Wayne Williams

Apple consistently reinvents iPod nano, rolling out new versions of its tiny player annually since 2005, with the exception of last year. It’s not too much of a stretch to assume we’ll see an updated version this year, out in time for Christmas, and according to Japanese blog Macotakara, it will be a return to the earlier, taller form factor, but with some notable differences.

The blog, which cites a "reliable Chinese source", reports that the new device will be three-quarters the height of the fifth-generation model, with a rectangular (presumably touchscreen) display, a home button like the one found on iPhone and iPad, and a "dedicated new iTunes service", suggesting it may have a working version of iOS onboard.

Macotakara also states that the clip that appears on the back of the current square design (for use during physical activity) will be abandoned, making the new 7th-gen nano much thinner.

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The Apple iPad is the best-selling tablet by quite some margin, but with increasing competition from the likes of Google and Microsoft, its dominance could be under threat. Although the company could (and likely will) make some minor improvements to the iPad at some point -- making it thinner, boosting the camera, and finding a way to reduce its core temperature, for example -- it needs to come up with new variations if it wants to stay on top.

That means going large and producing a ‘MacPad’, which would essentially be a touchscreen, keyboard-less version of the Macbook Air (bringing it into direct competition with Microsoft Surface), or going small, and finally introducing the much rumored iPad mini.

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Malware on Android devices is a real and growing threat, and one that is only likely to worsen. The latest Trojan to be found in the wild is a particularly nasty piece of coding named MMarketPay.A by TrustGo, the mobile security company that discovered it. Believed to have infected more than 100,000 smartphones in China, the Trojan downloads paid apps and videos from Mobile Market (M-Market), China Mobile’s official app store, without the user’s knowledge, resulting in some pretty hefty bills.

The malware is picked up by downloading infected apps from one of nine app stores (nDuoa, GFan, AppChina, LIQU, ANFONE, Soft.3g.cn, TalkPhone, 159.com and AZ4SD) and once installed on a device, it bypasses M-Market’s SMS security step, and begins placing orders and downloading content.

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British Airways faces criticism after unveiling plans to look up frequent fliers on Google as part of a customer service programme called "Know Me".

Two-thousand iPad wielding airline staff will be given access to the data, which will include travel history and, most interestingly of all, photos pulled from Google Images. BA says the idea of the initiative is to be able to offer a more personal service -- the photos will allow staff to greet recognized passengers with a smile when they arrive at the terminal or plane.

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Apple, like all big tech companies, files patents for lots of things. Some are used in products it plans to make, but others are just ideas that may or may not ever come to fruition. For this reason you can never read too much into new patents, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sit up and pay at least some attention to the news that Apple has been granted a broad patent for a head-mounted wearable computing device that sounds rather similar to Google Glass.

While the news might suggest that Apple has simply ripped off Google’s innovation, the truth is the patent was actually filed in October 2006 but just granted now.

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A couple of days ago Microsoft researcher Terry Zink claimed he’d uncovered evidence of Android phones being used as part of a botnet to send spam from Yahoo Mail servers. In his blog post on July 3rd he reported that the spam, which included "androidMobile" in the message header, and "Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android" at the bottom of the emails, was being sent from devices located in Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela. He then went on to speculate that users of the infected phones might have installed Trojanized pirated versions of legitimate apps, and become infected that way.

Security experts Sophos, agreed with his findings after running investigations of its own on the spam messages, but didn’t actually find or test any of the supposed malware itself. Google has since denied that any Android devices have been compromised in this way, stating there was no evidence to prove Zink’s claim, and that the junk messages had just been formatted to look as if they originated on Android handsets.

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A technology journalist friend of mine often makes sweeping statements regarding how well he thinks a new program or piece of hardware will fare, and he’s usually completely wrong. When Ubuntu first arrived, he declared it would kill off Windows and render Microsoft an aging OS irrelevance. When Apple launched the iPad he told everyone who cared to listen that it would be a total failure because no one would want one.

I’m far less prone to making such proclamations, but I think I’m on reasonably safe ground when I say Windows 8 is going to be a dud. No version of Windows will ever be a total failure. Even Vista, which is regarded as one of Microsoft’s least successful operating systems, sold reasonably well, and I’m sure as soon as Windows 8 is released we’ll hear a lot of statistics coming out of Microsoft about how it’s the fastest-selling OS since Windows Whatever. But they’ll be statistics that we’ll have to take with a fair amount of salt.

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Tablets are the hottest computing devices right now, and thanks to the likes of Google Nexus 7  and Microsoft Surface, they’re only going to gain in popularity. In fact, the latest NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report has them on target to surpass notebook shipments by 2016. Not too shabby for a platform that didn’t even really exist before the original iPad launched in April 2010.

The total number of mobile PC shipments for 2012 is estimated at 347 million units, with tablets accounting for around 121 million of those. Notebooks are forecast at 208 million units, with mini-note PCs (netbooks) making up the remaining 18 million shipments.

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VideoLAN’s VLC, the hugely popular open source cross-platform media player, has finally been released for Android. Before you get too excited though, this is a beta version ported from iOS, so will only run on devices with an ARMv7 CPU and NEON. It has a rather basic UI and some performance issues too. In fact, according to VLC, "It might kill your kitten, destroy your house and start the Mayan apocalypse. Use it at your own risk".

If the limitations don’t put you off, and you have no qualms about potentially initiating the end of the world, the app offers the ability to play most local audio and video files (stored in its media library or any folders on your device), as well as network streams. It supports auto-rotation, aspect ratio adjustments, volume gestures, multi-track audio and subtitles.

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Reality Jockey is responsible for some of iOS’s more interesting audio apps, including RjDj, Inception and Dimensions. The London-based developer’s latest offering, Project Now, is an ambitious music app that aims to choose the perfect music for every situation you find yourself in. For example, if you’re just relaxing at home, it will play a selection of suitable tunes from your music collection. Go to work and it will switch to something more fitting for the business environment. Visit the gym, and you’ll hear music to work out to. Cleverly it also mixes in external sounds from your microphone, so you can still hear the world around you when you’re out cycling, or in the office.

When you first run the app it will import your music, which will take a while to complete. After then it will attempt to assess your situation, based on the current day, time, location and sounds around you, and find music to match. It can identify 21 different circumstances, including calm, active, asleep, snowy, night out and full moon. Quite why you’d want to listen to different music when the moon is full I’m not sure.

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One year ago today, Google moved onto Facebook's turf and stunned techdom in the process. How much has changed? Google+ now has a total of 250 million users. Of that figure, Google says 150 million people use the service at least monthly, and 50 percent of those active users do so daily. That doesn’t actually mean 75 million people go to Google+ every day though -- it just means that they have some sort of interaction with Google’s social features, or more likely, click +1 buttons.

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In an article that appeared earlier today on BetaNews, Robert Cringely talks about how Microsoft can compete with Apple on pricing but -- due to supply and manufacturing issues -- won’t be able to undercut its rival. It’s an interesting observation, and one that’s based on sound thinking.

But Surface is a curious beast. The iPad is, to all intents and purposes, a scaled-up Smartphone. Microsoft’s tablet (or tablets, rather) is a touch-screen PC. It runs Windows 8, and Office, and applications like Photoshop.

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Flipboard, the social newsreader with a stylish magazine-like design, has emerged from beta and is now available free for all Android devices, including the Kindle Fire (although it’s optimized for smartphones rather than tablets). Editor's Note: It's not compatible with my ASUS Transformer Pad 300 -- curses.

The app lets you build a magazine made up of topics that interest you. Categories on offer include News, Technology, Flipboard Picks, Design, Photography, Politics, Sports, Style, Film, and Travel. Content is pulled from a range of quality sites like the BBC, Wired Magazine, and USA Today, and fully localized. American readers will see something different from British or Australian users.

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English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin… How many different languages can you name? At a guess, probably no more than about twenty, which sounds bad when you consider there are an estimated 7,000 languages being spoken every day somewhere on our planet. The vast majority of these are, of course, virtually unknown, and used by a very small portion of the world’s population.

In fact, according to National Geographic, the 3,500 smallest languages are spoken by just 8.25 million people, and the tiniest of these native tongues are teetering on the brink of being silenced forever. It’s believed that one language dies every 14 days -- as its speakers switch to more common alternatives -- and nearly half of the world’s languages are expected to have been wiped out within a century.

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There was nothing really wrong with Tumblr’s previous iOS app. It offered all the features you’d expect, such as the ability to access your dashboard, create a post, manage multiple blogs and view and reply to messages. The interface was straightforward, intuitive and unmistakably Tumblr.

Version 3.0, however, is just so much better in every way. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up, so is faster, sleeker, easier to use and more in line with its Android counterpart, which itself was updated a couple of months ago.

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