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Apple has found a way to save itself from paying any taxes to the U.K., a new report out of the country claims.

Despite generating pre-tax profits of 68 million pounds ($103.6 million) during its last fiscal year ended September 2012, Apple didn't pay a single dime in taxes to U.K. authorities, The Financial Times reported recently, citing corporate filings with the U.K. government. In the prior year, Apple paid 11.4 million pounds.

So, how did Apple sidestep those taxes? According to the Financial Times, the company awarded millions in stock awards to employees. Since those awards are deductible, it was able to completely eliminate all of the taxes it would have been forced to pay on its profits.

Apple, like most other major companies, has developed a slew of techniques to save itself from paying taxes worldwide. The company's efforts have drawn some fire in Europe where Apple funnels more than 80 percent of its operating income generated internationally into an Ireland-based subsidiary. In that market, the company pays a tax rate of just 0.05 percent -- much lower than tax rates in the countries where the sales are actually generated.

Earlier this year, congressional investigators documented Apple's ability to reduce its tax billions by billions of dollars a year. All of the company's tactics were completely legal, but they helped the company save at least $74 billion in offshore cash from being taxed.

Despite criticism on that, Apple CEO Tim Cook believes his company has done nothing wrong, saying at the D11 Conference in May that the firm doesn't "use tax gimmicks."

HP wants to get back into the smartphone biz.

(Credit: HP)

HP plans to jump back into the smartphone business.

Yam Su Yin, HP's senior director for consumer PC and media tablets for Asia Pacific, told the Press Trust of India that the company will focus on all segments of the market, including tablets, notebooks, and all-in-one PCs, the Indian Express reported on Sunday.

Asked specifically about a smartphone, Yin said: "The answer is yes but I cannot give a timetable. It would be silly if we say no. HP has to be in the game."

HP attempted to carve a bigger slice of the mobile market after acquiring Palm in 2010. But the WebOS-based devices failed to catch on with consumers, prompting HP to eventually pull the plug on its new tablet and smartphones.

So, how will HP compete in a mobile industry even more dominated by Apple and Android than it was three years ago?

Yin was mum on any details but told PTI: "Being late you have to create a different set of proposition. There are still things that can be done. Its not late. When HP has a smartphone, it will give a differentiated experience."

HP has previously tipped off plans to dive back into the smartphone arena. Last September, CEO Meg Whitman told the Fox Business Network that HP is .

"We have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that would be your first computing device," Whitman said. "We are a computing company."

CNET contacted HP for comment and will update the story with any further information.

Xbox Music

(Credit: Microsoft)

More than a year after Microsoft announced its Xbox Music service, the company has finally brought it to the Web.

Microsoft's Xbox Music platform is now available for users in the browser. Customers can head over to its page and stream "millions of songs" from within the browser. Microsoft last week told CNET that the subscription, storage, and track-purchasing service would be coming to the Web, and it has officially made good on that promise.

Microsoft claims to offer "millions of songs" through Xbox Music and allows users to download tracks they purchase to a wide array of devices, including tablets, PCs, and other platforms. The offering was announced last year at the E3 gaming expo and was baked into the Xbox 360. It's also available on Windows 8 PCs. Tracks are synched across multiple platforms.

In a statement to CNET last week, Microsoft said that a mobile version of Xbox Music will be coming to iOS and Android sometime this year.

Ye Olde Google Reader

(Credit: Google)

Google Reader is no more.

The reason is directly correlated to the fact its passing will go unnoticed by most people who ever set up the service to funnel RSS feeds from sites, news blogs and other publishers. For them, if there is any reaction, it may be the heart-lightening realization that another box cluttered with neglected items is neatly wiped away.

The demise is by no means Google's first, but Google Reader's sunset means an impassioned cohort are left in the dark, nearly eight years after its dawn.

"The amount of information on the Web is rapidly increasing," Google said the 2005 day of the site's launch. "Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you're interested in. Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you."

It embodied Google's stated mission of organizing the world's information, and it matured into one of the most popular ways of tracking a swath of sites. It was also an early experiment for Google in social networking.

But Google Reader's relevance to the Web-going public eroded in the flood to Facebook and Twitter. That tidal shift to other social networking sites hurt Google Reader, but not as much as Google's own reaction to the networking competition.

When Google instilled changes to Google Reader sharing in 2011 to encourage more Google+ usage, an incensed cohort of ardent Reader fans protested. As Google+ became the golden child doted upon by the parent, that fervent Google Reader usership recognized the beginning of the end.

That end becomes reality today. In the tech firmament, one is taking the same tack. Yahoo is shutting down its RSS Alerts today too, according to a post of its official Tumblr Friday, replacing them with email alerts.

But a couple one-time titans are eager to pick up what Google is casting aside. Digg pushed through a revamp to cater to Google Reader users in a couple months. Feedly has been refreshing its site, now compatible with all major browsers, with a new interface that doesn't require plug-ins or browser extensions, though first it had to wean itself off Google's servers. And AOL launched its own offering.

And plenty of other alternatives are available.

It's the opposite phenomenon of a behemoth like Google entering a space and sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Google leaving means the fires of competitors can burn brighter, at least for those who are left looking for somewhere to warm up.

Those who loved and lost Reader, you're the right people to eulogize. The comments are yours.

Firefox OS, shown here on the ZTE Open, has a gallery app, but if you want to share photos, you have to do so one at a time by opening it first.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

It's not every day that a new mobile operating system arrives, but Tuesday will be one of them as Telefonica begins selling the inexpensive ZTE Open with Mozilla's Firefox OS in Spain.

The move marks the commercial beginning of an effort by phone makers and network operators to use Mozilla's open-source, browser-based operating system to reclaim power in the mobile market lost to Apple and Google.

The phone itself costs 69 euros ($90), including 30 euros ($39) of pay-as-you-go credit, or for those who sign up for a two-year contract, for 2.38 euros ($3.10) per month. That's a lot cheaper than most of the new Android and iOS smartphones on the market today that consumers have flocked toward and against which Firefox OS is designed to compete.

The ZTE Open won't impress smartphone power users who want more than its 3.5-inch 480x320-pixel touchscreen, 3.2MP camera, 256MB RAM, and 512MB flash memory that's boosted with an included 4GB microSD card. But it's not designed to win them over; it's more for new and cost-conscious smartphone buyers, said Yotam Benami, Telefonica's digital director of open Web devices, in an interview.

So why would a customer buy it? "We're excited about dynamic app search," which finds apps and pages on the Web rather than on app stores. "It's a very personalized experience. You can interact with Web apps in the cloud." He added, "The entire user experience is more simple and streamlined. Many users are frustrated with the complexities of Android," and low cost and long battery life are compelling advantages especially in emerging markets.

This single Firefox OS phone in a single market soon won't be alone. Telefonica also will sell another lower-end phone, the Alcatel One Touch Fire, and will launch the phones in Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia, Benami said.

It's not the only carrier on board. Telenor will launch its first Firefox OS phones in central and eastern Europe later this year, and Deutsche Telekom will do so in Poland. There are also several other Firefox OS supporters, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Sony and LG Electronics that build handsets and sizeable list of carriers.

For many of these allies, Firefox OS provides a way to loosen the mobile marketplace control of Apple and Google, which control not only their operating systems but also the app stores used to distribute software.

"The current dynamics of the mobile ecosystem are problematic for OEMs, for developers, for end users, and for carriers," Benami said. "Firefox resolves many of these issues."

Developers get multiple pathways to market, he said. Hanset makers get new choices and "a path to lower level of litigation," a reference to the swarm of mobile-market lawsuits between the biggest mobile players. And for carriers, "We are not bound by rules set by one particular company that owns the platform."

As the difficulties at Microsoft and BlackBerry have shown, it's hard to compete against Android and iOS. The Firefox OS supporters think they have a recipe that will work, though, in part because of the billions of people who haven't yet entered the market and because the operating uses Web programming that means the developer and app ecosystem isn't starting from scratch.

It's that Web connection that gives Firefox OS its edge over other mobile OS challengers, said Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Jay Sullivan.

"The only remaining ecosystem is going to be around the Web," Sullivan said.

Even though Web pages and Web apps work on Firefox OS devices, there's still a lot of programming work to be done. Challenges include support for multitouch interfaces, learning how to write Web apps that use new interfaces like accelerometers and offline support, and the much broader issue of adapting pages to small screens and slow mobile networks.

For that reason, Mozilla is fleshing out developer documentation and holding evangelism and training events around the world for programmers. And it's promoting the Geeksphone Keon for developers.

Plenty of developers will need a presence on the Web, and they'll be able to reach Firefox OS users, Sullivan argued.

"When you look at the long tail of highly relevant local apps, a lot of people developing those are small local developers," he said. "They don't have the money to develop an iOS app, an Android app, and a Web app."

Rivals chipped away at the market lead of Apple's Safari in mobile browsing during June 2013.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Safari, the top browser in terms of mobile usage, lost a little share to three rivals in June.

The Apple browser dropped from 60.0 percent of usage in May to 58.0 percent in June, still well ahead of ompeting browsers, according to statistics released by tracking firm Net Applications on Monday. Google's unbranded Android browser, in second place, also dipped, from 20.7 percent to 20.6 percent.

Picking up the slack were Opera Mini, which rose from 10.5 percent to 11.2 percent; Google's Chrome, which rose from 3.2 percent to 3.8 percent; and IE, which rose from 2.0 percent to 2.4 percent, Net Applications said.

The mobile browsing is a more volatile market tan on the PC, where trends are slower to shift. In the mobile world, where browsing often is sluggish, a lot of software development activity concentrates on writing native apps rather than on Web apps.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer leads the PC browsing market, while in June Google's Chrome stole share from Mozilla's Firefox.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Net Applications bases its data on visits to a network of Web sites using its analytics software, counting a browser if an individual uses it once on a day and attempting to correct for country-by-country usage differences between its own network and actual global Web traffic.

For browsing with personal computers, IE extended its lead from 56.0 percent in May to 56.2 percent in June. Firefox dropped, from 20.6 percent to 19.2 percent, while Chrome rose from 15.7 percent to 17.2 percent.

Net Applications added a new factor in its measurements. Starting in with the June 2013 statistics, the company started discarding "hidden pages" such as tabs opened previously that are reopened during a browser relaunch, but that are not viewed again. "A percentage of the background tabs are never viewed by the user and therefore should not be used to measure usage share," Net Applications said in an FAQ.

For June 2013, Net Applications classified 6.4 percent of Firefox page views as hidden pages, with Opera was close behind at 6.3 percent and Chrome at 5.6 percent. IE was much lower, at 0.7 percent, and Safari was at 0.2 percent.

Net Applications already screened out a different type of page view used in Chrome, "prerendering," in which a browser loads a Web page in anticipation that a person might want to view it. However, Net Applications disclosed just how often Chrome prerenders pages: 12.1 percent of page loads.

That figure suggests that Google prizes fast page loads over network usage that turns out never to ever produce a real page view. If a prerendered page is viewed, it counts as a legitimate page view in the statistics.

Mobile browsing continues to encroach on PC browsing.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Mobile browsing accounts for only a small fraction of overall browsing, but it's gradually expanding as people spend more time with smartphones and tablets.

Mobile browsing accounted for 11.4 percent of overall browsing, while PC browsing was 88 percent, Net Applications said.

Another analytics firm, StatCounter, captures data with a different methodology, counting every page view and not correcting for country-by-country differences. Its statistics show Chrome in the No.1 place overall and extending its lead, with Microsoft slumping at the same time and Firefox holding mostly level.

That difference over Net Applications' data could be explained in part by greater daily usage on the part of Chrome users, because Net Applications measures browser users while StatCounter measures browser usage.

StatCounter, which measures browser usage with a different technique than Net Applications, shows Internet Explorer losing ground to Google Chrome.

(Credit: StatCounter)

Which watch?

(Credit: CNET)

Apple apparently likes how the "iWatch" moniker fits a wearable computer and has reportedly applied for a trademark for the name in Japan.

The iPhone maker seeks to protect the name for a product that is categorized as a handheld computer or watch device, according to a filing earlier this month with the Japan Patent Office. The filing was only made public in the past week, according to Bloomberg, which first reported on the application.

Apple has reportedly been developing a smartwatch that would run the company's iOS mobile operating system. Employees from Apple's marketing, software, and hardware units who had previously worked on the iPhone and iPad are reportedly part of a team numbering more than 100 experimenting with wristwatch-like devices that sport curved glass.

Interest in wearable computers has swelled in recent months with the developer release of Google Glass. Apple rival Google is reportedly developing a smartwatch that runs Android, and Samsung has indicated that it has long been interested in producing a smartwatch. Microsoft is reportedly studying the idea.

Rumors of Apple working on just such a device have been circulating for months. A report from a Chinese blog last December held that Apple had partnered with Intel to develop an iOS wristwatch that would be Bluetooth-enabled and sport a 1.5-inch OLED screen.

The smart wristwatch notion isn't exactly groundbreaking: a lot of smartwatches, fitness bands, or some hybrid of the two, were talked up earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show. Some of those devices include the long-awaited Pebble wristwatch, which made its debut at the conference, and the 007-inspired Martian Passport Watch.

CNET has contacted Apple for comment and will update this report when we learn more.