iPhone users pay highest phone bills

New data shows that 59 percent of iPhone users spend more than $100 per month on their carrier bill, while 56 percent of Windows phone users and 53 percent of Android users pay that much.

Rumors of a cheaper iPhone on the horizon may come as welcome news for fans of the device -- especially because iPhone users reportedly pay the highest monthly phone bills, no matter the carrier, according to AllThingsD.

Android, Windows, and BlackBerry users spend less per month to use their smartphones, according to data by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners that was acquired by AllThingsD. It seems that the higher costs come from carriers charging more for iPhone data plans and additional wireless fees.

"We think it has to do with their data plans and carriers, rather than their usage habits," CIRP co-founder Michael Levin told AllThingsD. "They are all on expensive data plans, unlike Android users, some of which are on prepaid or unsubsidized plans with regional carriers."

10 ways PowerPoint 2013 gets more polish

Love it or hate it, PowerPoint isn't going away any time soon; it remains the professional tool of choice for presentations. Features that were already in PowerPoint just became easier to discover and use with the 2013 release. For example, task panes and other elements now suggest options for tweaking your deck, rather than leaving you to find them yourself. You’ll see fewer but more relevant choices, thanks to the new Themes and Variants—and you’ll find tools that were previously hidden, such as Shape Merge. Here are 10 ways your workflow, from design to presentation, can be more efficient in the new PowerPoint.

To learn more about the new Office suite, find our full review of Office 2013, as well 10 killer features in the new Word 2013 and 10 awesome additions in Excel 2013. Read on for 10 reasons to consider an upgrade to PowerPoint 2013.

New iPad 4 reportedly in the works -- perhaps a 128GB model

Are you ready for an iPad with beefier memory?

A new fourth-generation iPad with Retina display -- and perhaps as much as 128 gigabytes of memory -- is being readied for release, sources tell 9to5Mac. The upcoming slate would not be a new design but rather an addition to the current fourth-generation line, with the same color and wireless combinations as the iPad 4, these unnamed sources say.

Pricing is unknown, but the new model is described as a "premium SKU" (stock keeping unity) that would join the current lineup of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB iPads. A source at a large U.S. retailer provided 9to5Mac with what is purportedly a new SKU listing for iPads that includes a fourth model labeled as "Ultimate" to join its current lineup

In Swartz protest, Anon hacks U.S. site, threatens leaks

In response to the death of tech activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist collective Anonymous hacked a U.S. government Web site related to the justice system and posted a screed saying it would begin leaking a cache of government documents if the justice system is not reformed.

The group hacked the Web site for the United States Sentencing Commission late Friday, posting a message about what it's calling "Operation Last Resort," along with a set of downloadable encrypted files it said contain sensitive information. The sentencing commission is the caretaker of the guidelines for sentencing in U.S. federal courts.

"Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed," the group's statement reads. "Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win -- a twisted and distorted perversion of justice -- a game where the only winning move was not to play."

Swartz didn't face prison until feds took over case, report says

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County's district attorney had planned no jail time, "with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner," the report (alternate link) said. "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"

The report is likely to fuel an online campaign against Ortiz, who has been criticized for threatening the 26-year-old with decades in prison for allegedly downloading a large quantity of academic papers. An online petition asking President Obama to remove from office Ortiz -- a politically ambitious prosecutor who was talked about as Massachusetts' next governor as recently as last month.

Ortiz, 57, also came under fire this week for her attempt to seize a family-owned motel in Tewksbury, Mass., for allegedly facilitating drug crimes, despite ample evidence that the owners worked closely with local police. In a stinging rebuke, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein tossed out the case yesterday, siding with the motel owners -- represented by the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice -- and noting (PDF) that prosecutors had alleged a mere "15 specific drug-related incidents" over a 14-year period during which "the Motel Caswell rented out approximately 196,000 rooms."

Samsung quarterly profit jumps 76 percent on Galaxy sales

Samsung Electronics, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, said its fourth-quarter profit rose 76 percent to another record high on strong sales of Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

The South Korean electronics giant today reported a net profit of 7.04 trillion won ($6.6 billion), up from 4.01 trillion won in the same period a year earlier.

It was the fifth consecutive record quarterly profit for Samsung, which reported fourth-quarter sales of 56 trillion won ($52.6 billion), a 19 percent increase. Nearly half of that revenue came from its mobile communications division, particularly strong sales of its Galaxy S3 smartphone and Galaxy Note 2 phablet.

The results were slightly better than earnings guidance issued by the company earlier this month.

Samsung announced early this month that it had sold more than 100 million smartphones in the Galaxy series since its launch in May 2010, calling it "the driving force" behind the electronics maker's "rise to the top" in the global smartphone market.

CNET News Business Tech Intel to wind down desktop circuit board business Intel to wind down desktop circuit board business

The chipmaker says it will leave the traditional desktop PC circuit board business. As a result, the venerable tower PC will likely begin to fade.

Intel will get out of the traditional desktop motherboard business, as it focuses its resources on mobile products.

"We disclosed internally today that Intel's Desktop Motherboard Business will begin slowly ramping down over the course of the next three years," Intel said in a note to journalists today.

What does that mean exactly? Think of the PC tower systems that used to populate the Best Buys of the world. That's what Intel is winding down as it devotes more resources to ultrabooks,tablets, and phones.

WikiLeaks says Aaron Swartz may have been a 'source'

WikiLeaks said late yesterday that recently deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz assisted the organization, was in contact with Julian Assange, and may have been one of the organization's sources.

Reached in Iceland on Saturday evening, California time, WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson confirmed to CNET that the tweets were authentic but declined to elaborate.

In the tweets, the organization said it was revealing the information "due to the investigation into the Secret Service involvement" with Swartz.

Here are screenshots of the tweets:

SSDs vs. hard drives vs. hybrids: Which storage tech is right for you?

In times past, choosing the best PC storage option required merely selecting the highest-capacity hard drive one could afford. If only life were still so simple! The fairly recent rise of solid-state drives and hybrid drives (which mix standard hard drives with solid-state memory) have significantly altered the storage landscape, creating a cornucopia of confusing options for the everyday consumer.

Yes, selecting the best drive type for a particular need can be befuddling, but fear not: We’re here to help. Below, we explain the basic advantages and drawbacks for each of the most popular PC storage options available today. Tuck away this knowledge to make a fully informed decision the next time you're shopping for additional drive space.

Prosecutor in Aaron Swartz 'hacking' case comes under fire

Carmen Ortiz was being talked about last month as the next Massachusetts governor. Now she's being investigated for threatening the late Aaron Swartz with decades in prison.

A politically ambitious Justice Department official who oversaw the criminal case against Aaron Swartz has come under fire for alleged prosecutorial abuses that led the 26-year-old online activist to take his own life.

Carmen Ortiz, 57, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts who was selected by President Obama, compared the online activist -- accused of downloading a large number of academic papers -- to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar," Ortiz said at the time. Last fall, her office slapped Swartz with 10 additional charges that carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

"He was killed by the government," Swartz's father, Robert, said at his son's funeral in Highland Park, Ill., today, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.

Last Wednesday, less than three months before the criminal trial was set to begin, Ortiz's office formally rejected a deal that would have kept Swartz out of prison. Two days later, Swartz killed himself.

"He was being made into a highly visible lesson," says Harvey Silverglate, a Cambridge, Mass., attorney who first met Swartz in 2001 and spoke with him after his arrest. "He was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious -- politically-ambitious -- U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights."

Feds: MegaUpload was not entrapped

Entrapment is one of MegaUpload's claims in its legal battle against the U.S. government. The feds are now saying this claim is "baseless."

"Megaupload's allegations are baseless, as even a cursory review of Megaupload's pleading and the search warrant materials at issue disproves the allegation that the government misled the court as part of a conspiracy to entrap Megaupload," the government wrote in a Friday filing (PDF).

MegaUpload, which was founded by Kim DotCom, is the highest-profile service to be accused of criminal copyright violations by the U.S. government -- and the case is being watched closely around the globe.

DotCom's saga has played out over the past year after he was arrested on allegations of criminal copyright violation, conspiracy, money laundering, and wire fraud. U.S. federal officials accused DotCom of pocketing millions of dollars in illegal profits from criminal file sharing and downloading that has reportedly cost the film industry more than $600 million in damages.

Apple is done, say teens

Future adults allegedly believe, according to research, that Apple isn't cool any more. They're more impressed by Samsung's Galaxy and Microsoft's Surface.

When you want to know what's cool, you ask a teenager.

You have to ask her nicely or she will scowl you into oblivion or patronize you into a painful purgatory.

So I'd like to prepare you for some of this difficulty.

Teens have decided that Apple is, like, so over. If you want to be a veritable cooleratus, you want to be seen with a Samsung Galaxy phone in your hand or a Microsoft Surface laptoppy tabletstuck under your arm.

This definitive information comes to me courtesy of research performed by Buzz Marketing, as well as three 14-year-olds who tried to rob me of my orange Puma sneakers.

When they saw I had an iPhone, they couldn't even be bothered to take the sneakers. (I exaggerate slightly about this last element.)

White House shoots down petition to build Death Star

The White House has rejected a proposal to build a Death Star, saying that in addition to its prohibitive construction costs, the current administration does not advocate destroying other planets.

Today's official statement came in response to a petition posted in November to the White House's We The People platform that called for the administration to begin construction of a moon-size military battlestation armed with a planet-destroying superlaser by 2016. The petition, which attracted well more than the minimum 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the White House, suggested such a project could give the nation's economy a much-needed boost:

 By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.

Chrome 24 brings math formatting, better offline abilities

Alongside the perpetual effort to speed up JavaScript, Google's newest browser gets MathML support, offline data storage with IndexedDB, and security fixes.

Google released the stable version of Chrome 24today, adding support for IndexedDB for apps that work better offline, mathematics formulas formatted with MathML, and faster JavaScript.

The new version also comes with a range of security fixes, including two $1,000 bounties and one $4,000 bounty paid to people who found high-severity vulnerabilities. Because Chrome automatically downloads updates by default in part to patch holes as fast as possible, people just need to restart the browser to update it.

IndexedDB, under development for years, is geared to store data for use even if a Web site or Web app is working with no network connection. It's used for offline Gmail and Google Docs, for example.

Math markup language makes it easier for the browser to display formulas like the quadratic equation -- not something everyone needs, but as with accents and currency symbols, something very useful to a particular subset.

Another feature, built into Chrome 24 but disabled by default, is support for CSS custom filters, a technology that makes some graphical elements programmable. Adobe developed the technology as part of its effort to build into Web standards some of the features in its Flash Player software.Faster JavaScript is hardly news these days -- all browser makers are constantly working to wring the last bit of performance out of the Web's prime programming language. There's more, though: "We recently made some server-side changes to Google Cloud Print so that Chrome's printer selection dialog loads twice as fast. We've also been working on reducing the browser's startup time and setting up automated tests to catch any code changes that would slow Chrome down," said Google programmer and compiler expert Toon Verwaest in a blog post from when Chrome 24 hit beta in November.

Adobe's CSS custom filter technology arrives in Chrome 24 -- though disabled by default. It permits programmable graphics effects, such as this swoopy transformation to a text and graphics box. The text is still selectable.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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Eyes-on: Samsung's Youm flexible-display tech at CES 2013

Samsung debuted its Youm flexible-display technology at CES' closing keynote, and the tech is nothing short of eye-popping.

The screens, which were shown off here as just a concept, promise to change what kind of form factors are possible for companies that make smartphones and tablets.

Samsung brought out a handful of demo units around 5-inches in size to show press, including a phonelike device with a screen that wraps around the side edges and could therefore display information like text messages and other alerts without a user needing to view the entire screen. A similar design puts the wraparounds on the bottom, while another concept (shown off in a video) rolled out like a scroll.

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Behind the scenes, Samsung is making use of OLED to give the screens what it says are deeper blacks and a higher overall contrast ratio with better power efficiency than traditional LCD displays.

During a brief viewing of the technology following the presentation, Samsung showed a small group of reporters a close-up of the screens, which were displaying still images and videos. Touch interactions with the tech were not shown off (since the displays were not hooked up to CPUs), but Samsung was keen to demo the possible form factors, from a screen bent like a question mark to more simple designs that form a small curl on the edges.

Samsung did not provide a price or release date for Youm.

Samsung's approach (which the company teased last month) differs from competitor Nokia, which made waves in October 2011 with its "kinetic interface" technology. Nokia showed off a flexible screen that controlled aspects of the phone hardware depending on how users twisted the screen. So far, Samsung appears to be more interested in using its own technology to turn parts of the phone that would otherwise go unused to additional areas to display information and add interactivity.

This is not the first time Samsung has unveiled flexible-display technology at CES. The company demoed flexible, transparent displays at the same show in 2011, also with the intent to bring them to future devices. The newer models come in larger form factors and with higher pixel displays.

Updated at 1:05 p.m. PT with additional background.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

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Intel at CES: throwing down the gauntlet with Nvidia

LAS VEGAS—Intel swaggered into their CES press briefing like an aging gunfighter ready to take on the cocky young gun. You know, John Wayne versus Clint Eastwood style.

Pundits and analysts have wondered whether Intel can handle the new competition from ARM-based systems. The many companies building many different implementations of ARM, some suggested, would result in a “death by a thousand tiny cuts.” But Intel is showing some renewed fighting spirit here at CES 2013.

Intel VP of mobile, Mike Bell, opened up by touting the performance and battery life accomplishments of its current Medfield line of mobile processors. The chief target of Intel’s bragging was Nvdia’s Tegra 3 mobile processor, which was mentioned more than once during the briefing.

He then moved on to point out its 140-plus design wins for the company’s Ultrabook standard. It’s an impressive number on the surface, though Intel’s actual sales have beenless than stellar. After that initial stage setting, Intel dove into the meat of the matter: a bevy of new, and sort-of-new, processors.

Dad hires hit men to kill son's video game characters

Some fathers are overbearing.

Some, however, decide that enforcing parental law requires radical action. Such as hiring an assassin.

It does seem extreme. But a certain Mr. Feng of China might offer mitigating circumstances.

His son was allegedly being terribly disobedient and the assassins were hired merely to murder Feng Jr.'s video game character.

As Kotaku retells it, Feng Jr. was not doing well at school. He also failed to find employment.

However, he reportedly considered himself a video game king.

If you're going to topple a king, you have to chop off his head. So Feng Sr. hired several gamers who were game to kill the king. Virtually, of course.

Google to make Maps accessible to Windows Phone users

After stories suggesting that competition and not technical issues lay behind Maps redirect that bumped IE mobile users to Google.com, company says "recent improvements" to IE mobile and Google Maps now provide better experience and Google will remove the redirect.

Google says it will no longer block Windows Phone users from accessing Google Maps, and that the blockage was about ensuring a good user experience, not about intentionally interfering with a rival product.

The blockage generated headlines, with various news outlets suggesting that it was not about poor functionality on the part of the mobile version of Internet Explorer but was more about behavior on the part of Google that, ironically, was beginning to resemble past behavior by Microsoft.