With the shift to mobile Internet gaining pace, some of the big tech firms are adapting and others are not.

The latest earnings from the sector show that mobile is hitting the bottom line, either in positive or negative ways, at giants like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple.

When Turkmen mother Selbi Dzhafarova wanted to buy a toy car for her son's birthday, he burst into tears. "He asked us to buy him a computer instead," she said.

Her son Arslan's wish was hardly different from the wishes of young boys all over the world except that the nine-year-old lives in the hermit ex-Soviet state of Turkmenistan where Internet access for most private users was banned until just a few years ago.

Leading mobile phone chip maker Qualcomm said Thursday that the next generation of smartphones will take another stride forward as the company reported robust quarterly earnings.

"We still think the next smartphone is going to surprise you with the things it can do," Qualcomm director of CPU product management Travis Lanier told Agence France Presse. "There is a way to go in innovation."

Flying cars. Waterproof living rooms that you clean with a hose. A pool on every rooftop.

Many of the old dreams and schemes about daily life in the 21st century didn't come true — at least not yet. Author Gregory Benford has gathered them — along with more successful predictions — in a book, "The Wonderful Future that Never Was" (Hearst, 2012). Some of the imaginative ideas just weren't imaginative enough, he says.

Google on Wednesday unveiled a slimmer, more powerful tablet computer on its Nexus brand and a thumb-sized device that lets popular mobile gadgets feed online content wirelessly to television sets.

The ramped-up second-generation Nexus 7 by Taiwan-based Asus made its debut along with a Chromecast dongle that plugs into television sets to let people easily route online content to big screens.

Facebook surprised Wall Street by showing it can make money from folks on smartphones and tablets, causing the leading social network's stock to rocket.

"The work we've done to make mobile the best Facebook experience is showing good results and provides us with a solid foundation for the future," said Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg as the social network reported a quarterly profit of $331 million.

In the basement of Madrid's Reina Sofia museum, a giant robotic machine painstakingly scans a painting by Catalan surrealist artist Joan Miro, slowly snapping hundreds of microscopic shots.

The pictures taken by the machine, which uses infrared and ultraviolet photography, will help experts determine the condition of the 1974 oil on canvas painting called "Women, Bird in the Night" in unprecedented detail.

Like many young Palestinians, Amir was excited to get his first smartphone, despite the heavy price tag. But he did not keep it long after realizing the lack of 3G network meant its applications were largely unusable.

"I sold my iPhone because I just couldn't use it when I was out and about," said the Internet cafe worker, who asked to be given a pseudonym.

Apple could roll out smartphones and tablets with bigger screens in a move analysts say is an attempt to catch up with a trend set by its major rival Samsung.

The Californian tech giant and its Asian suppliers are testing smartphone screens larger than four inches and tablet screens slightly less than 13 inches, the Wall Street Journal reported, without naming the suppliers.

Network analytics specialty firm DeepField on Monday said that Google accounts for nearly a quarter of Internet traffic in North America.

"Based on measurements of end devices and user audience share, Google is now bigger than Facebook, Netflix and Twitter combined," DeepField chief Craig Labovitz said in a blog post.