Shortages of the iPhone 5 are down to the material it’s made of — which is so easy to mark and scuff that factory workers are reportedly struggling to build them to a standard that’s up to scratch. Factory workers are finding it difficult to keep the iPhone’s anodised aluminium casings pristine enough to meet Apple’s …

T-Mobile USA may be behind its rivals when it comes to 4G LTE, but that doesn’t mean it’s mincing words about its ambitions. T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray. T-Mobile AT&T and Verizon Wireless may be able to boast of a super-fast wireless connection now, but T-Mobile believes it can one-up both of them when it finally gets its LTE network rollout …

Apple’s iPad is now home to a Groupon application designed for restaurants. Dubbed Breadcrumb, the application is meant to include everything a restaurant would need to handle transactions. The application includes menus, allowing servers to input a person’s order and send it off to the kitchen. In addition, restaurant owners will be able to manage their tables to see what’s …

If you’ve munched your way through Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich and you’re still craving the next sugary Android fix — and can’t wait for the software update to be dished out to your Samsung Galaxy S3 — then read on. Jelly Bean (or Android 4.1, if you want to be all serious about it), was launched with the …

Adult-video purveyor FyreTV has created a native third-party Android app for Google TV. The FyreTV logo(Credit: FyreTV) One of Google TV’s lesser-known features is its ability to install third-party apps from sources other than the Google Play Store, and it’s this feature that FyreTV is exploiting. GigaOM reported that FyreTV — a company that hopes to be the “Netflix of …

SAN DIEGO — Though a significantly smaller show than January’s Consumer Electronic Show and February’s Mobile World Conference, MobileCon 2012 still kicked off its first day with a handful of new phones. However, hardware companies didn’t hog all the fun; there was plenty of carrier news as well. T-Mobile T-Mobile introducedits first Windows Phone 8 handset, the Nokia Lumia 810. …

RIM’s Dev Alpha test phone is the closest thing you’ll get to a real BlackBerry 10 phone this year. Lynn La/CNET Research In Motion, the ailing smartphone maker with seemingly more lives than the average cat, may not dish out the new range of BlackBerry 10 devices until March, according to Jefferies analyst Peter Misek. Writing in a research note …

A new E Ink reader has been announced for Europe, boasting to be the smallest and lightest e-reader ever — and priced at just €9.90. (Credit: txtr) Called the Beagle, from German company Txtr, it may be making a few big claims, but it certainly looks handsome, with four different coloured backs and specs that seem, on the surface at …

The Samsung Galaxy Music is a new budget blower with dual front-facing speakers to let you share your tunes with those around you — whether they like it or not. The Galaxy Music’s diddy 3-inch display offers a muddy resolution of 240×320 pixels, but will run a relatively up to date version of Android — Ice Cream Sandwich. Samsung hasn’t …

The economy may be slowly recovering, but that doesn’t mean you need to hand over more of your hard earned cash to your wireless provider. In this edition of Ask Maggie, I help two different readers figure out how to get the most value out of their wireless service. Of course, cheaper isn’t always better. If the service doesn’t work …

Now playing: Watch this: Shortcuts: Smart tweaks in iPhone Accessibility 1:08 Use the iPhone’s flash to notify you of missed calls and messages, and create your own vibrating tones in the Accessibility menu in iOS.

Walmart Wal-Mart is testing a same-day delivery service in a bid to outmaneuver Amazon in the increasingly cutthroat retail world. The Bentonville, Ark., retail giant has been tested the service in Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. It will next expand to San Francisco and San Jose, Calif. The service, called Wal-Mart To Go, is a trial run for the holidays …

Apple now spends more money on patenting stuff than it does on coming up with new ideas. That’s the result of Steve Jobs’ vow to “patent it all” when the iPhone was created. Last year for the first time Apple spent more money on patenting ideas than on research and development — the result of a strategy of patenting everything, …

To you and me it’s a big phone, to wilful language manglers it’s a “phablet”. Either way, Samsung’s 5.5-inch monster Galaxy Note 2 stretches the boundaries of mobile gadgets as much as it does the sinews of your mitts. With its ingenious S Pen stylus and Samsung’s pen-driven TouchWiz tweaks to Google’s latest Jelly Bean Android software, there’s a bunch …

Uncork the champers, string up the bunting and activate the Queen — Windows Phone 8 is primed for a very British debut on 29 October, the same day that Microsoft’s new operating system goes live in the US. We’ve been sent a ‘save the date’ invitation to a London-based box social in just under three weeks’ time, where we’ll doubtless …