But something shifted a few years ago. She became afraid of talking on the phone. Just hearing it ring could provoke panic. Maybe it was the suffocation of carrying her cellphone all day long. (“There are these tentacles in you all the time,” she said.) But she rarely answered the phone, preferring to text message, and the voice mail piled up like unopened bills dumped in a desk drawer – frightening and unknown and ever present -- until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and in a rush of guilt she would delete dozens of messages that had been left for her without even listening to them.

Sometimes she would text the person to find out what they needed: “Sorry I missed your call,” she would type, although technically she wasn’t, and technically she hadn’t. Instead, like so many people I know, she had simply stopped using her phone for the one purpose Edison intended: to speak to another person.

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Google will pay $40.00 per share, a 63 percent premium to Motorola's closing price on Friday.

Motorola Mobility was separated from the rest of Motorola in January. The company has remade itself as a maker of smartphones based on Google's Android software, but has struggled against Apple Inc. and Asian smartphone makers.

"Motorola Mobility's total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies," said Google CEO Larry Page in a statement. "Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers."

The acquisition has the approval of both companies' boards and is expected to close by the end of this year or early 2012. It dwarfs Google's previous biggest deal, the 2008 purchase of DoubleClick for $3.2 billion.

In premarket trading, shares of Motorola Mobility soared 60 percent, or $14.72, to $39.19. Shares of Google, meanwhile, fell $14.68, or 2.6 percent, to $549.95.

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The deal would reduce the number of wireless carriers with national coverage from four to three, and is sure to face close regulatory scrutiny. It also removes a potential partner for Sprint Nextel Corp., the struggling No. 3 carrier, which had been in talks to combine with T-Mobile USA, according to Wall Street Journal reports.

AT&T is now the country's second-largest wireless carrier and T-Mobile USA is the fourth largest. The acquisition would give AT&T 129 million subscribers, vaulting it past Verizon Wireless' 102 million. The combined company would serve about 43 percent of U.S. cellphones.

For T-Mobile USA's 33.7 million subscribers, the news doesn't immediately change anything. Because of the long regulatory process, AT&T expects the acquisition to take a year to close. But when and if it closes, T-Mobile USA customers would get access to AT&T's phone line-up, including the iPhone.

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Schedule:

9 a.m.: "Crowdsourcing Interactive Strategic Content Design and the Ubiquitous User Experience" (lecture) -- Learn this year's hottest empty buzzwords to use in presentations to possible investors of your start-up from the leading self-proclaimed experts in the industry, none of whom you've ever heard of.

10:30 a.m.: "Malcolm Gladwell: Genius or over-rated hack who has no idea what he's talking about?" (panel) – Several professors and more experts you've never heard of will tell you exactly why it's not cool to like "The Tipping Point" anymore.

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Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of mobile phones, said Friday it plans to use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Phone software as the main platform for its smart phones in an effort to pull market share away from Apple's iPhone and Android, Google's software for phones and tablets.

The move marks a major strategy shift for Nokia, which has previously equipped devices with its own software. Analysts said the deal was a bigger win for Microsoft than Nokia, whose CEO Stephen Elop in a leaked memo this week compared his company to a burning oil platform with "more than one explosion ... fueling a blazing fire around us."

Nokia said the partnership would "deliver an ecosystem with unrivaled global reach and scale." However, it warned that the new strategy would also bring "significant uncertainties," and said it expects profit margins to be hit by strong competition from rivals.

Nokia's share price plunged 9 percent to euro7.43 ($10.11) in afternoon trading in Helsinki.

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The top-level authority that governs such addresses will distribute the last batches on Thursday, two people with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement wasn't planned until Thursday.

That doesn't mean consumers will suddenly find websites unreachable, though. And if everything goes according to plan, Internet users won't even notice.

"It will just be 'business as usual' if everyone gets their job done," said John Curran, CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, or ARIN, one of five regional groups that dole out such addresses. ARIN covers the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean.

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The app, called IRS2Go, allows taxpayers to track their tax refunds and get tax tips form the IRS. It's free, and available for people who use iPhones or Androids.

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said the IRS is using the app to become more accessible to taxpayers. 

“This new smartphone app reflects our commitment to modernizing the agency,” Shulman said in a statement. “As technology evolves and younger taxpayers get their information in new ways, we will keep innovating to make it easy for all taxpayers to access helpful information.”

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Assa Abloy AB, the world's largest maker of door locks, has launched a pilot in which Clarion Hotel Stockholm will lend customers mobile phones with close-range radio chips, much like devices used for contact-less payments at gas stations.

Repeat visitors during a four-month trial will be able to check in through their phones before arrival and have their phones activated as "keys." They will then be able to skip the registration desk and unlock the door by holding the phone next to it.

The short-range radio technology, known as Near Field Communication, is expected to be built into smart phones in the coming years. It is also envisioned for ticketing and card payments. Assa Abloy says it wanted to test the system before expanding it to other hotels, commercial buildings and homes.

Greger Johansson, a telecommunications analyst at research firm Redeye, said NFC is a hot technology in the mobile phone market. But he said few models have incorporated it so far and it will take "several years" before it becomes widely used.

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"The results tell us a lot about mobile phone users and political trends," said Erin Lehane, CALinnovates.org Executive Director. "Now the next time you are on a plane waiting to take-off, you can just look at your neighbor sitting next to you tweeting on his iPhone and know that he is more likely to be adding applications to track where the nearest Tea Party rally is than your neighbor to the left of you typing away on his Blackberry."

Zogby online polls tend not to rank among the most reliable in the world of opinion surveying, and my gut sense on reading the press release was that it was highly unlikely that Californian iPhone users were gung ho Palinites. Indeed, as I was searching through the CALinnovates Web site to learn more about the organization, I learned that earlier in the year, the group had been touting a California-specific poll that found iPhone users more likely to support Jerry Brown for Governor while Blackberry users favored Whitman. So go figure.

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The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's claim research arm released its findings Tuesday in Kansas City.

The insurance industry group compiled data from California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Washington immediately before and after driver texting was banned.

The study found the number of crashes actually increased in three of those states after the bans were implemented.

Institute spokesman Russ Rader says the increase might be the result of drivers trying to keep phones out of view while texting.

Highway officials say enforcement of the bans is just starting.

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The Nexus One runs the Android operating system, Google's increasingly plausible challenger to the iPhone's dominance in "mind-share" -- the platform people talk about because of the innovation that it represents -- if not actual market share. (RIM's Blackberry line is still the leader by the numbers, though dropping in both mind- and market share, while Motorola and Nokia aren't currently making huge waves in the smartphone arena apart from Motorola's Droid models.)

But a new competitor has broken out of the pack. It's Samsung, the Korean mega-giant technology company, and its line of Galaxy S phones -- also running Android -- is a serious challenger. In the few weeks it's been on the market, the line has sold over a million units, according to trade press reports.

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The chip shortage means Apple Inc.'s rivals are having trouble making enough phones to compete with the iPhone, a problem expected to persist through the holidays. It's also affecting wireless carriers, some of which are seeing delays in improving their networks, and it could even raise computer prices.

There isn't an across-the-board shortage of chips, but rather problems with certain components here and there. If just one of the 20 to 30 critical chips that go into a smart phone is unavailable, the whole production line screeches to a halt.

Sprint Nextel Corp., for instance, couldn't satisfy demand for HTC Corp.'s EVO 4G, the first phone to use a faster "4G" network, in parts of the country. Motorola Inc. said shortages of a wide range of chips, from memory to camera sensors to touch-screen controllers, are contributing to problems supplying enough of the new Droid X phones to Verizon Wireless. The carrier's online store reports a two-week wait for shipping orders.

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Sales of smart phones in general rose 50 percent in Q2, and Fortune predicts phones will outsell PCs in short order. CNET details the rise in HTC device sales, and Fast Company takes a look at Motorola's weak results, despite its Droid phones.

In other smart phone news, India has reached the end of its rope with BlackBerry over monitoring within its borders, PC World is talking about the development of a phone for gamers, and ZDNet is covering the Samsung Epic 4G pre-orders that begin tomorrow.

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The Saudi state news agency SPA said in a report late Tuesday that the country's telecom regulator has informed mobile service providers in the country that they must halt BlackBerry services starting Friday.

The regulator, known as the Communications and Information Technology Commission, couldn't immediately be reached for comment to provide details of the ban or say how it would be enforced.

It said the suspension of service was being implemented because BlackBerry service "in its present state does not meet regulatory requirements," according to the SPA report.

RIM could not immediately be reached for comment.

Word of the ban comes just days after the neighboring United Arab Emirates announced it was planning to shut down e-mail, messaging and Web browsing on BlackBerrys starting in October.

India is also in talks with RIM over how information is managed on the devices. Like the UAE, it has cited security concerns in pushing for greater access to encrypted information sent by the phones that gets routed through the Canadian company's computers overseas.

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PC Magazine calls the Torch "new and different enough" after a hands-on test. Bloomberg is reporting that this year will also see a RIM tablet device, built to compete with the iPad. The San Francisco Chronicle covers the Blackberry-iPhone competition, and MarketWatch has its eye on Research in Motion's stock value today.

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These wins for customer freedom center around a technology broadly known as DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management -- methods used by hardware and software companies to allow customers only certain rights. It should more properly be called Digital Restrictions Management, because that's the real aim of DRM. People have found ways to break or work around DRM, but federal law makes it illegal to do so in most circumstances.

The cracks in DRM's legal facade are starting to grow, too. On Monday, the Copyright Office and librarian of Congress said, among other things, that it's OK to A) "jailbreak" your phone, thereby letting you install software not approved by the phone seller; and B) use brief excerpts of DVD videos in other works. Renewing a previously granted exception to federal copyright law, the office also said it was OK to unlock your phone so that you can use it with a different mobile network.

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But is there an Achilles' heel to too much configurability? What if manufacturers replace all of Google's add-on functionality with their own? Where's the win for Google?

A hint of just such a scenario is discernible within a Monday TechCrunch post arguing "Android Poised for Dominance in China, With Global Implications."

That's right, China — Google's search engine censor bête noire. A country that sees Facebook as a U.S. tool for intervention in domestic affairs, routinely shuts down popular blogs and microblogging services, and in general does its absolute best to keep a lid on the Internet. At first glance, one might be excused for wondering whether Google's license-to-anyone open-source Android strategy fits comfortably into China's top-down control model.

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Salmoneus, ruler of Elis, was a wealthy and unjust prince with an arrogant heart. He had founded a beautiful city and called it Salmonea, and he grew so overbearing in his pride that he commanded his subjects to give him the honors and offerings due to a god. He wanted to be taken for Zeus himself, and he traversed his country and other parts of Greece in a chariot meant to resemble that of the Thunderer. To accomplish this, he tried to imitate lightning with torches launched through the air, and thunder with the hoof beats of champing horses which he drove over a brazen bridge. He even had people killed and then pretended that his lightning had struck them down. From the heights of Olympus Zeus noted his folly. He reached into the thick of the clouds, drew forth a real thunderbolt, and hurled it at this mortal, raging in madness and insolence below. The bolt shattered the king and destroyed the city he had built with all those who dwelt in it.*

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PC World has five reasons you shouldn't believe the rumors, in fact. Analysts like the ones Barron's spoke to are falling all over themselves to predict the financial boon to Verizon that an Apple offering would bring. Forbes discusses the fundamental differences between the AT&T and Verizon networks. And the Financial Post concerns itself with what would happen to Blackberry-creators RIM if this actually goes down.

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