Latest Technology News

It's no secret that the PC market has slowly taken a turn for the worse. And, if we're to believe what research company IDC said in late-May, it's not going to get any better anytime soon, with shipments predicted to drop even further, by 7.8 percent this year. Furthermore, tablets are expected to out-ship PCs by 2015. Unquestionably, the future appears gloomy but, according to Gartner, the culprit is not the controversial Windows 8, as some pundits believe.

Gartner just released its latest report on the state of the PC market, which shows that Q2 2013 shipments -- which top 76 million units from all vendors, combined -- have declined by 10.9 percent compared to the same period, last year (when shipments exceeded the 85.32 million mark). "The sharp decline in the second quarter of 2013 was partly due to the shift in usage patterns away from notebooks to tablets, and partly because the PC market was exposed to inventory reductions in the channel due to the start of the transition to new Haswell-based products", says Gartner principal research analyst Isabelle Durand.

When Microsoft revealed the Xbox One two months ago it pushed the next generation console’s entertainment features, playing down the device’s gaming prowess. The message was clear. The Xbox One is an entertainment hub that can do games, not a games console in the traditional sense.

Microsoft is pursuing an audience outside its (once) loyal gaming community, and having targeted non gamers with talk of TV shows and music, the obvious next step is to pitch the Xbox One as a full blown business system, right? Wait, what?

Most people can think back to a time when we didn’t have mobile phones, so imaging a world without them isn’t too much of a stretch.

But Qualcomm has created an amusing video seemingly set in an alternate reality where all the products and services we use today -- ranging from email, Facebook and Twitter, to video and games -- still exist, but smartphones and tablets don’t.

US mobile operator T-Mobile just announced that the Nokia Lumia 925 will officially join its Windows Phone 8 portfolio starting July 17. The handset goes for $49.99 down coupled with $20 monthly payments over the course of two years.

US is the third major market where the Lumia 925 will be available, following its introduction in Germany and UK. The Nokia-branded Windows Phone will run on T-Mobile 4G LTE network and is among the least expensive high-end devices in the mobile operator's portfolio.

Norwegian browser developer Opera has teamed up with video sharing site Dailymotion to create a new service that can transform any Dailymotion video channel into a Smart TV application in less than a minute.

Opera TV Snap lets you convert an existing online video channel into a ready-to-run HTML5 app for inclusion in the Opera TV Store, a Smart TV app storefront supported by major television and set-top-box manufacturers.

In case you missed it, the Rambling Wrecks of Georgia Tech will next year begin offering an online masters degree in computer science for a total price of just under $7,000 -- about 80 percent less than the current in-state tuition for an equivalent campus-based program. The degree program, offered in cooperation with AT&T and courseware company Udacity, will cost the same no matter where the students live, though two thirds are expected to live and work outside the USA. Time to complete the degree will vary but Georgia Tech thinks most students will require about three years to finish. The program is inspired, we’re told, by the current hiring crisis for computer science grads -- a crisis that anyone who reads this column knows does not exist.

Programmers in Bangalore will soon boast Georgia Tech degrees without even having a passport.

Windows 8.1 has been designed to fix some of the apparent shortcomings of its predecessor, but unless you're using the Preview version you'll have to wait until August to get your hands on it. In the meantime the software giant has released a new peripheral which aims to provide a more immediate fix to the problem of using Windows 8 with a mouse.

The concept of the Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Mouse is simple -- you rub your thumb up and down on a touch sensitive, blue-colored button located on the left side of the mouse (sorry lefties!) to navigate apps. Clicking that blue button brings up the Start screen. This should make navigating Windows 8 much easier, and sounds great, but how does it perform in actual use? I purchased the mouse to find out.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it will extend the Windows Phone 8 support lifecycle to three years, effectively doubling the previous 18 month time-frame, which was revealed in mid-March.

"Beginning with Windows Phone 8 we'll make updates, including security updates, available for 36 months", says Microsoft's Tony Mestres. "These updates will be incremental, with each update built on the update that preceded it". So far so good. But now here comes the kicker -- your device may or may not receive the future software upgrades.

Google has released Google Chrome 28 for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest version of its open-source, cross-platform web browser sees Google implement the latest revision of its web rendering engine -- Blink -- and also give apps and extensions a better platform for interacting with users outside of the main browser window.

As part of the switch to a "richer" notification system, Chrome introduces a new Notification Center, which works independently of the browser via the taskbar or menubar. Already present in Chrome OS, the center currently only appears on Windows builds with this stable release, but will be extended to Mac and Linux shortly.

In the real world, when you have a birthday people give you gifts. But when these celebrations happen for software and services, the roles are frequently reversed. That is the case today as Apple celebrates the fifth birthday of its iTunes App Store by giving gifts to its customers.

Apple launched its iOS store on July 10, 2008 and the number of apps has grown exponentially since then -- from 500 apps at launch to 900,000-plus available today.

One man's virus is often another's legitimate program or cookie, so whatever antivirus software you have installed it's always useful to be able to get a second opinion from time to time. There are already a number of online scans you can use for this and BullGuard is the latest to join the party with today's launch of its own free scanner.

Unlike some of the alternative offerings, BullGuard works by adding a plug-in to your browser. This lets you run the scan at any time with just a single click on a toolbar button so you don't have to remember the website address or where you filed the bookmark. It supports all of the popular browsers too. The scan, which took just a couple of minutes using the Chrome plug-in on my -- not quite as fast as it used to be -- Windows 7 laptop, looks for viruses and checks that your current security is up to date.

In an effort to improve the Facebook experience on the tiled smartphone operating system, Microsoft just released a new update for its homebrew beta app which now finally allows Windows Phone 8 users to unfriend and unlike added folks and pages, respectively.

The latest Facebook Beta version (5.0.2.1) also fixes an issue which prevented the notification counts from updating and comes with the common "stability and performance" enhancements. The latest features will likely make their way to the stable Facebook app in a future update, after the obligatory testing is conducted.

Antivirus company Doctor Web has released its review of virus activity for June. Trojans remain the main threat but the big news is a new version of the Linux.Sshdkit virus designed to steal passwords from Linux servers. It has undergone a number of changes to make it harder for antivirus analysts to intercept stolen passwords.

This follows the trend that we reported last month of attackers becoming more businesslike in their attacks. Although the number of infected Linux servers is small as yet it's a worrying development.

US mobile operator AT&T just announced that BB 10.1 will finally be available for its branded BlackBerry Z10 handsets, nearly two months after the Canadian maker unveiled the latest operating system iteration.

Folks who have purchased the aforementioned variant of the smartphone can install the latest software version by heading to BlackBerry's "Software Download for AT&T" page and following the provided instructions. At the time of writing this article, however, the required BB 10.1 file is not yet available (AT&T says that it should be listed "starting today" -- Tuesday).

Microsoft just released a new Windows tablet video ad, which pits Dell's XPS 10 against Apple's popular iPad. This time around the action takes place at a baseball field, with the software giant emphasizing the multitasking benefits available to the users of its tiled operating system.

The video ad shows two agents trying to sign a new baseball player, with one using the iPad and the other the XPS 10 to video chat with the boss and obtain relevant stats. Needless to say, the Apple slate user struggles to multitask, having to switch between apps to communicate and find the needed information, while his rival takes advantage of Windows RT's built-in snap feature to run two pieces of software at the same time.