From EETimes: The worldwide semiconductor market grew 5% last year to a record $315 billion, despite a nearly 10% drop in PC sales and a smartphone market whose viral growth appears to be slowing for the first time in several years.

The $315 billion figure, which Gartner reported Thursday, is...

From PC World: It looks like Apple's free iWork suite for iOS just wasn't enough for many iPad users. One week after landing in Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Office for iPad has already seen more than twelve million downloads, the company tweeted from its Office account on Thursday. The Office apps...

From PC World: Blocking and throttling Internet traffic will become illegal in the European Union following a parliamentary vote on Thursday.

Members of the European Parliament voted to close loopholes in a proposed law that some believed would have created a two-tier Internet. The so-called...

From DailyTech: Apple sees Samsung in a position of greater control over its supply chain, and seems to be working toward similar goals with a potential majority stake purchase of a Japanese chip venture.

According to Reuters, Apple is currently in talks to purchase a 55 percent stake in Renesas...

From InfoWorld: Yahoo said Wednesday it was encrypting traffic flowing between its data centers, several months after leaked documents revealed the government had been sniffing those links.

Traffic moving between Yahoo data centers is fully encrypted as of March 31, the company announced on its...

From PC World: Intel is preparing a new “Braswell” chip to succeed its power-efficient Bay Trail processor found in PCs besides working on bringing over 20 Chromebook designs to the market this year.

“Last year, we had only four designs on Chrome. Today I can announce that we will have over 20...

From DailyTech: In addition to a few new Windows Phone 8.1 smartphones, Nokia has unveiled a new portable speaker called the MD-12 that's small, yet promises big sound. Nokia says that the speaker is about the size of an apple and has a built-in vibrating actuator that can produce bass when placed...

From DailyTech: As anticipated, the Lumia 630/635 were announced at Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) BUILD conference by Nokia Oyj.'s (HEX:NOK1V) Nokia Devices.

Nokia's strongest traction has been on the budget end. That success hasn't exactly been an accident. While lower-end hardware at lower cost is...

From EETimes: SanDisk has expanded its CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) product family with four new solid state drives (SSDs) to meet demands of enterprise workloads. The new SSDs leverage software to address endurance challenges, particularly those created by write-intensive application workloads...

From PC World: After falling behind ARM in the mobile processor market, Intel plans to go on the offensive by creating exclusive content for devices built around its chips.

More details about the exclusives will be shared on Thursday during the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. But Intel’s...