From the BlackBerry outage, to Yahoo giving it the boot, BlackBerry makers Research in Motion (RIM) have not been having the best week, and many are concluding that it is the beginning of the end for the beleaguered company. Whether it is the end, or just a series of unfortunate events, there is no doubt that they’re are struggling fiercely to stay afloat amidst market-dominating Apple, and their runner-up, the Android market.

Apple’s iPhone 5 has been released with mixed reviews. Many people are outraged at the fact that Apple has released a new cord, which will force most to buy adapters at around $30 a pop, just to make their new phone compatible with their accessories. And according to senior analysts from ABI research, Apple stands to make roughly $40 million in revenue from the adapters alone in the next fiscal quarter. Over the next year, the adapters will make Apple a minimum of $100 million in revenue. And despite consumers largely being outraged at this switch, and underwhelmed with the latest iPhone, many will still devotedly follow Apple because they are devout fans.

Apple unveiled the new iPhone 5 and their new connector cable, Lightening. What Apple today called “the biggest things to happen for iPhone since iCloud,” eager Apple fans are calling, “meh.” Apple unveiled the official iPhone 5, which does not appear to be much different from the iPhone 4S. The phone was introduced as being, “designed and built to an exacting level of standard unlike anything we, or anyone in our industry, have made before.” Except the last iPhone, apparently.

Streaming radio service, Pandora, may soon be regretting opening its music box. Apple is apparently sticking with what should be their official mantra, “anything you can do, I can do better,” after reports began to leak that they are working on a streaming radio option of their own. With this one announcement, Pandora shares went into a tailspin, plunging 19%.

A Chinese American Sun Kaisens employee, an ex employee of Motorola, has been sentenced to four years in federal prison for stealing trade secrets from Motorola, including their IDEN technology, and attempting to smuggle them to a Chinese technology company in China. Hanjuan Jin, a 41 year old female employee, was a software engineer with Motorola for nine years. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge, Ruben Castillo, found that Jin made a “purposeful raid to steal technology.” In addition to being charged with three counts of stealing trade secrets, Jin was also charged with three counts of economic espionage.

The Ad Hawk App has made a timely and welcome appearance. After all, it’s that time of year when political ads are on just about every TV and radio in America and Adhawk (there is both Ad Hawk for iPhone and Ad Hawk for Android) has answered our political prayers. Ok, ok, probably not the exact political prayers you had, but the app, a sort of Shazam for political ads, certainly helps decipher these ads that are playing everywhere. And not just your cheerful, “Vote for me, I’m great” ads, but those nasty, mud-slinging political attack ads.

The verdict is in: Samsung must pay Apple $1.5 billion for smartphone patent infringement. The lawsuit, filed by Apple Inc. last year, accused Samsung of copying the design of iPhones and iPads. Jurors on Friday produced a 20-page verdict, agreeing with Apple’s assertion that Samsung’s smartphones copied the design of the Apple iPhone, in both design and features. Apple lawyers produced pictures of the Samsung smartphones both before and after the introduction of the iPhone.

T-Mobile USA is bending over backwards to keep their dwindling customer-base by offering a new unlimited data plan. The new plan will roll out in September and is hoped to rival their competitors, who have started putting a cap on data use. T-Mobile’s new plan will run users between $70-90 per month, depending on which smart phone you choose, and will allow unlimited voice, text and Internet usage.

Paying for your morning latte just got easier with the new Pay with Square app, which allows users to pay for purchases without swiping their credit card. Instead, users can pay for their purchases directly with their Android or iPhone. The app can be downloaded directly from the Apple App Store or Google Play. Users must be running at least iOS 4.1 or Android 2.2 in order to use the app.

It is being hailed the “Instagram of Video” and, much like Instagram, has taken off like wildfire in the mobile and social media communities. Socialcam, a free video-sharing app, is quickly becoming a worthy adversary for YouTube on account of the fact that it is strictly a mobile app, and is tailored to be such. Many complain that uploading videos to YouTube from their phones is kind of a pain and being able to do so is a mere side product of YouTube’s focus on a computer-based user experience.

Isn’t it frustrating when you receive an SMS text message and it turns out to be SMS spam? Don’t you wish that you could report those spammers to your wireless carrier? Well, you can! Whether you want to report text spam to ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint – or any other North American carrier, it’s as simple as forwarding it right from your phone. Here’s how to do it.

A UK-based company, Masabi, that provisions ticketless ticketing via smartphones and other mobile phones for trains in the UK, will be bringing its service to the U.S. this summer. Boston’s train system, run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) will be giving the Masabi system a trial run this summer and, assuming all goes as expected, the Masabi service will be deployed system-wide in the fall.

If you get frustrated when your iPhone screen switches from the upright position (known as “portrait” view) to the horizontal orientation (known as “landscape” view) at the slightest change swivel of your wrist, you may have gone searching for a way to lock the orientation so that doesn’t happen. On the iPad, there is an external button to lock the orientation of the screen, but on the iPhone that same button serves the mute function. Here’s how to lock your iPhone screen so that it is locked in the portrait orientation.

More and more, people are performing web searches on their smart phones. It’s great to be able to do that, but it also can be frustrating to try to find what you’re looking for on that tiny screen, or without the full tools available to you with a keyboard or mouse. For example, how can you easily search for and jump to a particular word or term that’s down towards the bottom of a web page, and not visible at the top of the page?

Internet security firm Symantec (proprietors of, among other things, Norton Anti-Virus) have released the results of research that they have dubbed the “Honey Stick Project”. In Project HoneyStick, researchers “lost” a total of 50 cell phones in various cities around North America, including NYC, Washington D.C., LA, San Francisco, and Ottawa, Canada. The aim was to see what the average citizen would do with a found cell phone: would they try to reunite it with its owner, or would they do something more sinister with it? It turns out that the answer is “both”.