According to a Monday statement by Taiwanese handset maker HTC, some of the shipments of two of the company's smartphones - the One X and the Evo 4G LTE - which have been under review by US Customs because of an Apple patent dispute, have received Customs clearance and have been released to carrier customers.

The hold up of HTC handsets in US Customs was largely a result of a "limited exclusion order" issued by the International Trade Commission (ITC). The order makes its mandatory for the HTC smartphones to pass a Customs review before hitting the US markets.

A routine General Motors' (GM) review of `how' and `where' the automaker spends its marketing dollars has, according to the information shared by GM spokesman Tom Henderson, prompted the bigwig auto company to decided against advertising on Facebook social network.

With the routine review apparently revealing that GM's $10 million annual spending on Facebook advertising was having hardly any impact on consumers, the automaker - which incidentally is the third-ranking advertiser in the US
- had decided to discontinue its Facebook ads.

According to `inside' sources familiar with the proceedings at Yahoo, the company's latest CEO Scott Thompson agreed to step down from his post over the weekend --- a move which is an upshot of an activist investor's recent exposure of Thompson's allegedly `exaggerated' academic credentials in his biography.

Samsung’s newly-announced Galaxy S III smartphone – which was on display at the CTIA 2012 in New Orleans – boasts a few software enhancements, including the company’s TouchWiz user interface and facial recognition in photo gallery, which give the handset a notable edge in terms of overall appeal.

According to some commenters, who got a chance of a hands-on with Samsung’s “next Galaxy” - the Galaxy S III – at the CTIA, it is essentially the improvements on the software side which make the new Samsung handset notably better then its earlier Galaxy counterparts.

According to the latest statistics compiled by IDC and Bloomberg, Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) is, for the first time, trailing the Apple iPhone in its home market - Canada.

Going by the IDC and Bloomberg data, the Apple iPhone has toppled the RIM BlackBerry in terms of smartphone shipments in the Canadian market; with Apple shipping nearly 2.85 million units of its iPhone in 2011, and RIM shipping 2.08 million units of BlackBerry handsets during the year.

In its long-awaited data breach report released on Thursday, Verizon said that a small number of data breaches in 2011 were a result of the activities of hacktivists, and that most of the cyberattacks during the year could have been avoided had the companies not overlooked basic security-related precautions.

Based on an assessment of over 850 data breaches, Verizon's 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report was compiled with assistance from the US Secret Service as well as law enforcement agencies in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and The Netherlands.

In what apparently marks the most recent indication of Apple’s strategy to rein in the costs of key components of the new iPad, as well as eliminate risks for the company, research firm UBM TechInsights has revealed that at least three manufacturers have supplied the key components of the new tablet.

According to the information shared by UBM, a tear-down of a few units of the new iPad – which hit the store shelves on Friday, March 16 – has shown that some components performing the same functions in different tablets had been produced by at least three different manufacturers.

The scheduled March 16 launch of the new Apple iPad is bound to draw big crowds to the company's stores in New York, San Francisco and Washington --- with the crowds likely to comprise not just the Apple aficionados waiting to grab the third-generation tablet, but also dozens of protestors highlighting concerns about the welfare of the employees in Apple's China-based device-manufacturing plants.

Microsoft's scheduled `Patch Tuesday' release on March 13 had the company announcing six update patches, including one that fixes a `critical' Windows vulnerability - dubbed CVE-2012-0002 - which allows hackers to remotely gain control of a computer without authentication.

The critical flaw - the only one for this month's Patch Tuesday release - was fixed in the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) service of the operating system; and it reportedly affected all supported versions of Windows, including Windows XP, Vista and 7, and Windows Server 2003, and 2008.

In a Tuesday-posted blog post, ex-Google employee James Whittaker - who quit the Internet search company earlier this year to re-join his previous employer Microsoft - said that he had left Googleplex because of a change, for the worse, in the company's corporate culture, especially since Larry Page took over as the CEO last year.

The much-complained-about `battery drain' issue of the October-released iPhone 4S has been resolved for most of the users of the handset with Apple's new iOS 5.1 update, which was released along with the unveiling of the new iPad by the company last Wednesday.

The serious battery drainage of the iOS 5-equipped iPhone 4S and iPad came to the fore when several users of the handset complained on the online Apple forums that an apparent bug in the software led to battery drain, even when Siri and other prime features were not used.

Among the scheduled proceedings at the music hackathon, at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference on Sunday, was Nike's release of the application programming interface (API) for NikeFuel, which is the technology behind the company's January-unveiled waterproof wristband, the Nike FuelBand.

The eve of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, on Sunday witnessed the China-based telecoms biggie Huawei's unveiling of its newest offering in the smartphone arena --- the Huawei Ascend D Quad handset.

According to Richard Yu, manager of Huawei's devices division, the new Ascend D Quad will not only boast a notably bigger and sharper screen than the iPhone 4S, but will also have two times the processing power of the Samsung Galaxy Tab and other comparable handsets presently available in the market.

At its press conference in connection with the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012 - coming up next week in Barcelona, Spain -, Chinese firm Huawei will set the ball rolling for a number of mobile- and tablet-related announcements; as well as release some attention-grabbing devices, particularly with the aim of building up its brand in western Europe.

According to reports, Chinese company Shenzhen Proview Technology has taken the legal route against Apple, by complaining to a Shanghai court that it has the rights to the `iPad' trademark in China.

While Shanghai's Pudong district court has convened a hearing on the issue on Wednesday, Proview has already filed lawsuits against Apple in a number of other courts too; and has also requested commercial authorities to block the sales of the popular Apple iPad tablet in as many as 40 cities.