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China Mobile has announced that it will be releasing a Windows Phone 7 device that is compatible with the carrier's 3G network.

The move is significant for Microsoft and Nokia as China Mobile has 655 million mobile phone subscribers, by far the most in the world.

Apple has yet to get an iPhone available through China Mobile and many believe that fact will keep Apple a bit player in the world's most populous nation.

Pan Zhiyong, general manager of China Mobile's Guangzhou branch, says the phone will be available "imminently" and support the China Mobile 3G (TD-SCDMA) network. It is still unclear which device will be launched.

The device is widely expected to be the upcoming Nokia Lumia 900, although neither the company nor the carrier would confirm.

After one week of being blocked, officials in Tajikistan have restored access to Facebook and certain news sites.

"Yes, we've allowed access to Facebook but we don't know how long it will last," says one ISP. "If we again receive a signal to shut it down we will have to comply."

Following the publication of an article critical of the country's long-standing president, Tajikistan had blocked all access to two Russian-language news sites and the social networking giant Facebook on March 4th.
ISPs in the nation said the shutdown was ordered by the state-run communications service. Any user who had tried to access the sites were met with a redirect to their homepage, or the homepage of their ISP.

The news sites, tjknews.com and zvezda.ru, had published a story critical of President Emomali Rakhmon, who assumed power in 1992. It is well-known around the world that Rakhmon stole the 2006 election by fraud, and WikiLeaks brought to light that the president and his family have pillaged the country's coffers for years, including taking all profits from the state-run Tajik Aluminium Company (TALCO). The country is the poorest of the former Soviet states.

Tjknews.com had posted an article headlined 'Tajikistan on the eve of a revolution.'

Zynga has announced that it has signed a deal with developer Konami for content on its new 'Zynga Platform.'

Additionally, the company has inked deals with minor developers Rebellion and Playdemic.

The social gaming company launched the site earlier this month, in an effort to be less dependent on Facebook, the company for which it produces 12 percent of total revenue. Although the new service is still "fully Facebook-connected," the company will also open up its gaming platform to third parties.

Available so far in the beta of the platform are blockbuster hits like CastleVille, Zynga Poker, Hidden Chronicles, and CityVille.

Konami is behind classic games like Metal Gear Solid, Contra and Silent Hill, and will certainly bring some much needed "legitimacy" to the platform. It is unclear what content/games the new partners will bring to the service.

Three months after being acquired, the location-sharing app company Gowalla has shut down, as expected.

Says the statement: "Thank you for going out with Gowalla. It was a pleasure to journey with you around the world. Download your check-ins, photos and lists here soon."

The company launched in 2009, and had over 600,000 users in 2011.

Gowalla, which was made popular due to its "check-ins," had recently redesigned its mobile apps to move towards "user-generated place recommendations." The site was beginning to feel the heat from check-in services like FourSquare and from daily deal behemoths Groupon and Google before being acquired.

Some employees, including Gowalla's co-founders, will be making the move to Palo Alto to work on Facebook's Timeline initiative.

Samsung continues to crush the competition in the smartphone market in China.

The Korean phone maker took 24.3 percent market share in last quarter, easily beating out Apple which came in at 7.5 percent share. Samsung has had phones available on all three major carriers in the nation since 2009, while Apple has only been allied with one.

Apple recently signed a deal with a second carrier, China Telecom, just last week to make the iPhone available to millions of more potential buyers. Telecom is the smallest of the majors in China, with 123 million mobile phone subscribers, however, so the extent is somewhat limited.

China is expected to see a large bump in smartphone sales this year, up 50 percent to 137 million units. If the number is accurate, China will surpass the U.S. to become the world's largest market.

Apple does not have a deal in place with China Mobile, which is the largest carrier in the nation with 655 million mobile phone subscribers.

Apple has announced that the new iPad is already sold out, so fans who wanted to pre-order the device will have to wait a bit longer to get their tablet.

All pre-order supply have sold out, but the device goes on sale on March 16th through Apple retail stores and authorized resellers like AT&T, Verizon, Target and Best Buy.

Says Apple: "Customer response to the new iPad has been off the charts."

As of now, the new iPad pre-orders will ship by March 19th, later than launch day, which should come as a surprise to eager buyers.

Apple launched the LTE iPad on March 7th. The device features a Retina Display (2048x1536) screen, an A5X chip with quad-core graphics and a new iSight camera with an f/2.4 aperture and a five-element lens, capable of 1080p video recording with improved software stabilization.

Dell CEO Michael Dell has noted this week that the company will increase its efforts in the corporate market after the release of Windows 8.

In fact, the company will release the tablet "on the exact day" that Windows 8 becomes publicly available. The operating system is expected to be released in September, although Microsoft has not set an exact date.

The goal of the new tablet is to have access to Office applications like Word and Excel, and to be able to securely connect to corporate networks, two features that the iPad does not have.

Says the CEO (via BW): "Having a secure Windows tablet that works with all the Windows applications -- we're hearing a lot of demand for that and we think that will be quite attractive."

Windows 8 was recently released in "Consumer Preview" form for tablets and PCs last month to mixed reviews.

Japanese doctor wanted to show off Ferrari.

The 50-year old is charged with driving at 124km/h (77mph) in a 40km/h (25mph) zone. The evidence is a video he posted himself of the incident on YouTube. Angry YouTube users reported the video to police. The man reportedly said he simply "wanted people to understand the beauty of a Ferrari."

The video shows the car leaving an underground car pack and driving along highways and coastal roads in Fukuoka, southern Japan, for six minutes last April.

Police began investigating the video in May.

The camera was positioned behind the driver. Police determined the speed by calculating the distance covered in specific time frames.

He now faces a fine of up to $1,220 (£778) if convicted, or possibly could be landed with six months in prison.

Microsoft demos promising speech translation software.

The software synthesizes speech in a foreign language but keeps it in a voice that sounds like yours. It was demonstrated at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday by research scientist Frank Soong.

He was able to show the software reading out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss Rick Rashid, and then demonstrated a Mandarin translation using the voice of Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie.

"For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we'll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output [in] a different language, but still in his own voice," said Soong.

The new software could be used to help students learning a foreign language too. The system needs about an hour of training to develop a model capable of reading out in a person's voice.

Hear demonstrations of translations at MIT's Technology Review website.

Google paid out $120,000 for Chrome hacks.

The company had put $1,000,000 on the line for successful hacks against the Chrome web browser. For a full hack of Chrome, escaping the Sandbox by exploiting Chrome code and gaining control over a fully patched system, Google offered $60,000, while offering lesser amounts for other breaches.

Chrome had been successfully compromised during the week by Russian researcher Sergey Glazunov. On Friday, it was compromised for a second time by a teen hacker identifying only as PinkiePie.

He said he had worked for the past week and half on perfecting his attack, in which he used three previously unknown vulnerabilities to gain full access to a Dell Inspiron laptop running a patched Windows 7 operating system. All three vulnerabilities lay in code native to Google Chrome and therefore he qualified for a $60,000 pay day.

Google has already patched against both attacks shown at Pwnium.

"Congratulations to PinkiePie (aka PwniePie) for a beautiful piece of work to close out the Pwnium competition!" an advisory accompanying the update for Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of Chrome stated.

Apps send out your phone numbers, e-mail addresses, GPS coordinates and more.

An app collecting data on your phone should only need to do so if its critical to functionality, or at least that's what conventional wisdom would suggest. In reality, some smartphone apps send data to remote servers that has nothing to do with how the app operates in the first place.

A report in the UK's The Sunday Times probed 70 of these applications using MiddleMan software to monitor data transfers. Of the 70 apps, "twenty-one transmitted the phone number, six sent out email addresses, six shared the exact co-ordinates of the phone and more than half passed on the handset's ID number."

While the privacy policies and terms of these apps probably do all mention that they collect such data, most do not give an indication of where the data ends up. Using its MiddleMan software, the Sunday Times got a peak at the destinations.

Fifteen of the apps (one of which is a wallpaper app named "Cute Dog", passed on the phone number of the device to an LA-based advertiser, while a Flashlight app sent the user's email address and phone number to Delhi, India.

Lawsuit makes disturbing allegations against store workers.

It was filed by Lisa Blazek against U.S. Cellular, after she worked in a store in the city of Spencer, Iowa from 2007-2010. In it, she alleges that employees at the store would immediately search through customers phones for naked or sexually explicit images.

"If photos of that nature were found, they would show them throughout the store," the complaint reads. "Many times I would be called over to look at something only to find out that it was a sexual picture on a customer's phone."

She said the pictures ranged from simple nude photos to blatant sexually explicit material.

Her claims are denied by lawyers who are representing the company and four employees named in the lawsuit. It was filed last year.

Blazek claims her experience in the store was that of non-stop harassment, and that it only got worse once she complained. She claims her work hours were changed so she wouldn't be on shift with the worst offender, but that no disciplinary action was taken.

After she brought it to the attention of higher ups, a company investigator accused her of having a relationship with one of the alleged harassers and attempted to coerce her into abandoning her complaint altogether. Eventually, she quit her job, and is now seeking compensation for lost pay, health benefits, emotional distress and additional punitive damages.

Google reportedly warning app developers.

It was reported that the search giant threatened to remove developers' software from its store unless they accepted payments exclusively using Google's payment service. While developers for Apple's Store have no choice but to use Apple's iTunes payment service, apps for Android often accept from a variety of sources, such as PayPal.

Recently, the Android Market was absorbed into Google Play, a music, movies and app store similar to iTunes. After this changes, reports that Google had changed its payment policies and was now threatening app developers emerged.

Google told the BBC that it has not changed its policies for Android apps, and that the distribution agreement always made developers use the Google Wallet service. It did not reveal whether it has started to enforce that requirement.

The Android Market / Google Play does allow for in-ap purchases to be made using alternative payment services. This means that, for example, Amazon does not have to sue Google Wallet and give Google a cut for every item it sells with its Android app.

Geotagged photos pose a risk, Army says.

It has warned that smartphones often geotag photos automatically with GPS information, which can give away the exact location of a unit. In 2007, four US Army helicopters were destroyed in Iraq after geotagged photos featuring them were posted online.

The Army also warns that this information could be dangerous to soldiers at home who use Facebook and other social media services. "Do you really want everyone to know the exact location of your home or your children's school?" Staff Sgt Dale Sweetnam of the Online and Social Media Division said.

"Before adding a location to a photo, soldiers really need to step back and ask themselves, 'Who really needs to know this location information?'"

Facebook's Timeline has also posed a new problem for the Army, revealing soldiers' routes and habits publicly to anyone who is interesting in knowing. It's for these reasons that the British Army has banned the use of all mobile phones in operational zones, and also warns soldiers about taking geotagged photos at home.

Microsoft Applied Sciences group shows simple low-lag concept touchscreen.

Users of touchscreen devices will have noticed the slight lag/delay between when they touch the surface with their finger tips, and when that touch actually registers with the device. This is particularly evident when using drawing / painting applications, when you have to drag your fingertip across the screen.

Microsoft Research has shown a very simple concept touch display with two orders of magnitude less latency than current systems. The video is not graphically rich and the demonstration is quite basic, but it gets the point across.