Stories by: Nancy Gohring

Palm launched an online store where users can buy software directly from their handsets, becoming the latest phone maker to follow in Apple's footsteps with an application store.

Just two years ago, the mobile phone market was pretty ho-hum. You had your candy bar phones and your flip phones. There were BlackBerry devices and Windows Mobile phones. Those phones had calendars and contact lists, and a few other apps that were too annoying to use. Few people ever added any new applications to their phones. Surfing the Web was for emergency use only, since it was slow and ugly.

They're back: rumours of an impending Zune phone announcement from Microsoft, this time probably at CES.

Microsoft's Live Labs on Wednesday introduced a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from Web sites and share the collections with others.

Fourteen new companies including Sony Ericsson have joined the Open Handset Alliance, the group backing Google's Android mobile operating system. The total number of companies in the alliance now totals 47.

Just in time for the end-of-year shopping season, Google is offering an unlocked Android phone, targeted at developers but available to anyone. While the phone might be attractive to consumers and developers alike in the U.S., its price in other countries is putting off even developers.

Microsoft has released an early version of an open-source content management platform that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large Web sites.

After warning less than a month ago that the worldwide handset market would do worse than expected this year and next, Nokia on Thursday revised down its expectations again.

Smartphone maker HTC said on Wednesday that it bought San Francisco design firm One &. for an undisclosed sum.

Microsoft is making payback quicker on its Cashback program after the service suffered an outage Friday and failed to give some people discounts they were eligible for.

Microsoft has charged a Florida company with cybersquatting in a new lawsuit filed Wednesday.