Droid, the most hyped Android phone to date - even Google promoted it on its home page today - is finally available to buy in Verizon Wireless stores.

More than 100 people queued at midnight outside a midtown Manhattan store to be among the first members of the public to get their hands on one.

I’ve been lucky enough to have one on loan for more than a week now, so here’s my assessment after the jump of whether it has been worth the wait and queues. Continue reading "Droid - the good, the bad and the ugly"

You just know that this is not the end.

It’s like one of those bad soap operas. There’s a big family wedding coming up and the distant European cousins aren’t invited. It leads to some vicious public name-calling. Eventually everyone calms down and the cousins are invited after all, though some other guests have be thrown off the list to make room for them.

But as soon as they all get in the same room again, it won’t take long for the bad feelings to return. You just know. Continue reading "Skype soap opera set to continue"

In this week’s FT techtalk, we discussed how the dotcom world is bubbling along again, the tech industry is rebounding and the video game sector is about to be lifted by a rocket-propelled grenade or two.

We also took a peek at a new Twitter device, looked at the newest phones and brought you the breaking news on the resolution to the Skype dispute. Read our multimedia transcript below and join us next time live for FT Techtalk. Continue reading "FT techtalk - the boys in the bubbles"

This is probably as good as it gets for D-ram industry consolidation in Taiwan. ProMOS, which stood on the brink of bankruptcy for much of the past year, was assured of new business on Friday when it signed an agreement to provide manufacturing services to Japan’s Elpida. Elpida will also licence the technology needed to produce future generations of D-ram chips to ProMOS. Continue reading "As good as it gets for D-ram consolidation"

Top wired telecom provider AT&T is clearly doing something right with U-verse TV, its cable-like service delivering more than 100 high-definition television channels over internet pipes to what are now more than 1.8m living rooms.

On Thursday, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan and others came to San Francisco to show off what may be coming improvements to U-verse, among other things, from the research labs that claim 8 Nobel Prizes. Continue reading "AT&T says people still don’t want the Web on TV"

Two weeks after the launch of Windows 7 come some early data on how it is faring with consumers (while these sales are minor in the bigger scheme of things, getting early favourable buzz going with consumers is an essential part of building momentum for the new operating system).

According to research firm NPD, purchases of the software upgrade in the US were 82 per cent higher in the first few days than they were at the launch of Vista (in dollar terms). You can put most of that down to promotional offers.

However, consumers didn’t rush out straight away to buy Windows 7 PCs (despite assurances from Steve Ballmer that new PCs will be the main driver of demand for the software). Sales of PCs were up 49 per cent from the year before, which is less than the 68 per cent year-over-year bump they got with the Vista launch. You can probably put that down to the recession.

The verdict: this vital product launch has gone off pretty smoothly (while giving Apple another chance to poke fun). But it will be a long time before 7 can be declared a success.

Google has had several years of tussles now with privacy regulators. Three years ago European data protection commissioners began question what the company was doing with all the personal data it was gleaning from users of its search engine. In the past year, the company has faced outrage - at least in some pockets like Italy, Japan and Switzerland - over Street View, which provides panoramic, eye-level views of every street of major cities around the world.

Earlier this year, a leading privacy group called on the US Federal Trade Commission to consider shutting down Google’s web services until the company could better safeguard personal data. There have been a number of instances where Google Docs, Google Desktop and Gmail have had glitches which made users personal documents visible to others. Continue reading "Google’s ‘dashboard’ privacy controls are a good start"

The growth of the smartphone category is causing intense competition among operating systems, handset makers and the chipmakers that supply them.

Paul Jacobs, chief executive of Qualcomm, the biggest wireless chipmaker, sees that competition intensifying over the next year in smartphones and other handsets, which will translate into lower prices. Continue reading "Qualcomm sees falling phone prices in 2010"