Personal Technology

On Tuesday, Dell rolled out a new laptop aimed at mobile entrepreneurs, the 13.3-inch Vostro V13. With a starting price of $449, Dell is sending a combined message of value and innovation with the latest addition to its small-business line of Vostro laptops. Full Story »

Symantec, which rolled out Norton Online Backup as a standalone service earlier this year, is giving it a major overhaul that adds a bunch of attractive features and fixes some limitations of the original version. Full Story »

PARIS (AFP) - Microblogging service Twitter has branched into the market for electronic payments, unveiling a mini credit card swiper that plugs into the iPhone, at a European internet fair on Wednesday. Full Story »

Google finally released the beta version of its Chrome browser for Mac on Tuesday. As expected, the new browser is lacking some features that its Windows counterpart has, such as bookmark sync, a bookmark manager, and offline capability. Full Story »

PARIS (Reuters) - Taking a page out of Apple's book, France Telecom's mobile phone unit Orange launched its own shop to sell downloadable videos, games, music and other content to its 130 million mobile phone subscribers. Full Story »

Add the Motorola Droid to the expanding list of hacked devices that give more adventurous users greater control over how they can use their smartphones. Late Tuesday Wired's Gadget Lab reported that instructions had been posted to an Android forum that supposedly show you how to gain administrator access to your Droid device. Full Story »

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Eric's sidekick Pam on "True Blood" is getting a promotion. Full Story »

NEW YORK - A 1948 print of Ansel Adams' iconic photograph "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" has sold for $360,000 at an auction in New York City. Full Story »

DALLAS - Texas Instruments Inc. raised its fourth-quarter profit and sales outlook on Tuesday, citing an improving market for chips used in cell phones and other electronic gadgets like hard disk drives and video game consoles. Full Story »

After a long wait, Google's Chrome browser is now available for Apple Macintosh and Linux computers. In a blog post Tuesday, Brian Rakowski, product manager for Chrome, announced that beta versions of Chrome are now available for Mac OS X 10.5 and later (Intel only) and several flavors of Linux, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. In addition, Rakowski announced the availability of extensions for the Windows and Linux versions of the browser. Full Story »

LOS ANGELES - MySpace's online music venture with recording labels completed its purchase of song streaming site imeem on Tuesday, scooping up its 16 million users and mobile phone applications for less than $1 million. Full Story »

The ratings scandal that led Apple to purge 1,000 iPhone apps underscores why the App Store user review system needs repair. Full Story »

ALBANY, N.Y. - When Jory Langner finds time for a field trip during an upcoming visit to Washington, he won't have to ask local birders where to find candidates to add to his life list of birds sighted. Full Story »

The day has finally arrived. Let the trumpets blare and confetti rain from the sky. With three weeks to spare, Google has met its self-imposed deadline and the beta version of its Chrome Web browser is now available for the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Full Story »

Dell on Tuesday introduced the budget Vostro V13 laptop, which bears a resemblance to the company's super-thin Adamo luxury laptop, but is close to three times cheaper. Full Story »

Google's limited launch of its Goggles visual search app has plenty of people wondering when they'll be able to try out the new tool. Google Goggles, released to Android users on Monday, allows you to search on your cell phone simply by snapping photos: You point your phone's camera at a place or object, and it delivers detailed information to you within seconds. Full Story »

Apple is sending a clear message to developers: Play nice or get out. Apple made the message clear by booting out a developer and its approximately 1,011 apps from Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch. Full Story »

Samsung has revealed a bit more about Bada, a new mobile phone platform that's supposed to bring apps to cheaper smartphones. Full Story »