Consumers who want a higher-end Firefox OS than the Alcatel One Touch Fire and ZTE Open that just went on sale soon will have an option: the Geeksphone Peak+. Geeksphone, a small Spanish company, makes the higher-end Peak and the low-end Keon. Both are for developers who want to contribute to Mozilla’s Firefox OS project …

Programmers and fanboys fixated on the thorny problem of Android fragmentation had reason to pay attention to Google statistics that this week showed the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean, surpassing the two-and-a-half-year-old Gingerbread as the most-used version of Android. It’s a notable achievement for Google, which has been trying to push the Android world toward the modernized features and …

Tapping on a map in Google Maps for Android, then scrolling to the bottom of the screen, will reveal an option to cache the map for offline. screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET A day after users complained that the overhauled Google Maps app for Android made it hard to store maps for later use offline, Google has updated its app to …

A week after Spain’s Telefonica became the first carrier to sell Firefox OS phones, Deutsche Telekom has become the second. The German company will begin selling the Alcatel One Touch Fire with Mozilla’s Firefox OS in Poland starting Friday in 850 shops and online, the company said Thursday. Deutsche Telekom subsidiaries Magyar Telekom in Hungary and Cosmote in Greece will …

Worldwide, people now use Samsung’s smartphones more often than Apple’s to surf the Web, according to a study released Wednesday. In January 2013, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches surpassed Nokia phones to account for the most Web pages viewed on the Internet, according to a report (PDF) from StatCounter, which monitors Web usage across a network of 3 million Web …

Unifying Europe’s telecommunications market could mean an annual economic boost of 110 billion euros, or $141 billion, a top European Commission official says. Neelie Kroes, the EC vice president responsible for the region’s digital agenda, has been pushing for a unified European telecom market for weeks, arguing that Europe’s patchwork regulations, varying spectrum, and cross-border costs for customers make the …

It’s not every day that a new mobile operating system arrives, but Tuesday will be one of them as Telefonica begins selling the inexpensive ZTE Open with Mozilla’s Firefox OS in Spain. The move marks the commercial beginning of an effort by phone makers and network operators to use Mozilla’s open-source, browser-based operating system to reclaim power in the mobile …

Google has come to its senses with its Gmail app for Android. A June Gmail overhaul dropped the delete button by default from the e-mail software, a move judged to be silly by me and by 88 percent of the CNET readers who responded to our poll. Plenty of other people didn’t give a fig, the button’s absence wasn’t a …

Neelie Kroes, the European Commission vice president in charge of the digital agenda, sketched out several steps toward the unified mobile-network market she believes is necessary to keep Europe’s economy from falling behind. In a speech Tuesday, she called for several steps to lower barriers that today make it hard for carriers to expand from one country to another and …

Android users who want to see if the grass really is greener on the Apple side of the fence now can try out the new color scheme debuting in iOS 7. A theme called jbOS7 marries the Jelly Bean version of Android with the iOS 7 style. Its creator, shmogt, used some custom icons and TeslaCoil Software’s Nova Launcher home …