Industry news

All this week in the pouring British rain, people in suits have been gathering at a biennial trade show in Farnborough, England, to ogle the latest aircraft -- and sometimes buy a few. There's plenty on display for aviation geeks to get excited about, such as the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, but I was mainly there to take a look at the tech that BAE Systems is hawking out to its mostly military customers.

The main attraction was the first public showing of a plane that flies itself -- a 1983 Jetstream once used by a Scottish distillery that's … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--App developers and consumer advocates are unhappy with news this week that AT&T may be considering a plan that would allow data-heavy service providers to pay upfront for the bandwidth their customers may use.

Earlier this week, AT&T's CTO John Donovan told The Wall Street Journal at the Mobile World Congress here that the carrier is considering a kind of toll-free calling for mobile data. The idea is that mobile-app providers whose services consume a lot of data, such as video streaming, could buy 1-800-like service from AT&T so that their users … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Where do the largest telecommunications companies in the world want to be in in the future? In the cloud.

We've all heard this schtick before: Carriers don't want to be the purveyors of dumb pipes. Their equipment suppliers--namely, Cisco Systems and Alcatel-Lucent--also don't want them to be dumb pipe operators. The reason is simple: There just isn't much money in being dumb.

Smart is the way to go.

But for telecommunications giants, what does it mean to be smart? For the CEOs of Deutsche Telekom, Alcatel Lucent, and Cisco Systems, who spoke as part of … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Wireless operators need to stop locking devices and offering overly complicated data plans. That's the message from Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn and eBay CEO John Donahoe here at Mobile World Congress.

Dunn and Donahoe took the stage today as part of a panel discussion about mobile payments. While the CEOs talked a lot about how shopping and payments are changing thanks to mobile devices, they also took a few jabs at wireless operators, challenging them to become more open to help spur greater adoption of their services across a broad range of devices.

While the mobile phone … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain - A year into its partnership with Microsoft, Nokia is filling out its Windows Phone smartphone portfolio and differentiating devices with Nokia-only features and apps.

On Monday, Nokia kicked off the Mobile World Congress tradeshow here with a new low-end Lumia Windows Phone smartphone, the Lumia 610. This is now the fourth Lumia Windows Phone in the portfolio, and it will sell for 189 euros ($254) in Europe before subsidies.

Microsoft announced the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 in October. These were the first Windows Phone devices for Nokia, and they were initially only available in Europe. Now, … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Sony Mobile Communications has a new strategy. Instead of announcing one killer phone at this year's Mobile World Congress, it's announcing a suite of devices that it hopes will attract a wider audience of consumers, particularly those at the low end.

Will the strategy work? It's hard to say. There's a lot of competition out there that will make it hard. Still, with full ownership from its former parent company Sony, executives say they're ready to spend big on making Sony's mobile phones a household brand.

Sony Ericsson (Sony Mobile's former name … Read more

There was an Apple II in my third-grade classroom. We used it to play Oregon Trail. Then it died.

Therein lies the problem with iPads in high school: devices break. When Apple announced digital textbooks for primary schools via iBooks 2 this morning, the first thing I thought was: Oh, God, what about the hardware? I've done hard, rewarding time in public schools. Both my parents were high-school teachers and I've chaired the PTA at my children's public grade school and can say with certainty that the best software in the world won't make it practical … Read more

It's not news that women don't come to CES in droves--it's always been this way.

When I bring up the topic, I often get this response from both men and women, sometimes with a shrug: "Women just don't like technology the same way that men do," or "It's like sports; men care about the fiddling with technology. Women just want it to work." The prevailing thinking is that men are from GadgetLand and women are from...somewhere else. And no one seems particularly upset about it.

We should be more upset … Read more

Following FCC chairman Julius Genachowski's official show of opposition to AT&T's proposed buyout of T-Mobile, AT&T said last night that it will take a $4 billion accounting charge in the fourth quarter to cover a breakup fee to T-Mobile should the deal fail to gain regulatory approval.

AT&T and T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telecom also said they've withdrawn their pending approval applications to the FCC "to facilitate the consideration of all options at the FCC and to focus [the companies'] continuing efforts on obtaining antitrust clearance for the transaction from the … Read more