Pastors with hundreds of thousands of virtual followers, sermons live-tweeted, a Bible mobile app downloaded by millions and now the Pope on Twitter -- Christianity is taking a social media leap of faith.

Catholics and Protestants are quietly embracing the digital age in a bid to shake off an out-of-touch, stuffy image and gain more followers, culminating with Benedict XVI's arrival on Twitter -- and his much-anticipated first tweet Wednesday.

U.S. teachers have flooded school-centric charity website DonorsChoose.org to snap up Chrome notebook computers Google made available to classrooms for just $99 each.

DonorsChoose said Tuesday that it was no longer taking Chromebook requests from instructors since the allotted supply was exhausted due to the "tremendous response" to the offer.

U.S. technology giant Apple has been working with component suppliers in Asia to test new TV sets in a possible move to branch into the television market, a report said Wednesday.

Apple has been testing several TV prototypes for large-screen high-definition TV for a few years, sources familiar with the situation were quoted by the Dow Jones Newswires as saying.

The city of Mildura is not at the end of a dirt road in the Australian bush, in tire-choking desert sand far from food and water. Unfortunately, Apple's much-maligned mapping application thinks it is.

More than two months after Apple's CEO apologized for errors in its Maps service, Australian police say the app is "potentially life threatening" because of the bad directions it has given to the southern city. On Tuesday, a police official said Apple had "sort of half-fixed" the problem.

Microsoft is rolling out dozens of new apps for the Xbox 360, building on statistics that show members of its paid online subscription service spend more time on it watching video than they do playing multiplayer games over the Internet.

The company said Tuesday that by early next year it will add more than 40 apps to its Xbox Live service, such as MTV, The CW Network and CBC's Hockey Night in Canada. Many of the apps will require paid subscriptions on top of the Xbox Live Gold subscription, which costs $60 a year, or $10 a month.

Clothes that could literally light up your life were unveiled Tuesday by Japanese researchers who said their solar-cell fabric would eventually let wearers harvest energy on the go.

The new fabric is made of wafer-thin solar cells woven together that could see people powering up their mobile phones and other electronics with their sweater or trousers.

The Philippines is to roll out 100,000 electric tricycles in an effort to replace the petrol-powered ones that currently ply its cities, one of the project's financiers said Tuesday.

The "e-trikes" would provide an alternative to the gas-guzzling, smoke-belching motorized tricycles that now ferry Manila residents through narrow streets not served by buses, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said.

Taiwan's HTC on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone boasting a higher resolution display that Apple's iPhone 5 just days before its rival's latest handset goes on sale on the island.

The HTC Butterfly features a 5-inch screen with a pixel density of 440 ppi (pixels per inch) and full 1080P HD resolution, compared to the iPhone 5's 4-inch screen at 326 ppi at a lower resolution.

Motorola Mobility on Monday confirmed that it is shutting down most of its operations in South Korea as part of a move to consolidate research after being bought by Google this year.

"This was a difficult but necessary decision," Motorola said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.

U.S. regulators have launched a series of probes on whether mobile apps targeted at children violate privacy laws by collecting and sharing data which can be used for detailed profiles, officials said Monday.

The Federal Trade Commission said its latest review of mobile apps available on Apple's App Store and Google Play found that many collect personal data, and often share this with developers or marketers without disclosing this fact to parents.