Microsoft is the secret owner of a powerful ecosystem. "Secret," because until now the company has done very little to get its various products to talk to one another. Today Microsoft is taking a promising step forward, announcing that Windows Phone 8 will be designed from the ground up to natively interact with Windows 8 when both launch later this year. Alongside this deep integration, with Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is pushing a redesigned Metro homescreen that allows for more user control, a SIM-based mobile wallet and a built-in mapping solution that isn't Google Maps.

All of you reading this who own a smartphone, raise your hand. Hmm, yeah, that's what I thought — DVICE readers are heeled, as they used to say in the old west. You who didn't raise your hands, you stupid phone owners — no, I mean the phones are stupid, not you — after all, if there are smart phones, there must be stupid phones, right? Okay — how about smart-challenged phones. In all events, those of you with not-smart-phones are now an endangered minority. According to Pew Research, 53 percent of Americans say they now own a smartphone. To me, owning a stupid phone here in the second decade of 21st century is akin to someone in the 1950s insisting on mounting a horse to satisfy their primary transportation. So why haven't you joined the modern era and gotten yourself a smartphone? And why aren't all you smartphone owners (you can put your hands down now) making like smartphone-toting St. Pauls and proselytizing among the non-smartphone believers?

When I see the word "free" I'm always wondering what the catch is. Maybe this is it: Researchers at Purdue University have conducted a study in conjunction with Microsoft that showed in some cases up to 75% of an app's total energy consumption was spent on locating and powering up the app's third party advertising.

HTC's tagline is "Quietly brilliant." In the last year, it's been anything but. With what felt like an endless release of similar smartphones with wild names, HTC's going into 2012 with a different mindset: simplify, refine and excel. The HTC One family is a trio of smartphones from high to low that represent the new HTC — a mobile company that is focusing more on the qualities in a smartphone that people care about most, instead of just pumping out smartphones every week. Read on to see if HTC's One X, S and V smartphones are worth considering.