Technewsbuzz.com

The latest version of Palm’s webOS is out, but a reduction in orders to suppliers had investors worried Wednesday. The release of webOS 1.3.5 for Sprint Nextel’s Palm Pre and Pixi customers isn’t expected to ease Palm’s financial woes, but makes it easier for users to download applications from the App Catalog. Palm has had 10 consecutive quarterly losses, and its new webOS faces significant competition. Palm investors worry that webOS may not be the preferred platform for Palm’s wireless-carrier partners or end users. And Palm’s recent cuts in orders to suppliers left investors feeling shaky. While Palm expects webOS to lead its product road map and services and be a key differentiator, it’s a new OS and the …

Instead of wishing Verizon Wireless a happy holiday, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn has sent a not-so-happy message to the wireless carrier. In an open letter, the newly appointed commissioner said Verizon has some explaining to do. Clyburn wants Verizon to provide better justification after the company last week announced a higher early termination fee (ETF) for contracts associated with the purchase of smartphones, PDAs and netbooks offered at a reduced price. The commissioner called Verizon’s reason for increasing the ETF from $175 to $350 “troubling” and “unsatisfying” and expressed hope the company will reconsider the fee hike that may …

BlackBerry users are still fuming over the near-total collapse of e-mail this week, and the impact on manufacturer Research In Motion could last a lot longer than a New Year’s Day hangover. Users got an early piece of coal in their stockings Tuesday when many BlackBerry smartphones — now deemed “Crashberries” by some wags — stopped sending and receiving e-mails. BoxTone, a mobility management software provider, said the outage started between 3 and 4 p.m. Tuesday and reached a critical state by 7 p.m. “At each of our customers, BoxTone detected a greater-than-normal quantity of users with messages pending, based on our learned baseline of what is normal for each server and carrier, and immediately …

With BlackBerry users still fuming over the near-total collapse of e-mail just prior to Christmas, the impact on manufacturer Research In Motion could last a lot longer than a New Year’s Day hangover. Users got an early piece of coal in their stockings Tuesday when many BlackBerry smartphones — now deemed “Crashberries” by some wags — stopped sending and receiving e-mails. BoxTone, a mobility management software provider, said the outage started between 3 and 4 p.m. Tuesday and reached a critical state by 7 p.m. “At each of our customers, BoxTone detected a greater-than-normal quantity of users with messages pending…

The iPhone is already touted for its gaming prowess almost endlessly, but it looks like things are about to take a pretty big leap forward. Epic Games has been crackin’ away at an iPhone port of their Unreal Engine 3 — the engine that powers such jaw-droppingly beautiful games as BioShock, Mirror’s Edge, Gears of War 2, and a bunch of others — and they’re now far enough along that they’re looking to show it off. The first person lucky enough to get some hands-on time with the engine was Anand over at Anandtech , who seems to have walked away impressed. The stuff we’ll see on the iPhone obviously aren’t going to be …

PayPal is finally extending its money transfer system to the BlackBerry, with a new, free Send Money app for the Blackberry. The app will let you access your PayPal account and easily send money to a recipient. You can find on the BlackBerry App World here. The app will also tap into your contact list on the phone making it simple to choose a recipient to send money too. Users can also access their recent PayPal transactions and monitor their account balances directly from the app.

Oh now this is exciting. Microsoft released a Twitter application for the Zune HD a few moments ago, and I’ve been tasked with testing it out for your edification. Spoiler: it works, it’s buggy, and I can’t see the sense in using it. Installation was not easy. Oh, sure, loading up the Zune software and navigating to the appropriate section was simple enough, and syncing the application was as expected, but my Zune HD wouldn’t connect to the Internet for whatever reason. An error message popped up saying “Disconnect your Zune HD from the computer before trying to connect to a wireless network.” To that effect, at…

Microsoft is getting into iPhone applications. The company just launched a Bing app, approved by Apple and ready for download for the iPhone and iPod touch on Apple’s App Store. The application is free and, analysts said, may be yet another sign that Apple is moving to rely less on Google. “Let’s talk about some cool stuff you can do with the Bing app,” said Justin Jed of the Bing for mobile team. “Our investments in voice search — you may have played with them on Windows phones or BlackBerry already — continues in our iPhone app and works great for map locations as well as old-fashioned web search.” If a …

Despite some last-minute drama with the government , Canada’s WIND Mobile has launched today, bringing to the table an interesting new low-cost competitor to the nation’s giant incumbents, Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Though its network — based on last year’s AWS auction — lacks the footprint of the bigger guys, the pricing is pretty compelling: its $15 voice plan offers twice the minutes of low-cost competitors Koodoo and Fido (which are really just fronts for Telus and Rogers, anyway) and CAD $35 (about $33) wins you unlimited data on your BlackBerry. Speaking of BlackBerrys, WIND is rolling out the Bold 9700 as one of …

While Seesmic has been available for BlackBerry handsets since right around the end of November, it has thus far required you to manually download the application by visiting http://m.seesmic.com/. That’s like what, a million letters to type? Typing is for chumps. Fortunately for all of us lazy-thumbed folks, RIM has just given Seesmic the greenlight for distribution in the BlackBerry App World – no typing required. Seesmic is celebrating their newfound availability with an update to the client, adding a handful of new features to the mix. So what’s new in the latest build? Here’s the big list: Support for BlackBerry OS 4.5 We now have versions for our older…