Customers are now buying more costly cell phones with features such as GPS, Bluetooth, and music enablement, not just in the US but worldwide, according to recent research by two industry analyst firms.

According to a new study from analyst firm NPD, mobile handsets sold in the US during the second quarter of this year were, "by and large, more feature-rich than those sold the year prior." Meanwhile, demand is increasing throughout the world for handsets with features such as GPS, touchscreen, and multimedia, concurs a study by IDC released at the end of July.

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The FTC has given EA the go-ahead to purchase the smaller rival, and EA has indicated that it had shifted strategies away from a hostile bid to more friendly talks.

US Federal Trade Commission approval of the deal had been something that was eluding EA for several months now. Along the way, the agency had extended its own deadline to approve the merger, most recently in early July until this Thursday.

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Are you ready for 3D, overlaid, interactive widgets to move off of the PC desktop onto your television set? An initiative announced yesterday by a powerhouse team of developers will probably make it happen, whether you're ready or not.

In one of the many intriguing developments to come out of this year's Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, both Yahoo and Comcast stated yesterday they will partner with Intel in the creation of a system that will conceivably deliver interactive, overlaid widgets -- the kind you see on the Mac OS X Dashboard or the Windows Vista Sidebar -- directly through live, digital TV.

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Just one day after the Federal Communications Commission released its official opinion and order regarding the cable provider's throttling practices, Comcast has changed its ways.

Called Fair Share, the service's new protocol will slow down the connection speeds of Comcast's most bandwidth-heavy users for periods of up to 20 minutes. It will be application-agnostic, and will be triggered by the customer's overall use of bandwidth.

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Claiming that the iPhone 3G doesn't really perform "twice as fast for half the price," a user in Alabama has filed a class action suit against Apple, charging that the phone is "defective" and that it has failed to live up to its hype.

The disgruntled customer, Jessica Alena Smith, issued the complaint against Apple in the US District Court in southern Alabama on behalf of herself "and all others similarly situated," a number estimated in the court filing at "thousands and perhaps tens of thousands" of other people.

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The Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon's block-level persistent storage service for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has come out of beta, offering more security for databases in the event of instance failures.

For companies relying on cloud-based services, the threat of outages looms large. In July, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down for eight hours, dozens of popular sites such as Twitter and SmugMug were disrupted.

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High definition "webisodes," RSS feeds, podcasts, and iTunes downloads will be integral elements of a new image-making campaign for the 256-year-old US Postal Service.

The new, multiple award-winning "Mark of the Eagle" campaign hardly represents the first time the US government agency has stepped to new technologies over the past two-and-a-half centuries. But instead of automating processes such as sorting and processing mail, the USPS' latest move is geared to drawing more business among new generations who have a lot more communications options open to them than just popping a letter into a physical mailbox.

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Today, IBM announced a $300 million investment around building upon its 154 existing data centers in 2008, with the addition of 13 new "Business Resilience" service delivery centers in ten countries, including the US.

The new data centers will be located in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area in the US and in emerging markets elsewhere in the world, said Brian Reagan, IBM's director of business continuity and resiliency strategy, in an interview with BetaNews.

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Bloggers have uncovered paperwork for two possible applications from Microsoft having to do with keeping the details of a user's browsing session private.

Critics of what could become a critical feature for Internet Explorer 8 have derided the idea of a built-in privacy feature for erasing histories and other trace elements, as nothing more than a "porn mode," allowing for surfers to cover their tracks if they are viewing questionable content. However, Mozilla -- which was set to include the feature in Firefox 3, but later pulled it -- argued for its legitimate uses.

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Apple is apparently set to release a fix for an issue which is locking some iPhone users out of their installed third-party applications.

Users have been complaining about the issues in Apple support forums since earlier this month. With the first post coming before the 2.0.1 update, its not unreasonable to believe some have been experiencing this problem nearly from the start.

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Following a BetaNews article indicating that Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin suggested the company's finances were in bad shape, the company shot back that it was not the case.

A spokesperson for the satellite radio provider contacted BetaNews late Tuesday refuting the original article's premise that Karmazin had admitted that Sirius XM's finances were not healthy.

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In its latest Stop||Watch commercial rankings, TiVo found that, while viewers fast-forward through most paid advertisements, movie trailers are among the least skipped.

Stop||Watch has been measuring this trend for months. In May, the top three most-watched commercials were promoting movies. Now, the results for June show the top four commercials in total viewing were for movies.

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To remain competitive as user activity levels off, eBay has announced that Buy it Now sales will incur a reduced flat fee for an extended listing period.

Online auction service eBay charges its sellers twice for each transaction: once for listing the item (called the insertion fee) and once after the item has been sold (or the final value fee). Effective September 16, sellers will be able to insert 30-day Buy it Now auctions for 35¢, a 70% reduction in listing cost, according to eBay.

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In a series of announcements this afternoon, Sony says its preparing to distribute a wide array of new gaming system features well for the holiday season, including a new hard disk capacity for its upper-tier PlayStation 3.

As of last February, Sony was bundling its $499, upper-tier PlayStation 3 as an 80 GB console with Metal Gear Solid 4 and a DualShock 3 controller. Then last month, the new CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America announced an 80 GB Core package for $399 in lieu of an actual price cut.

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Download AIM Express 7.0 from FileForum now.

Two new AIM updates geared toward keeping the mobile user connected, were launched by AOL this morning: AIM Express (IE6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3, and Safari 2 & 3) and AIM for Windows Mobile (5 & 6).

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