Verizon Wireless is making its 4G LTE service a bit more affordable for the masses. The Pantech Breakout. Verizon Wireless Starting Thursday, the carrier will sell the Pantech Breakout for $99.99 after a $50 rebate and a two-year contract. The Breakout marks the first reasonably priced 4G LTE phone in Verizon’s lineup. Previously, the carrier …

Mounting piracy is the dirty little secret in the world of mobile applications. The Android market is facing a growing problem in app piracy. Piracy isn’t talked about a lot, but it has quietly grown into a major problem for many developers. It’s more of an issue in Android because its open nature and loose authentication tools allow pirates to …

Apple’s stock has done quite well by new CEO Tim Cook. Josh Lowensohn/CNET Apple shares hit an all-time high today, underscoring the growing hype and anticipation over the company’s next major product. The stock reached a peak of $413.23 before retreating slightly to $411.63–still up nearly 3 percent from the previous day–at the close of the trading session. The company …

Samsung Electronics has appointed a former Sprint Nextel executive to help its U.S. mobile arm plan and launch new phones. Samsung tapped Kevin Packingham as its new senior vice president of product innovation, the company said today. Packingham was most recently chief executive of Amerilink Telecom, a small private company created to usher Chinese equipment manufacturer Huawei in as a …

If you’re a parent with some overly active children, you may want to consider the SecuraFone application. SecuraFone SecuraTrac, a company more used to creating small personal emergency alarms for senior citizens and patients, is trying its hand at a mobile application called SecuraFone. It plans to launch the app–which will be available for the iPhone, as well as on …

Seven states have hopped on the growing bandwagon of opponents of AT&T’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile USA. The attorneys general of California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington today joined the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit to block the deal between AT&T and T-Mobile. The participation of the states adds another dose of uncertainty to a deal that …

Talk about bad timing for Research In Motion. On the heels of another disappointing quarterly report, RIM is suffering from an outage that has hit its e-mail and BlackBerry Messenger services today. BlackBerry customers took to Twitter to voice their complaints. The company later acknowledged problems. “Some Canada & LatAm customers report BBM issues. Our support teams are investigating. We …

Research In Motion will have to learn from the mistakes of the PlayBook tablet if it wants to see any success with its next generation of BlackBerry smartphones. With disappointing sales and plunging profits, how could the company not feel the urgency to rush out a phone using slick its new QNX software? But that would be a bad idea. …

Research In Motion saw its profit in the second quarter fall by more than half as Apple and Google continue to eat its lunch. No one was particularly bullish about how well the PlayBook was going to do in the second quarter, but it did even worse than expected. RIM The BlackBerry smartphone manufacturer reported quarterly earnings today of $329 …

Hewlett-Packard risks putting its PC business in an awkward “lame duck status” as it looks to spin it out. HP Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu believes that such a move could take 12 to 18 months given the legal, tax, and business issues that need to be sorted out, in line with the company’s own expectations. HP is opting to …