The window for U.S. companies to submit their H-1B visa applications for next year opens today and ends on Monday. And Google’s not very happy about the details.

Neither are Microsoft and other tech companies. They want the government to increase the number of visas that companies can get to hire foreign workers. More than 150,000 applications are expected to be submitted this year, more than double the annual limit of 65,000.

Most large technology companies point to hundreds of job listings that they can’t fill because of the lack of qualified U.S. candidates, they say. In the long run, if they can’t hire enough skilled workers here, development and engineering offices are more likely to open elsewhere: H-1B concerns already prompted Microsoft to open a new programming center in Vancouver.

Tech companies are going to conclude “it’s not worth the effort to hire foreigners in the U.S.” In addition, a recent study concluded that insufficient quantities of visas are actually sending would-be U.S. job openings overseas (or north, to Canada).

Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday said it is betting heavily on a touch-screen phone that appears to be the closest thing the U.S. market has seen to Apple Inc.’s vaunted iPhone.

The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price, Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cell-phone industry trade show in Las Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the $399 for the cheapest iPhone.

Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product introduction, according to David Owens, the company’s director of devices.

Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of the functions are accessed by touching the screen.

Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday it would offer full Web browsing for cell phones this year, following the footsteps of Apple Inc’s iPhone, which has won praise for the way it displays Web sites as they would appear on a computer.

Microsoft said at CTIA, the annual U.S. mobile show, that it will make Internet Explorer Mobile available to phone makers in the third quarter with the first phones to go on sale by year end.

Amazon.com Inc.’s brick-and-mortar competitors have yet another reason to fear the Web: a new service that lets shoppers compare prices and buy things with a few quick taps on their cell phones.

Amazon TextBuyIt, which launched late Tuesday, lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 (that’s “Amazon” on the keypad) from anywhere their cell phones work - including from inside physical stores.

If Amazon stocks matching items, the service returns two results at a time. Shoppers can immediately buy one of the first two the selections by texting back the number “1″ or “2,” or they can ask for more by texting the letter “M.”

New TextBuyIt customers will be prompted to enter the e-mail address associated with their existing Amazon account plus a shipping zip code. The service then calls them and walks through the checkout process using an automated voice system. Shoppers get confirmation by text message and e-mail.

From there, the customers can check on order status on Amazon’s Web site.