U.S. antitrust agencies should block Google’s proposed acquisition of crowdsourced mapping app Waze because the deal would take away Google’s major competitor in mobile maps, consumer group Consumer Watchdog said. Google’s proposed acquisition would remove the most “viable” competitor to Google Maps on mobile devices, Consumer Watchdog, a frequent critic of Google, said in Wednesday letters to the …

On the second day of its annual HP Discover user conference in Las Vegas, Hewlett-Packard launched an OS designed specifically for cloud computing, called the HP Cloud OS. Initially, however, the software can only be obtained by purchasing HP systems. HP Cloud OS “will provide the foundation for our common architecture for the HP converged cloud,” said …

When the iPhone first came out six years ago, it was widely derided for not having a physical keyboard, unlike then-dominant BlackBerry. A few years later, when Android smartphones first appeared, several sported physical keyboards as their key iPhone-killing feature. Today, touch keyboards rule the smartphone world. Even among Android devices, the MotorolaDroid 4 and Photon …