Latest Technology News

Today, Apple and China Mobile finally announce a distribution partnership that had been heavily rumored for months. While the deal to sell iPhones through China Mobile isn't surprising, the wild variation in analyst estimates is. Let's take a look at a few wrinkles that may be playing havoc with these estimates.

The easiest numbers to find on Chinese carriers are usually subscriber details. The chart above shows the 2G/3G subscriber mix on the three major Chinese carriers. Therefore, the details that analysts typically use to base sales estimates are -- subscriber base, 3G subscriber base and number of unlocked iPhones (2G) on the network. For China Mobile, these figures are 759 million, 176 million and 45 million respectively. Bernstein Research's survey also shows that some China Mobile subscribers use smaller carriers for data service, so these subscribers may have been excluded from these estimates. Analysts are also aware that China Mobile does not offer mobile number portability -- given the status granted by specific blocks of numbers, some analysts may have assumed a major sales impact.

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Good commercials can do several things. They can entertain you, endear you to the brand, and make you covet the product they are trying to sell. The new Samsung Galaxy Gear video does none of those things.

My colleague Alan Buckingham watched the video and declared Samsung Galaxy Gear wants to improve your social life. My impression is slightly different. The guy wearing the watch is a major creep with stalker tendencies. He gets the girl at the end of the video, sure, but to be honest, I fear for her safety. Here’s how the sinister events unfold.

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Right off the bat, I should mention that this pertains to our friends up in the Great White North. With that out of the way, online retailer Amazon has come up with yet one more way to push sales over the holiday season, a run it began before Black Friday had even dawned, and when other merchants were only planning Cyber Monday deals.

Much like the other deals, the company isn't waiting for the official day, which arrives December 26th. Instead, Amazon kicks off a week of deals, and it begins today.

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Bing is a decent search engine, and the daily images that adorn its homepage are always worth a look. Late last week the Bing team announced the ten most popular homepage images for 2013, which includes an aerial view of Gardens by the Bay and the Super Trees in Singapore City, a night shot of Mount Shasta in California, a mangrove seen from underwater in the Seychelles, and Lulworth Cove along the Jurassic Coast, in England. As well as showing off the pictures, the Bing team provides a link so you can download them for use as desktop wallpaper.

If you’d prefer to have the images cycling in a screensaver, the Bing team has now made that possible too, in the form of a new 13MB "Wallpaper & Screensaver" Pack.

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One of the problems with big data is its sheer size. This leads to problems when it comes to moving files around and can lead to a loss of competitiveness if companies aren't able to process files in a timely manner. The issue can be magnified if it involves transferring files to and from cloud platforms.

IBM has recognized this problem and in response has swallowed up California-based Aspera, a specialist in high speed transfer techniques. The company's patented "fasp" technology can reduce the transmission times for large files or data sets by up to 99.9 percent. It overcomes bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow the transfer of extremely large files, such as high-definition video or scientific research data, over long distances.

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It’s been a long time coming, but finally Apple announces it has entered into a multi-year agreement to bring the iPhone to China Mobile, the world's largest mobile network.

As part of the agreement, the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available from China Mobile's extensive network of retail stores, as well as Apple’s own retail locations across mainland China, beginning on Friday, January 17, 2014. Pre-registration to get a handset will begin 25 December.

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The other day I chronicled the strange journey of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that is notorious for finding less-than-legal software, movies, TV shows, music…you name it. Sure, it’s wrong to steal content, no matter how you justify it -- people deserve to be paid for their work. After all, I don’t work for free, I fully expect to be compensated for my efforts. I have a wife and kids to provide for. I would guess you also do not labor for free.

However, that piece about the many domains the service has recently occupied, combined with something my colleague Mark Wilson brought up about the ridiculous porn filtering in the UK, got me thinking.

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There was a time when "activist investor" Carl Icahn actually owned and ran businesses, one of which was TransWorld Airlines (TWA), eventually sold to American Airlines. In an attempt to cut costs, TWA under Icahn outsourced reservation service to a call center built in a prison with prisoners on the phone. When you called to book travel you were giving your credit card number to a felon and telling him when you’d be away from home. Smart move, Carl, and very akin to what may have caused the post-Thanksgiving theft of 40 million credit card numbers from Target, the U.S. discount retailer.

Target used to do its IT all in the USA, then to save costs they moved IT to a subsidiary in India. Care to guess where the Target data breach came from? I’m guessing India. I’m also guessing that there will never be any arrests in the case.

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Windows Sysinternals has unveiled Disk2vhd 2.0, a tool for converting physical Windows systems to virtual formats.

The major plus in this release is support for VHDX, a significant update to the VHD format which offers much-improved performance, increased reliability, and more. Just leave the "Use Vhdx" box checked and the program will create a VHDX file for you.

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Just last month Google and Microsoft came together in an unlikely pairing. This was not a software venture, but a bid to help tackle the problem of child porn online. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said on numerous occasions that ISPs needed to do more to not only block access to torrent sites -- despite the fact they can be used for perfectly legal downloads -- but also to make it more difficult for children to access pornography. Four major ISPs either already have porn filters in place, or have plans to roll them out.

TalkTalk's filters have been in place for a few years now, Sky's were recently launched and Virgin is piloting a scheme due for full scale roll out at some point in 2014. In the past few days, BT switched on its filters, falling in line with government requests for access to legal porn to be made opt-in -- i.e. blocked by default. So is this having the desired effect? Well, it's very early days, but there are a few observations to be made already.

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I have previously gone on record as being one of those people -- the crowd that wants a smartwatch. My reasoning, however, differs greatly from what Samsung is pushing in its latest Galaxy Gear ad. As a runner, I am an avid wearer of the little wrist accessory. My kind are nothing, if not anal about time, distance and pace; and a watch that can handle an app like MapMyRun while utilizing GPS is a glorious prospect.

Samsung, on the other hand, has gone in a different direction to push its technology. The hardware maker instead goes after the singles crowd, spending two and a half minutes telling guys why this watch will help their social lives, and also, quite possibly, letting women know why they should worry about it.

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This is the final roundup before Christmas and the penultimate one of 2014. Things are very much starting to wind down for the year, and the world of tech is starting to go into something of a hibernation mode. But that's not to say that there hasn't been a fair select of big stories over the past seven days. If you're dreading the prospect of traveling across the country to meet up with family, Microsoft may have a solution -- just turn to Skype instead!

Valve's highly anticipated Steam OS was made available to the public as a beta, so gamers can create their own rigs. Gamers with a lots of spare cash floating around might prefer to opt for a solid gold Xbox One -- but the price tag is an eye-watering £6000 (around $9,800)! For those to whom quality matters, Amazon's announcement that all new shows in 4K Ultra HD will come as great news. For entertainment at slightly lower resolution, Redbox Instant made an appearance on the Kindle Fire HDX -- a tablet that I was quite enamored with. Roku 3 users can also celebrate the arrival of YouTube for their video entertainment.

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Regardless of your beliefs, it's rather difficult to resist a good Christmas movie. There is something soothing about gathering the family around the TV to watch that annual classic, be it Miracle on 34th Street or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Neither is new, but neither ever seems to get old.

Elf is also no longer particularly new, having been released back in 2003 when we all ran Windows XP, and Google hadn't yet thought about Android or the Play market.

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Christmas is nearly here, and Santa is getting ready for his yearly round of toy deliveries. Of course the days of making wooden soldiers and spinning tops are long gone -- kids today want more hi-tech gear, and Saint Nicholas has had to move with the times.

He no longer has to rely entirely on hand delivering everything in a reindeer powered sleigh either, thanks to advances in parcel delivery like the Hyperloop inspired YuleTube or the Amazon Drone-style Gift-o-Copters, and optical camouflage technology ensures Santa will remain virtually invisible while making deliveries (and enjoying furtive kisses with mommy underneath the mistletoe).

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Sixtieth in a series. The US Windows Store on Windows 8.1 passed the 100,000 apps mark this week.

Users of Windows 8.1 who access the store have now 100,962 apps at their disposal that they can download and install on their system. This is an increase of 2,383 apps over last week, and while the overall growth slowed down a bit, it still means that it stayed well above the 2,000 apps per week mark.

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