Tim Conneally

Acer America on Thursday announced the price and availability of the Aspire S5-391-9880 ultrabook. This particular PC stands out from the mass of selfsame thin and light PCs because of the interesting design Acer used to hide the machine's extra USB, HDMI and Thunderbolt ports.

With a thickness ranging from 0.44 inches at its thinnest point to 0.59 inches at its thickest, The S5 isn't the thinnest ultrabook going, and at 2.65 lbs, it's not the lightest. Nor is it the most powerful, capacious, or flashy, with a 3rd Generation Intel Core i7-35i7U ("Ivy Bridge") processor, a 256GB solid state drive, and a 13.3 inch (1366 x 768) backlit LED screen, a common feature to many Ultrabooks.

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Email newsletters are about a half of a step above spam. If you purchase something online, install some piece of software, or sign up for some service and thoughtlessly breeze past the checkbox that says "Keep me informed about (product)!" you can very easily find yourself getting monthly, weekly, or in the case of the most egregious mailers (like Bed, Bath, and Beyond or Victoria's Secret) daily newsletters or circulars, and those things add up quickly.

Or, if you are a systems administrator of one sort or another, and you receive automatic server notifications in your inbox, you can go from inbox zero to a deluge of semi-important messages in no time at all.

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Security software company AVG has taken an active role in providing security apps for the popular mobile platforms like iOS and Android, and has garnered approximately 114 million active users across them all.

Today, AVG has released its free alternative Web browser AVG Family Safety for Windows Phone, following yesterday's update to the software for iOS.

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Amazon Cloud Player, a service that lets Amazon users stream their cloud-stored music collection to their mobile device over a regular data connection, has been available on Android for more than a year. Tuesday, Amazon finally released the iPhone and iPod touch version of the Cloud Player App.

Just like the Android version, users can stream their music, download songs, or manage their music in the cloud, with the included ability to share playlists created in iTunes with the user's cloud library.

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For as much emphasis as Apple puts on its mobile ecosystem, the company's Mac business continues to grow. At WWDC 2012 in San Francisco on Monday, Apple unveiled its latest upgrades to the Macbook line of personal computers, bringing out new versions of the MacBook Pro and Air lines, and introducing a new subset of MacBook Pros that carry the higher resolution Retina display.

MacBook Air

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After meeting its Kickstarter goal of $100,000, three-year old startup Infinitec has made its Android-powered Pocket TV available for pre-order for just $99. The device utilizes the relatively new "HDMI Dongle" set top box form factor used by the Roku Smart Stick, and it brings Android Ice Cream Sandwich to the television screen.

The Pocket TV is powered by a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with 512MB of RAM, has 4 GB of internal storage and a microSD port supporting cards up to 32 GB in size. It's also equipped with a mini USB port for devices such as keyboards or webcams.

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At Computex 2012, Acer quietly showed off an update to its 7 inch Android-powered Iconia A100 Tab which is expected to come out in the third quarter of the year.

The new tablet is known as the A110, features a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 1 GB of RAM, and will run Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.

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One of Broadcom's goals for 2012 is to bring to market new hardware that supports the fifth-generation of Wi-Fi networking standards, 802.11ac. At CES 2012, Broadcom debuted its first 802.11ac chips, then rolled out more designs in the following months so device manufacturers could take advantage of the faster throughput the new standard allowed.

Asus, D-Link, Huawei, and LG all have announced plans to support 802.11ac with consumer hardware, and this week, Asus and Broadcom unveiled the first consumer-facing notebook computer to feature full 802.11ac compliance, the Asus ROG G75VW gaming notebook.

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Google on Wednesday announced some upcoming changes to its geospatial products Maps and Earth, which promise to greatly improve the user experience with the two services.

These changes will include more "Street View" maps for areas where there's no street, an expanded presence of Google's DIY mapping tool Map Maker which will be available in South Africa, Egypt, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland, and greatly improved 3D aerial imagery in Google Earth.

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Splashtop Inc. makes a handful of applications that allow users to link their mobile tablets with their PC in different ways. On Wednesday, the company released a new tool for developers that lets them use an Android tablet or an iPad as the touch interface for Windows 8.

Called Win8 Metro Testbed -- Powered by Splashtop, the application recognizes more than a dozen Windows 8 touch gestures, including: Swipe to view the Charms menu, Swipe to switch apps, Swipe left/right in Internet Explorer to move between pages, Swipe down to bring up additional menus, Swipe down on an item to select it, Pull down to close an app, Slow swipe to "snap" two apps side-by-side, Swipe to show running apps, Pinch for "Semantic Zoom," and more.

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With the recent talk of state-sanctioned malware like Stuxnet and Flame, Google on Tuesday announced it has taken measures to alert its users when it believes they are the target of state-sponsored cyber attacks.

Google Vice President of Security Engineering Eric Grosse said on Tuesday that targeted users will receive an alert like the one pictured above. This alert warns when Google's internal analytics have sniffed out patterns that look like their email is the target of phishing or malware.

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Google issued a succinct announcement on Tuesday, stating it had acquired cross-platform mobile productivity app makers Quickoffice, and that Quickoffice will soon be integrated into the Google Apps product suite.

"When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It's been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users," said Allen Masarek, Co-founder and CEO of Quickoffice in a statement on Tuesday. "Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google. By combining the magic of Google's intuitive solutions with Quickoffice's powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow."

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Toshiba USA on Tuesday announced a small selection of next-generation Windows machines, including a new ultrabook in the Satellite family, a convertible Windows 8 notebook designed in conjunction with Intel, and pair of mobile devices running Windows RT.

Unlike Asus, who yesterday presented mostly finished preproduction prototypes of its first Windows RT device, Toshiba did not show off much in the way of RT hardware. Instead, the company presented a loose roadmap for device availability.

The two devices Toshiba announced on Tuesday are being designed in conjunction with Texas Instruments, and will be powered by multi-core TI OMAP systems on a chip. One will be a touchscreen clamshell PC, and one will be a mobile tablet with keyboard dock similar to the Asus Tablet 600.

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Late last year, I got pretty excited about the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android tablet. The tablet/notebook form factor spoke to me, the specs were impressive, and the overall package looked just right for an individual looking to do more working than playing.

Asus has revisited the appealling form factor of the Transformer Prime and applied it to Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 specifically for devices running on ARM-based processors.

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Instapaper, the popular iOS application that lets users save web pages for offline reading, was released for Android on Monday, and can now be downloaded in Google Play.

Instapaper's creator Marco Arment released the app exclusively for iOS, and showed a public preference for the platform, hence earning him the label of "Apple Fanboy" from much of the platform-partisan Web. But due to the undeniable success of Android tablets such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's Nook, Arment and Android app makers Mobelux have ported Instapaper to Android.

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