Michael Kan

HTC said on Wednesday its newest smartphones models had all passed a required U.S. Customs review, clearing device shipments to the country after they were previously delayed because of the inspection.

The Taiwanese smartphone vendor completed the review process with U.S. customs, and the devices were found to be in compliance with an International Trade Commission (ITC) ruling, HTC said in a Taiwan Stock Exchange filing.

Vendors on one of China's largest e-commerce platforms are resorting to calling the hit PC game Diablo 3 "Big Pineapple," which sounds similar in Mandarin Chinese, as a way to dodge the site's censors. The site has banned the sale of the overseas product pending a review from government authorities.

U.S. developer Blizzard launched Diablo 3 earlier this month, bringing its highly anticipated game to Taiwan and South Korea. But the launch has stopped short of coming to China, which requires imported games to be cleared by the government's Ministry of Culture. The review can take months, as was the case with one of Blizzard's previous titles, Starcraft 2, which received approval by the ministry half a year after its initial launch in July 2010.

One of China's top Twitter-like sites, Sina Weibo, is working to attract Japanese companies to advertise on its platform by helping the firms open and use accounts on the microblogging service.

Sina Weibo now has 324 million users, 30 million of which are daily active users, said Sina chief financial officer Herman Yu on Friday at the CHINICT Internet conference in Beijing. Sina Weibo largely operates as a Chinese-language site. But the company behind it has the eventual goal to expand overseas into non-English markets, Yu said while addressing an audience.

PC maker Lenovo has used a basement price strategy in China to become the country's second largest tablet vendor, coming ahead of rivals offering Android-based products, according to research firm IDC.

In this year's first quarter, Lenovo had a 17.2 percent market share of China's tablet market, according to IDC, with Samsung trailing far behind with a 3.8 percent share. Among Android-based tablets sold in the country during the quarter, Lenovo's reached a 48.2 percent share.

Lenovo's net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter grew by 59 percent, as the world's second largest PC maker saw continued growth in sales across both mature and emerging markets.

The Chinese PC maker reported on Wednesday that its net profit reached US$67 million during the quarter ended March 31, up from $42 million a year earlier.

Taiwanese smartphone vendor High Tech Computer said on Sunday certain models of its newest smartphones have passed U.S. Customs and are being released to its carrier customers, after the company previously warned of a delay in product shipments because of an International Trade Commission (ITC) order.

HTC said last week the U.S. would see delays in availability of its HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE smartphones because of the customs review. But on Sunday, HTC said some models have passed the inspection, although it could not specify which models, according to a company filing made to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Yahoo has agreed to sell off about half of its stake in Alibaba Group back to the Chinese e-commerce giant as part of a US$7.1 billion deal, the two companies jointly announced on Monday.

The sell off means Alibaba will buy back about 20 percent of its own company stake from Yahoo, giving the Chinese e-commerce giant greater control over its own operations. In return, Alibaba will pay Yahoo $6.3 billion in cash proceeds and up to $800 million in newly-issued Alibaba preferred stock, the companies said in a statement.

Baidu, which runs China's most popular search engine, has unveiled its newest smartphone, featuring the company's own mobile platform and priced to target the country's low-end handset segment.

The Changhong H5018 will be priced at less than 1,000 yuan (US$158) without a contract, the company said Tuesday. The device marks the second smartphone the company has released, the last one being a handset developed in cooperation with U.S. PC maker Dell that was announced in December.

Android's increased fragmentation across hardware devices and OS versions, and its lack of a central app store, have left game developers disappointed with the OS, according to the CEO of "Plants vs. Zombies" publisher PopCap Games.

"Android is not a very good business for most game companies, no matter what anyone tells you," PopCap CEO David Roberts said in interview Thursday. "I'm sure there are some people making money on it, but based on the amount of hardware it sells it hasn't turned into the game business I think a lot of folks hoped"

The company behind one of China's largest mobile Internet browsers, UCWeb, will incorporate note-taking features from Evernote into its product, as part of a partnership to help the companies expand globally.

The partnership announced Thursday will likely help Evernote achieve its objective to make China its second-largest market by year end.

Evernote launched a Chinese version of its popular note-taking service on Thursday, marking the U.S. company's entrance into a key country, which has already become its third largest market, behind the U.S. and Japan.

The company named the Chinese version of its note-taking service as Yinxiang Biji, translated in English as Impression Notes. The service will run parallel to the existing Evernote app service hosted from the U.S., allowing existing users in China to easily migrate information over to the new platform.

Flipboard expects the daily number of downloads coming from China for its popular personalized news reading app will very soon surpass its U.S. downloads, following the company's entrance into the Chinese market last December.

Already, the company's China downloads for its Flipboard app are about equal to the U.S. downloads, said Flipboard CEO Mike McCue on Wednesday. But given the country's growing mobile user base, the China downloads "could easily surpass" U.S. downloads in the near future, he said.