Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo said Friday that the launch of a new smartphone operating system to rival Google's Android and Apple's iOS had been pushed back owing to development delays.

The open source offering called Tizen, based on the Linux operating system, is the product of a tie-up between companies from Japan, China, South Korea, Europe and the United States.

Israeli government websites were briefly downed on Thursday by a power cut at a server facility, a finance ministry official told Agence France Presse.

Boaz Stembler, a spokesman for the ministry which is responsible for government web services, did not say how long the stoppage lasted but that power was restored by 3:45pm (1345 GMT).

The chief executives of Apple and Samsung have agreed to attend a mediation session by mid-February to discuss their legal battle over smartphone patents, court documents showed Wednesday.

Senior legal executives from both companies met on Monday to "discuss settlement opportunities," read a filing to the U.S. District Court in San Jose that is handling the patent case.

A 3D printing trend playing out at the Consumer Electronics Show bodes a future in which shoes, eyeglass frames, toys and more are printed at home as easily as documents.

Music star will.i.am even made a debut here as creative officer for 3D Systems, predicting that the technology will do for many basic items what iTunes did to the way people get songs.

There is no one inside the Range Rover in a Las Vegas parking lot. But it still guides its way to a parking place, after what looks like some hesitation.

The self-parking is directed by an app which controls the vehicle, detects an available space and maneuvers into it.

Television giants at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas are touting the wonders of ultra high-definition screens despite doubts by analysts that people will buy them.

Screens offering picture resolution about four times more vivid than current high-definition sets starred at an array of press events staged on the eve of the CES showfloor opening on Tuesday.

The robots are coming, and they're here to help.

Help clean your windows, teach children, or even provide entertainment or companionship.

A new smartphone operating system developed by a global collaboration of tech firms to rival Google's Android and Apple's iOS will be launched in the next few months, Japanese mobile phone operator NTT Docomo said Wednesday.

The system, an open source called Tizen based on Linux, is expected to be installed on telephones that are sold from the end of March, NTT Docomo spokesman Jun Otori told Agence France Presse.

Huawei, China's largest cellphone manufacturer, is releasing a phone that can be thought of as the inflight refueling system of the mobile world: it can be used to recharge other phones.

The Ascend Mate2 has a 6.1-inch (15.5-centimeter) screen, making it more than twice as big as an iPhone 5. It's almost the size of a tablet, giving rise to the half-joking term "phablet." It's the successor to a phone of the same size launched last year.

LG will bring the software that once powered Palm's smartphones to the majority of its Internet-connected TVs this year.

The South Korean firm unveiled webOS-based smart TVs at a trade fair Monday in Las Vegas, less than a year after it bought the operating system for smartphones and tablet computers from Hewlett-Packard Co.