Latest Technology News

The path to a free copy of Windows 10 should be very straightforward, but Microsoft has made it more confusing than necessary by making several contradictory statements.

In a nutshell (as it stands at the moment), if you have a valid installation of Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 then you can upgrade to the new OS for free, provided you do so before July 29 2016. If you don’t upgrade in that time frame you’ll need to purchase a license. This will set you back $119 for the Home edition or $199 for the Pro version. If you’re a Windows Insider you can continue getting free beta builds, license free. Still confused? We’ve put together a simple flowchart to help you work out if you’re eligible for the free upgrade or not.

WhatsApp officially introduced voice calling in mid-March, after a couple of months of private testing. The feature, which was announced a year before, arrived on Android first, making its way to iOS less than a month after. Windows Phone users, however, were left waiting.

But, thanks to the latest update to the Windows Phone app, WhatsApp Calling is now also available for those using the tiled smartphone operating system.

Windows Update has long been pushed as the way to make sure that Windows is fully patched and secure as possible. It is recommended that it be left in Automatic mode so updates are downloaded as they are released. Samsung, however, has different ideas.

The company has been found disabling Windows Update on a number of the computers it sells, channeling people to use its own SW Update tool instead. Microsoft MVP Patrick Barker noted the activity when he found a program called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe on his computer. The culprit was Samsung's crapware.

It is that time of the month again when Microsoft releases new firmware updates for its Surface tablets. And this time around the devices for which updated firmware is offered are Surface Pro 3 and Surface 3.

Surface Pro 3, being the oldest slate of the two, has received regular firmware upgrades since June 2014, with one offered just last month, but for Surface 3, June 2015 marks the release of its first firmware update. Here is everything that is new.

It seems as Google’s software, with the ability to listen everything being said in a room, was being installed on computers without the owners’ consent, and everyone’s freaking out about it.

It was first spotted by open-source developers who noticed that Chromium (open-source basis of Chrome) began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users, The Guardian wrote in a report.

Not all partnerships and alliances are created equal. Some are superficial, some are one-sided, and some are actually balanced and meaningful. A balanced partnership is the rarer of those types, but when they happen, magic can happen.

Today, a partnership comes to light that has many in both the Enterprise and open source communities excited. Two powerhouses -- Red Hat and Samsung -- are forming an alliance for mobile Enterprise solutions. Will this partnership be balanced and meaningful? It looks very likely.

It's only a few weeks since Apple announced some details about iOS 9. One feature that grabbed the attention of many people was Apple's move to address the problem of iOS getting a little fat -- it was announced that iOS 9 will need far less free space to perform an upgrade. But if you are running very short of room, there's a new reason to smile.

The second version of the iOS 9 beta was released to developers today and, as noted by 9to5Mac, Apple's mobile operating system features a great new way to handle devices that are low on space. iOS 9 is now able to temporarily delete apps to free up the necessary megabytes, before reinstalling them when the update is complete.

For years, we’ve been using motherboards that are designed to be flat, coming in square and rectangular shapes. But one challenge with such design is that when you bend it, the circuit board breaks and becomes less efficient due to tearing. But that is about to change, thanks to the long inspirational Japanese paper cutting techniques.

A University of Michigan research team lead by Professor Nicholas Kotov has found out a way to implement Japanese paper cutting techniques -- otherwise known as kirigami -- to a new type of flexible conductor, which can be used to make electrodes and wires. The new type of flexible conductor for the first time enables us to think of gadgets that could bend, and even transform.

We've all had occasions when we've sent an email and then, for one reason or another, wished we hadn't. It may have been a message fired off in anger, or a missive you notice is littered with typos. For some time -- six years in fact -- Google has offered a bit of a safety net in the form of the Undo Send Labs feature.

For more than half a decade this was nothing more than an experimental feature, hence its appearance in Labs. But now Google has announced that it is being properly integrated into Gmail for everyone to use. There's no need to enable an experiment option any more, this is now a feature that everyone can access through Gmail's settings.

One of the defining features of Twitter is trending topics. It's easy to catch up on what's hot right now, and it's something that Instagram is borrowing in its latest update. The millions of users of the photo service now have access to a new Explore page that includes not only a trending component that highlights events and topics that people are posting about, but also trending tags and places.

These new options make it easier to home in on content of interest, and changes have also been made to Search. You have the option to search Places, Tags, and People separately, or you can use the Top section to search all at once.

Not willing to be upstaged by Apple Music, Google is launching a free version of its Google Play Music service. To make money, the free version of the service will be supported by advertisements -- forget free trials and the prospect of upsetting artists such as Taylor Swift.

The free version of Google Play Music is starting life in the US and Google is pushing the fact that there are curated radio stations to suit whatever mood you find yourself in. The station features the involvement of some of the Songza team and it is possible to home in on a custom radio station based on genre, mood, decade, activity, or similarity to particular artists.

Both Western Digital and Seagate are set to launch the latest entries in their portable hard drive ranges, bringing consumers more storage than ever before.

As more and more high resolution images and videos are being used by consumers, the demand for storage has grown rapidly in recent years.

We are not far removed from a time when computers took up entire rooms in universities and government facilities. Home PCs used to be huge towers and monstrous CRT monitors. Times have certainly changed.

When 50 Cent and Lil' Kim rapped about magic sticks, I don't think they were talking about computer dongles. However, having a full-fledged computer in a tiny stick is certainly magic if you ask me. Today, that is exactly what Lenovo announces, with the Ideacentre Stick 300; a Windows PC that resembles a flash drive.

Amazon announced the Echo a few months ago, but it's been a long time coming. The Bluetooth- and WiFi-enabled speaker sits in your home and answers your questions or commands. It does so simply upon voice activation, and it answers with its own vocal rendering.

Well, the device is finally coming to market, as Amazon announces the ability to order for all customers. It does a lot more than answer your questions, though. There's home automation, music and many other features it can control.

Renaming one file on a PC is easy. A whole folder full? That’s more of a challenge. Explorer can’t help, and even turning to the command line doesn’t give you very much.

1-4a Rename is a free, portable batch renaming tool which aims to change all that. It’s old, and the interface is a mess, but if you need real renaming power then it might be worth a try.