Amazon's Fire phone does not have access to Google's Play Store. I want to get that out of the way first, as it may be a consumer's biggest concern about the phone. However, that said, it might not be a big deal. In fact, it is quite refreshing to experience Google's Linux-based operating system without Google. In my opinion it is dangerous for Android to become synonymous with Google's store.

With Android, you do have the ability to add 3rd party stores without rooting or hacking. Unfortunately, on most devices, only Google's Play Store comes installed. While I have seen some devices come with the Amazon Appstore preloaded too, make no mistake, the Play Store is always the main focus. The Fire phone bucks that trend and puts Amazon's store into the spotlight and that is not a bad thing. Actually, as I will explain later, you can add additional app stores and even install some of Google's apps.

A cyber security researcher has worked out ways to hack into passenger jets through the plane's Wi-Fi and inflight entertainment systems.

If confirmed, the claim could prompt a comprehensive restructure of aircraft security, and cast new scrutiny on the way aircraft electronic security has been managed in the past.

It's not commonplace, but every so often, businesses tell me that their mobile traffic is still too low for them to make it a priority over the traditional PC web. In truth, the low traffic is probably a direct correlation to the poor user experience their visitors have when accessing a non-optimized website via a mobile device. It's a vicious circle, but things have to change.

Not having a mobile web strategy for a consumer-facing company means you're ultimately moving against the market and no business should be swimming against such a powerful tide as that means being left behind. So what is a good mobile web strategy? Here are five key questions you need to answer to know if your website is mobile ready.

China has come down hard on US-based security company Symantec and its Russian counterpart Kaspersky, removing it from the list of approved antivirus providers in Chinese government computer systems.

The news comes amid a move from the Beijing government to limit Chinese dependency on foreign technology firms.

Microsoft continues to try and change opinions regarding its tiled OS, and today the company introduces a new video showcasing three reasons Windows 8.1 is better. It doesn’t say what it’s better than -- Windows 8, possibly, or Windows 7 -- but it does show how you can use Windows the way you want.

The minute long video is fast paced, colorful, and set to a pumping music track ('Sassy Gang' by Mike Sampey and Mark O'Grady). Frankly if you’ve never used the tiled OS before you probably won’t have a great idea of what is going on, but the flashy captions might help you make some sense of things. As for the three reasons? They are, in order, The Desktop ("it comes up automagically!"), The Apps (which you can pin to the desktop or the Start screen), and The Navigation (the ease with which you can switch between desktop and full screen apps).

Faster is almost always better. While computer enthusiasts are continually trying to get an edge and squeeze out more performance, they are often stopped by one thing -- a lack of money. Yes, in the computer world, you must pay to play and hardware is not always cheap. Often manufacturers will trot out something so remarkable (and expensive), that nerds start drooling and dreaming about owning it, but never actually achieve it.

Today, HGST shows off what it is calling the world's fastest SSD. Unfortunately, it is so fast that most people will not be able to afford it any time soon. With that said, it is only a tech-demo for now, but today's demos are tomorrow's consumer products. Are you ready for a cheetah-like SSD in your system?

6 Wunderkinder GmBH has unveiled Wunderlist 3.0, a major new release of its to-do list manager for Mac. Also available for iOS and Android, the biggest surprise with this new release is the lack of a Windows update from version 2.

For the platforms still supported, Wunderlist 3.0 comes with the promise of a revamped real-time sync engine, major redesign and the promise of over 60 improvements.

Softland has released FBackup 5.1 and Backup4all 5.1, minor new versions of its free and paid-for Windows backup products.

Both programs, which offer file-based backup and extended functionality via plug-ins, come with the promise of improved backup performance and more detailed statistics view, along with other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Baseball season is in full swing and marching steadily towards the playoffs, and football is now in pre-season, making it a great time to have easy access to sports information. Now those who have joined, or will soon join, the Amazon ecosystem with a Fire TV, are going to get just that, along with other services as well.

The retailer announces the addition of MLB.tv, WATCH Disney Channel, WATCH Disney Jr., Animal Planet Live, and the WWE Network. "Customers are loving the selection on their Fire TV, telling us how easy it is to watch their favorite movies and TV shows, listen to music, and play games in their living room. And because of that, developers continue to bring great apps to the platform, with app selection more than doubling since launch", says Steve Rabuchin, Vice President of the Amazon Appstore.

Windows Phone users who are enrolled in the Preview For Developers program can now install Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1. The major update, which was announced less than a week ago, is set to officially roll out to the masses in the comings months.

The most important user-facing changes that Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 introduces are Live Folders, a new feature which finally enables folders on the platform, and improvements to the stock apps, privacy and security. Of course, it also makes way for Cortana's first expansion.

If you have something to say, you can either say it to a person's face or resort to Leak, a new cloud service that lets you send anonymous emails that will likely never be traced back to you if some common sense is used. I prefer the open approach, but I sense that today quite a few people will embrace the latter.

The possibilities are endless. You can send any sort of message through the service, as long as you don't push things too far. Leak would rather you don't threaten or bully people, encourage damaging behaviors, send "graphic" images or porn, spam or share private information. Of course, based on the anonymous emails I am seeing (some sent "leaks" are publicly shared on the site), there are users who will do the obvious: abuse the service and act immaturely.

Gigaset (previously Gigaset Siemens) is launching a range of affordable Android tablets in the UK. This is the first foray into the tablet market for the home phone specialist which will initially be offering two devices -- an 8 inch model and a 10 inch one.

The smaller tablet, the QV830, is available to buy from Curry’s now, priced at £99.99, while the larger QV1030 will be available shortly. The price for that model has yet to be confirmed.

Backup specialist Intronis has announced that it’s integrating Bare Metal Restore into its ECHOplatform for small and medium businesses, which offers a flat-fee unlimited cloud and local storage pricing model.

The BMR functionality offers complete physical-to-physical (P2P) bare metal recovery and physical-to-virtual (P2V) BMR recovery options for greater flexibility and performance. Available at no extra charge to Intronis channel partners it allows recovery back to the original system or to a replacement machine.

When we tried it last year, TEncoder impressed us as a powerful video conversion tool with a stack of features: file, folder and folder tree import, video trimming, 800+ output profiles, excellent subtitling support, deinterlace and crop tools, full control over output codec settings, and a whole lot more.

It was an outstanding package, but the developer had only just got started, and major updates have taken the program into whole new areas.

The way that many enterprises use data places heavy demands on storage, both in terms of capacity and performance. Whilst SSDs can solve the performance issue they don’t always offer the capacity required.

California-based BiTMICRO is a pioneer of SSDs having been involved with them since 1999. With the launch of its new MAXio E-Series PCIe drives it's aiming to deliver capacity, performance and reliability for companies that need to support high volume application workloads.