Wayne Williams

The Lumia 1020 is famous for its camera. The Nokia smartphone offers a 41 MP shooter with Xenon flash, Zeiss lens and OIS (Optical Image Stabilization). It’s capable of producing photos at a whopping 7712 by 5360 resolution and recording 1080p video at 30 FPS.

Apple’s 8 MP iSight camera on the iPhone 5s is much weedier in comparison, although it does have some tricks up its sleeve, including a sensor that increases the area available for pixels by 15 percent. But even so, pitted head-to-head you’d expect the Nokia phone to win easily right? Apparently not. According to Laptop Mag, it’s Apple’s new phone that takes the crown.

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Running can, at times, get rather boring (especially treadmill running). I’m a huge fan of the Zombies Run app which helps keep runners like me going for longer by providing an unfolding story in-between your music tracks, and also offers numerous modes (like Radio, Race and Supply) for when you’ve listened to all of the available chapters.

A bit of variety is always welcome though, and Runtastic is muscling in on Zombies Run territory with what it’s calling Story Running.

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I like unusual games, and the original Papa Sangre really appealed to me. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s essentially a sound-only game for iOS in which you listen for 3D audio clues as to where you are and the direction you need to be going in. The follow up, The Nightjar (featuring the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch), added more of a story to the proceedings, and now in time for Halloween, Papa Sangre returns.

I was one of the beta testers for the new game, and I’m pleased to report Papa Sangre II is a massive improvement over the original. The rebuilt binaural processing Papa Engine does an amazing job of recreating a 3D soundscape in your mind and the addition of actor Sean Bean’s vocal talents, a choice of control systems and some inspired levels -- one moment you’re escaping a burning house, the next shooting ducks in the dark -- combine to create a very rewarding experience.

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When you install an app or desktop program in Windows 8.1 it gets added to the Apps screen. From here you can add it to the Start screen by right-clicking to summon the Customize menu, and then selecting "Pin to Start". You can also "Pin to Taskbar" if you want regular quick access to it while working in the desktop.

The Apps screen, which you can set as your default view, can be ordered by Name, Date Installed, Most Used, or Category -- to make it easier to find the apps and desktop programs you want. You can also have desktop programs show up first when the Apps screen is sorted by Category. To do this, right-click the taskbar and select Properties. Click the Navigation tab and tick “List desktop apps first in the Apps view when it’s sorted by category”.

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Security research firms frequently test browsers to see how good they are at protecting users from malware and phishing attacks. The results show you how secure (or otherwise) the latest versions are, but don't give you any real indication of how well they might perform in the future.

Identifying trends in performance is important, particularly for companies thinking of switching browsers, so NSS Labs evaluated the security of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari by aggregating results from phishing and socially engineered malware (SEM) attack tests conducted between 2009 and 2013.

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Windows 8.1 is great. But at the same time it -- and its predecessor -- is based on a slightly flawed concept. It's built on the idea of a one-size-fits-all operating system, but in order to get it to work across tablets, desktop PCs, laptops and hybrids, Microsoft has had to make various compromises. A bit like trying to make one suit fit four people with different body shapes.

Windows 8.1 (like Windows 8) fits best on tablets, but tweaks had to be made to ensure it runs on smaller screen sizes. Windows 8.1 works well on standard PCs, but you can almost feel Microsoft's disapproval when you're controlling the OS with a mouse and keyboard -- "But that's not how it's meant to be used!" As a desktop user there are various elements of the new OS which annoy me, but none more so than the Calculator app.

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Windows 8.1 is a huge improvement over Windows 8. Once you've spent any time in the preview (or one of the leaked builds) you'll find it impossible to go back to the obviously half-baked original.

But the default setup still has some annoyances that get in the way and prevent you from just booting up your PC and using Windows. For starters there's the lock screen to get through -- a delaying stage which serves little purpose in a home environment. Then you have to enter your password and log to in your Microsoft account, and finally, once you've cleared those steps, there's the Modern UI to go through on your way to the desktop. Fortunately you can configure Windows 8.1 to skip all of that nonsense.

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I know a couple of people who have been victims of identity theft, and while they didn’t lose anything financially, there was a lot of work required afterwards to clear up the mess and put safeguards in place to ensure it didn’t happen again. What was amazing to me was that the thieves were able to do things like open store cards with information that was not only false, but incorrect (an entirely fictitious date of birth, for example).

A new infographic from Experian looks at the dangers of identity theft both on and offline, and provides statistics that show while most of us are aware of the risks, few of us actually do enough to properly safeguard our personal information. The findings probably won’t surprise you.

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Microsoft is hoping to appeal to serious musicians and remixers with a new add-on for its tablet range. The Surface Music Kit is a backlit cover (called a Blade) that plugs into the Surface keyboard port and replicates the sort of hardware buttons typically used by a music producer or performer.

When you connect the Music Cover, it will install the companion app automatically, providing you with access to all of the building blocks of a song -- templates, drums, bass, keyboard, vocals, and so on. You can use it to create new music but it’s particularly well suited to remixes and mashups.

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Yesterday was unquestionably the day of the tablet. Nokia unveiled the Lumia 2520, its first Windows RT 8.1 slate, Apple announced the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display, and Microsoft’s Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 went on sale.

It was unfortunate timing for Microsoft. On a day when Steve Ballmer and co. would have hoped people would be talking about Surface, they were salivating over Apple instead. The fruit logo company inflicted more damage on Microsoft than just drawing focus for a day however.

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Despite being billed in the press as an iPad event, Apple announced much more than just the iPad Air and new iPad mini today. As well as improved hardware it revealed its OS update Mavericks would be free, and the giveaways didn’t stop there.

Its iWork productivity apps -- Pages, Numbers and Keynote -- and its iLife creativity apps -- iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand -- have been redesigned to take full advantage of OS X Mavericks and iOS 7, updated to 64-bit, integrated with iCloud and made entirely free. They’ll come bundled with new Macs or iOS devices. If you’re an existing user, and running Mavericks or iOS 7, you’ll be able to update to the new versions. Not planning on buying new hardware and not an existing user? You’ll still need to pay to get them, I’m afraid.

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When a big tech company live streams a launch event, we usually embed it here for readers to sit back and enjoy. Apple likes to make things difficult though. At last month’s iPhone event it didn’t bother providing a live stream, and you can only watch today’s iPad event if you’re one of the Apple faithful.

To be fair, the restrictions on today’s live stream should surprise no one. It’s exactly the same deal as the iPad reveal last year -- you need to be watching on Apple TV or using Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.6 or later, or iOS 4.3 or later.

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Last week my colleague Mihaita Bamburic explained how to install the freshly released Windows 8.1 in VMware Player and Workstation, and I wanted to follow that up by showing how to set up the new OS in my personal favorite virtualization software -- Oracle VirtualBox.

There are many reasons why you may want to try out Windows 8.1 before committing to it as your primary operating system -- if you used Windows 8 and hated it, you may want to see exactly how much better the updated release is. If you’re thinking of upgrading from an old OS but aren’t sure about the Modern UI, this a good way of trying it out first.

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Oh dear. If you try and search using Google in Windows 8.1 there’s a very good chance the results page won’t display properly. Whatever you search for will generate a mangled page that works, but makes finding the results you want rather tricky.

This problem doesn’t affect searching using Google in Chrome, or Firefox, it only affects IE11 in both Modern UI and Desktop modes.

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You don’t want to save files locally on your hard drive -- you want to store them in the cloud, right? That’s what Microsoft thinks anyway. For that reason it’s baked SkyDrive into the heart of Windows 8.1 and made it the default save-to location for documents.

Although you can easily save elsewhere, one of the main save options, Libraries, has been removed from File Explorer’s sidebar. Another of those weird decisions that the Redmond, Wash. tech giant likes to make from time to time (like giving us a Start button without a Start menu).

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