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Late this morning, Robert Johnson sent me a link to Paul Thurrott story "Windows 8 Sales Well Below Projections, Plenty of Blame to Go Around" -- "Uncertainty could turn Windows 8 into the next Vista". The lead sentence is frightening: "Sales of Windows 8 PCs are well below Microsoft’s internal projections and have been described inside the company as disappointing". Uh-oh.

Robert asked my opinion, and I'll give it. Relax. Slow start isn't surprising at all. I've said for more than a year that Windows 8 wouldn't be big. It's a transitional operating system coming when most businesses just upgraded to Windows 7 or are in process of doing so and when tablets capture consumer interests more.

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There’s nothing more annoying than someone playing on their mobile phone during a movie. Even if you’re sitting a good distance away, the glowing small screen lights up the cinema like a beacon, making it harder to focus on what’s happening on the big screen.

Forthcoming feature-length thriller App is set to turn what is usually seen as socially unacceptable behavior into a highly social act, encouraging everyone to use their iPhones and Android devices to follow a parallel storyline while the film is playing.

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This week, Google brought a little something from ill-fated Nexus Q to Google TV. Even my non-techie wife is amazed, and that's the point. This little something is really big, because anyone can use it and get dramatic benefits.

The new YouTube for Android app installed on smartphone or tablet now acts as a remote control to Google TV, taking interaction far removed and clumsy and making it intimate, fun and easy. If Amazon and Netflix operated similarly -- and the set-top box got Hulu Plus -- I'd cancel AT&T U-verse, baby.

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If you’ve tried an iPad mini, or just seen one, you’ll know the screen is a decent size and well suited to using like a tablet. It’s not quite so good for using as a laptop/netbook replacement (unless you have really good eyesight or like peering at things in a hunched-over manner), but that hasn’t stopped Belkin from rolling out a portable keyboard folio for it.

The Portable Keyboard Case connects to Apple’s device via Bluetooth and is a scaled down version of the keyboard the company sells for the full-sized iPad. If you’re the sort of person who likes to pretend you’re a giant, you’re going to love it.

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A couple weeks from now we’re going to start serializing my 1992 book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. It’s the book that was the basis for my 1996 documentary TV series Triumph of the Nerds and ultimately led to this column starting on pbs.org in 1997.

What goes around comes around.

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I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading review after review of Microsoft Surface. I feel like 90-percent of them were not written for me. You see, I’m your average user. I’m the average Joe user with a strong interest in the field of technology. I don’t care about pixel densities, or all the other niggles on performance tech geeks fight about all the time.

What matters to me: Does a particular device allow me to not only consume content but create it as well. And Surface accomplishes those two goals tremendously well. I write this review on a Surface RT using Microsoft Word in Office 2013.

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I’ve been thinking about getting a new tablet for a while. Although there’s nothing physically wrong with my iPad 2, I’ve been itching for a bit of new tech in my life and there are some truly excellent choices available this year, including the newer "new" iPad, the iPad mini, Microsoft Surface, and the Google Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. All of which are definitely worth considering.

A friend let me borrow his Nexus 7 for a week, during which time I realized a small tablet was not for me, so that also ruled out the iPad mini. The Nexus 10 looked appealing, and so was on my shortlist. Microsoft Surface I discounted because even though I now use Windows 8 daily, I still don’t really like it and the current lack of great apps for Surface is a bit of a deal breaker. Maybe in the future…

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Anthropics Technology Ltd. on Wednesday pushed out a major update to its Portrait Professional "airbrushing" software, including new touch-up functionality, better handling of multiple faces in a single image, new face modeling and 3D skin processing, and much more.

There are a lot of solutions available to the consumer looking to gently touch-up photographs. Some are built into smartphones, some are available as freeware, some are available as plug-ins to common desktop software. It's all kid's stuff compared to Portrait Professional.

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Two months ago, I declared Android winner in the smartphone wars. The victory is now broader, in a total route of all competing operating systems and in process driving down iOS market share. That's right, after more than five years of near-constant growth, Apple's platform retreats before the Android Army.

Android's global smartphone OS share rose a stunning 19.9 points year over year in third quarter, according to Gartner. That's to 72.4 percent, up from 52.5 percent. Meanwhile iOS fell to 13.9 percent from 15 percent.

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The Windows 8 UX Pack 6.5, which emulates large portions of the Windows 8 classic desktop, including non-Aero effects and the new Charms bar, in Windows 7, gains two minor changes in this release. First, the default system drive icon has now been set to the same as that in Windows 8, while the other makes the Charms Bar Immersive UI the default setting.

Fixes include resolving issues with logon screens not changing properly on OEM-bundled machines, plus permission problems with third-party applications. Version 6.5 also ensures the Start orb shows up correctly after a system restart.

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When Microsoft first announced that Internet Explorer 10 would be part of Windows 8 most users assumed that this would also mean a release of the browser for the version 7 operating system. The first version of Internet Explorer 10 was released publicly with Windows 8's Developer Preview back in 2011, and then updated whenever new versions of preview builds released. Microsoft at that time was tight lipped about the future of IE10 for Windows 7

October 2012 came and brought along Windows 8's launch. It was in the week prior to the release of Windows 8 that the company shed some light on the future of IE10 for Windows 7. A blog post indicated that Microsoft had plans to release a  preview version for Windows 7 in November 2012.

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If anyone should be able to handle online orders, other than Amazon, Google should be it. This is a cloud company, after all. But today's Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 sales debuts are a total bust, with countless processing errors. Google pissed off the wrong people. Blog and social network reports from the other launch countries boded ill for sales starting at 9 am PT today in the United States. Matters are much worse.

Even before the designated launch time, the costlier $349 Nexus 4 went out of stock, with many failed and successful buyers reporting multiple errors during the sales process. The $299 model shifted to "Notify Me" from "In Stock" minutes later. By 9:15 am PT neither smartphone was available, with lots of eager geeks frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to buy a product in the shopping cart and purchase part-way processed. These gadget geeks are loud mouths and will rake Google for the fiasco launch.

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Today, Google launches Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Expectations run high for the latest member of the green robot family, even though it's less of a major upgrade and more of a here-and-there improvement from its predecessor. Can it live up to the excitement?

At a first glance, the second version of Jelly Bean is just that...the second version of Jelly Bean. It looks and feels very similar to its predecessor. I'm an avid Android modder, and a new operating system has to live up to pretty high expectations. So rather than write a boring review presenting some of the things that you already know, I will also assess these changes in comparison to custom distributions such as AOKP Jelly Bean Milestone 1, and CyanogenMod 10 nightly.

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The Windows 8 Start screen is without doubt one of the prominent new features of the operating system. It is the first screen of the operating system that new users see when logging in and also the screen that the majority see every time they do so. While there are ways to bypass the Start screen to go straight to the desktop, it is unlikely that the majority of people will make use of those.

It may feel like an oversight to some users that Microsoft decided to lock down the available Start screen customization options. Instead of giving users the option to select any background image they want, the company limits the Start screen backgrounds to 20. While Windows 8 users are still free to select custom pictures as desktop backgrounds, they do not have the same option when it comes to this important part of the operating system.

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Tomorrow, Google Nexus 4 goes on sale, along with the new Nexus 10 tablet. The question: Who will buy? I've got answers.

Six days ago, I posted poll "Will you buy Nexus 4?" Early responses are quite surprising. Exactly 53 percent of respondents say they will buy the smartphone "as soon as available", with another 15.4 percent planning to do so "within 3 months of release". Say, what? Yes, that's my reaction, too. But the phone has received rave reviews from those publications receiving one (we're on the wait list). The results contrast strikingly with our iPhone 5 buying poll. More than 70 percent plan to buy Nexus 4 vs 33 percent the Apple mobile.

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