The Alcatel One Touch Fire, one of the inaugural phones to sport Mozilla’s Firefox OS, won’t get version 1.2 of the browser-based operating system — but it will get 1.3. That’s the word from Mozilla and Alcatel. And although it’s an inauspicious start for the browser-based operating system, it’s likely a relief to those who …

Three French carriers — Orange, Bouygues, and Iliad’s Free Mobile — have begun competing for customers by cutting the roaming fees that can spook travelers and tourists from using mobile phones when abroad. The price war is good news for people in Europe, where a fragmented mobile-network market means it’s common to worry about the extra costs for making calls …

Qualcomm has acquired 2,400 patents and patent applications relating to Hewlett-Packard’s mobile technology, the companies announced Friday. The acquisition includes about 1,400 patents and applications from the United States and about 1,000 from other countries. The patents are from ill-fated mobile efforts at HP — the iPaq handheld device, the Palm business it bought in 2010, and the Bitfone mobile …

Adobe Systems released a new version of its Photoshop Express for Android app Thursday that brings optimizations for Android 4.4 KitKat, new editing options, more direct to effects filters, and a new engine for processing photos. “We have made every effort to fine-tune the app for Android. As an example, Android users will appreciate accessing and processing images saved on …

Fiber-optic broadband is becoming less of a rarity. Subscriptions to the high-speed networking service grew 13.9 percent from June 2012 to June 2013, according to newly released statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which monitors economic trends in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and some other developed countries and regions. That growth means …

What were the top three most used phones in 2013? The iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5, and the iPhone 4, according to an Actix study that tracked communications between mobile devices and carriers’ mobile networks. But Samsung is the clear rival: its Galaxy S3, S2, and S4 claimed the fourth, fifth, and sixth places, respectively, according to figures that Actix, …

The movie business now will have a direct voice in a controversy about how to handle copy protection of videos on the Web. That’s because the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group that creates Web standards, such as the HTML technology that underlies every Web page on the Internet. “Just …

Samsung’s Galaxy S5 will be stylistically distinct from S3 and S4 predecessors, and the next-generation flagship Android phone could include an iris scanner when it ships in March or April, according to the company’s mobile-products leader. “Many people are fanatical about iris recognition technology… We are studying the possibility,” said Young-hee Lee, executive vice president of marketing for Samsung mobile’s …

T-Mobile, trying to snatch customers away from other US carriers, appears likely to announce an offer Wednesday to pay a whole family’s early termination fees they’d otherwise have to pay themselves to cancel mobile phone contracts. Droid Life spotted a T-Mobile ad on tech sites that promises: “We’ll pay your family’s termination fees when you trade in your devices.” Such …

T-Mobile has signed a deal to buy blocks of 700MHz radio-frequency spectrum from Verizon Wireless for nearly $2.37 billion and to give up some wireless spectrum of its own worth $950 million, the company announced Monday. Wireless spectrum is a precious commodity, particularly for a company like T-Mobile that’s seeking to catch up to Verizon and AT&T in 4G coverage. …