Latest Technology News

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Following the news that Windows Phone 8 Update 3 is available to developers, I updated my Nokia Lumia 920 to the latest version through my App Studio account. My colleague Alan Buckingham went through the changes this release introduces in one of his past stories. As you may known, the latest goodies will make their way to all compatible handsets once the upgrade rolls out to the public over the next couple of months.

UK catalog store retailer Argos will start selling its own £99.99 Android tablet on Wednesday. The Argos MyTablet undercuts Tesco's £119 Hudl, but the saving is at the cost of a lower spec. MyTablet has only 8GB of storage to the Hudl's 16GB, shorter battery life and a lower resolution screen. It also comes only in silver or pink rather than the Hudl's choice of four colors.

Argos says its tablet is targeted at the teenage and pre-teen market and it ships with parental controls pre-enabled. The device runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and comes with 19 pre-installed apps including BBC iPlayer, Angry Birds and social networking tools.

One of the biggest problems I have with all those fancy iPad rollouts in corporate America is that they are merely patching a larger problem instead of solving it. Let's face it, nearly 60 percent of tablet buyers currently are not replacing their primary mobile devices -- they're merely supplementing them. Less than 9 percent truly see themselves replacing their laptops with tablets. If tablets are the future of mobile computing, there is a serious problem with their perception by non-consumption driven buyers.

When one of my customers approached us about helping them migrate an aging, near-crippled fleet of netbooks into modern tablets, I knew there had to be a better way than the "iPad standard". We initially toyed with the idea of getting tablets to use in conjunction with GoToMyPC or LogMeIn, but the recurring costs on such an approach started to balloon. Plus, a workforce that lives and dies by the full Microsoft Office suite would never adjust to a touch-only future.

OS X Mavericks is coming -- we’re still not exactly sure when, but probably October 22 -- and if you want to create a backup install USB stick for when things go wrong, you’ll want to take a look at Lion DiskMaker 3.0 beta 2.

Lion DiskMaker is designed to create bootable rescue disks from your OS X installation files (from 10.7 Lion onwards). Version 3.0 beta 2 adds support for the forthcoming OS X Mavericks release.

If you’ve identified a malicious process running on your PC then you’ll probably want to close it down, and in theory this seems easy enough (right-click in Task Manager, select End Task). Malware can apply several tricks to escape, though, and one of the easiest is to assign its process the "critical" flag, normally reserved for key Windows processes. Try to close a critical process, and your PC will immediately crash.

Windows provides no standard way to get around this, probably because tinkering with the critical flag can be dangerous. But if you’re an experienced PC user and willing to take the risk, then the open source ProcessCritical should be able to help.

While Microsoft continues its onslaught to control your living room, the company has been slowly revealing features and aspects of the Xbox One. Social media and social sharing have become an expected feature for the console -- not an optional one. Today, Microsoft announces a new friends app for its upcoming gaming machine that brings people together socially.

Microsoft gaming-guru Major Nelson says, "designed around you and your friends, Xbox One will have plenty of room for all your favorite people in the brand new Friends system on Xbox One. Your Xbox 360 friends will automatically be added to your Friends list. With Xbox One you can have 1,000 friends, connect with people instantly by following them and have infinite followers yourself. You can also see all of your Xbox One and Xbox 360 friends and their activity in your Activity Feed".

Popular desktop customization tool Rainmeter has today been updated to version 3.0.

The big story comes in the new build’s use of the Direct2D rendering engine when available, which means anyone using Rainmeter on Windows 8 (or a fully updated Windows 7 system) should see much improved text quality.

It’s nearly here: dotPDN LLC has released the first alpha of Paint.NET 4.0, a major update and rewrite of its popular freeware image-editing tool for Windows. Featuring a rebuilt rendering engine, improvements to various tools and a tweaked user interface, the new release has finally reached the stage where daring members of the public can test it for the first time.

The new build does come with some restrictions -- as telegraphed at the beginning of its development, Paint.NET 4.0 will only run on Windows 7 or later.

While there are some Windows Phone 8 customers out there who have only just received the GDR 2 update for their handsets, Microsoft is looking towards the future already, preparing the next iteration of its mobile operating system.

Today the company takes the first step towards pushing it out, announcing features and developer availability.

Fans of smartphones with larger displays have a new reason to celebrate as HTC takes the wraps off the gigantically-screened HTC One max. The new 5.9-inch device joins the HTC One and HTC One Mini, creating quite a family of choice.

The One max is without a doubt the daddy of the group, and in addition to the larger screen it also features HTC Sense 5.5. Just like the One, the One max has an all-metal (well, mostly) body.

It’s nearly a year since Microsoft released the divisive Windows 8, and this week sees the launch of Windows 8.1 -- an update to the tiled operating system that aims to fix many of the perceived wrongs of the first version, while introducing some very welcome new features.

If you’re a Windows 8 or RT user you’ll be able to download the update for free starting at 4AM PDT (that’s 12pm in the UK) on 17 October. You’ll be able to get it directly through the Windows Store.

It looks as though Facebook is trying to help reduce the costs of using the social network on the move with its acquisition of Onavo. Onavo specializes in mobile data compression and data usage tracking, with a goal of helping people use mobile data more efficiently. The company has an office in Tel-Aviv, and this is to be turned into Facebook's Israeli office.

The acquisition comes a couple of months after Mark Zuckerberg launched Internet.org with a view to making the internet available to a larger number of people around the world. Onavo joining forces with Facebook is not unrelated, and the company says it is "eager to take the next step and make an even bigger impact by supporting Facebook's mission to connect the world".

If Windows Notepad is too underpowered for your plain text editing needs, then the open source FXiTe could be an interesting alternative. It’s targeted at developers, but don’t let that put you off: there’s plenty here for regular users, too.

This starts with its extreme ease of use. The program is compact (a 1.29MB download), and portable, you can just unzip and go. The interface looks a little odd -- the toolbar has colored buttons, rather than icons -- but there’s nothing too complicated, and you’ll be creating and editing plain text files without any problems at all.

"Windows XP will essentially have a 'zero day' vulnerability forever". These spot-on select words come from Tim Rains, who penned a stellar TechNet blog post back in August on the impending XP doomsday. That entry, aptly titled "The Risk of Running Windows XP After Support Ends April 2014" goes into a deep discussion about the underpinning reasons as to why it's so critical that organizations start moving their fleets off the now 12 year old OS.

I've been writing extensively about the end of XP for some time now myself, advocating customers begin their planning well ahead of the support sunset date.

Online storage services are a great way to make your most important files available everywhere, but they can be expensive. Those monthly fees soon mount up, particularly if you need a high capacity account.

If you’re looking for low prices, though, hubiC will appeal right away. You get 25GB for free; 100GB is around $18 a year, 500GB is about $82, and 1TB is an annual $136 (all prices plus tax). You can even expand this to 100TB, if you really must. Not bad at all.