High global prices for the Windows Phone 8 Nokia Lumia 920 are causing a stir for outlets reporting U.S. dollar equivalents ranging from $643 to $860 in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Sweden — but U.S. buyers considering the phone have little cause to worry. Although international price tags are said to be 10 percent to …

Apple ditched Google Maps over voice-guided turn-by-turn driving directions, according to reports. The two companies faced stalemate over the maps app as Apple refused to allow Google branding, while Google refused to give up spoken directions. AllThingsD reports Apple wanted verbal directions added to the Google Maps app on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch — after all, they’re included …

Last week it was priced at £400 — now it seems the HTC 8X costs £530. HTC’s first Windows Phone 8 device arrives later in the year, and we’ve seen wildly differing prices for it. The new price comes courtesy of Amazon, which is offering the phone for £530, with free delivery, at the time of writing. The bad news …

What would you say to an LTE hot spot that connects up to 10 Wi-Fi devices and comes with a 2.8-inch touch screen? The MiFi Liberate, made by Novatel Wireless, uses the screen to offer easy access to management menus directly from the device. Icons that smartphone and feature phone users are accustomed to pressing lead you to data usage, …

Just one look at the stylus in Samsung’s Save the Date invite we received today will tell you all you need to know: it’s time for the U.S. to get the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (II) “phablet.” Related stories: Samsung Galaxy Note 2 hands-on Quad-core Samsung Galaxy Note 2 launches with 5 carriers That’s my educated guess, anyway, considering that …

The Samsung Galaxy S3 4G will be in Telstra stores from 9 October and can be ordered online from today. Telstra’s S3 4G page. (Credit: Screenshot/CNET) When Virgin and Optus announced that they would be selling the 4G version of the popular Samsung Galaxy S3, Telstra was biding its time before discussing its own plans for availability. Telstra has now …

iPhone 5 owners are complaining that Apple’s new phone take photos with an annoying purple haze. The complaint appears to have surfaced in a forum thread at AnandTech, and sees an unsightly purple halo appearing when photos are taken with the new phone pointing toward bright light sources. One user has reportedly contacted Apple support and was told it was …

Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins has no shortage of confidence, boasting to investors that he believes BlackBerry 10 will take market share away from his rivals. The new platform will also attract consumers new to smartphones to, Heins said during the company’s quarterly conference call. RIM’s BlackBerry 10 smartphones will target mid-tier consumers and higher when they first launch, …

Bank of America is testing a new mobile-payment service that lets customers use their Apple or Google smartphones to scan pictures to pay for things. The bank is testing technology developed by a company called Paydiant. The solution uses Quick Response or QR codes. The way it works is that users use their smartphones to scan the QR code, which …

Apple’s App Store has always offered the most apps to users. But that could change. Google announced yesterday that its Google Play store now offers 675,000 applications. Apple announced earlier this month that its store had 700,000 applications available. Both Google and Apple’s apps stores launched in 2008. However, as Inside Mobile Apps pointed out yesterday, Apple’s option has historically …

Intel has excitedly chucked out a whole bunch of details about its new Atom mobile processor that will soon be turning up inside Windows 8-powered tablets. The good news is that the new silicon will allow for skinny, powerful slates with long battery life. Intel’s newest Atom chip — known to its closest friends as the Atom Z2760 — is …

For all the talk of revolution at Research In Motion’s developer conference this week, something about BlackBerry Jam Americas felt rather familiar. Think of it this way: a once-mighty tech company, elbowed out of the smartphone revolution by Apple and Android, making a new push to get back into the game. Amid high pressure to deliver, the company puts all …

Editors’ note: This story was updated September 27, 2012, to include a response from Logitech. In my review of the Logitech UE Smart Radio, there’s a single parenthetical line mentioning that the company is discontinuing the Squeezebox line of products. Incredibly, that’s more than Logitech has officially said on the matter, leaving the passionate fans of the Squeezebox platform wondering …

I’ve had some hands-on time with Simple.TV’s hardware, but it won’t be shipping until mid-October. Sarah Tew/CNET Simple.TV started as a darling of CES 2012, but recently it’s been faced with the more pedestrian realities of launching a new product, such as raising money via Kickstarter and meeting its release dates. Simple.TV announced late yesterday that it would not be …

If you’re looking for a cheap TV 42 inches or larger, there are a lot of advantages to buying a plasma instead of an LCD. The biggest is picture quality: an LCD is typically not able to reproduce the black levels and contrast of an equivalently priced plasma, and plasma always trounces LCD for viewing angle and uniformity. Entry-level 720p …