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Nokia Lumia 900 update includes flip

If you wish your Nokia Lumia 900 did a little bit more, you may be in luck. Nokia began rolling out another update today to its premier, polycarbonate smartphone that includes a few little enhancements like the popular and ever-useful muting of calls when you flip the phone face-down. Related stories Nokia, Microsoft hold NY …

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Galaxy S3 Jelly Bean and Bond’s blower in Phone News video

Now playing: Watch this: Phone News: Galaxy S3 Jelly Bean and Bond’s blower 2:52 Prepare your brain for all the phone news it can handle — from Jelly Bean to James Bond we’re rounding up the week’s mobile happenings, so click play on the video above to edify yourself. All the week’s major tech stories are covered, starting with hot-off-the-press …

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Wal

Watch out, Google Wallet. There’s a new mobile-payment service in the works. A consortium of of retailers today announced that they have launched a mobile-commerce company, called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX). Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and Lowe’s are among the many companies that have signed up for the initiative. The companies combine to generate a whopping $1 trillion in sales …

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Kyocera Rise with Android 4.0 comes to Sprint, Virgin Mobile

Now playing: Watch this: Kyocera Rise: A keyboard phone with a scoop of ICS 0:56 Sprint and Virgin Mobile announced today that they will carry the Kyocera Rise, a slideout QWERTY keyboard phone that we first caught a glimpse of in May during CTIA 2012. In addition to its four-row keyboard, the Rise runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. …

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Take a virtual tour of Mars on your iPhone or iPad

If you’ve been following the Curiosity rover’s progress even a little, you’ve probably seen the cool 360-degree Mars panorama that hit the Web a couple days ago. As CNET’s Amanda Kooser pointed out, it’s “about as close as you’ll get to being there.” Now you can get even closer, virtually speaking. It turns out that the panorama works with gyroscopes, …

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HP spins off WebOS business, rebranding it as ‘Gram’

Hewlett-Packard is rebranding its WebOS Global Business Unit as a new company called Gram, according to an internal company e-mail. Penned by HP Senior VP Martin Risau, the August 11 memo obtained by CNET encourages employees to tell outsiders little about the company other than it is operating in stealth mode: Thank you for all of your enthusiasm at yesterday’s …

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Are letterboxed movies really 1080p?

Geoffrey Morrison/CNET CNET reader Doug asks: Hello! I was watching a movie on Blu-ray the other day filmed in the 21:9 aspect ratio and I realized that it technically wasn’t “1080p” since about 1/4 of the screen was taken up by the horizontal black bars (called “letter boxing,” correct?). Anyway, I was just wondering how many pixels were being used …

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Android 4.0 rolling out to Droid 4

Motorola has confirmed that the Verizon Droid 4 is now officially undergoing its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update. A late Monday tweet from the handset maker advises that the update is rolling out in phases. As is the case with other Android 4.0 builds, the Droid 4 will get features such as face unlock, data management, and a friendlier …

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