MANILA, Philippines -- Last week was a pleasant reminder about how beautiful the world is. I am not referring to the world's largest beauty pageant. Instead, I am talking of how the world, at least the part of it that I saw while onboard a bus bound for Bicol a few days ago, is filled with the beauty of creation.

Of course, there are the undeniable evidence of human presence and its sometimes corrupting effects. Ill-designed and occasionally ill-advised structures dot the roads and byways that the bus traversed on its way out of the metropolis to the heart of the country's more rustic and laid back environs.

Overall, however, much of the countryside has retained its sweet and comforting charms.

It makes me wonder, again, why in the first place are we crowding and massing ourselves into the metropolis' dirty and suffocating embrace.

Oh, I remember. We all are working our behinds off to eke out a living.

Giant Mango

Some consumers have this problem, sometimes a dilemma even, which revolves around making up their minds which to buy, a smartphone or a tablet PC. Sometimes, the whole thing (I cannot find the courage to call the whole thing a problem) boils down to the size of the device's screen.

Hence, would they go for the more mobile (but saddled with a smaller display) smartphone? Or should they opt for a tablet PC that comes with a bigger screen but is consequently less portable than a smartphone?

I do not know whether pitying such consumers or giving them a good whack on the head would make the world a better place. I leave that to Technews readers to decide.

Anyway, our confused consumers might finally have found some sort of solace courtesy of HTC, one of the world's leading smartphone makers.

The Taiwanese electronics manufacturer recently introduced the HTC Titan smartphone. The Titan, which runs the Mango version of the Windows Phone mobile OS, lives up to its name with its 4.7-inch display.

Aside from easing some consumers' fixation with large screens, the HTC Titan also comes with a 1.5GHz processor, 16GB of built-in storage, and quad-band radios. It also includes an 8-megapixel camera at the back and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.

Mobile Lawsuits

The smartphone market has been growing at explosive rates lately. An increasing millions of consumers are purchasing smartphones, which some analysts say are actually highly portable computers. In the process, the market growth has also spurred expansions in the mobile Internet and apps development markets.

These growth numbers, however, might turn into dust with the way tech giants, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, have been throwing lawsuits against some of the leading mobile device manufacturers. For example, Samsung and HTC face several patent-infringement cases.

Google, with its newly appointed CEO Larry Page, seems to have started efforts to rein in Android's open source tendencies. For its part, Microsoft is shaking device makers into "royalty agreement," which the software giant hopes will contribute significant amounts to its coffers.

Apple, meanwhile, is slapping Samsung with bundles of lawsuits across Europe, Australia, and Japan.

While this corner believes it is only fair that patent owners benefit financially and otherwise from their collections of inventions and technologies developed in-house, there comes a point when too much and pervasively litigating environment and mindset smother competition and innovation.

Ultimately, not only the device makers and the patent holders themselves suffer. The whole industry and, sadly, the consumers themselves pay for some companies' desire for more revenue.

That's all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.