On Tuesday, two and a half months after the first beta was released, Opera announced that its new WebKit-based browser for Android is now available as a "final version". This is just one step towards a Presto-free Opera as, in mid-February, the Norwegian company revealed that it will slowly adopt the WebKit rendering engine across all of its browsers.

Opera for Android, among other new features, emphasizes content discovery by allowing its users to find (and read) various articles straight from the browser's homescreen. Folks simply have to select their areas of interest, such as arts or technology, and Opera displays a number of stories from "relevant global and regional sources". This is similar to what Flipboard and other apps deliver.

IntelliBreeze Software has released Gmail Notifier Pro 5.0, a major update of its Windows tool for monitoring various online accounts via the Taskbar Notification area. The tool, which allows personal users to monitor up to two supported accounts without registration, offers more than simple Google Mail notifications, and version 5.0 extends this support further by adding Microsoft Exchange and SkyDrive notifications to its feature list.

Version 5.0 also adds a built-in local RSS feed server, allowing users to pipe notifications from the program into RSS readers on other platforms, including smartphones as well as computers.

Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. This fairly innocuous word has become one that is bandied around with abandon, often with the misplaced notion that it adds an element of 'cool' that was not previously present. But is working in the cloud all it's cracked up to be? Is it necessary? Should you care about it?

You don't have to think back all that far to remember a time when simply being online seemed like a fairly alien concept -- never mind actually working online. When the concept of Active Desktop was added to Windows 9x the notion of staying online throughout the day just to see the desktop update with the latest weather forecast, news, stock prices or other data was unimaginable.

Flickr is the service Yahoo forgot about between its latest Mail and homepage redesigns. It's boring, outdated, bland, ugly and uninviting and these are just a couple of the words that cross my mind right now. Thankfully, Flickr wants to change all that with the latest revamped version, announced late-yesterday. You know, maybe the cool kids will want to hang out again.

The biggest change comes from the new website, which drops the old design. It's now fresh, simple and modern and gives the cloud service character. Big photos in the stream, menu bar on top and the usual suspects on the right -- Explore, Flickr Blog and a list of people you may (want to) know -- dominate the uncluttered experience. Friends get a similarly-styled profile page which emphasizes shared content.

The big day is almost here. Microsoft reveals the new Xbox at an event held on its Redmond, Wash.-based campus tomorrow, and speculation runs rampant around the web. We do not even know the name of this next-generation console, let alone what capabilities the device will come with.

However, if you can not wait for the news stories to break then there is good news if you should happen to be a Windows Phone 8 user. The software giant announces a special app for its smartphone operating system that enables users to watch the event live right from wherever they happen to be -- which will be the workplace for many. Sorry employers.

They may be just about the most primitive form of computer animation there is, but animated GIFs can still be fun, and genuinely useful, so it’s a shame they’re not more widely supported on the PC. Most programs will just display the opening frame, at best, leaving you to guess at everything else.

There are ways around this, to some extent. Right-click a GIF in Explorer, for instance, select Open With > Internet Explorer, and a browser window will open and play the animation. This is a long way from being convenient, though, so if you’d like easier playback -- and a lot more besides -- then you’re sure to prefer 7GIF.

For even the most security minded individuals and organizations, malware continues to be a serious problem. It is all well and good knowing that your system has become infected and ensuring that you have the tools to perform a clean-up operation, but the key to avoiding future problems is determining the source of infections.

This is what Sourcefire aims to achieve with its new Network File Trajectory and Device Trajectory techniques. The company points out that in modern work environments the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model is becoming increasingly common. It is one thing to protect your own machines, but quite another to secure any device that may connect to a network.

When I was young, and I dare not discuss when that was, I owned a Fiat X1/9.  The relationship with that car ended badly, but I shall always remember it as the car I was driving when I met my wife. Fast-forward a few (okay, more than a few) years and the car company is regaining popularity, but no longer as the little sports car I referred to as the "poor man's Ferrari". Today the company announces a new partnership with Microsoft to bring Windows EmbeddedAutootive to its vehicles.

Despite the polarized reactions to Windows 8, Microsoft continues to see success with the Embedded version of the operating system, with Home Depot announcing adoption of Embedded 8, and now the Italian car maker.

It may not be 'America's pastime', but Microsoft still proudly announces that it is making a deal with Major League Soccer to bring the sport to its Windows 8 customers.  The sport known as soccer in the US, but football to most of the rest of the world, joins the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey Leagues on Microsoft's latest operating system.

The announcement came at yesterday's game between the Los Angeles Galaxy and New York Red Bulls held at Red Bull Arena. The MLS Match Day app is not new, only "improved". This new version features exclusive content and this season’s schedule, standings, highlights, play-by-play, roster lineups, game stats, goals, cards and substitutions.

Four months after Sony unveiled the Xperia Tablet Z, the Japanese maker announced that the fondleslab is now finally available to purchase worldwide through online and brick and mortar stores. Despite the fact that the Xperia Tablet Z hits the shelves later than initially planned -- March 1 -- the company says that this hasn't affected consumer demand.

"Xperia Tablet Z has received an incredibly positive response since it was announced and this is demonstrated by the strong pre-orders the product has received", says Sony's Tomokazu Tajima. The tablet touts some attractive specifications, namely the IPX5/7 and IP5X ratings for waterproofing and dustproofing, respectively, the low weight of only 495 grams and the 6.9 mm thickness.

Designing a great image editor has always been a tricky balancing act. It’s important that the program has real power, plenty of useful functionality, and delivers more than you’d expect in every area. But at the same time, it should ideally be lightweight, easy to use, the kind of tool you can be using productively in just a few minutes.

Most image editors fall short in at least one area, of course, but there are occasional exceptions. And Hornil StylePix is a great example. This lightweight and portable program concentrates on the core editing essentials -- transforms, color and image corrections, painting, text tools and more -- so isn’t weighed down with functions you’ll never need. But the features you do get are very well implemented, with a host of powerful options helping to deliver far more control than you might expect from a free tool.

NetShelter, a digital advertising network that focuses on tech publications, has been purchased by Ziff Davis for an undisclosed sum.

The name and activities of the company may not be familiar to you, but it’s responsible for delivering nearly 16 billion ad impressions per year on 150 consumer and business tech sites, including BetaNews, SlashGear, TechSpot, CrackBerry, Android Central, MacRumors and Neowin.

As has been widely rumored over the last few days, Yahoo has paid $1.1 billion for blogging platform Tumblr. In recent times this is the most paid for an Internet acquisition since Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion last year.

Founded by David Karp in 2007 from a bedroom of his mother's New York apartment, the attraction of Tumblr has always been its clean interface and ease of use, which allows people to be up and blogging within minutes. The service has around 217 million users worldwide and is the 24th most popular site in the US according to research company Quantcast.  The company employs 175 people and claims to have more than 100 million blogs.

On Monday, Finnish company Jolla announced its first smartphone running Sailfish OS, called Jolla. The handset, which features mid-range hardware specifications, is available to pre-order for EUR399 and will ship by the end of the year.

So what do you get for EUR399? The company refrains from providing detailed hardware specifications, but says that the Jolla packs a 4.5-inch display and is powered by a dual-core processor. The handset comes with 16 GB of internal storage alongside a microSD card slot, an 8 MP back-facing camera with autofocus, a removable battery and 4G cellular connectivity (only in supported markets). The Sailfish OS is "Android app compliant".

Popular cross-platform, open-source video transcoder HandBrake 0.9.9 has been released, and despite the version number increment is actually a major update. HandBrake allows users to convert video from a wide variety of formats -- including DVD and Blu-ray -- into MP4 or MKV files with support for .H264 and FFmpeg codecs.

Highlights in the latest release include support for the .H264 codec’s preset, tune and profile options, Blu-ray (PGS) subtitle support, additional video framerates and filter modes, improved audio remix and an updated user interface.