MICROSOFT

Shares of AOL, the No. 5 website, fell 1 percent in late Monday trading even after the troubled company won its first Pulitzer Prize.

Samsung has confirmed that a Windows 8 phone will be launched around October 2012, according to Taiwanese reports. The handset devices, codenamed “Apollo,” are said to add support for a quad-core processor and higher display resolutions.

After suffering their worst two weeks of the year, stocks will look to quarterly earnings to determine whether the recent pullback has been exhausted or more losses are justified.

As U.S. taxpayers complete their income tax forms, few had as good a 2011 as new Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose compensation now is valued above $600 million.

Earnings season will kick into full gear next week with results due from major players. The stock market had an incredible first quarter with double-digit percentage gains, and the flood of company earnings reports will largely decide which way the market will be going from here.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), the No. 1 PC vendor, kept its crown in the first quarter and added share as worldwide PC shipments rose 1.9 percent, market researcher Gartner (NYSE: IT) said.

Microsoft announced its biggest-ever customer for cloud computing - software that it hosts on behalf of clients and delivers over the Internet - after winning a contract to provide free services to a major Indian education body.

Apple changed the entire smartphone genre with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and five years later, Apple fans are anxiously awaiting a new iPhone, rumored to be released between June and October 2012. Nobody outside the enormous complex at 1 Infinite Loop truly knows what the sixth-generation iPhone, presumably called the iPhone 5, will look like or feature, but that isn't stopping us from daydreaming about all of the possible features in Apple's next phone.

Google reported first-quarter financial results that beat analysts' estimates by a wide margin.

AT&T has been pushing its Nokia Lumia 900 hard, but sales associates at its stores don't seem convinced.

Bethesda Softworks has been promising fans some new surprises, and now it seems that “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” announcement is finally unveiled. Players have been expecting a new DLC package, but this morning CNN reported that the widely popular RPG will be coming to Kinect.

While Samsung and Apple are still tight-lipped about their plans to release their next flagship smartphones in the market, other major phone manufacturers are taking full advantage of the whole market situation and delivering their best bets to consumers.

Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday it won a ruling in a Seattle court effectively preventing phone company Motorola Mobility from immediately obtaining an injunction in Germany that could stop Microsoft from selling its Xbox and other software products there, due to a patent disagreement.

International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), the No. 2 computer services provider, announced a new campaign called “PureSystems” to sell computers and software for cloud computing.

Nokia has reported a bug in some of its new Lumia 900 4G devices, which were released in the U.S. just last week.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) the Finnish mobile phone maker trying to turn around, warned its shift will take longer than expected. As a result, financial results for the first half of 2012 will be negative, it warned.

The Lumia 900 is suffering from data connection problems, Nokia has confirmed. The company has described the problem as a memory management issue.

When Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), the most popular search engine announces first-quarter results after Thursday’s market close, the biggest question will be about overall revenue. Will it regain momentum lost in the fourth quarter?

The successor to the Xbox 360 -- dubbed the Xbox 720 by gaming journalists -- is reported to contain a 16-core CPU that could power the next generation of Microsoft Kinect game consoles.

Starboard Value, the hedge fund that owns 5.3 percent of AOL (NYSE: AOL), the No. 4 website, denounced AOL’s sales of patents as inadequate.

Microsoft's push into the tablet industry will see only limited success, with the U.S. software maker remaining a distant No. 3 behind Apple and Google, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.