Microsoft aims to help Windows Phone owners safely store their personal data on its servers as part of a future service. An software engineering job listing picked up by WMPoweruser seeks someone to join its “Windows Phone Backup, Migrate, and Restore team.” “Our goal is to ensure that no matter if someone loses their phone, …

Verizon’s network has once again been hit with downtime in the U.S., with customers reporting that their phones are unable to get a data connection. Droid Life, which picked up on the outage, says that customers have been having issues connecting to Verizon’s 3G and 4G LTE networks in various major cities across the U.S. including New York, San Francisco, …

People unwrapping new smartphones with Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS as part of the Christmas holiday once again led to record activations and app downloads this year, says mobile analytics firm Flurry. In a report issued today, Flurry says that the number of Android and iOS devices activated on Christmas Day jumped 353 percent over the number of activations from …

Nearly a year and two months after its launch, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has hit a new milestone. The collection of apps and games that run on Microsoft’s Windows Phone devices now sits north of 50,000 applications, according to a count by the blog All About Windows Phone. More than a third of those were added in the past three …

Owners of Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphone and the 7-inch Galaxy Tab won’t be getting the latest and greatest version of Android. In a blog posting on a Korean promotional site run by Samsung, the company noted that the two devices would not receive the update to Android 4.0, the most up to date version of Google’s mobile operating system. The …

Research In Motion could once again face a legal fracas over the name of one of its software products. Broadcast measurement firm BBM Canada has taken offense with RIM’s use of the “BBM” shorthand moniker for its BlackBerry Messenger service, Reuters reports. That’s RIM’s software that lets BlackBerry users communicate with one another, and comes pre-installed on many of the …

Smartphone-app makers have a new way to classify age-specific ratings for their software using an already-popular program, but some of the biggest players in the mobile-app business are not on board with its launch. Wireless-industry trade group CTIA and the Entertainment Software Rating Board today formally announced a system that lets developers assign a rating to their game, letting users …

Google’s doubling down on its efforts to pull iOS users into frequent searchers with a new iPad-centric version of its search app. The new version, released today as a free update to the company’s universal iOS app (iTunes), gives iPad users on iOS 4 or higher a handful of new features, and put Google’s app in tighter competition with Apple’s …

Next week brings the unveiling of a new rating system for mobile applications, akin to what the video game industry has used for the past 17 years. The CTIA-The Wireless Association today said that it’s taking the wraps off a new mobile application rating system early next week with with the help of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). That’s …

After what can only be described as a poor start for Google’s much-anticipated Gmail app for Apple’s iOS platform, the software has returned. The app, which was released earlier this month and then yanked almost immediately, had a bug that Google said broke notifications. It also served up an error message the first time users fired it up. “We’ve fixed …