A leaked shot of the Lumia 800 shows a familiar form factor. Photo: WinRumors

Nokia needs a swift injection of relevance — badly. Compared to Google’s and Apple’s mobile OS offerings, Nokia’s Symbian software is positively prehistoric. And Nokia phones overall are little more than handheld curiosities, at least in the U.S. consumer market.

Indeed, pulling a Nokia out of your jeans pocket is somewhat akin to pulling up to the curb in an old Citroen. Onlookers must inevitably ask, “Why?”

But we’re finally seeing hard evidence of a much-needed sea change at Nokia. This Tuesday, screenshots of three ...

Google+ is the fastest-growing social network in history, with 40 million users since its June launch. To help them focus, Google’s quietly shuttered a number of products, removing iGoogle and Google Reader’s social features and closing Google Labs, Buzz, Jaiku and Code Search in the last two weeks alone.

But in doing so, they also killed off one of its oldest and most useful tools, from its most popular product.

On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing “plus”: the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Goo...