The iPad continues to frustrate magazine publishers who counted on the Apple tablet as a digital lifeline for their ailing traditional businesses. A key sticking point has been Apple's reluctance to allow publishers like Hearst and Conde Nast charge for subscriptions for iPad editions of their titles, as they do offline. A New York Times story today highlights that publishers feel having to charge on an individual basis (typically at the same cost as a print copy) is holding back their progress in attracting readers to the iPad.

So everyone knows Verizon Wireless will face a bit of a conundrum in promoting the iPhone after so conspicuously bashing the Apple devices with its "Droid Does" campaign targeting its limitations. Well, Verizon can't turn around now and attack the Droid since it still hopes to sell lots more of those and other Android phones. That leaves its old sparring partner AT&T as the logical target of an ad campaign where both sides have essentially the same device. Network speed and quality will be the factors that differentiate the two carriers' version of the iPhone. So what approach might Verizon …

The speculation over whether Verizon Wireless will get the iPhone has ended, but projections about the impact this will have on AT&T continue. According to a new study from ChangeWave, 16% of AT&T subscribers surveyed just before the Verizon iPhone announcement said they would switch to Verizon when it began offering the iPhone.

This is cool. In the updated version of its Google Translate for Android app released today, Google has added an experimental feature called Conversation Mode that allows users to translate in-person conversations on the fly.

After years of ceaseless speculation, rumor, hype and disappointment, the Verizon iPhone is finally a reality. The nation's largest wireless operator paired with the world's most iconic smartphone. Jan. 11 may be celebrated in coming years as a sort of second Christmas for Apple worshippers and phone geeks everywhere.

It's no secret by now that Verizon Wireless plans to announce tomorrow it finally has the iPhone, breaking AT&T's three-year stranglehold on the coveted device. The smartphone equivalent of the golden goose is no longer AT&T's property alone.

Along with the explosion of tablets, Android devices and 4G phones, one of the trends emerging from the Consumer Electronics Show this week is a fresh mobile video push in 2011. Despite the shutdown of Qualcomm's FLO TV service last year and the sale of the FLO spectrum to AT&T, broadcasters, carriers and handset makers are rolling out new initiatives banking on a growing mobile video audience.

If "4G" could be licensed as a trademarked term, its pitch might be "4G: Whatever you want it to be." AT&T's rebranding this week of its formerly 3G network as 4G because of a broadening of what can be termed a fourth-generation wireless service is only the latest and starkest example of how meaningless the label has become.

A new report from mobile analytics firm Flurry estimates more than 60 million devices run Google's Android operating system. The number of Android smartphones or tablets has jumped nearly tenfold in the last two years. And while HTC was the early beneficiary of Android's emerging popularity, other manufacturers, especially Samsung, have taken increasing shares of the Android market in the last year.

Increasingly our phones are not phones at all. There's the old saw about the iPhone being the Swiss Army knife of phones, good for everything but making calls (though lately, there have been murmurings that it doesn't make a very good alarm clock either). With open-source Android able to be installed on everything from car dashboards to toasters (ok, not quite yet on the latter, but the former is happening), the line becomes further blurred than it had been with talk of a Facebook phone. Now we have another "phone" on the way: the so-called Playstation Phone from Sony.