Wal-Mart says it’s cutting the price of the most up-to-date iPhone in half. That’s another sign Apple is getting ready to unveil a new model.

Wal-Mart says that starting Tuesday the iPhone 3GS with 16 gigabytes of storage space will cost $97 with a two-year contract with AT&T. It currently costs $197.

Nokia Corp. will run mapping and navigation services for Yahoo Inc. in an acknowledgement that the slumping Internet company hasn’t kept up with rival Google Inc. in the increasingly important area of location services.

Yahoo will, in turn, provide e-mail and instant messaging services on Nokia phones, as part of the worldwide partnership announced Monday.

Yahoo has been working to focus on its core businesses - creating and licensing content, selling online ads and providing messaging services - while turning to partners to run some of its other offerings.

Students at Northern Arizona University will have a hard time skipping large classes next fall because of a new attendance monitoring system.

The new system will use sensors to detect students’ university identification cards when they enter classrooms, according to NAU spokesperson Tom Bauer. The data will be recorded and available for professors to examine.

Bauer said the university’s main goal with the sensor system is to increase attendance and student performance.

Nokia and Microsoft unveiled on Wednesday the first result of their new software collaboration aimed at breaking the dominance of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry in wireless services for corporations.

The companies unveiled Communicator Mobile software, which enables people to see their colleagues’ availability, and click to communicate with them using instant messenger, e-mail, text or phone call.

The names and status of colleagues are embedded directly in the devices’ contacts application. Owners of Nokia E52 and E72 models can download it as of today from Nokia’s Ovi Store.

Microsoft Corp. unveiled two cell phones Monday that are meant for social networking-savvy teens and twenty-somethings, in an attempt to revitalize its mobile business and regain ground on iPhones and BlackBerrys.

Microsoft said its new touch-screen phones - a short, square-shaped handset called Kin One and a longer, more rectangular one called Kin Two - will be sold exclusively in the U.S. by Verizon Wireless. They are being made by Sharp Corp., which has produced Sidekick cell phones, whose software comes from Microsoft-owned Danger Inc.

Hundreds of thousands of soccer fans are likely to get their first taste of live 3D viewing during this year’s World Cup, the vast majority of them in cinemas rather than at home, according to football body FIFA.

Together with partner Sony, FIFA plans to supply 25 World Cup matches in the immersive 3D technology made popular in cinemas by blockbuster movie Avatar and expected to spread to living rooms around the world this year.

Viewers with 3D television sets who live in a country where the broadcaster with World Cup rights also has 3D capabilities will also be able to watch live in 3D at home — if they are not put off by the need to wear special glasses.

Microsoft Corp will show off its latest mobile phones on Monday, but don’t expect a direct rival to the iPhone.

The world’s largest software company is trying a new tack in the hotly contested arena with its long-awaited “Project Pink” devices.

Unlike Apple’s popular device or Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, they are aiming at hyperactive teenagers who want multiple instant messaging accounts, e-mail, games, music and Facebook in a cool-looking package.

Sharp’s latest 3-D displays deliver bright, clear imagery without the cumbersome glasses usually required for such technology. Now the bad news: They only work on a 3-inch (7.5-centimeter) screen held one foot (30 centimeters) from the viewer’s face.

Sharp Corp. demonstrated liquid crystal screens Friday for mobile devices that showed 3-D animation, touch-panel screens that switched from one 3-D photo to another and a display connected to a 3-D video camera.

Movies and TVs in 3-D are no longer surprising. Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp. of Japan, as well as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics, already sell or are planning 3-D TVs.

The drawback until now has been the need for special glasses, which show different images to the right eye and the left eye. Sharp’s 3-D technology doesn’t require them because the displays are designed to shoot different images to each eye.

The technology may be applied to TVs in the future, said Executive Managing Officer Yoshisuke Hasegawa. But he acknowledged it now works better when the distance between the viewer and the screen is fixed.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, the world’s second-biggest mobile phone maker, on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S, which is based on Google Inc’s Android software.

The Galaxy S, which will compete with devices from Nokia, Motorola Inc and Apple Inc’s iPhone, will be available for global distribution later this year, said JK Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile phone business.

He said in a keynote speech at the CTIA annual wireless trade show that the phone would use an advanced screen technology called Super AMOLED, which promises a display 20 percent brighter that will reflect 80 percent less sunlight outdoors.

The Galaxy S will also have a 1 gigahertz Samsung chip, which Shin said is twice as powerful as today’s average smartphone.

Just as photographic film was mostly replaced by silicon image chips, now quantum film threats to replace the conventional CMOS image sensors in digital cameras.

Made from materials similar to conventional film—a polymer with embedded particles—instead of silver grains like photographic film the embedded particles are quantum dots. Quantum films can image scenes with more pixel resolution, according to their inventors, InVisage Inc., offering four-times better sensitivity for ultra-high resolution sensors that are cheaper to manufacture.

Nintendo Co plans to launch a new model of its DS handheld game console that allows users to play three-dimensional (3D) games without using special glasses, aiming to reinvigorate demand for the five year old machine.

The Japanese company said the new portable player, tentatively named “Nintendo 3DS,” will be able to play titles created for previous DS models and will be launched in the financial year starting in April.

Google Inc is working with Intel Corp and Sony Corp to develop a new class of Internet-enabled televisions and set top boxes, according to a media report.

The effort, known as Google TV, has been under way for several months and is based on Google’s Android software.

According to the report, the partners hope to make it easy for consumers to use Web applications like Twitter on their TVs and to entice software developers to create new applications to run on Google TV.

Google has begun testing the set top box technology with Dish Network, the Times said.