Speaking at the D11 conference in California, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside has confirmed the existence of the company's long-rumoured X-phone. The device is to be called the Moto X and is set to launch in October.

This is the first major product launch from the company since it was bought by Google in 2011. Woodside teased delegates saying, "It's in my pocket but I can’t show it to you." He did confirm that the phone will be packed with sensors so that it will be able to detect when it’s taken out of a pocket or when it’s travelling in a car, for example, allowing it to adapt its behavior. No details of exact specs have been released.

Linux users are a strange bunch. As a distro gets popular, it tends to lose credibility with the Linux elitists. It is much like an underground rock band. As the band gains mainstream success, the original fans view the band as "sell-outs". For instance, Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distro, is viewed negatively by many as a beginner distro (Linux users only feel this way because of its success -- Ubuntu is a wonderful OS). Linux Mint however, is the exception to the rule -- it is revered by newbies and elite users alike. This is despite its long-held top spot on www.distrowatch.com and the fact that it is based on Ubuntu.

On May 29, 2013, Linux Mint 15, codenamed "Olivia" was released. This is the newest version of Mint and is based on Ubuntu 13.04. While Linux Mint is built on Ubuntu, it removes what many users hate about that distro -- the Unity desktop environment and integrated Amazon.com search.

On Thursday, South Korean manufacturer Samsung announced a new smartphone part of its upscale Android lineup, called Galaxy S4 Mini. The handset is marketed as a smaller variant of the company's current green droid flagship, the Galaxy S4, but don't expect any of the latter's bells and whistles.

The Galaxy S4 Mini is shorter, narrower, thinner and lighter than its predecessor, the modest Galaxy S III Mini. However, it can easily be compared to the Galaxy S II (the company's older Android flagship) rather than newer halo devices when it comes to hardware specifications. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing and not the other way around.

Software versioning has changed a great deal over the years. It used to be that version 1 of an application would be released and it would be followed in around a year's time by version 2. You might well find that updates would be released in the interim -- versions 1.1 and 1.2 for example -- but it didn't take long for things to start to get more complicated.

Minor versioning changes became more and more common, so you might well encounter versions such as 1.2.13. In many respects this was a good thing. It was easy to compare the version of an application you had installed with whatever the latest version was.

In theory, a free online storage account sounds like it should be a great way to share files with others. And this can be true, at least sometimes, but there are complications. Like having to upload your data first, for instance. And then trusting its security to your service provider.

If these are issues for you, though, you could try another option: installing Weezo and allowing it to run a secure server on your own PC, making selected files and folder available to whoever you like. This is far easier to get working than you might expect. And it’s just a small part of what this interesting free program can do.

Ringo Starr admits he gets frustrated that all people ever want to talk to him about is The Beatles. The developers of Windows 8 must feel similarly annoyed that despite all the changes in the new OS, all anyone wants to talk about is the Start button.

Windows 8 gets a lot of things right, and a lot of things wrong, but the lack of a Start button and menu in the desktop is the one thing that seems to unite all the haters. It’s symbolic of how badly Microsoft judged our attachment to the status quo in its rush to embrace the future. Fortunately with Windows 8.1 Microsoft gets a chance to fix things and give us the OS we should have had in the first place.

Last week it was pointed out that in the latest Twitter update, the implementation of two-factor verification that we mentioned here, was less than solid. Now, as opposed to working to solve these issues, the company instead concentrates on its latest mobile apps updates.

Today Misha Lushin of Twitter announces that the social network has "just released updates to our iPhone and Android apps. Tweeting is now even easier and more seamless".

Just over three months after its release, Microsoft is celebrating a million sales of Office 365 Home Premium. Going a long way to prove detractors of software subscriptions wrong, Microsoft's latest version of its office suite has managed to maintain average sales of more than one unit per second.

With a subscription costing $99.99 per year, Microsoft has clearly pocketed a healthy profit with this release, but the fact that the software can be installed on up to five machines may actually mean that sales figures are perhaps not as high as they could have been.

A move to Gmail frequently results in temporary disorientation. The labels feature takes getting used to, especially for those arriving from Outlook, which allows for the creation of folders. Now Google aims to clean things up a bit and help customers be better organized with the load of email received daily.

Itamar Gilad, Product Manager at Google, announces that "on the desktop, the new inbox groups your mail into categories which appear as different tabs. You simply choose which categories you want and voilà! Your inbox is organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when".

Back in April Amazon released 14 original TV shows, exclusive to Prime customers. The company, through its video production studio, promised to take the most popular of these and turn them into series. The viewers spoke, and now the retail giant today announces those results.

Five of the original 14 pilots have been accepted -- Alpha House, Betas, Annebots, Creative Galaxy and Tumbleaf all make the final cut. Meanwhile, one of the hot favorites, Zombieland, was not picked up. It became much less popular after customers actually watched it.

On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared for the second time at the D: All Things Digital conference. The interview, lead by perennial hosts Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, mostly centered around the current state and the future of the fruit company, but also briefly touched other popular topics like Android and wearable technology.

Tim Cook, who wears a Nike+ FuelBand, says that "wearables [the category] is extremely interesting" and capable of deeply impacting people's lives. The man, however, asserts that folks are reluctant to wear things that they don't normally do, giving glasses as an example. For this reason, he believes that products like Google Glass don't appeal to most users and are only attractive to "vertical markets".

A few years ago, if you wanted to join a website you had to create a brand new account, enter your email address and come up with yet another password to try and remember. That’s all changed of course and now you can log into a vast amount of sites using existing credentials for services like Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Today, Amazon adds itself to the list of services you can use to gain access to other sites with the introduction of Login with Amazon.

Although Microsoft has yet to officially reveal the price of its next generation games console, Amazon has decided to set the figure at £599.99 on its pre-order page.

This is considerably higher than most people would have expected -- closer to £400 would have been a reasonable guess -- and dwarfs the launch price of the Xbox 360 which cost gamers £209.99 for the core system back in December 2005.

On Wednesday, Microsoft's Japanese arm revealed that on June 6 the Surface Pro tablet will finally be available in the land of the rising sun. The fondleslab is set to arrive in two different trims with 128 GB and 256 GB of internal storage, the latter of which is offered for the first time on the Surface Pro.

The 64 GB Surface Pro will not be available in the local market, likely due to the fact that users can access just 23 GB of storage (practically less than half of the advertised capacity). Microsoft took heavy fire for this caveat, which it appears to avoid in Japan. Prospective buyers can also grab Touch Covers with different design themes, a move that the company carried over from other supported markets.

153,000 iPhone and iPod owners are in line for a payout from Apple after the company agreed to a $53 million settlement to a 2010 lawsuit. The class action suit concerned malfunctioning devices that the Cupertino, Calif. based company claimed had been damaged after coming into contact with water.

A "liquid damage policy" allowed Apple to deny warranty coverage if the liquid indicator inside the device changed color from white to pink or red, "proving" contact with water.