Stories by: Dan Rosenbaum

Even by the new standards of cell phone advertising, the run-up to the HTC ThunderBolt -- Verizon's first 4G LTE smartphone -- was elaborate and expensive. Gatefold ads in mass-market magazines and high-profile TV spots on the Oscars, NASCAR and college basketball all proclaimed that there was a new 4G phone coming from Verizon, but not much else. Inquiries made of HTC and Verizon were met with official shrugs. The company spent many millions of dollars advertising a phone and didn't tell anyone when it would be on the shelves.

Because of the way the U.S. mobile phone market is structured, it's next to impossible to find an unlocked phone that isn't loaded with bloatware. For those who want a carrier-independent smartphone, an enticing option is the Nexus S, a very nice successor to Google's Nexus One, which did so much to popularize the Android operating system.

Good writers borrow, great writers steal, or so the saying goes. Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 (WP7) operating system borrows heavily from Apple's iOS and Google's Android but then takes the interface and navigation in an intriguing new direction, offering a user experience that at least equals and in some ways surpasses them.

Starting Wednesday, September 1, if all goes according to plan, you will be able to order one of the first in what will surely be an avalanche of Android -based tablet computers. That's the day the eLocity A7 , running Android 2.2 and based on the Nvidia Tegra 2 chip, will be available for pre-orders at Amazon.com.

Ever more computers are carrying ever more confidential data -- trade secrets, personal information of clients and constituents, and national security information. Encrypted hard disks requiring hardware keys or passwords are supposedly the way to keep that information safe.