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A little more than four months ago, part of the interestingly named "Project Sputnik", Dell announced the XPS 13 Developer Edition which ran popular open source operating system Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. After a long wait, the new laptop is available for purchase today for a not-so-cheap $1,549.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition ships with a 13.3-inch 720p HD display. Processing power is provided by a third generation Intel Core i7 3517U processor that tops out at 3 GHz, an HD 4000 video card, and 8GB of DDRIII RAM. It also comes with a 256GB solid state drive, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. To keep the laptop running off the grid, there is a 47WHr battery which Dell says can deliver up to 6 hours and 13 minutes of unplugged operation.

Quick, someone add "Nearer My God to Thee" to Steve Ballmer's Xbox Music queue. Microsoft's CEO has a real problem -- well, at least his OEM partners. Simply stated: US Windows PC sales still suck and got absolutely no lift from Windows 8's release. So much for 40 million licenses sold in the first month (and we know it really was longer, since license sales to businesses started in August). Then there is increasing context for Windows chief Steven Sinofsky's sudden departure. The new operating system sinks like Windows Vista. Cue the violins.

New Windows version is supposed to lift PC sales, but they're down 21 percent since the October 26 launch. Notebook sales slumped 24 percent and desktops 9 percent, for the same time period a year ago. "Clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for", Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, says.

To Microsoft's credit, it knows it has to be constantly vigilant with its public image. Internet Explorer has been raked across the coals for years, and no matter what Microsoft does, people seem to be unhappy. This is not to say the browser hasn't earned a lot of this criticism with security vulnerabilities and web standards problems, but sometimes the relentless onslaught of negativity in web comment sections is too much to handle.

Microsoft's latest video shows that sometimes the best a company can hope for is for people to hate them less.

If you want to download music for free then the Internet isn’t exactly short of options, so discovering that we now had another, in the shape of the new MP3jam, didn’t exactly fill us with excitement.

But then we actually tried the program. And it turned out to be a real surprise.

A month ago Microsoft released Windows Phone 8, with major improvements designed to give the company's smartphone operating system a better fighting chance against established market competitors such as Android and iOS. Current Windows Phone 7.5 users, however, will only get a limited number of the new features through Windows Phone 7.8, which the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation announced that it will ship in early 2013.

The launch date, however, does not coincide with the Windows Phone 7.8 ETA provided by Microsoft Italy on Facebook late last month. The update will be rolled-out to existing customers in "early 2013", rather than shortly after Windows Phone 8 is released as was previously suggested by Microsoft's European arm. The new smartphone operating system is still in the process of testing and approval, suggesting the reason why the upgrade is not yet deployed. Microsoft's reward to early Windows Phone adopters is nothing. Clearly the new thing, Windows Phone 8, is greater priority.

Google has updated the iPhone and iPad version of its famous browser, adding support for Passbook and allowing users to open PDF files in other applications. Google Chrome for iOS 23.0.1271.91 also includes a number of tweaks and bug fixes.

The update is joined by a minor stability update to Google Chrome for Android 18.0.1025469, which Google promises to resolve issues with “frequently occurring stability issues”.

You’ve got a speedy, modern PC and a fast internet connection -- so why is it that you can’t watch streaming videos without regular dropouts and interruptions?

These kind of problems can be frustrating, and they’re certainly tricky to diagnose. But the free DPC Latency Checker could help point you in the right direction.

In the beginning there was English and it was good. Okay, not so much. Honestly I found YouTube captions early on to be pretty darn bad. The Google speech recognition tool wasn't up to snuff and it sometimes led to hilarious results. But, to it's credit, the company has made strides to improve. In fact, if you have used Android lately then I think you will find speech-to-text to be pretty solid.

YouTube, a Google property, introduced captions back in 2009. At the time it was English only, but as the technology improved other languages were added -- Japanese, Korean and Spanish were next to appear. Now the service offers an additional six languages.

I'm not wrong -- tablets are still incapable of replacing PCs, but I purchased one anyway. Local Black Friday sales got the best of me, and the end result is the iPad 2 that's laying on my couch right now. Before you start calling me names for buying an older product or "betraying the Android army", let me put it like this -- Apple's tablet was cheaper than a Google Nexus 7.

Price is a very strong incentive in any of my buying decisions. Because of it I couldn't even think about purchasing an iPad, as it normally runs for $550 in my area. But that changed when I read the price tag during the Black Friday sale -- it was roughly $285. Suddenly priorities changed and an older, otherwise overpriced, product made sense. I just had to get it, despite what logic may have tried to dictate at the time.

I have a special request for you, President Barack Obama. Intervene on behalf of a great American institution. Surely all it takes is an executive order. You bailed out General Motors and the banks, something you reminded all of us during your reelection campaign. Surely you can come to the aid of a company dear to you. Research in Motion has a big problem. Nokia asks courts in Britain, Canada and the United States to ban BlackBerries, because of a contract dispute. You have the power to stop this travesty before it starts.

We all know how you feel about BlackBerry; after becoming president you fought to keep your RIM smartphone and won. BlackBerry security protocols are good enough even for our Commander-in-Chief. You're an addict and make no secret of the fact. Hell, there have been rumors among hacker communities for years that you are a frequent poster on some CrackBerry forums. You're a fanboy, Mr. President. Now is time to put your loyalty to practice, by saving the tech you love so dearly.

Create a document in Microsoft Office and you’ll usually find it includes metadata, information you might not realize was there: your name, company name, some computer details, version information, comments and more.

Windows makes it easy enough to remove metadata from individual documents (right-click > Properties > Details > Remove Properties and Personal Information), but you can also use the free Document Metadata Cleaner 3 to check and clean your entire system in a single operation.

Network testing and security analysis firm NSS Labs has released the third part of its comparative browser vulnerability study, this time focusing on phishing protection. The previous installations, released last September, focused on general malware blocking and click fraud.

NSS Labs observed Safari 5, Chrome 21, IE10, and Firefox 15 for ten days and found that the general phishing URL catch rate was pretty good across the board. In fact, the group said there is so little difference in the average block rate between the different browsers that one must "consider other factors, such as socially engineered malware blocking capabilities for qualitative differences in the security effectiveness of the browsers."

According to Microsoft, one-third of new Outlook.com sign-ups are from active Gmail users. While a good portion of those are likely just signing up to get an account to use with Windows 8 (I’m a Gmail devotee but use my Outlook.com address to log into the OS as it offers clear benefits), Microsoft presumes that these new users must dislike Google’s service and want to switch. To this end, the company hired a research firm to say what it wanted to hear.

"Hundreds" of Gmail users were recruited and asked to give Outlook.com a try. These test subjects moved their emails over and used the service for a brief while before being grilled on their experience. The researchers found that the group largely preferred Outlook.com’s clean design (it's possible), and the fact that the service makes sharing photos and Office documents easy (fair enough). But here’s the claim that I can’t quite believe: Apparently the users found Outlook.com "does a better job of blocking spam" than Gmail. Sorry? The only reason you could possibly think that is if you never get any spam in the first place (which would be the case with brand new Outlook.com sign ups).

Nexus 4 is no longer "sold out" at Google Play, and I can't help but laugh at the store's idea of "ships soon". That's "8-9 weeks" for the $299 model. Exactly how is that not sold out? Basically, Google throws out hope to the hopeless. Still, from a marketing perspective, long wait is better than telling potential buyers the product is out of stock. Meanwhile, people place orders and get somewhere in the long queue.

Yesterday, Google resumed Nexus 4 sales after selling out within hours of taking orders on October 13. Like that day, the search giant struggled to take orders, with many buyers watching orders be cancelled in the shopping cart. But the persistent succeeded, often after several hours effort. Today's wait time is more about when devices ship rather than ordering them. Expect "4-5 weeks" on the 16GB model.

Almost four months ago Microsoft relaunched Hotmail as Outlook, as the company's response to Google's Gmail. In the meantime the new service reached more than 25 million active users, a number which has steadily grown since its introduction. To expand reach into Android territory, Microsoft even launched a new app for green droid devices.

The Redmond, Wash.-based corporation says that because of conversation threading, keyboard shortcuts, quick access to search operators and tab/send the transition towards the new Outlook email service is easier. Taking the fight over to its main competitor, the company also "finds" that four out of five (that's 80 percent in pie chart talk) Gmail users would switch to Outlook after just five days of use. That's a rather bold claim, and it seems a bit far fetched. But why?