Gadgetory

can one app save apples Maps I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update folks are buzzing again about Apple this time there's a report that it might buy the traffic app waze it's a social navigation app with about 30 million users TechCrunch has a source saying that the app is asking for 750 million dollars but Apple so far is only offering 500 million Apple of course would be interested in buying a direction app to help strengthen its troubled Maps app but apples got another trouble this week the company said there's a glitch with its new Do Not Disturb feature and it won't be fixed until Monday this feature on iOS 6 lets users silence incoming calls alerts and notifications but just for a preset time window for example you might want to put a Do Not Disturb on while sleeping so a text message alert doesn't wake you up but somehow the Do Not Disturb function remains on past it's set time so people are missing messages unless they manually turn off the feature looks like Sprint is planning to launch its own prepaid service on january 25th with four phones at least that's according to a document leaked on the blog android police these aren't the top phones and smartphone plans cost 70 dollars a month Sprint's prepaid business has always come from its sister stores boost mobile and virgin mobile boost and virgin had better monthly rates but they do limit download speeds when you hit a certain threshold expect prepaid to be a bigger area of competition in the coming year especially with tmobile about to merge with metro pcs and there's a new operating system coming to the party lubuntu which is an open-source operating system for PCs and televisions is launching a system for smartphones it has several swiping gestures for navigation it might remind you of webos from the old palm phones this isn't something you probably see for another year but it will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas also at CES will learn more about the smart evolution kit for Samsung televisions last year samsung said it was working on this device that you stick in the back year TV to give it a system upgrade so you can get the benefits of the latest TVs without having to buy a new one it's like a TV brain transplant well samsung says such a kit could cost between 200 to 300 dollars and we'll finally get more facts on Monday at the show you want to keep to seeing it all week for continuous coverage of CES but our live video coverage begins Monday and on Thursday we named the best of CES show winners so you won't want to miss that that's your tech news update you can get links to all the stories I mentioned on our blog sina com / update from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey