Latest Technology News

CodeWeavers has released a major new version of its Wine-based CrossOver tool, which is designed to make it possible to run Windows applications and games on both Macintosh and Linux platforms. CrossOver Impersonator Edition boasts a brand new CrossTie feature, which enables users to install hundreds of Windows applications with a single click. It also incorporates over 4,500 patches that went into the latest release of Wine (1.3.9), and replaces all previous versions.

CrossOver is based on the open-source Wine software, which CodeWeavers contributes a massive amount of code to. Wine works by isolating programs in "bottles," each complete with its own C drive (including all sub-directories), Windows Registry, Wine settings and, of course, all the application files. Separate bottles can be created to isolate programs from each other or for setting up different versions of Windows for compatibility purposes. CrossOver Impersonator provides a more user-friendly front end and support, albeit in return for a commercial fee.

Continue reading →

Samsung and ZTE were big winners selling mobile phones in 2010, based on new data released by IDC. Apple fell from fourth to fifth place. Smartphone shipments drove year-over-year growth to a new quarterly high -- 17.9 percent -- in fourth quarter. Unit shipments rose from 340.5 million units to 401.4 million. IDC measures shipments into the channel, which means unsold handsets are counted. Gartner should soon release actual sales data, for which the numbers will be lower.

For the year, manufacturers shipped 1.39 billion cell phones, up 18.5 percent from 1.17 billion units a year earlier. The United Nations estimates there are 5 billion cellular subscribers worldwide. IDC predicts that smartphones will be the major sales growth driver through 2014. This year, smartphone shipments are projected to rise by nearly 44 percent year over year.

Continue reading →

Sound quality really matters. The tiniest of audio glitches can often be enough to ruin a home movie or audio file, yet most applications offer little to address this. Video editors may offer hundreds of ways to tweak your picture, for instance, but when it comes to audio processing, if you get as much as a wave editor and a "clean" button then you're generally doing very well. If your software simply isn't delivering the audio quality you need, then, it may be time to get some help from a specialist tool -- and MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab 17 Deluxe has plenty to offer.

The program can import audio from audio files, videos, or even record it directly from any external audio source that you can plug in to your soundcard (microphone, record player, cassette player and so on), useful if you're looking to digitize your old vinyl record collection. A stack of cleanup tools can then automatically remove clicks, crackles, humming, hiss and more.

Continue reading →

Hot on the heels of its first stable release, The Document Foundation has announced the immediate availability of LibreOffice Portable. As the name suggests, it's a repackaged version of The Document Foundation's free open-source application that is designed to run directly from USB -- or even cloud -- drives, allowing the end user to run the program on any Windows-compatible computer, including Macs and Linux running WINE.

LibreOffice is an offshoot of the OpenOffice project, brought into being by The Document Foundation because of concerns of the project's future as an open-source program having come under the ownership of Oracle following its purchase of Sun Microsystems. It contains a free word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentations tool and drawing application.

Continue reading →

In the company blog Thursday, Netflix Director of Content Delivery Ken Florence presented a ranking of the best and worst network operators for Netflix streaming, a ranking that the company plans to maintain and publish as a monthly report.

Florence says the top HD streams from Netflix are about 4,800 Kbps, and because the service adapts to the available bandwidth a provider may have, no one carrier would hit that maximum and maintain it. However, it serves as a good reference point for the average overall throughput a network can provide. Charter, the leading US network in overall throughput, averaged 2,667 Kbps between October 1, 2010 and January 15, 2011.

Continue reading →

[Editor's Note: This was a live document from 4:20 p.m. EDT until 5:40 p.m.]

Microsoft weathered the brunt of slower-than-forecast PC sales to beat Wall Street consensus for fiscal 2011 second quarter. The software giant announced earnings after the bell, for the three-month period ended Dec. 31, 2010.

Continue reading →

Facebook has denied reports that it had partnered with Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC to release its own phones, calling the reports "overblown" in comments to Reuters. Reports of a possible partnership first surfaced in London-based business website City A.M. on Wednesday. The site claimed that the phones would be launched at an event at the Mobile World Congress, to be held February 14-17 in Barcelona.

While not saying that HTC was not developing some type of Facebook-enhanced phone, it would not be branded as such, the site's business development chief Dan Rose said. "This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way," he said. Regardless, mobile is an ever bigger portion of the social networking site's business, a quarter-billion users visit its mobile site every month.

Continue reading →

Google took steps Thursday to honor a previous commitment to root out piracy in its searches, beginning to censor torrent searches from its Autocomplete and Instant functionality. The Mountain View, Calif. company's efforts don't seem perfect: several torrent searches still seemed to be available.

Among the terms apparently filtered out include popular clients BitTorrent and Rapidshare according to reports. On some built-in search functions in browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari, the terms appear to have disappeared. Betanews was still able to search for specific torrents such as "windows xp torrent," however, and Google was still returning torrent links through Instant at least for our testers.

Continue reading →

London police have detained five individuals ages 15 to 26 in connection with an investigation into Anoymous, a "hacktivist" group responsible for attacks on companies that suspended accounts associated with leak site WikiLeaks. The investigation is a global effort, and includes law enforcement agencies in both the US and Europe.

The Metropolitan Police Service did not indentify the accused, nor did they directly link them to the group. In the US, efforts have been stepped up to identify anyone who may have been involved in the efforts here, although so far no arrests have been made. The UK five are charged with offenses under the Computer Misuse Act, passed by Parliament in 1990.

Continue reading →

Let's be honest: watching TV on your computer can be a painful experience. If you have a TV tuner you still need access to an aerial point, and if you opt to watch over the Internet you can find yourself having to move between multiple websites when looking for something to watch.

The solution is obvious: watch internet television through Windows Media Center -- after all, it's perfect for live TV, so why not catch-up TV too? Some services -- like Sky Player in the UK -- are even available through WMC, but what if yours isn't covered?

Continue reading →

Skype has announced a final release for version 5 of its Mac client, bringing it in line with Windows. Skype for Mac 5.0 was originally released as a public beta last November, and immediately brought an outcry from enraged Mac users unhappy with the redesigned interface, which had been tweaked to bring it into line with the Windows version.

As a result, Skype has made a number of tweaks to this final version that aim to address the criticisms. It also brought back full-screen video chat and made it easier to view and hide the chat options when in a conversation. However, the final release also means that group video chat -- which was previously free in the beta version -- is now a premium feature, with a day pass costing $4.99, and a monthly subscription costing $8.99. A 7-day trial is included within the latest release.

Continue reading →

I love Nokia. It's a global brand with huge, but rapidly declining, global presence. Nokia brought advanced capabilities, like quality photography, video recording and video calling, to its handsets long before competitors. For years, Nokia defined mobile innovation at both ends of the market -- providing quality, affordable handsets to the masses and cutting-edge feature phones to enthusiasts. That was then. I love Nokia, but Nokia doesn't love me.

Nokia is rapidly bleeding market share, and its once hallowed brand is being hollowed by Apple and competitors like HTC and Samsung that ship Android smartphones. By Nokia's own estimates, its share of the global smartphone market fell to 31 percent during fourth quarter 2010. Nokia's decline is much less about Androids and iPhone and more about the Finnish handset maker falling behind in software and services, and in process losing developer and even customer confidence.

Continue reading →

After pushing out two release candidates in as many days, Opera Software on Thursday released the final version (build 1190) of its Opera 11.01 Web browser.

This latest version adds some tweaks to mouse gestures, and some stability improvements. The only real new feature of this particular version is the inclusion of the DOM object window.DOMStringList, but it is still an extremely important download for security purposes.

Continue reading →

At a press conference in Japan on Thursday, Sony Computer Entertainment announced it will be launching PlayStation Suite, which will make PlayStation content available on Android handsets and tablets.

"The world of portable [gaming] has undergone a huge change since the release of the PSP," said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. "When we released PSP, cell phone providers were unable to deliver PlayStation-quality content. After six years, these multi-function handheld devices are ready for the PlayStation-like experience."

Continue reading →

A fair number of Betanews readers have asked how they could get Google's unbranded Cr-48 notebook running Chrome OS. On Dec. 7, 2010, the information giant announced a pilot distributing 60,000 notebooks -- a grand test for those folks ambitious enough to live on the web for as long as six months. I assumed that Google had given out all the laptops. Either it didn't or there's a new batch to be had.

In a blog posted late this afternoon Eastern Time, Heaven Kim, Google product marketing manager, writes: "If you already live on the web and are itching to get your hands on a Chrome notebook, we've teamed up with a few Web Store apps for a chance to test-pilot the Cr-48. Check out blog posts from MOG, Box, LucidChart, and Zoho for more details. Then go ahead and rock out with 10 million songs, manage your files in the cloud, perfect your diagram drawing skills or move your office onto the web. While you're at it, you might also discover a new favorite app among the more than 2,000 apps in the Chrome Web Store."

Continue reading →