California’s budget deficit has swelled to a projected $16 billion — much larger than had been predicted just months ago — and will force severe cuts to schools and public safety if voters fail to approve tax increases in November, Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday.

Mitt Romney is used to doing most of the talking when he’s out scouting for votes, but this time, he mainly just listened. For more than an hour last month, the presumptive Republican nominee met with about a dozen prominent social conservatives who have been openly wary about his bid for the White House.

Purported details surrounding an unannounced high-end smartphone from LG have emerged alongside a leaked image, possibly revealing LG’s upcoming flagship smartphone intended to take on the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC’s One X. BriefMobile on Thursday published an image of the LG LS970, rumored to launch on Sprint in the coming months as the LG Eclipse 4G LTE

George Clooney played the suave host, chef Wolfgang Puck whipped up something for dinner, and President Barack Obama and about 150 of his Hollywood set donors enjoyed a few laughs at Clooney’s good humored expense.

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television.

If you’re at all familiar with other gadgets powered by Google’s open-source Android operating system, like most of today’s smartphones and tablets, you might be forgiven for thinking that Google TV – a set-top box powered by Android – would have a remote control that’s as simple as a flat touchscreen. With maybe a few large, friendly buttons, like the icons on your phone’s home screen. Right?

The Pebble smartwatch has had a tremendous journey over the past three weeks. Not even a week after its announcement, the watch became the most funded project in the history of crowd-sourcing website Kickstarter. Eric Migicovsky, the company’s founder, and his team have since doubled in size from five employees to 10 and have sold 85,000 watches to 66,434 backers, raising more than $10 million in the process

Apple is indeed preparing a smaller version of its wildly popular iPad tablet and it will launch this coming October for between $200 and $250, a new report claims. Numerous earlier reports have suggested that an iPad with a 7.85-inch display will launch in the third or fourth quarter this year, and now Apple watcher iMore has reinforced these rumors. The site, which has reported accurate information about unannounced Apple products in the past, says the scaled down tablet will look exactly like the current 9.7-inch iPad but smaller. It will also feature a display resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 pixels, identical to the panel on Apple’s new iPad.

Microsoft may be petitioning the social network to use its slide-tiled operating system on a top secret handset

(Reuters) – Research in Motion said the U.S.

Research In Motion (RIM) on Wednesday announced that the US Department of Defense staff and partners have been given the go-ahead to use more of the Canadian firm’s BlackBerry OS 7 smartphones.

President Barack Obama’s history-making embrace of gay marriage could send far-reaching political aftershocks through a presidential campaign defined by voter concerns about the economy but likely decided by slivers of the electorate in a handful of battleground states. “The politics, it’s not clear how they cut in some places that are going to be pretty

Rovio on Wednesday announced that its Angry Birds franchise has surpassed one billion downloads across Android, iOS, Windows and Mac OS X, with 350 million downloads having been served in 2012 alone. The latest Birds installment, Angry Birds Space, was downloaded more than 10 million time in less than three days and a whopping 50 million times in 35 days, making it the fastest growing mobile game of all time.

Android has been good to Samsung. Very, very good. Samsung recently reported its second consecutive quarter of record earnings, thanks in no small part to its wildly popular line of Android-powered Galaxy smartphones

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion has hired two new senior executives as it faces its most difficult period in its history.

T-Mobile has acknowledged internally that Apple’s iPhone offers a “poor customer experience” on its network, but the nation’s No.4 carrier is working as quickly as it can to change that. The company announced this past February that it will be performing upgrades to its network that bring faster data speeds to users who purchase an iPhone on their own and unlock it for use on T-Mobile, and on Tuesday the carrier said the work will be performed ahead of schedule.

Everyone can guess the evolutionary miracle that will occur as soon as the election is over, Yahoo!’s Walter Shapiro argues.

PARTIAL VERDICT: A federal jury has concluded Google’s popular Android software for mobile devices infringes on the copyrights of Java, a programming system that Oracle bought two years ago as part of a $7.3 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.