Problems with the trackball on BlackBerry Tour phones have led to return rates near 50 percent, an analyst at TownHall Investment Research said.

Users are complaining about the issue in a number of online support forums. They say that they must roll the trackball repeatedly for it to move the cursor on the screen only minimally.

HP is trying to revive the idea of placing smart screens around the home to display content from the Web and PCs, though the number of Web sites available at first will be very limited.

The emergence of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, virtualization and unified switching fabrics is ushering in a major shift in data center network design: three-tier switching architectures are being collapsed into two-tier ones.

Google is developing a product called Fast Flip that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse through news articles on the Web, a process that the company finds is cumbersome and discourages people from reading more online.