Latest Technology News

Two months ago, I declared Android winner in the smartphone wars. The victory is now broader, in a total route of all competing operating systems and in process driving down iOS market share. That's right, after more than five years of near-constant growth, Apple's platform retreats before the Android Army.

Android's global smartphone OS share rose a stunning 19.9 points year over year in third quarter, according to Gartner. That's to 72.4 percent, up from 52.5 percent. Meanwhile iOS fell to 13.9 percent from 15 percent.

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Popular cloud storage service Dropbox has surpassed 100 million users in its five years of activity. To celebrate the event, the company will give 10GB of extra storage to users that post 160-character stories about how they use Dropbox. The company will pick a hundred of its favorite ones to be declared as winners.

Apart from the publicity generated by this promotion, there is another side of the coin. Users that post their stories provide an interesting insight on how cloud storage integrates with different types of lives and professions. Obviously Dropbox is used for sharing files, right? Right. So how are people using it differently?

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The Windows 8 UX Pack 6.5, which emulates large portions of the Windows 8 classic desktop, including non-Aero effects and the new Charms bar, in Windows 7, gains two minor changes in this release. First, the default system drive icon has now been set to the same as that in Windows 8, while the other makes the Charms Bar Immersive UI the default setting.

Fixes include resolving issues with logon screens not changing properly on OEM-bundled machines, plus permission problems with third-party applications. Version 6.5 also ensures the Start orb shows up correctly after a system restart.

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A Little more than a month after CyanogenMod 10 M2 was released, the team behind the popular custom Android distribution announced the third monthly build. Like before, the focus is on stability. And since Android 4.2 was pushed to AOSP yesterday, there is some information on the future CyanogenMod 10.1 as well.

The work on CM 10 is not over just yet, even though the latest release is labeled as "stable" or "LTS" (Long Term Support). Nightly builds are still hitting supported devices and bug reports are expected to keep coming as well. But with more than 10,000 installs since yesterday, the stable version is taking off quite well.

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Ashampoo has announced the availability of Burning Studio 12, its flagship disc burning suite. And top-of-the-new features list this time is probably the program’s improved ability to handle larger burning jobs.

Support for 100GB and 128GB BDXL discs means you’re able to write much more data to an individual disc, for instance, and if there’s still too much data then the new Disc Spanning feature will automatically spread the job over as many discs as is required.

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Berlin-based O&O Software GmbH has launched O&O MediaRecovery 8, a brand new version of its Windows recovery tool that specializes in restoring lost and deleted video, photos and music files.

Version 8, which is also available in 64-bit, comes optimized for Windows 8, plus extends the number of media formats supported and promises to search more thoroughly for missing files, improving the user’s chances of recovering them.

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If you’re working on some confidential document and need to leave your PC for a while, then locking the system is one way to maintain your privacy. Hold down the Windows key, press L, and only someone who knows your user account password will be able to restore access to the computer.

When you’re working on a shared computer which that need to regularly use, though, this may not seem like such a good idea. What you really need is a tool like WinLock, which can password-protect and hide any application window, yet leaves the rest of the computer freely available for everybody who needs it.

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Android Open Source Project Technical Lead Jean-Baptiste Queru announced that Google is pushing the Android 4.2 source code to AOSP, after the company released the second Jelly Bean-branded operating system today. To complement Android 4.2 the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation also uploaded the factory images for a number of Nexus devices.

The Android 4.2 source code will be available under the "android-4.2_r1" name, with the matching development branch named "jb-mr1-dev". Interestingly enough Queru says that the Nexus 10 is the best choice for AOSP work on the latest version of Android, which he considers the most open flagship device. But the Nexus 7 with 3G connectivity is not supported at the moment because of the GSM stack that is not yet licensed for the Android Open Source Project.

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Nokia's mapping and location-based services experience on Windows Phone is nothing short of excellent. Today, Nokia introduced the new brand for its geospatial, navigation, and location services, simply called "Here," which wraps up all of its services into a single cross-platform "location cloud."

This new brand will bring the Nokia mapping experience to Android some time in early 2013, including both a reference app and an SDK that allows developers to tie the new mapping service into their own applications. Nokia said that the augmented reality search technology first shown off in Nokia City Lens will be available in Here as a service called LiveSight.

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Today Google launches Android 4.2 alongside the new Nexus lineup. Galaxy Nexus as well as Nexus 7 owners that have the ability to run apps with elevated privileges are faced with a dilemma on whether to upgrade or not. Fear not, you can still root your Nexus using the latest version of Android.

The advantages of rooting are nothing to sneeze at. I run apps with elevated privileges more than a few times a day and I had to get the root capabilities up and running after upgrading to Android 4.2. The process is fairly straightforward and should not pose any difficulty even to less experienced users. I do have to mention that this guide can apply to the Nexus 4 and 10 as well, after developers release the compatible tools.

Getting started

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When Microsoft first announced that Internet Explorer 10 would be part of Windows 8 most users assumed that this would also mean a release of the browser for the version 7 operating system. The first version of Internet Explorer 10 was released publicly with Windows 8's Developer Preview back in 2011, and then updated whenever new versions of preview builds released. Microsoft at that time was tight lipped about the future of IE10 for Windows 7

October 2012 came and brought along Windows 8's launch. It was in the week prior to the release of Windows 8 that the company shed some light on the future of IE10 for Windows 7. A blog post indicated that Microsoft had plans to release a  preview version for Windows 7 in November 2012.

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Microsoft has announced the availability of Internet Explorer 10 as a Release Preview edition, in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, for Windows 7. (And yes, only Windows 7 users with SP1 installed need apply. Windows Vista and XP are left out of this one.) Changes are mostly under the hood, but the upgrade does deliver some major performance improvements which you may like to try.

In our first tests, the new Release Preview installed much like any other Windows update. It downloads a few files, and whirs for a while before demanding a reboot. Which takes a little longer than usual as various core files are replaced.

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You may know Citrix for collaboration and support software like GoToMeeting and GoToAssist, but the company is a lot more than just those two apps. It also is into virtualization services and has even got into the cloud business recently with services like XenServer, CloudGateway, CloudPortal and more. Back in 2011 Citrix purchased the domain Cloud.com. So far the company has quietly sat on the URL, but now it appears the company has something in mind.

The domain was created way back in 2000 and is currently registered through 2017. For now, Citrix isn't giving much information about what it has planned and the site's Twitter account has been silent since April 3rd. At that time, Citrix proclaimed: "We're hiring Ruby on Rails Ninjas for an awesome new product. Any candidates out there? Drop us a note". Citrix is tweeting through their @cloudstack address, indicating that Cloud.com may have something to do with that service.

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If anyone should be able to handle online orders, other than Amazon, Google should be it. This is a cloud company, after all. But today's Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 sales debuts are a total bust, with countless processing errors. Google pissed off the wrong people. Blog and social network reports from the other launch countries boded ill for sales starting at 9 am PT today in the United States. Matters are much worse.

Even before the designated launch time, the costlier $349 Nexus 4 went out of stock, with many failed and successful buyers reporting multiple errors during the sales process. The $299 model shifted to "Notify Me" from "In Stock" minutes later. By 9:15 am PT neither smartphone was available, with lots of eager geeks frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to buy a product in the shopping cart and purchase part-way processed. These gadget geeks are loud mouths and will rake Google for the fiasco launch.

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Today, Google launches Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Expectations run high for the latest member of the green robot family, even though it's less of a major upgrade and more of a here-and-there improvement from its predecessor. Can it live up to the excitement?

At a first glance, the second version of Jelly Bean is just that...the second version of Jelly Bean. It looks and feels very similar to its predecessor. I'm an avid Android modder, and a new operating system has to live up to pretty high expectations. So rather than write a boring review presenting some of the things that you already know, I will also assess these changes in comparison to custom distributions such as AOKP Jelly Bean Milestone 1, and CyanogenMod 10 nightly.

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