Latest Technology News

Nokia's fortunes and the future of Windows Phone tie to one device: Lumia 920 running Windows Phone 8. The Finnish handset maker revealed the smartphone yesterday in a joint announcement with Microsoft. This is the Windows phone you waited for, or did you? Perhaps you already gave up and bought Android or iPhone. What I want to know on this sunny September day: Will you buy Lumia 920? If so, when -- and why? If not, why not?

Nokia and Microsoft need Lumia 920 and sibling 820 to succeed. Once the global phone leader, Nokia is now second to Samsung. During Q2, Nokia's global sales share fell to 19.9 percent from 22.8 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner. Meanwhile Microsoft's mobile platform share rose to 2.7 percent from 1.6 percent. But that's behind Samsung's Bada. Combined, Android and iOS have 82.9 percent share, forming a near impenetrable barrier of the likes Microsoft has never seen. Like Windows on PCs, Android and iOS command a broad ecosystem of applications, peripherals, developers, retailers and other services or providers.

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Just hours ahead of Amazon's debut of a new Kindle tablet on Thursday, Kobo, the e-book company that can be thought of as "Canada's Kindle" debuted a new color Android tablet called the Kobo Arc.

Kobo Arc is the company's second Android tablet, following up on the Kobo Vox which debuted around this time last year.

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Consumer and enterprise cloud storage company Pogoplug on Thursday announced it has integrated Amazon Glacier long-term archival storage into the Pogoplug service. In its usual fashion, Pogoplug mirrors content from your local drives in the cloud and makes them accessible through a Web interface and mobile apps. Now, with Glacier integration, PogoPlug can also back content up to cold storage at the same time.

This announcement comes just two weeks after Amazon Web Services announced Glacier, making Pogoplug the first consumer cloud service to integrate with Amazon's new offering.

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I expect better from Google than this. Its Motorola Mobility subsidiary today announced three seemingly sizzling new Droids coming to Verizon, but they're not running the current operating system but instead will be "upgradeable to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean by end of 2012". We've heard promises like this before on Verizon "with Google" devices. Just ask Galaxy Nexus or XOOM 4G LTE owners about the broken upgrade promises and the long wait for, well, nothing.

Google officially released Jelly Bean in mid-July, when Galaxy Nexus HSPA+ models automatically upgraded, but CDMA models available from Sprint and Verizon did not. Hell, users still clamored to get from Android 4.0.2 to 4.0.4 on Verizon models and couldn't. C`mon, Google, you own Motorola now and should be able to do better. If Verizon is the problem, fix it! Droid users deserve some respect, and you owe them and Verizon, too. Because if not for Droid, the green robot might not be nearly as popular today. Hat tip goes to Apple, too, for helping Android along (next paragraph explains why).

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Backup software comes in many different varieties -- file-based, disk imaging, synchronization tools, continuous data protection, and more -- which can make it tricky to identify precisely which package you need.

But if that sounds too much like hard work, then you could simply buy a copy of Acronis True Image 2013, which can handle just about anything you might want to do.

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Motorola Mobility on Wednesday afternoon unveiled three new devices in its Droid Razr family of Android smartphones: the Droid Razr HD, Droid Razr Maxx HD, and Droid Razr M. With these new devices, Motorola continues the very straightforward approach to Android devices began early this year: offer physically skinnier devices with better battery life.

The Droid Razr HD has a 4.7" Super AMOLED display, a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM, Verizon 4G LTE/3G WCDMA connectivity, an 8 megapixel camera and 1.3 megapixel forward-facing chat cam, 12GB of onboard storage and a 2530 mAh battery.

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For the three months ending in July, Android and iOS combined US smartphone subscriber share reached 85.6 percent, according to comScore. That's 3.4 percentage points higher than April. Meanwhile, Research in Motion and Microsoft mobile platforms receded to 9.5 percent and 3.6 percent share from 11.6 percent and 4 percent, respectively. While comScore combines defunct Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, we henceforth refer to both using the latter name.

The smartphone market clearly consolidates around Android and iOS, leaving even less share for Windows Phone or BlackBerry. Android and iOS will soon face the new batch of Windows Phone 8 handsets, including the Nokia Lumia 920 announced today. However, as it stands now, Microsoft's mobile operating system has plenty of ground to cover to even count as a worthy adversary to the two major platforms.

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Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia on Wednesday morning announced the latest smartphone in the Lumia family, the Nokia Lumia 920, which is the company's flagship Windows Phone 8 device. The device bears a strong physical resemblance to the previous Lumia flagship devices, but this time around, Nokia has innovated in design rather than simply overload with more powerful specs, and it showed off its innovations today by unveiling some exclusive new apps and capabilities.

The Lumia 920 has a 4.5" (1280 x 768) WXGA display, a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor with 1GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage and an 8.7 Megapixel rear-facing camera/1.2 Megapixel forward facing camera combo, the internal specs are good, but not insane top-of-the-market specs like those provided by Android smartphone makers.

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Second in a series. Well it took me more than the one day I predicted to finish this column, which purports to explain that dull feeling so many of us have in our hearts these days when we consider the US economy. Our entrepreneurial zeal is to some extent zapped. For a decade it seemed we needed to jump from bubble to bubble in order just to drive economic growth -- growth that ultimately didn’t last. What happened? Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) went away, that’s what happened.

I wrote several columns on job creation over the last year, columns that explained in great detail how new businesses, young businesses, and small businesses create jobs and big businesses destroy them. Big business grows by economies of scale, economies of scale are gained by increasing efficiency, and increased efficiency in big business always -- always -- means creating more economic output with fewer people.

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Symantec has released brand new versions of its Norton security packages for Windows, Norton Anti-Virus 2013, Norton Internet Security 2013 and Norton 360 2013. It’s the first time all three packages have been updated simultaneously, while the branding has also been amended to remove all references to a date, simply naming each Norton Anti-Virus, Norton Internet Security and Norton 360, respectively.

The 2013 versions come with what Symantec describes as “five layers of patented protection”, which include stronger social networking and anti-scam protection. There’s also full, certified support for Windows 8 and the promise of better performance on multi-core CPUs.

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Just how involved would you like to be with the process of cleaning up and maintaining your computer? If you’re reading this, there’s a fairly high chance that you like to get pretty hands on, but there will still be occasions when time is short and you need a quick-and-easily solution to get the job done quickly. Puran Utilities is a free utility suite that has both bases covered with an impressive selection of more than 20 tools that you can use individual or in combination with each other.

These tools cover everything from check your hard drives and registry for problems, removing unnecessary software, rendering deleted files unrecoverable and much more.  Many of the optoins available may sound like tools that are already built into Windows, but this is not the case for all of them. Windows has lacked a file wiping tool for years, and a registry cleaner is similarly noticeable by its absence, but even if you view Puran Utilities as a repository of simple tools, it is useful to have everything available in one place.

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I’m a big fan of SharePoint. I’ve worked with it for years, right back to SharePoint 2001. It does a lot of things very very well (Since you ask -- document management, collaborative working, and increasingly social networking functionality). However, SharePoint also does lots of things, its feature set is simply huge. Not all of these features are as mature as others, and as a result it is easy for SharePoint systems to end up feeling a bit mixed and matched. Some things work well, some less so, and some should have been avoided altogether.

It is often as important to know what not to do with SharePoint, as it is to know what to do. So, with that in mind, here are 3 things you should avoid with SharePoint:

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To celebrate Chrome's fourth-anniversary -- well, in beta -- we're asking readers if and why they use Google's browser. The search and information giant released the first public test build, for Windows, on Sept. 1, 2008, with the one-oh release following just three months later. For a company renown for perpetual betas (wasn't it five years for Gmail), the rapid push to release build was uncharacteristic -- and foreshadowing. As Martin Brinkmann explains, Google set a rapid-release cycle -- new versions about every six weeks -- that transformed web browser development.

Yesterday, Tim Conneally told his personal story about using Chrome, starting from the beta. I would like to hear your story, too. You can comment to this post, or, better, email me -- joe at betanews.com. I'd like more than a comment, but your story to which we can put your byline, bio and photo.

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The Sony Xperia S smartphone comes with Sony's Timescape UX by default. Now, Sony has pledged to support a third-party project to port "stock" Android to the device.

In August, Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Technical Lead Jean-Baptiste Queru started a new experiment to port the vanilla version of Android to the Sony Xperia S, Sony's first post-Ericsson smartphone. Yesterday, the Japanese smartphone manufacturer announced its support for Queru's experiment by publishing the binaries for the Xperia S via the Sony Developer page.

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iPhone, iPod and iPad users who take advantage of the streaming capabilities the BBC’s iPlayer app now have a new feature to play with -- the ability to download programs and store them on your phone or tablet for up to a month. This is a move that will be welcomed by travellers as it opens up the chance of downloading a batch of programs at home over a Wi-Fi connection to avoid racking up expensive data usage bills while away from home.

There is promise of an Android version of the updated app in the pipeline, but for the time being this is something that can only be enjoyed by iOS users. The newly added offline mode is a great addition to the app, which had already been updated to allow for programs to be streamed over a data connections as well as when connected to Wi-Fi. While the change is undoubtedly beneficial, it does come with limitations.

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