Switzerland

Apple's iPad tablet will go on sale a few days later than originally announced -- a fact that is attracting attention. The company announced Friday that the Wi-Fi version will be released for sale on April 3 in the U.S. At the iPad announcement in January, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said the product would ship in late March.

There have been rumors that the sale date was pushed back to accommodate an unspecified production problem. The 3G version goes on sale in late April, and preordering for either model in the U.S. begins in a week.

Reshaping the Landscape?

Smartphones can not only play music and help you locate the next restaurant, they also perform more banal tasks like waking you up in the morning. It is common for people to be dragged from their sleep to the electronic sound of their mobile ring tone.

That raises the question of whether the ordinary alarm clock should be put on the list of endangered species. After all, the desktop computer put paid to the typewriter. Is it time for the bedside clock to sound its last post?

More than half of the people in the developing world are now cell phone subscribers, a U.N. report said Tuesday, highlighting strong global growth in telecommunications.

There were an estimated 4.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions at the end of last year, compared with about 1 billion in 2002, the International Telecommunication Union said in a report. In developing nations, 57 percent of people were signed up.

"The rate of progress remains remarkable," the U.N. agency said.

Duncan Gardham in The Telegraph:

After weeks of back-and-forth negotiations between Internet search giant Google and the Chinese government, Google says it will continue to oppose China's efforts to censor information on the Internet. For the past several years, Google has censored results on its Google.cn search engine as requested by the Chinese government. But recently, Google decided to pull the plug.

By Evert Cilliers

From The New York Times:

From The New York Times: