BARCELONA, Spain–The momentum for Android continues to build, with 850,000 phones and tablets getting activated each day. That’s according to Google Android chief Andy Rubin, who unveiled the statistic on his Google+ page today. Like most other major wireless players, he was in attendance at Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest wireless trade show. “Walking …

BARCELONA, Spain–Isis, a mobile-payments joint venture among three of the major wireless carriers, is taking the slow and steady approach to its mobile wallet. And it appears to be working. An image of the Isis mobile wallet. Isis The venture, formed from an alliance between Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA, said today that BarclayCard, Capital One, and Chase will …

BARCELONA, Spain–Not everything is rosy in the wireless industry. That’s an unusual thing to say during the kickoff keynote address at Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest wireless confab. Yet that’s exactly what Franco Bernabe, CEO of Telecom Italia, said during his prepared remarks today. “I don’t want to say we’re an industry with problems,” Bernabe said. “We’re still growing …

BARCELONA, Spain–Intel has unveiled a number of new partnerships and chips as the company, which is dominant in the PC business, attempts to find the same success with mobile devices. Intel said today it is working with ZTE, Lava International, and Orange on handsets, and with Visa on a multiyear partnership to build a mobile-payment service together. It also unveiled …

BARCELONA, Spain–LG is banking that the consumer need for speed will drive sales of its mobile devices, a bet the company hopes will pay off with a larger foothold in the smartphone market. The company’s product lineup for Mobile World Congress, which was announced throughout last week, illustrates its increasing use of high-end components. The phones include Nvidia’s Tegra 3 …

BARCELONA, Spain–Just as dual-core chips represented the pinnacle of mobile devices last year, quad-core phones are shaping up to be the must-have feature on any premiere smartphone. The problem is, do consumers really care? Sure, the tech media and analyst community obsess over specifications, and at a show like Mobile World Congress, it’s hard to fault a vendor for putting …

BARCELONA, Spain–Remember the Chacha or Salsa? Yeah, few do. They were among the several smartphones unveiled by HTC at last year’s Mobile World Congress confab. The two, which stood out at the conference for their integrated Facebook button, barely made a dent with consumers with they hit the market. But with another year comes renewed focus on the business. HTC …

BARCELONA, Spain–LG is jockeying to be the next handset partner to craft a Nexus device–allowing the company to get first dibs on one of the next iterations of Android. “We’re having discussions,” Ramchan Woo, head of LG’s smartphone division, told CNET in an interview. “We’re working on it.” Over the past few years, getting the Nexus title and working directly …

T-Mobile USA faces a daunting uphill climb as it looks to turn itself around. The nation’s fourth-largest wireless provider, two months removed from a failed attempt to merge with AT&T, today laid out its comeback plan, which includes improving its existing network and deploying 4G LTE by 2013. Parent Deutsche Telekom has committed to investing $4 billion in the business, …

commentary The PlayBook tablet can finally access corporate e-mail. Hallelujah, right? No, don’t expect the legion of BlackBerry faithful to flock to the PlayBook, now that it has the one key feature everybody said Research In Motion should have included in its tablet in the first place. At this point, even the most ardent fan has to admit that this …