Nokia Siemens Networks has released the MBit Index study which shows that mobile data traffic on 2G as well as 3G networks has increased 92 percent between December 2011-12. However, data traffic on 3G in particular has witnessed a sharp rise by as much as 196 percent, which is almost three times more than the data traffic generated by 2G services during the same period. The report also suggests that a lot of high-end 2G users migrated to 3G services during the second half of the year 2012, especially due to the 3G tariff reductions.

Despite facing a mass exodus of senior executives and internal tensions, HTC could have sold close to 5 million units of its flagship smartphone, the One, since its launch over a month ago. “Orders are pretty good so far and are still more than what we can supply. This is partly due to the shortage of components. When the issue is resolved next month, we will have a better idea if it’s doing really well or not,” a HTC executive told the WSJ.

Micromax has launched its MMX377G data card in India. The handset vendor claims it can deliver download speeds up to 14.4mbps and upload speeds up to 5.76mbps.

Nokia used to be the king of smartphones and feature phones, now it rules neither. While Windows Phone as a platform is on the rise, the growth is very slow, and in its last quarter, its Asha line of feature phones took a massive tumble in terms of shipments. Well, the writing was up against the wall considering Android smartphones have been becoming cheaper and smoother to use, month after month, but Q1 of 2013, was a real knock-out punch for Nokia. The Finnish company hopes that the Lumia 520, which was announced at MWC earlier this year, could be the smartphone that could take on Android smartphones in the sub-Rs 10,000 segment. Priced at Rs 10,499, it does pack in all the things that Nokia stands for and offers a decent feature spread. But does it tick all the right boxes for the average Indian consumer? Read on to find out.

Barely hours after being spotted on benchmarks, HTC has officially announced the Desire 600. The Dual-SIM smartphone will be available in markets starting June and features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2GHz quad-core processor and runs on Android Jelly Bean with Sense 5 UI running on top. Think about the Desire 600 as an affordable variant of the One.

In sync with launching the Kindle Fire HD in 170 countries, Amazon has also opened up its Appstore in nearly 200 countries. Android users (including non-Kindle Fire HD users) can now get the Appstore and buy Android apps. This follows Amazon’s announcement last month of its plans to launch the Appstore in 200 countries this year. The world’s largest online retailer differentiates itself from Google’s Play Store by claiming it tests and checks every app before it appears on its store, which would at least theoretically ensure there is no malware unlike the Play Store.

HTC seems to be working on expanding its mid-range smartphone portfolio under the Desire series, as two of its upcoming phones in this series have been revealed in two different cases of leaked certification and benchmarks. The GFX Bench is flashing the alleged benchmark results for Desire 600, while the other phone named as Desire 200 has been spotted by VR-Zone in a Taiwanese certification page.

Amazon today announced it is launching its Kindle Fire HD tablets running on forked Android in 170 countries. Both the variants – Kindle Fire HD 8.9 and Kindle Fire HD (7-inch) – will be available from Amazon’s website. It will start shipping on June 13 but customers can pre-order them today onwards. We had earlier exclusively reported that Redington would distribute Kindle devices in India. Amazon announced its plans to launch its Android app store in India among other countries in April, which would enable users to buy apps and other Amazon services. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is priced at $269 and $299 for the 16GB version with offers that bring sponsored content on the lock screen or $284 and $314 without special offers respectively. The Kindle Fire HD 7 is available for $199 and $229 for the 16GB and 32GB variants respectively with special offers and $214 and $244 without special offers for the 16GB and 32GB variants.

Read on for the complete PR.

Google has updated Chrome for Android and has introduced some much-needed new features. Most of these new features like full-screen browsing and better search page were seen on the updated Chrome for iOS devices that was introduced back in April.

While Internet Explorer may not be the most popular web browser in the world any more, but it still remains a very important part of the web, considering it comes preloaded with the world’s most popular operating system, Windows. We’ve been hearing about an update to Internet Explorer 10 (1E10), as screenshots of IE11 were leaked out when Windows Blue, aka 8.1 was leaked out on the web. Today, Microsoft has dropped a big hint about the incoming update in the form of a Vine teaser.

In the eye of recent hacking attempts on the micro-blogging site, Twitter today introduced an added layer of security to its login page. Twitter calls it the ‘two-factor authentication’ system, which uses one’s mobile phone as an added way to verify if it is genuine login attempt.

Google has released an updated version of the Drive app for Android that has a number of enhancements. Some of these new features include a card style file display like Google Now, an option to scan and keep a track of important documents in Drive, and several other performance tweaks. Recently, Google had also clubbed the memory space for Drive with that of Gmail and Google+, resulting in a total of 15GB of free cloud storage.