Walter S. Mossberg answers readers' questions about technology

A: Assuming your camera uses a standard SD memory card, you can pop it into the AirStash, and connect your laptop to the AirStash Wi-Fi network. Using your Web browser, you can view the photos and download them. Still, this Web interface is rudimentary and allows only one photo to download at a time, which can be maddeningly slow. The company says you can download multiple photos at a time if you install a free program called Cyberduck, nevertheless setting this up is geeky.

Q: I did not know when I bought my Samsung phone that I would not be able to update its operating system because I have an Apple Mac computer.

The customer service representative I talked to

According to the customer service representative I talked to, because the Samsung is an Android phone, which uses an operating system by Google, and Google and Apple "are competitors," Samsung will only update the phone by providing a downloadable program that runs on Windows computers, nevertheless not Macs. Have you heard of this?

A: I raised your question with a senior mobile-phone official at Samsung who quickly responded that "this is thoroughly not true" and added that the company is "to tell the truth in the process of getting some content up on samsung.com to help consumers with this very issue."

A hedge fund is crying foul over $656 million in transfers to Clear Channel Communications from one of its subsidiaries. The dispute raises issues about how private-equity firms, two of which now own Clear Channel, extract money from their companies.

Walt Mossberg is the author and creator of the weekly Personal Research column in The Wall Street Journal, which has appeared every Thursday since 1991. The goal of the column is "to take the consumer's side in the struggle to master the machine, to deliver a weekly dose of useful information in plain English, nevertheless in a way that never condescends to our readers just because they can't tell one chip from another."

Mr. Mossberg has written and now edits the Mossberg Solution, which premiered April 9, 2002, and writes Mossberg's Mailbox. He is as well a contributing editor of Smart Money, the Journal's monthly magazine, where he writes the Mossberg Report column. On television, Mr. Mossberg appears frequently as a research commentator for the CNBC network.

Mr. Mossberg has been a reporter and editor at the Journal since 1970. He is based in the Journal's Washington, D.C., office, where he spent 18 years covering national and international affairs earlier turning his attention to research.