TopNews

The Tuesday announcement by Sprint, about its plans to sell the LG Mach slider-style smartphone with qwerty keyboard, indicates that the third-ranking US carrier still feels that there is enough demand for handsets with qwerty keyboards, in spite of the increasing inclination of the users towards touchscree smartphones.

The LG Mach is the second qwerty-keyboard handset which will be offered by Sprint this fall --- the other physical qwerty keyboard handset to be sold by the carrier being the Motorola Photon Q.

South Korea-based fifth-ranking handset manufacturer by shipments, LG Electronics, has recently released its new Android-based handset - the Optimus L9, which the company had demonstrated at the MobileCon 2012 event.

The new Optimus L9, for which LG had joined forces with T-Mobile to cater to the US markets, is the top-tier handset in the L-series lineup; and is equipped with a 1GHz dual-core CPU as well as 4G capabilities.

In a recent announcement which underscores the fact that Verizon Wireless is apparently set to surpass its year-end 4G target, the bigwig US carrier has revealed that its 400th 4G LTE market will be launched two months ahead of schedule --- on October 18!

According to the announcement, the 400th market in which Verizon will roll out its high-speed 4G LTE service next week will be Marquette, Mich. In addition to Marquette, the carrier's 4G LTE services will be available to as many as 21 new markets on the same day, October 18.

On Tuesday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings revealed in an announcement that he is leaving the Microsoft board of directors --- the departure, coming after Hastings' 5-1/2-year stint as a Microsoft board director, will take effect November 28; the day for which Microsoft's annual shareholders is scheduled.

About the reason behind his decision to quit the Microsoft board, 51-year-old Hastings - who owns approximately 226,000 shares of Microsoft stock presently valued at $6.6 million - said that the move will give him more time on the Netflix video subscription service.

While the debacle of the home-bred Maps app for the iOS 6 may appear to the casual observers as an incident which took Apple completely by surprise, some recent reports have revealed that the company apparently had enough beforehand warning about the problematic issues with its embarrassing Maps app.

The Firefox 16 version - meant to be a much enhanced platform for developing apps for the desktop browser as well as the mobile web - has recently been released by Mozilla, with the aim of giving the web developers a notable array of new tools to build and debug websites.