Personal communications

HANNOVER, Germany--In today's James Bond world, smartphones get you instant access to top-secret information. In the real world, security constraints mean mobile phones generally aren't nearly so clever or convenient.

BlackBerry and Secusmart hope to change that through a partnership that at least has won over the German federal government. It has authorized purchases of phones with the BlackBerry 10 operating system augmented with Secusmart's SD card-mounted security chips for classified communications, said Hans-Christoph Quelle, Secusmart managing director, speaking here at the CeBit technology show.

The approach uses a feature in BlackBerry 10 called Balance, which partitions … Read more

Nokia Lumia 822 owners can expect a small gift from Finland today. An over-the-air software update began rolling out to the Verizon Wireless Windows Phone 8 device at 1 p.m. ET.

New features in the update include improved performance for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and support for more microSD card brands. You'll also gain the ability to select an MP3 file as a ringtone, edit a multimedia message when forwarding, select multiple recipients for a message (yes!), and ignore calls with a text message reply.

A slightly downgraded Nokia Lumia 920, the Lumia 822 is one of three Windows … Read more

If you didn't get enough new phones from Mobile World Congress this week, then I have good news for you. Sprint today followed through on a previous leak by announcing the Sprint Force, an Android smartphone made by ZTE.

Running on Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 and powered by an 1.5GHz dual-core processor, the Force Sprint has a 4-inch WVGA (480x800 pixels) capacitive touch screen display and, for a smartphone at least, a relatively compact build (4.88 by 2.54 by 0.47 inches; 5.4 ounces).

Inside you'll find Wi-Fi, a 5-megapixel main camera with … Read more

HTC quietly confirmed today (or should I say quietly and brilliantly?) that its custom Sense 5 interface will come to select 2012 Android smartphones. A post on the company's Facebook from last week tells of multiple models which should expect the new HTC experience.

The short list of devices tapped for the HTC Sense 5 UI are the HTC One X, One X+, One S and the HTC Butterfly. HTC does not explicitly name which iterations will see the update though it mentions "global variants." Depending on how loosely this is interpreted, we might see the Droid … Read more

Imagine waking up, reaching for the tablet on your nightstand, and turning on your coffee maker from bed. You catch a few more winks before it alerts you that your hot java's ready. If Qualcomm's concept Wi-Fi coffee maker ever goes into production, your mornings may never be quite the same.

The coffee maker, however, is just one of many odd and unusual gadgets on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--People save 1 billion files every day to Dropbox's online storage service, Chief Executive Drew Houston said today at the Mobile World Congress show here.

In addition, the company's 100 million users tap into the service with 500 million devices, he said. The statistics shows major growth for a company founded in 2007 when today's high-end smartphones only just were emerging.

When the company started, Dropbox could synchronize people's data among PCs, but now of course it helps bridge the gaps to smartphones, tablets, and presumably other Internet-connected devices of the future. The company has … Read more

Google had already achieved a measure of success with the Chromebook Pixel, according to an analyst at Gap Intelligence.

"[It's] a fantastic ploy to get people to think about Chrome differently," said Deron Kershaw, an analyst Gap Intelligence who follows retail sales of laptops.

The Pixel is now being sold by Best Buy at a starting price of $1,299.

Kershaw continued. "In addition to drawing a line in the sand with Apple on touch, they're trying to craft the sense that premium hardware and a web-centric OS aren't incompatible with each other. And … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Carriers love to bash companies like Skype and WhatsApp that provide services on top of their mobile networks at the Mobile World Congress trade show. But one thing was different this year: Viber Media founder and Chief Executive Talmon Marco entered the lion's den to defend the idea.

Viber's free messaging service, which competes directly with carriers' own high-profit services for text- and multimedia-messaging services, is a prime example of the despised over-the-top (OTT) approach. Marco showed no remorse for sapping telco revenues and argued that users are just moving to where the innovative, useful services are … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--With another 2 billion people hooking up to the Internet in the next five years, there's plenty of room for another mobile operating system, Mozilla Chief Executive Gary Kovacs said today in a sales pitch for his new Firefox OS.

Apple and Google have led the way in the smartphone market but can't cover the whole thing, he said in a speech to thousands at the Mobile World Congress show here, though he didn't mention the companies by name.

"I find it impossible to understand how 3, 4, 5, or 6 billion people are going … Read more