The number of corporations arming workers with tablets will double early next year, a research firm said today, citing its recent survey of more than 1,600 IT buyers.

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Apple, Oracle and EMC are involved with CPTN Holdings LLC, the Microsoft-led consortium that is purchasing 882 patents from Novell for US$450 million, according to a Dec. 9 posting on the website of German antitrust authority Bundeskartellamt, or Federal Cartel Office.

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STEC today announced that for the first time a major equipment manufacturer, IBM, has incorporated its MLC-based SSDs into both high-end external storage arrays.

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The U.S. Department of Commerce recommends a new privacy bill of rights and an enforceable privacy code of conduct for online firms.

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Continuing its ongoing legal battle against Apple, Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia on Thursday said it has filed infringement claims against the iPhone maker in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands covering more than a dozen patents Nokia asserts are its own.

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Apple’s Mac App Store will officially open for business on January 6th (along with CES in Las Vegas). But some developers are still unhappy with some of Apple’s terms including a prohibition on free demos, beta software, and some types of content.

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The World Wide Web consortium offers suggestions for making Web-based mobile apps easy to use, and easy on the network

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A leading open standards organization has welcomed the European Union’s new rules on industry cooperation, adopted by the European Commission on Tuesday.

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Nokia announced on Thursday that it has filed patent claims in the U.K. High Court, Dusseldorf and Mannheim District Courts in Germany and the District Court of the Hague, Netherlands, again taking aim at Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

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Justice Breyer’s recent comments about Facebook and “The Social Network” and recent Supreme Court hearings present interesting questions: How clearly do the Justices understand technology? Can they accurately comprehend highly technical Internet protocols? How well does the U.S. Constitution apply to today’s legal questions?

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The third update to Apple’s iBooks app lets users organize iBookstore purchases and PDFs into groups called collections (much as you would print books on physical bookcases). It also adds support for highly illustrated books (like children’s titles) and the ability to print notes made about passages in individual books.

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EBay will boost its mobile development capabilities with the acquisition of Critical Path Software, announced on Wednesday.

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Oracle has released version 5.5 of its open source MySQL database

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Microsoft on Wednesday showed off how Facebook friends will influence Bing users’ search results, as part of a wide-ranging update on search that also showcased developments in its local and image search and maps offerings.

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According to Matt Rosoff over at Business Insider, Google is willing to shell out “tens of millions of dollars” to the major record companies so they’ll buy into the search giant’s proposed music service.

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As recently as a year ago, many enterprises couldn’t have imagined that the iPhone would now be second place in terms of security features that enterprises require, behind only the BlackBerry and ahead of Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

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The man behind the world’s largest social network has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

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Resellers are confused when it comes to the cloud and are in no position to help out their customers according to a new survey

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Carriers and pundits must move beyond speed battles to achieve more of the potential benefits available from commercial deployments of long term evolution (LTE) mobile networks, Ericsson has urged.

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The U.S. ranks 25th in the world in average Internet connection speed, a new report says.

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We’d recommend buying these top-rated cameras anyway, but their Black Friday bargain prices sweeten the deal significantly.

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Hong Kong-based network operator CSL has become the first to offer mobile broadband using both LTE and the latest version of HSPA, it said in a joint statement with network vendor ZTE on Thursday.

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Three men found guilty of being accessories to crimes against copyright law for their part in running The Pirate Bay have lost their appeal, while a fourth man still awaits trial.

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Rumors continue to swirl over Apple’s next generation iPad, and one reliable Taiwanese newspaper says the new device will be out in the first quarter of 2011, complete with video calling, two cameras, new display and touch technology, and a USB port to connect easily to other devices.

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European countries are outstripping the U.S. in terms of broadband take-up, but their broadband connections don’t match the speeds of those in Asian countries.

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YouTube is an excellent way of informing others about your products, but it’s surprising how many video clips involve the same fundamental errors–everything from interjecting speech with “um,” to allowing the camera to lose its focus. Even videos from supposedly professional media outlets can involve a depressing level of amateurism.

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The $1.3 billion in damages assessed Tuesday by a federal jury against German business software vendor SAP for stealing intellectual property from database giant Oracle could be reduced by the presiding judge, Phyllis Hamilton, who still has to formally affirm the verdict.

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The U.K.’s domain name registry is examining its policies around suspending domain names, a move occasionally undertaken in order to prevent criminal activity on the Internet.

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The U.K.’s National Health Service plans to make clearer the privacy policy of its Choices health information Web site, which shares browsing information with Facebook, following complaints from a security expert and a lawmaker, an NHS spokesman said Thursday.

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The University of Warwick has awarded a contract for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) facility to OFC.

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Sales are a common enough occurrence in the fourth quarter of the year, but if some analysts are to be believed we’re going to be seeing some drastic price reductions on televisions this holiday season.

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Thirty-three contributors to the OpenOffice.org project are leaving, unhappy with what they say is Oracle’s attitude toward the project’s organization and management.

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Nearly half of the IT decision makers surveyed recently by Gartner named data growth as one of their top three challenges and almost two-thirds of them plan to add capacity next year.

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A botnet has been systematically attacking Web sites that post blogs or forums containing content critical of the Vietnamese Communist Party, according to security firm SecureWorks.

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Since its founding in 1946, Sony has produced some of the biggest hits in consumer electronics. Brand names like Walkman, Handycam and Trinitron helped define the company as a giant in the industry and more recent hits like Cybershot, Vaio, Bravia and PlayStation have helped keep it there.

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Attending the best scholarly lectures used to require access to high profile academic institutions (and a lot of money). Apple’s often overlooked iTunes U brings you lectures, presentations, and now texts from the world’s top universities for free.

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Taiwanese company Proview is planning to file a lawsuit against Apple for alleged trademark infringement over the iPad later this year, Proview’s chairman said on Tuesday.

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I was going to ignore the debut of “human input” search engine Blekko.com today, mostly because I’m wary of “this is the next big search engine” kind of hype.

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IT departments do not trust virtual infrastructure to form the backbone of their IT environment, according to new research.

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Lookout Mobile Security will soon start selling a premium version of its smartphone security software that includes new privacy and backup and restore features.

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