Stories by: Galen Gruman

Google is making its hot Chrome browser available to its hot mobile platform. Find out what you gain - and lose.

Demos, like appearances, can be deceiving. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, one of the media hits was OnLive Desktop, a service that provisions a Windows 7 desktop environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010 to the iPad over an Internet connection. For many, the idea of being able to run the full Office suite is very appealing, given some of the limitations of the iPad's native office productivity tools such as Apple iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers), Quickoffice, and Documents to Go.

Thanks to the proliferation -- and relative similarity -- of Android smartphones on the market, finding the right model to suit your needs is no easy task. But for those looking to bulk up on battery life, enter Motorola Mobility's Droid Razr Maxx.

Two years ago, on January 27, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. Computing has never been the same, despite all the 'iPad killers' - here are some of the failures

When it comes to business mobile usage, Apple reigns. That's according to Good Technology, an MDM (mobile device management) vendor that tracks the activation of new devices managed by its customers. It's no surprise that in the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple iPhone 4S activations were huge at 31 percent of all new devices activated and 40 percent of all new smartphones, as that highly anticipated smartphone was released in October.

As major technology websites such as Reddit and Wikipedia prepare to go dark this Wednesday in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and the similar Protect Intellectual Privacy Act (PIPA) act in the Senate, there are signs that the protests from the technology industry are causing Congress to rethink the two bills, which is supported by the entertainment industry and a variety of business groups whose goods are often counterfeited or pirated. The technology sector -- outside of online businesses -- has been conflicted, with the Business Software Alliance initially supporting SOPA but then withdrawing that support.

It was just five years ago that Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, which despite early criticisms came to redefine mobile computing.

So far, few Android tablets have caught fire; arguably, only the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has made any impression with buyers. That sleek, iPad-looking tablet offers the basics for both personal and business users in a nice package, and it's remained at the top of the Android tablet hill since it debuted six months ago. Motorola Mobility's new Droid Xyboard -- an awkward name meant to evoke the villainous cyborgs of "Battlestar Galactica" fame (a disturbing motif, frankly, carried through in its startup screen) -- poses a serious challenge to the Galaxy Tab.

When then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised in spring 2010 that iOS would support native printing, I and many others were happy, as the inability to print was a big inconvenience when using an iPhone or iPad. But iOS 4.2's printing support was disappointingly limited to a handful of AirPrint-compatible printers from Hewlett-Packard, and the list has hardly grown in the year since. Worse, iOS 5 this past fall plugged a hole that app developers had used to enable printing to non-AirPrint network printers. Printing became effectively useless on iOS devices.

iOS 5, Android 4 "Ice Cream Sandwich," Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango," and BlackBerry OS 7 were all released in the past few months, each promising to advance the iPhone, Android smartphones, Windows Phones, and BlackBerrys respectively to the head of the mobile pack. But only one can be the best.