The Typo’s keyboard covers the iPhone home button, but that’s “replaced” by a substitute button on the bottom-right side of the keyboard. Sarah Tew/CNET BlackBerry has squashed Ryan Seacrest’s BlackBerryesque Typo iPhone case, at least for the time being. A US district judge in San Francisco granted this week a preliminary injunction — i.e., a …

Josh Lowensohn/CNET AT&T is cutting the price of its 2GB Mobile Share Value Plan. The company announced Saturday that starting tomorrow — Sunday — customers with one smartphone can sign on to the 2GB plan for $65 a month, and customers with two smartphones can sign on for $90 a month. In both cases, that’s a $15 drop from current …

Users of the iOS version of Google Hangouts can now place outgoing voice calls — free to numbers in the US and Canada — and can, if they’re in the states and also have a Google Voice number, receive calls in the app as well. The new feature is part of version 1.3.0 of Hangouts for iOS, which was released …

We’ve had just about all the leaked photos we can handle of Google’s yet-to-be-released Nexus flagship phone and Android 4.4 KitKat, thank you very much. (Or at least photos of gadgets that purportedly show the Nexus 5 and the new OS.) Now, we think, a little video might be nice. Related stories Android 4.4 KitKat detailed again in new Nexus …

Apple and Samsung have been conducting private talks about working out their ongoing patent disputes, with Samsung pushing for a cross-licensing deal that would settle all outstanding litigation, according to a report. Drawing from heavily redacted legal documents and unnamed people familiar with the discussions, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the two companies had face-to-face meetings in Seoul …

Contradicting a report from earlier today, Verizon said it has no plans to acquire Vodafone, either on its own or with a bidding partner. Citing “usually reliable people,” the Financial Times had reported that Verizon was teaming with AT&T to buy Vodafone, in a deal worth $245 billion. Under the deal, the FT reported, Verizon would acquire the 45 percent …

It appears that 2013 will be the year that mobile shopping becomes pervasive. According to the just-released “Q4 2012 Developer Survey Report,”  from research firm IDC and Appcelerator, a mobile-platform developer, it’s likely that most retail companies will have enabled mobile commerce in 2013.  The survey, which encompasses the views of nearly 3,000 Appcelerator customers, predicts that 86 percent of shoppers …

The tablet wars are heating up, and just in time for the holidays. With new items from from Samsung, Asus, Lenovo, Dell and others, and new Amazon Kindles and possibly an Apple iPad mini on tap, Google may be taking its Nexus 7 tablet out of Wi-Fi confinement. Paul O’Brien of the tech site MoDaCo started a thread in a post Saturday that …

Now playing: Watch this: Stamping out aggressive mobile app ads 1:25 Downloading free Android apps could make you vulnerable to aggressive adware, according to San Francisco-based security firm Lookout. In fact, as much as five percent of those free apps have spammy ads that may be parceling out your information to third parties according to CTO Kevin Mahaffey. That number …

Nearly everyone has that one relative on their holiday shopping list who’s hard to buy for. When imagination fails, we turn to gift cards. While most gift cards these days are of the physical variety, there are at least a handful of companies starting to offer gift cards you can store on your smartphone. SmartPlanet’s Sumi Das finds out how …