A Chrome OS-based tablet made by HTC will be offered through Google's new best friend Verizon starting on Nov. 26, according to a new report (or rumor, as the case may be).

Citing an unnamed source, AOL's Download Squad blog says that the new tablet will run on an NVidia Tegra 2 chip, and will feature a 1280x720 screen, 2GB of RAM, at least a 32 GB SSD, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity. There's a lot missing among that handful of details, however. For one, why will the tablet run on Chrome OS and not the Android platform? And if it's running on a cloud-based OS, do you really need 32 GB of memory?

Rumors that Apple is ready to end its exclusive contract with AT&T by bringing the iPhone to a rival carrier are nearly as old as the smartphone itself. As AT&T customers have grown more and more annoyed with the dubious performance of the carrier's network, the rumors have gotten louder. When a move finally becomes more than rumor, the fallout will be huge, says a new survey.

At the end of June, Bloomberg reported that Verizon Wireless will begin offering the iPhone in January. The article was -- reasonably enough -- viewed with suspicion because: a) we've heard this story more than once; b) the sources were the super-vague "two people familiar with" Apple's plans; and c) to run on the Verizon network, Apple would need to develop a CDMA iPhone, which is a touch more work than simply offering the same GSM model  through T-Mobile -- which has also been repeatedly rumored.

Gartner has released its second-quarter sales stats for the smartphone market, and there are some interesting -- though not particularly surprising -- results in there.

Riding the popularity of its EVO device, which has been a brisk seller despite its much-maligned battery life, HTC has climbed into the top-ten list of smartphone providers worldwide. Checking in at number eight, the Taiwanese company moved 5.9 million phones last quarter, up from 2.4 million in the same period in 2009 -- good for 139 percent year-over-year growth.

Here's an interesting philosophical question: If a company doesn't quantify its sales, but claims that product A sold X many more units than products B and C combined over Y number of days, does it have to issue a correction when that turns out not to be true? It may not be up there with "If a tree falls in the woods ..." but in tech and telecommunications marketing it's about as close as you get.

The company in question is Sprint, which on Monday generated some headlines (on the day that Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, no less) by announcing massive sales for its new Google Android-based phone, the HTC Evo. Sprint said that on June 4 -- the new 4G smartphone's launch day -- it sold three times the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre phones sold over their first three days of availability combined.

Multi-tasking? Check. Hi-res display? Check. Zoom and flash? Check. Video calling? Check (sort of).

On Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the wrapper off the latest iPhone model at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, but the new design and features were more or less what everyone had expected, thanks in part to the prototype that fell into the hands of tech blog Gizmodo earlier this year.

Can a single day go by without Google getting involved in some kind of legal proceeding? Google, whose lawyers have been very busy recently, may not be the direct target of Apple's lawsuit against HTC, but Apple is taking legal aim at phones that use Google's mobile Android operating system.

Apple filed the suit Tuesday with the U.S. International Trade Commission and U.S. District Court in Delaware, claiming that HTC is infringing on 20 patents related to the iPhone's  user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. According to the court filing, the patents "cover generally various software and/or hardware technologies that can be incorporated into mobile communication devices, including cellular phones and smart phones."