TheStreet

Tech Trends

Arguably, everyone – young and old – male or female - Democrat or Republican - techno-freak or Luddite – loves sweets.

And, even though we're still mired in September the peak candy buying season is fast approaching. Halloween is less than six weeks away.

And, among other meaningful things, that means it's time for the yearly survey of the world's most popular candies – as determined by actual sales.

Is Wal-Mart planning on marketing their own, branded tablets and book readers?

Are they betting those devices are becoming passe?

Or, do they just want a bigger piece of the online sales pie for themselves?

I got to see and touch the new iPhone 5 yesterday. I was surprised at just how thin and lightweight it is. Apple should be commended.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people who've actually played with the device who are reportedly not as pleased with Apple's new mapping system.

Samsung didn’t shell out lots of money to announced their new Galaxy Note tablet/phone today. They spent a few shekels in Germany, a few weeks back, doing just that for the international model of the handset.

But today they announced the U.S. version of the device. If it were a movie you would say that it's “opening wide”.

Following the LG Android announcement, very early this morning, we were offered bus rides to the next event – an HTC announcement - all the way over on Manhattan's West Side.

As you can guess by Steve Ballmer's appearance in the above photo HTC announced two new Windows Phone 8 phones.

It has been a very busy morning for smartphone introductions.

LG came to midtown Manhattan, early this morning, to show off their next superphone – the Optimus G.

Actually, it was a joint news conference – with partner Qualcomm sharing the stage. Qualcomm's high-octane, quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor is the electronic brain inside the phone.

A lot of people ordered the new iPhone, last weekend.

So many that carrier AT&T says they've broken all previous records.

“Customers ordered more iPhones from AT&T than any previous model both on its first day of pre-orders and over (the past) weekend”.

Microsoft has announced that they've licensed a bit of software to Research in Motion.

Remember them?

RIM signed a patent licensing agreement which gives the Canadian-based company “broad access to the latest Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) for certain Blackberry devices”.