U.S. Senator Charles Grassley plans to drop a hold he placed on two FCC nominees because of a tussle with the agency over documents related to its treatment of would-be hybrid mobile operator LightSquared.

Two U.S. lawmakers pressed a federal agency on Monday to say how much taxpayer money went into testing the proposed LightSquared network, a private 4G system that the FCC ultimately rejected because it would interfere with GPS.

One of the most important capabilities that smartphones now have is knowing where they are. More than desktops, laptops, personal navigation devices or even tablets, which are harder to take with you, a smartphone can combine its location with many other pieces of data to make new services available.

With the end of the public comment and response periods on LightSquared's plan to operate a 4G LTE service near GPS frequencies, it's now the FCC's turn to decide how to proceed.

The maps on smartphones and tablets soon may extend into buildings, but consumers and service providers won't use indoor maps the same as outdoor, participants in the location-based services business said on Wednesday.

The location-based mobile services industry is already lucrative but has to do a better job easing consumers' fears about invasion of privacy, some executives said on Wednesday at the GPS-Wireless conference.

The FCC's proposal to kill LightSquared's planned LTE network would violate the fledgling carrier's property rights by taking away its spectrum and destroying its multibillion-dollar investment in mobile broadband, LightSquared will argue on Friday in a formal comment to the agency.

LightSquared Chairman and CEO Sanjiv Ahuja has resigned his CEO post, in the latest change to rock the company that still says it wants to build a 4G network using frequencies next to the GPS spectrum band.

Mobile users are more connected to the Internet than ever. As of December 2011, ComScore estimated that there are 97.9 million smartphone users in the US - nearly a third of the total population.

Automobile technology has become so advanced that today's cars are essentially computers with wheels. So why aren't we using them to surf the Web, communicate with other cars or order food at nearby restaurants?

If you're looking to buy a dedicated GPS navigation device, you'll quickly discover that every manufacturer offers an almost dizzying array of products -- each with slightly different features. The challenge, then, is to determine which features are must-haves and which would just be nice to have.

The more I use the HTC Incredible, the more I like it. And the thing that really makes the Incredible, er, incredible is its operating system, Android<.

Facebook wants to know "What's on your mind?" Twitter asks "What's happening?" But that's getting old already. The burning question for the next wave of social networking is "Where are you?"--and services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and Loopt want you to use your smartphone to answer it.

As Nokia takes on Google with turn-by-turn voice navigation on select smartphones, the worst nightmares of GPS device makers are coming true.

Do you remember where you were the day they unveiled Facebook? No? How about Twitter? Amazon.com? Google Search?

We've been down this road before: A trusting soul gets bum directions from a GPS navigation system, winds up in the middle of nowhere, and may or may not survive the ordeal.