Consumers probably won't have to pay more for iPads, iPhones and other popular consumer electronics despite a Chinese company's pledge to trim work hours and raise wages for its hardscrabble assembly workers.

The paychecks have already been steadily growing even before this week's pledge, and labor expenses remain a small portion of the total bill for most gadgets made in China.

China has shut down websites, made a string of arrests and punished two popular microblogs after rumors of a coup linked to a major political drama that led to the fall of a rising star.

Authorities closed 16 websites for spreading rumors of "military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing," the official Xinhua news agency said late Friday, citing the state Internet information office.

French videogame titan Ubisoft said Thursday that pre-orders for the next version of its blockbuster "Assassin's Creed" videogame are on a record-setting pace.

So many copies of "Assassin's Creed III" have been reserved in advance of its October 30 release date in North America that it is on track to become the most pre-ordered title in the company's history, according to Ubisoft.

Google is teaming with Asia-based hardware makers on a low-priced, 7-inch tablet computer to challenge offerings by Amazon.com and Apple, reports said.

Android software backed by the California Internet giant will power hardware built by partners including Samsung and Asustekto compete with iPad and Kindle devices, according to Digitimes and the Wall Street Journal.

Nearly half of U.S. mobile phone owners have smartphones, with adoption of Internet-linked handsets rocketing in the past year, according to findings released on Thursday by the Nielsen research firm.

The number of telecom subscribers with smartphones increased 38 percent to account for 49.7 percent of the handset market by February, Nielsen reported.

Yahoo! on Thursday said that it will soon add a tool to its websites that allows visitors to signal that they don't want their online activity tracked for ad targeting or other ends.

The California-based Internet pioneer promised to deploy a "Do Not Track solution" across its global network, including online advertising units Right Media and interclick, by mid-year.

Following the Opening Ceremony for the Arabnet 2012 Summit held in Beirut, an interesting panel on hot trends in web and mobile kicked off Thursday with TechCrunch editor MikeButcher, National Net Ventures CEO Rashid AlBallaa, Angel Investor Hussein Khanji, CMEA’s Saad Khan and Hummingbird Venture’s Pamir Gelenbe.

According to AlBallaa, mobile youtube in Saudi Arabua is the second worldwide. “The Middle East market is hugely growing and most of start-ups tend to evolve around entertainment or e-commerce, entertainment because a huge percentage of the population in the Middle East is young.”

Sony on Wednesday brought together blockbuster console title action and popular free-to-play style gaming in its Home online community for PlayStation 3 users.

Sony Computer Entertainment America rolled out "Cutthroats: Battle for Black Powder Cove," which lets as many as 24 people at a time serve as gunners or captains of rival pirate ships out to sink one another in timed sessions.

Google and Oracle continued legal wrangling in a dimming effort to reach a deal to avoid facing off before jurors in a patent case trial.

The trial remained set to start next month in a San Francisco federal court after Oracle spurned a proposal that Google pay about $3 million in damages and potentially cut the company in for less than a percent of Android revenue.

Facebook will make its stock market debut in May with a record-setting initial public offering of shares, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The world's leading online social network has stopped selling shares on the secondary market in order to get a precise count of investors, the Journal said, citing unnamed sources.