Ka-ching! The cash register may be on its final sale.

Stores across the U.S. are ditching the old-fashioned, clunky machines and having salespeople — and even shoppers themselves — ring up sales on smartphones and tablet computers.

Technology giants including Apple and Microsoft on Friday defended their pricing policy in Australia at an official inquiry launched over concerns that they were overcharging customers.

Australians, on average, are forking out 34 percent more for software, 52 percent more for iTunes music, 88 percent more for Wii games and 41 percent more for hardware than U.S. consumers, according to consumer lobby group Choice.

Apple's iPhone is outdated, according to the chief executive of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd.

Thorsten Heins made the comment Thursday on the eve of the much-delayed launch of the new touchscreen BlackBerry in the United States. AT&T begins selling the Z10 touchscreen BlackBerry on Friday, more than six weeks after RIM launched the devices elsewhere.

Microsoft said Thursday it received 75,378 law enforcement requests for data in 2012 in the tech giant's first report on the sensitive subject.

The requests, which included those for the Skype messaging and voice service, potentially impacted 137,424 accounts, Microsoft said on its corporate citizenship Web page.

A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the online news "clipping" service Meltwater violates copyright law by using excerpts from Associated Press articles, the parties said Thursday.

The U.S. news organization sued Meltwater, claiming the service infringed on AP's copyright by delivering its articles to clients without paying a subscription fee.

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have developed a way to put glasses-free 3-D video on mobile devices with a viewing angle so wide that viewers can see an object more fully just by tilting the screen.

Glasses-free 3-D is not unique. Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s 3DS handheld allows video game play in 3-D without glasses, but it requires players to look straight into the screen with their noses centered.

Thailand plans to distribute about 1.7 million handheld computers to students and teachers this year in the world's largest handout of the devices for education, officials said Thursday.

Nine firms from countries including China, India, Germany and the Netherlands are set to join an online tender in April to supply the tablet computers, according to the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

YouTube says more than 1 billion people are now visiting its online video site each month to watch everything from clips of cute kittens to scenes of social unrest around the world.

The milestone announced Wednesday marks another step in YouTube's evolution from a quirky startup launched in 2005 to one of the most influential forces in today's media landscape.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has warned that India is lagging badly behind in harnessing the power of the Internet because of its failure to invest in high-speed telecom networks.

"It is well behind in the web services model that the rest of the world is adopting," Schmidt told the CNBC-TV18 television channel late Wednesday during a trip to India.

Fancy watching a movie on your mobile phone, where figures leap out from the screen in 3D, rather as Princess Leia did in that scene from "Star Wars"?

That's the claim made by U.S. researchers, who on Wednesday reported they had made a display which gives a three-dimensional image that can be viewed without special glasses and is intended for cellphones, tablets and watches.