The following is a round up of stories that made the headlines this week at Neowin.
This week saw news dominated by Mobile World Congress, in which HTC was awarded Device Manufacturer of the Year. Apple's iPhone 4 was the victor in the GSMA Global Mobile Awards' Best Mobile Device category.
This week also saw the Samsung Galaxy S II and 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab II details leak ahead of the official announcement by Samsung; the company did have something else to cheer about though, after reportedly landing an $8Bn parts deal with Apple to supply LCD panels, mobile processors, and NAND flash memory chips to the Cupertino giant.
Mark Zuckerberg also dropped in via video to help announce Facebook Phones at the MWC, saying that 'dozens' of handsets are currently in the works. HTC showed off their two new handsets named ChaCha and Salsa (yes, that's what they're really called), sporting a new Facebook button.
During HTC's big announcement-spree at Mobile World Congress, the Taiwanese firm released details of a new tablet that they hope to release in the second quarter of 2011 named the HTC flyer, sporting Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
Microsoft were also in the news this week, after shifting 2 million downloads of the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate; but one blogger showed why IE9 doesn't please all, and we discovered that the final version will land sometime next month. Windows 8 saw some coverage too this week, when a new screenshot leak of build 7926 hit the web. In other Microsoft news, the Windows Phone Marketplace surpassed 8000 approved apps, and IE 9, Twitter integration, SkyDrive were confirmed for WP7. Microsoft’s Bing search engine has once again seen its market share rise over the past month, while Windows 7 SP1 was released to MSDN/TechNet users.
Mozilla also took a swipe at Microsoft this week after claiming that IE9 is not a modern browser, they also claim to have a Release Candidate of Firefox 4 by Feb 25, with a final coming sometime in March. It also has to be noted that Firefox 5 is also already in the planning stages.
Rumors surfaced this week that Apple is to re-design the iOS notification system, and possibly make 3 models of the iPhone 5 with one being smaller (later denied), and that the Mac App Store was to be integrated into iTunes; but it wasn't all roses for Apple this week, after Apple discovered 91 children employed at their supplier's factories. A disgruntled former-employee also shared in detail what it is really like to work in an Apple Store. It was also questioned if Apple's subscription policy is in violation of anti-trust laws. Apple also admitted that workers were exposed to n-hexane, not such a good week for them!
We were also contacted by Google this week, to correct an earlier rumor that Google were planning to implement default encrypted searches.
And that concludes our round-up.
Oliver Haslam contributed to this article.
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