rebate offer.

Many Best Buy locations sold out of the Pre almost immediately.… Read more

Following the filing of a lawsuit by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa over fake tweets made in his name, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has taken to the company blog to respond to the suit and detail Twitter's future plans to combat false accounts.

"With due respect to the man and his notable work, Mr. La Russa's lawsuit was an unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous, " Stone wrote in a post that went up Saturday. "Twitter's Terms of Service are fair and we believe will be upheld in a court that … Read more

It's the closely printed (or displayed in very small font size at a Web page) pieces of text that most of us don't bother to read before we agree to them. Yet it's something that shouldn't be ignored at all. It's called terms of service, or TOS for short.

Remember the time that AT&T sneakily changed its TOS and banned users from streaming media from third-party sites via its cellular network? Thanks to the media outcry (CNET News included) the company retracted the changes a few days later only to reinstate them again, … Read more