Google's low-cost carrier service, Project Fi, is now available for a select range of data-only devices, specifically tablets including the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 4.

The iPhone 6s was the most searched-for consumer technology item this year in Google's annual Year in Search rankings, published on Wednesday, though Apple did have competition from companies like Samsung and LG.

For years, Apple's detractors have predicted that the company's industry-leading profits from Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads would erode away as cheaper products from high volume competitors--and more innovative disruptors--emerged to knock it from its profitable perch, forcing the company to constantly invent new product categories just to stay alive. But that hasn't happened. Instead, Apple keeps increasing its profitability while also expanding into new market segments.

The difference between encryption and security on iOS and Android isn't just a technical issue but a "digital security divide," according to the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. That's because Apple secures its devices while Google leaves Android open to data collection and surveillance.

Google's bug hunt to identify software flaws in Android has revealed 11 exploitable flaws in Samsung's software included on its high end Galaxy S6 Edge flagship, including "a substantial number of high-severity issues," within just a week of looking.

A British newspaper has published a meandering, conspiracy-chasing fantasy piece written by discredited theater-journalist Mike Daisey... in its technology section.

Last year's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus introduced a larger, slimmer form factor housing higher resolution Retina HD screens and improvements in processors, cameras and wireless. While Apple's latest 6s and 6s Plus models look virtually identical, the company has significantly improved nearly every key feature, from a stronger glass and metal exterior outside to high-performance components inside, including a new pressure sensitive 3D Touch display.

Preliminary testing of Apple's latest A-series mobile Application Processor shows that it brings a big jump in general CPU performance over last year's already speedy A8. It also advances Apple's lead in proprietary ARM core design performance over Samsung and Qualcomm.

Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus from last fall beat this year's top Android flagship phones in a series of raw performance benchmarks. However, despite often having a pixel resolution advantage, Android phones also typically deliver worse looking graphics on top of being slower, as revealed by GameBench.

Last Friday, Tom's Guide published an article calling Samsung's flagship Galaxy S6 the "world's fastest smartphone," writing that it came in "first in 6 out of 9 real-world tests and synthetic benchmarks." Unfortunately, that claim relied on cherry picked figures and ignored the real world entirely.

While boasting an "Octa Core" Application Processor and an extremely high resolution display, Samsung's new Galaxy S6 falls flat in running GPU intensive apps and games -- particularly in comparison to Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Consumers looking to make the switch from an Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone device to an iPhone can now bring their old handset directly to Apple, where they could trade it in to receive credit toward the purchase of a new iPhone.

Apple Watch has incited more mocking disbelief, concerned handwringing and passionate prognostications of doom--for Apple, for its buyers, for society in general--than any product since iPhone, with the potential exception of iPad. Maybe Apple is onto something here.

When Apple rolls out a rare new product--rather than canceling it internally--you'd have to be naive to think it was rushed to market without much consideration and therefore probably doomed to failure. But you'd be equally naive to think that the incumbents positioned in the path of Apple's next potential juggernaut wouldn't desperately seek to defend their turf, bending the truth to the breaking point if necessary.

This year's SXSW festival in Austin, Tex., will feature more than a thousand iBeacon transmitters onsite, allowing attendees to receive timely, location-specific messages and the ability to connect with others.

Despite initial promises by Google, and rival Apple implementing the technology in iOS 8 last September, new devices loaded with Android 5.0 Lollipop are not using default full-disk encryption meant to prevent criminals, police, and spy agencies from getting unauthorized access to private data.

Even as Apple is reportedly struggling to put together its own long-rumored web television initiative, satellite provider Dish Network has begun to roll out its competing Sling TV over-the-top offering to a select group of early adopters. AppleInsider was given access to the invite-only beta and brings some first impressions of the impressive service.

Adoption of Apple's latest mobile operating system continues to grow, according to the company's App Store statistics, with 72 percent of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches now running on iOS 8 while no single version of Google's Android has surpassed 40 percent.

After years of failing to do much more than embarrass Samsung Electronics in legal battles over patent infringement, Apple has rapidly obliterated Samsung's mobile division profitability, rendering it as barrenly unprofitable as every other Android or Windows licensee with razor thin margins in the phone, PC and tablet market.

Motorola did intend to include a Touch ID-like fingerprint sensor in its Android flagship Nexus 6 smartphone, the company's then-CEO has revealed, but canceled the plan following Apple's acquisition of would-be component supplier AuthenTec.

Between 2006 and 2013, AMD & Nvidia fumbled the ball in mobile chips, losing their positions as the world's leading GPU suppliers by failing to competitively address the vast mobile market, enabling Apple to incrementally develop what are now the most powerful mainstream Application Processor GPUs to ship in vast volumes. Here's how it happened, the lessons learned and how Apple could make it happen again.

A new report claims that Samsung has decided against using Qualcomm's 64-bit Snapdragon 810 Application Processor in its next flagship smartphone due to overheating issues, and will instead be forced use its own internally developed (and significantly slower) Exynos chip instead.

Between 2005 and 2014, Intel fumbled the ball in mobile chips, losing its position as the world's leading processor supplier by failing to competitively address the vast mobile market and enabling Apple to incrementally develop what are now the most powerful mainstream Application Processors to ship in vast volumes. Here's how it happened, the lessons learned and how Apple could make it happen again.

Within three years of Steve Jobs' return to Apple in 1996, he transformed the then-struggling company into an innovation machine capable of consistently stealing attention from the rest of the industry. This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas suffered at least its fifteenth year of being upstaged by Apple.

Google's Android team has advised outside security researchers that it will no longer fix security bugs found in Jelly Bean or earlier releases, despite the fact that "pre-KitKat 4.4" software powers the majority of active users' devices currently accessing Google Play. Meanwhile, less than 0.1 percent of Android users have received Android 5.0, and those who have report an "unfinished/unpolished" experience.

Intel's mobile chip division has lost $7 billion over the last two years while heavily subsidizing the manufacturing costs of Android tablet makers agreeing to use the chipmaker's Atom mobile x86 processors. Microsoft's new Office for Android won't run on any of them.

There's something about Apple that makes people lose their minds, particularly people who are journalists. The most likely explanation is that putting "Apple" in a headline is currently the most irresistible clickbait known to mankind. That, and there's no time for fact checking or any sort of basic research in today's BuzzFeed world of made up garbage.

Apple's final quarter of 2014 is expected to set dramatic new records in iPhone sales and overall profits, but external issues out of the company's control will also play a part, ranging from cheaper oil to declining foreign currencies.

The Google-branded, Motorola-built Nexus 6 attempted to incorporate a fingerprint sensor like Apple's Touch ID which debuted on last year's iPhone 5s. However, the feature was abandoned shortly before the phone's introduction.

Android Police named Apple's iPad Air 2 as its top tablet pick among "Android devices" for the 2014 holiday season, calling it "reliable, predictable, and very fast."

Qualcomm's upcoming 64-bit Snapdragon chips designed to power new high end Android flagship phones including the Samsung Galaxy S6, LG G4 and HTC One M9 are reportedly running into new issues that threaten to further delay any real competition to Apple's iPhone 6 juggernaut.

Security firm Bluebox Labs tested a dozen Black Friday bargain Android tablets from major retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, Kmart, Kohl's, Staples, Target and Walmart and reported "shocking" security flaws, malware and active backdoors installed on the new devices.

Apple's A-series Application Processors that power iPads--including the latest and greatest A8X in iPad Air 2--are inciting billion dollar losses for Intel and threatening major problems for rival tablet chips from Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia, along with all the companies that depend upon those vendors for their mobile chips.

After failing to do much more than embarrass Samsung Electronics in years-long legal battles over patent infringement, Apple has rapidly obliterated Samsung's mobile division profitability, rendering it as barrenly unprofitable as every other Android or Windows licensee with razor thin margins in the phone, PC and tablet market.

Apple's new A8X Application Processor not only trounces other Android tablets in CPU tasks, but is also advancing iPad Air 2 to the front of the line in graphics operations as well, even before considering the ten-fold boost potential of iOS 8's Metal API.

Apple's newest iPads feature one of the same chips used by iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to handle tap-to-pay NFC transactions, but the new iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 only support Apple Pay within apps, sparing users the embarrassment of carrying around a gigantic alternative to their credit card.

New Geekbench processor benchmarks show Apple's triple core, 64-bit A8X Application Processor is dramatically faster than the latest Android tablets, despite their additional cores and faster clock rates.

Despite using one of the fastest Qualcomm mobile Application Processors now available, Google's new Nexus 6 and Samsung's Galaxy Note 4 fall flat in running GPU intensive apps and games--particularly in comparison to Apple's iPhone 6 Plus.

While boasting an "Octa Core" Application Processor option and an extremely high resolution display, Samsung's new Galaxy Note 4 falls flat in running GPU intensive apps and games--particularly in comparison to Apple's iPhone 6 Plus.

While many new Android flagships sport hardware specifications that appear competitive with recent iPhones, top rated iPhone games remain conspicuously missing from Google Play, a problem that Apple's new Metal API and 64-bit Application Processors threaten to only make worse going forward, despite Android's lead in unit shipments overall.

Bloggers who invent and inflate "controversies" and "scandals" for Apple are increasingly achieving the opposite of what they are setting out to do.

After establishing iPhone 5s as a "forward thinking" high-end luxury device a year ago, Apple is now enhancing its eighth generation of iPhone with a broad range of new and improved hardware components, inside a slimmer new case design with a much larger, higher-resolution display.

Over the past few years, Apple has released a series of OS technologies that connect devices using Bluetooth, WiFi or a combination of the two wireless technologies. Here's how the new Apple Watch--as well as AirDrop, iBeacon and the new Continuity features of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite--work to deliver simple, efficient and fast wireless connectivity, in marked contrast to Google's rival efforts for Android.

U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh on Wednesday handed down an order denying Apple's motion for a sales ban against Samsung products a jury found to have infringed on three patents in May.

In the face of dubious market research portraying Apple's iPad (and perhaps the entire tablet market) as troubled and teetering on the brink of collapse, Apple's chief executive Tim Cook expressed a sincere lack of concern while addressing analysts, alluding to long term strategies for outliving tablet rivals focused on volume shipments and short term market share gains.

A new Android design error discovered by Bluebox Security allows malicious apps to grab extensive control over a user's device without asking for any special permissions at installation. The problem affects virtually all Android phones sold since 2010.

As IBM secretly mulls plans to sell off its increasing outdated processor chip fabs in New York and Vermont, a new wave of mobile chip developers--led by Apple, ARM and Qualcomm--are hiring away many of the top chip designers of the once leading firm.

Law enforcement agencies in California and New York have reported a major drop in iPhone robberies over the first five months of 2014, a shift they attribute to Apple's new Activation Lock feature released as part of iOS 7 last fall.

Among the surprises that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2014 is the company's new Metal framework and shader language, aimed at radically enhancing the hardware accelerated graphics potential of the A7 Application Processor powering the company's latest iOS devices.

Today is opening day for WWDC, and San Francisco's Moscone Center is full of international developers registering for the conference, most of whom are now emblazoned with the black "WWDC 2014" jacket is giving attendees, along with an iTunes gift card.