Vodafone, the U.K.-based mobile operator, has started taking preorders for Google’s Nexus One smartphone, which it will offer for free with a two-year contract at 35 pounds, or $54.15, per month. The company will start selling the Android-based handset on April 30–four months after sales began in the U.S. Up to now, Europeans could buy …

The U.K. government will not exempt universities, libraries, and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week. This would leave many organizations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the Internet, leading legal experts to say it will become …

ARM and Globalfoundries have released details on their upcoming system-on-a-chip platform, which they say will combine “PC-class performance” and a huge jump in battery life for mobile devices. The companies revealed the details Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Their system-on-a-chip platform is based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 processor and Globalfoundries’ 28-nanometer manufacturing process. The platform will be used in …

The Symbian Foundation has unveiled S^3, the next version of the Symbian open-source mobile operating system. S^3 is the first entirely open-source version of the platform. Details announced Monday at Mobile World Congress include HDMI support, new memory management techniques, a new graphics architecture, and readiness for 4G support. The foundation said it expects the platform to be “feature complete” …

The mobile operating system Symbian has been completely open-sourced, comfortably within the two-year time frame set for the migration project in 2008. On Thursday, the Symbian Foundation–the not-for-profit industry group set up by Nokia and other manufacturers to open up and give away the OS–said all Symbian source code, comprising 108 packages, was now available for free under the Eclipse …

Motorola has joined Eastman Kodak in asking U.S. authorities to ban imports of BlackBerry devices, in a dispute over patents. On Friday, Motorola said it had filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging that BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is infringing on five Motorola patents with its products. According to Motorola, RIM used to have a license …

The shortage of IPv4 addresses has reached a critical stage, according to the registries that allocate Internet numbers around the world. The Number Resource Organization (NRO), which represents the registries, said Tuesday that less than 10 percent of all IPv4 addresses remain available, threatening the future network operations of all businesses and organizations unless ISPs and businesses step up their …

A new version of Bluetooth has been revealed by the industry group behind the wireless technology, which is targeting low-energy applications in the health care, fitness, and security markets. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced the adoption of Bluetooth Core Specification version 4.0 on Thursday. The new iteration follows the speed-centric version 3.0 of the Bluetooth specification by just 10 …

The world’s first commercial LTE mobile broadband services went live in Oslo and Stockholm on Monday, through the Scandinavian operator TeliaSonera. Offering theoretical maximum speeds of 100Mbps and real-world speeds of 20Mbp to 80Mbps, the services are about 10 times faster than predecessor HSDPA. As of Tuesday, people in Norway and Sweden will be able to buy a mobile dongle …

Windows Mobile lost 28 percent of its smartphone market share between last year’s third quarter and this year’s third quarter, according to market researcher Gartner. Figures released Thursday by Gartner show that Microsoft’s mobile OS had 11 percent of the global smartphone market in Q3 2008. A year later, it had 7.9 percent. Meanwhile, the iPhone’s share rose from 12.9 …