Latest Technology News

Bluetooth speakers usually need some sort of distinctive feature to help them to stand out from the crowd. In the case of the LuguLake that distinctiveness is in the way it looks.

The first thing that strikes you is the funky design, it's about the size of a tennis ball, or an apple if you prefer, with a shiny black finish and a sort of suspended saucer over the speaker cone itself. On the top of this is a touch pad that acts as a volume control as well as allowing you to pause and skip tracks, and answer calls so you can use it as a speakerphone.

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The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has defined the fifth generation networks (5G) and decided to commercialize that technology by the year 2020.

ITU-R Working Party 5D of the UN’s telco arm finalized its 5G vision and rubber-stamped it as IMT-2020 at a meeting in San Diego, California last week, Total Telecom reported.

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If you've been following the news about Windows 10, you can’t have avoided the confusion that arose from Gabe Aul's poorly written (but ultimately updated and clarified) blog post. We now know exactly where we stand. If you have a genuine version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.x you can upgrade to a fully licensed version of Windows 10 for free on July 29. For anyone without a genuine copy of 7 or 8.1, you can legitimately keep running Windows 10 if you are happy to stay on as a Windows Insider.

Of course, even if you upgrade from a valid version of Windows 7 or 8.x, you can still choose to remain a Windows Insider. Just as happens now, this means that you are granted access to pre-release builds on the Fast and Slow rings. Each preview build will be time-limited, but a new version will be released before the previous one expires. So... what will you do? Do you want to stay on the cutting edge of Windows advancements? Or would you prefer to stick with a more stable version of the operating system. There are, of course, pros and cons to both routes.

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Fitness bands and smartwatches that monitor your activity are notoriously inaccurate. Wear a bunch of them at the same time and they’ll all return entirely different results. And we’re not talking about slight discrepancies either -- the results can differ by several thousand steps. The idea is the trackers provide you with a general ballpark figure, rather than a precise one, so you can see how your activity varies on a daily basis, and take steps -- hah! -- to improve on it.

As a result, comparing the results from two or more fitness trackers isn’t usually very helpful -- each device will measure activity in its own way, and who is to say what’s right or wrong? However, more advanced wearables -- Microsoft Band and Apple Watch, for example -- measure your heart rate, and it’s much easier to check how accurate they are. All you need to do is compare the results they produce with the figures from a reliable source.

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A large number of organizations are continuing to use Windows Server 2003, despite Microsoft announcing that support for the operating system will cease in less than a month.

According to a recent study by Softchoice, 21 percent of servers were still operating the OS in the first half of 2015, a fall of 11 percent compared with the same period twelve months ago.

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The wearables market continues to grow and there's something of a battle -- just as there is in the smartphone market -- between Apple Watch and Android Wear. Google's wearable OS keeps receiving updates and one of the things that makes it stand apart from Watch OS is the level of customization it offers users.

Today Google unveils 17 new watch faces to add to the existing catalog that already extends to more than 1,500 entries. As ever, the claims of there being something for everyone apply, and there are numerous cultural nods with Terminator Genisys, Hello Kitty, and Angry Birds faces all available for download.

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As my colleague Manish Singh reports overnight, Apple reversed course and now plans to compensate artists for the first three months of music streaming. It's time to ask: Were the whiners grandstanding or sincere? The question mainly is meant for Taylor Swift, whose Father's Day Tumblr post seems to have brought, eh, swift response to the—what I call—"play for no-pay" plan.

The company unveiled Apple Music during the World Wide Developer Conference on June 8. The streaming service will be free to subscribers for the first three months, with Apple initially choosing not to make royalty payments to artists. I condemned the ridiculous strategy last week. The company sits on a nearly $200 billion cash horde, and content creators are among its most loyal customers. Stiffing them makes no sense from several different perspectives, with good public relations being one and expressing thanks to artist customers being another.

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Have you bought, or are you planning to buy, one of AMD's new graphics cards, like Fury X or R9 380? If so, well done my fellow PC builder; these cards are extremely powerful, while being competitively priced. Great choice.

While not the first cards to feature FreeSync, the higher end of these new cards will allow for comfortable 4K gaming too. Obviously you need a 4K FreeSync monitor. Well, need is a strong word -- you can get by without it (it is not food or water), but you do need it if you want to be the coolest PC gamer in your neighborhood (and you do). Today, Samsung announces two such monitors that will have you drooling.

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Uber has faced numerous complaints since its inception in 2010, including suggestions that drivers are not properly vetted. Now the taxi service is facing legal action over plans to track the location of its customers whether the app is running in the foreground or background on their phones.

The new policy is due to come into force on July 15, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the FTC saying that the policy change is unfair and should be investigated by the commission. It will be possible to opt out of this location tracking, but EPIC feels this is unreasonable.

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In the industry we’re in you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who is anything but positive about the development of technology. Thanks to technological advancements, we can carry whole computers in our pockets, travel to anywhere in the world without having to leave our living room through devices such as Oculus Rift and 3D print body parts to save lives.

But there is one area where people aren’t quite so enthusiastic and that is in employment, where jobs in a variety of industries are under threat from automation.

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NASCAR racing has both its fans and detractors. Try as I might, I fall into the latter category. For me, watching cars go around a circular track for hours is a great cure for insomnia. Rally car racing is certainly a much more interesting spectator sport, but I digress.

While I don't like NASCAR, enough people do to make it a smart organization to partner with. This is why you see so many sponsorship logos on the cars. Today, NASCAR and Microsoft partner to display the Windows 10 logo on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s car. The partnership expands beyond the superficial, however.

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Google today revealed details of a new project designed to power the world of journalism. News Labs is a joint venture between Google and a number of technology firms and entrepreneurs to make it easier to research and publish stories. It's something aimed primarily at major newsrooms and reporting outlets, but it also features tools that can help to power and promote collaborative citizen journalism.

The search giant has several programs that have been created to make it easier for people to make use of YouTube to deliver and consume news. User-generated news has become increasingly important in recent years, offering not just a wider range of opinion but also unparalleled localization, and Google is keen to be at the heart of it. Newspapers and news websites are far from being the end of journalism; reader interaction adds to the narrative.

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I still remember when cable internet came to my neighborhood. As someone who had done all of his web surfing over dial-up, this was to be a life-changing event. I went to Nobody Beats the Wiz, where I got the modem and Ethernet card for my PC tower.

The excitement of having broadband has since worn off, but it is something I cannot live without. The crazy thing, however, is that I have rented my modems for years -- something the majority of users do. This has really added up over time. Today, NETGEAR announces the Nighthawk AC1900 WiFi Cable Modem Router (C7000). A cable modem and router in one, so you can finally stop renting your equipment and move on to ownership.

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CSVPad is a compact, free and portable editor for CSV and similar files.

The program can handle all kinds of format variations: tab separated, colons, semicolons, pipes, dollars and more. Fortunately you don’t have to worry about the details as by default CSVPad automatically detects and uses the correct format all on its own.

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Out of the office on holiday this summer? Despite being encouraged to switch off, and enjoy a well-earned break, the reality is that many people find it difficult to "go dark" and so fall into the trap of checking emails by the pool.

So whether you’re travelling to a conference or a hitting the beach, you need to take appropriate steps to keep your data secure, particularly when browsing the internet or making online payments from your mobile device.

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