Tuesday, Microsoft announced it has begun a major update to its consumer cloud storage service SkyDrive, which includes a new Web interface to the service, updated apps for desktop and new ones for mobile, and some new APIs for developers.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft opened its newest webmail brand and design upgrade on Outlook.com, and over a million people signed up in the first 24 hours alone. The update to the SkyDrive interface will be similar, and it will bring the same clean appearance, and will utilize the tile-based interface formerly known as "Metro" that is common among most current-generation Windows properties.

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At the end of 2011, Microsoft released Office OneNote for iPad, bringing the cult favorite note-taking application to all of Apple's devices.

But major shortcomings with the freemium OneNote for iPad app have earned it a significant number of negative reviews in the iTunes App Store. Third-party iPad app Outline+, released at the end of July, seeks to provide fixes to these complaints. So far, the app tackles two of the major issues plaguing the iPad version of OneNote: syncing and formatting.

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It's a radical thought. What if Microsoft is secretly planning to ditch Intel? With all of the recent talk about Windows RT "PCs", distinctions between the consumer roles associated with RT-based devices and the more traditional PC roles normally reserved for Intel-based systems have become blurred.

Suddenly, usage scenarios and form factors that were firmly part of Intel's territory are being encroached upon by a cornucopia of non-x86 Windows offerings. And cheering them all on is the chip maker's longtime comrade-in-arms, Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash.-based behemoth has been looking for a way out of the Wintel duopoloy for some time now, and the combination of increasingly powerful ARM designs and a tepid response to Intel's Ultrabook campaign has given the company the perfect opportunity to step out on its old partner.

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The transpiring events of Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung divides the technology industry and hones in on several overarching intellectual property talking points and issues that far extend the perpetual "eye for an eye" battle the companies occupy. Many writers and pundits state that the lawsuit will be a primary stepping stone to IP and patent reform and will be a primary decider of the future of patent law in the technology industry.

What the trial really rises to the surface: the two differing approaches with which Apple and Samsung view the situation. Apple’s perspective hinges on protecting the intrinsic and unique value of their intellectual property, whereas Samsung focuses more on the end game of consumer perception.

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Paragon Software has released Backup & Recovery 12 Home, the latest edition of its extremely capable consumer-oriented backup tool. And while the New Features list is a little on the short side this time, build #12 does benefit from support for incremental disk imaging.

This new addition means your backups can contain only data changed since the last increment, saving time and storage space. Which is presumably what Paragon means when they slightly unclearly say that the technology “boosts efficiency of backup to the network storage up to 200 percent”.

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One of the fundamental aspects of open-source software is that it’s open for all to use or modify as they see fit. Comodo has taken this approach to release its take on two open-source browsers, namely Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, with the release of Comodo Dragon and Comodo IceDragon respectively.

Both browsers attempt to provide more secure alternatives to the originals -- although on Windows builds are provided, and with the release of Comodo IceDragon 14.0, Comodo has added an extra layer of protection in the form of CertSentry in addition to a number of other tweaks and improvements.

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Well, hell's bells. Apple sold about as many iPhones as Wall Street expected during second quarter after all. That's the big, glaring takeaway I see from phone sales data Gartner released today. The numbers also show something else: The analyst firm either has really lousy methodology (which I doubt), or Apple apologists have been wrong all along (as I've asserted for years). Gartner reports 28.94 million iPhones sold, to Apple's 26.03 million.

Gartner is the only major analyst firm tracking actual handset sales to end users, while others record shipments into the channel. Apple does the same, although every time Samsung reports smartphone numbers, Apple apologists rush to claim the figures are shipped while calling iPhone's numbers sales. Not so. Apple reports shipments, too, and corresponding revenue, which comes from sales to cellular carriers, other third parties and direct sales. As such, Gartner's numbers rarely reconcile with Apple's, but they're usually lower. For second quarter, they're considerably higher. The difference is significant, and in Apple's favor.

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If Surface is the hit Microsoft hopes it will be, there’s the possibility that Apple might follow suit with an OS X powered MacPad at some point in the future (well, we can hope, can’t we?). The good news is you don’t actually have to wait for Apple, before trying out OS X on a tablet, you just need OS X Pad HD.

The advanced theme from Fnet Designs transforms your iPad into a Mac tablet with a fully functional Finder bar, and lets you add apps to the dock and change its style to match any of the 70 available wallpapers (or your own), create sidebar folders for Finder windows, and access settings and customization options through the System Preferences Menu. All software updates are applied directly through the theme.

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If you’re looking to browse your camera’s RAW format images on a PC then your first instinct will probably be to locate a suitably powerful image viewer. But there could be a simpler solution.

Microsoft’s Camera Codec Pack supports the viewing of a host of device-specific formats in Explorer, Windows Live Photo and any other Windows Imaging Codecs-based software, and it’s free and straightforward to use.

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In a highly logical collision of functionality, enterprise social media management platform HootSuite on Tuesday announced support for Microsoft's enterprise social network Yammer had been added via a new App in the HootSuite App Directory.

With the Yammer app installed, HootSuite users can view and participate in conversations, interact with groups, Like or reply to updates, and view or add attachments directly from the HootSuite dashboard.

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BetaNews certainly loves the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Joe Wilcox uses one, Tim Conneally uses one, now I use one. I wanted a smartphone that could easily deal with day-to-day tasks, had decent enough battery life that could get me through the day, had good build quality, and most importantly, received timely software updates.

As some of you may have already read, my Galaxy Nexus came with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but I managed to update it to Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean. I wanted to experience it without the placebo effect induced by claims of a faster interface. So how does it stand up to my four criteria?

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How do you keep up with the pulse of your business? For most companies, everyday activities are based on business processes that are repeated and repeatable. A retail company takes in sales. They process credit cards. They order more stock. They replenish inventory. A manufacturer procures raw materials in a global market. Then, they transport them to the manufacturing facilities. Finally, they create their product and distribute it.

No matter what the business or the task, every activity that costs or makes money is governed by a process. In the current business landscape, most businesses run these processes using IT tools. Managers look to IT to build in logical, dependent frameworks that keep the whole business running like clockwork. With the Internet, Cloud and mobile technologies, IT also has the task of connecting all of these activities together so that they can be controlled, orchestrated and monitored from almost anywhere.

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With iPhone 5's launch presumably close, and the 4S itself being discounted at carriers and retailers (and Apple, too, if you ask), AT&T now offers an early discount to smartphone customers ahead of the launch of the next model.

AT&T smartphone customers are being extended the same benefit that iPhone 3GS customers received in 2010 ahead of the launch of the iPhone 4, and some iPhone 4 customers saw ahead of the iPhone 4S announcement. As was the case previously, getting the special pricing requires a new two-year contract.

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The Commodore 64 celebrates its thirtieth birthday this month. That’s 64 kilobytes for around $600. A massive amount of RAM at the time. And for another $600 you could buy a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, which could store 170kB on a disk. Programs loaded completely into RAM so that you could remove the program disk from the drive and insert another one to store data. Where can you get a word processor or database that will run in 64k now? Yes, of course we’re routinely doing things now that were only distant dreams back then. But I began my computing experience running my business on just such a Commodore 64.

By 1986 mass market PC clones featured a colossal 512k of RAM and a 4.77MHz processor. But although that was a massive step forward, in no time you needed to upgrade to 640k RAM, and then find ways of using the extended memory registers between 640k and 1MB. In 1990, Windows 3.0 needed 7MB of disk space -- so you’d need a hard drive to run it, which not everyone had.

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Windows 8 gets grief from all angles, including from the gaming industry. Valve’s boss Gabe Newell recently called the forthcoming OS "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space", and Blizzard's Executive vice president of Game Design, Rob Pardo, tweets that Windows 8 "was not awesome for Blizzard either".

There are a couple of reasons why Gabe Newell, who worked at Microsoft for 13 years before leaving to form Valve, doesn’t like the new operating system. The awkwardness of running games through the interface formerly known as Metro is the most obvious issue, but the integrated Windows Store, which will directly compete with Valve’s distribution service Steam, is a much bigger concern for the company.

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