A new way of powering your smartphone has been released that can provide a week’s worth of charge using renewable energy sources.

Upp is a portable power solution utilizing hydrogen fuel cells that should charge any USB-compatible device.

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Three weeks ago I asked "What tech changed your life in 2014?" You answered here and on Google+. As the new year starts, I wonder what will make all our lives better. Apple Watch? I doubt it. Shake me awake from the nightmare if the wearable isn't the most successful flop of 2015. Windows 10? Skipping nine is a good sign, but is giving users more of what they don't want to let go life changing? Eh, no.

At the precipice of looking ahead, this is a last look behind. Once Consumer Electronics Show leaks and early announcements rush the InterWebs, all eyes will turn forward -- blind to what many people have, focusing on what they want instead. That's because "aspiration" is the defining word of the technology era, and the promise if you buy newfangled This or That your life will be better for it. Sometimes the promise is true, but too often not, which is why I asked the important question three weeks ago.

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Microsoft has just released the Technical Preview of Windows 10. It’s a very early build, so you wouldn’t be advised to run it as your main operating system, and while you could set it to dual boot, running it in a virtualized environment is probably a better idea.

The process is very simple -- all you need is a copy of Oracle VM VirtualBox and the Windows 10 Technical Preview ISO.

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When it comes to cord-cutting, there are few options available to the sports fan. While some sports provide options for online subscriptions, the NFL is not among them, forcing fans to use "alternative" methods for watching their team play on Sunday. As the regular season ends, so does one of the best sources for accomplishing this.

Wiziwig.tv is closing its doors, after providing live streaming sports of all varieties to its users. The website cites a change in law in Spain that would possibly trip it up, resulting in ridiculously heavy fines if found guilty, which seems likely.

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The Windows Store might still be a bit of a mess, and there aren’t anywhere near as many decent apps as those found in the Apple App Store and Google Play, but things are definitely improving.

Changes to the store in 2014 resulted in 30 percent more active users, and over 110 percent year-over-year increase in app downloads and gross sales. Microsoft says it has seen an 80 percent increase in registered developers and a 60 percent increase in app selection too, which is good news for the platform. The software giant has also revealed big plans are afoot for 2015.

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Looking back on this last day of the year, I wonder how my daily tech changed so much since the first. On Jan. 1, 2014, my core computing comprised Chromebook, Nexus tablet, and Nexus smartphone. Midyear, I switched out to all Microsoft—buying Surface Pro 3 and Nokia Lumia Icon. While commendable the effort, Windows poorly fit my lifestyle. Today, I'm all Apple—13-inch MacBook Pro Retina Display with 512GB SSD, iPhone 6 128GB, and iPad Air 128GB. I can't imagine using anything else.

Following the lead of my BetaNews colleagues Mihaita Bamburic, Ian Barker, Alan Buckingham, Brian Fagioli, and Wayne Williams, I review my year in tech, and unlike 2013 focus on products that released during the year. I present my 2014 personal tech alphabetically, from company name, rather than order of importance—because they all matter. Note: While the list looks like four, it's five because the first is two combined.

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Leanify is a file minifier, a lightweight tool which can cut file sizes without affecting the core content (image files are smaller but their quality remains the same, for example).

We’ve discussed similar tools before, in particular FileOptimizer, but Leanify is, well -- a little different.

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We published our best Windows store apps of 2014 yesterday which listed great applications released for Microsoft's tiled operating system.

Today, we have a list of top games for Windows 8 that include popular releases such as Sonic Dash, Star Wars Assault Team and Taptiles.

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A new report has revealed that Apple devices were a hugely popular Christmas gift this year, trumping smartphone rivals.

Flurry’s annual Christmas report found that 51.3 percent of new devices activated on Christmas Day were manufactured by Apple, compared with 17.7 percent by Samsung and 5.8 percent by Nokia.

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I'm not easily impressed. Lots of tech products see the light of day each year, but only a few I consider to be truly great. And by that I mean technology that I want to have in my life, that brings value, and, last but not least, that makes me feel good. The subjective factor is just as important, I believe, when it comes to the things that I have to look at and interact with on a daily basis. That's just the way it is, and I'm fine with it.

Because of this, a pretty long list can get really, really short in no time. My colleagues have already shared their favorite tech products of 2014 with you, and now the time has come for me to do the same. It's BetaNews tradition, after all. So, without further ado, here they are.

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You know what it's like. You have a niggling desire to launch a DDoS attack on a website but there are a couple of problems. You might not know how to do it, you might not want to run the risk of getting caught, or you might, you know, be too lazy to do it yourself. Never fear, Lizard Squad is on hand to help you out.

The hacker collective hit the headlines over the holidays after taking out the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. It then claimed to have had a (small) hand in the hack of Sony, but now the aim appears to be to monetize the whole venture. Lizard Squad has launched a service called LizardStresser that could be used to launch DDoS attacks.

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A list of this year’s most pirated movies has been revealed online, with most of 2014’s blockbuster releases featuring.

Director Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, claimed the title of most illegally downloaded film in 2014.

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DnGrep is a powerful text search and replace tool for Windows. It comes packed with all the functionality you'd expect from anything with the GREP name, but a well-designed interface ensures it's also very easy to use.

Getting started, for example, is as easy as specifying a path to search, a text string to look for, clicking "Search" and waiting for the results. It's much like any other search tool, really, although even here it’s delivering more than you might expect, as the program searches archives, PDFs and Word documents, as well as plain text files.

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2014 could be viewed as the year of set-top boxes. 2015 is likely to see even more action, as more of what we watch moves to online content, be it Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu Plus, the new CBS offering, or one of the lesser known competitors. When you take all of that into account, you'd assume it would have been a big year for Roku, and you'd be right.

Today the company ran down the numbers for 2014 and they were a bit staggering in terms of just how well the set-top box maker has performed.

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From now on, if you buy an app, music track or book from iTunes and change your mind, you can get your money back in the first two weeks, no questions asked -- if you are in the EU, anyway. Distance selling laws mean that a 14-day cooling off period is in place, so it is possible to get a refund on anything bought through iTunes in this timeframe.

It doesn’t matter if you don't like an app or album, something doesn't work as it should, or you just need your money back after an impulse purchase, the cash will be returned to you without question. One the face of it, this is great news for consumers, but the outlook is potential less rosy for app developers, authors and musicians.

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