Latest Technology News

If you’re looking to personalize your PC then customising its system and application icons can deliver great results.

Of course, you have to find alternative icons, first, and so your first instinct might be to browse a few online libraries to see what’s available. But there is a more straightforward alternative: and that’s to explore the thousands of icons already present on your own system. It’s easier than you think.

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At the annual Nokia World conference in London Wednesday, Finnish mobile phone company Nokia officially unveiled its first two smartphones that will run the Windows Phone mobile operating system: the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. These will be the first smartphones Nokia will sell in the United States since it partnered with Microsoft earlier this year.

The Lumia 800 is the device that was known as "Sea Ray" in leaks back in June, and it offers a 3.7" AMOLED curved glass display, a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 processor with 512MB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage, and an 8 megapixel camera. The software it runs is Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" and it will be available internationally in both GSM and WCDMA varieties.

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BurnAware 4, which ships in Free, Home and Professional flavors, is the latest version of the lightweight but powerful burning tool that handles a wide variety of discs.

Burnaware Free handles most common disc based tasks. You can copy data to all types of CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs, subject to the limitations of your drive. It supports bootable and multi-session discs and it’s possible to make audio discs and disc copies.

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This morning, Gizmodo’s Brian Barret posted "Remember Netbooks? No One Else Does, Either" In the post, Barret cites recent data from ABI Research that indicates the rise of tablet computers at the expense of netbooks: "Media tablet shipments surpassed netbook shipments this quarter, reaching 13.6 million units, compared to just 7.3 million netbooks. Netbooks had previously led the way with 8.4 million shipments in 1Q11, compared to just 6.4 million media tablets".

Barret takes this research as an opportunity to gleefully dance on the grave of the netbook computer, stating that it is now "very hard to find a compelling argument as to why you'd prefer one [a netbook] over a tablet". I disagree.

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You would think the inventor of the iPod's next gadget creation might be some new consumer electronics gadget that will revolutionize the world once more. What if I told you Tony Fadell's latest creation is a new twist on something far, far less revolutionary -- the thermostat?

Fadell's new venture, Nest Labs, aims to create greener technologies. While it may seem somewhat odd for the company's work to begin with the thermostat, it actually makes sense. In our quest to stay comfortable in our homes, constantly fiddling with the thermostat actually wastes a lot of energy.

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Leading online retailer Amazon submitted its third quarter 2011 sales and earnings figures on Tuesday, revealing a big jump in sales -- especially in its Kindle product line -- but an overall decline in income.

Sales increased 44 percent sequentially, going from $7.56 billion to $10.88 billion; this represented a 39 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

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Finnish security vendor F-Secure has released the 2012 editions of its flagship antivirus package and security suite. As updates go, it’s relatively minor, with most of the changes being beneath the surface. Still, there are some worthwhile improvements on offer.

F-Secure says it has upgraded the behavior monitoring, scanning performance and malware removal capabilities in this edition, for instance. Improved automation in the handling of malware samples means F-Secure’s cloud-based protection network can offer an even faster response to the latest security threats.

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A new version of Android will be available in November, initally on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Much of the analysis of this Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android is focused on the implications of it running on both smartphones and tablets, where older versions of Android ran on one or the other (1), as well as shiny new gimmicks such as face recognition to unlock a handset.

This unification of smartphones and tablets is a red herring. Other things matter much more for Android. Android tablets are failing in the market, while Google’s smartphones sell in enormous numbers. This is a major issue for Google.

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To accompany the new stable version of the Chrome browser Tuesday, Google updated its Chrome App Store Apps with a new look and new interface.

The new App Store is marked by big images for the featured apps and extensions, that users need only to hover over to reveal a short review, user rating, and "add to Chrome" button. A left-hand navigation panel contains the store's search feature, and lists of popular apps and extensions, collections, and categories.

Individual pages for apps and extensions have been updated as well with a tabbed interface that breaks the app up into Overview, details, and reviews. The reviews interface now links to a user's real identity with their Google+ profile.

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iPhone 4S users on Sprint's network have flooded the carrier's support forums with complaints of slow data speeds, leading some to consider returning the device before Friday to avoid the $350 early termination fee.

Complaints appeared on support forums on October 14, the day the iPhone 4S launched at retail. Tests indicate that in some cases data throughput was as slow as .25Mbps -- only a little faster than a 2400 baud modem. The issue also seems mostly limited to the 4S itself: other Sprint phones tested side-by-side are unaffected although scattered reports of bandwidth issues are appearing elsewhere.

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Tenth in a series. Microsoft launched Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001. By every measure it is the most successful Windows version ever, bringing stability to the platform, too.

Anyone can easily dismiss Windows XP, because it's so overly familiar, having stayed long in market and so seemingly unchanged. But Microsoft accomplished much around the venerable operating system, which quickly became a stable platform for the company, too. In fact, change defined XP during its first half-decade in market, but built on the stable platform beneath. Within three weeks of the launch, Microsoft announced the Tablet PC version and Media Center Edition, then codename "Freestyle", in January 2002.

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DVD rental and streaming video provider Netflix has posted its third quarter 2011 earnings, and though the company's revenues are higher than they were last year, decreasing subscriber acquisition and increasing costs of content licensing will have a significant impact on the company's bottom line next year.

If we were to go strictly by Netflix's earnings data, it would look like the company is continuing to do well: $822 million in revenue (49% higher than 2010,) $62 million in net income (63% higher than 2010,) and earnings per share exceeded Wall Street expectations by more than 20%.

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It’s hard to believe that WinZip, the stalwart archive program, has reached its sixteenth release with the latest update, which picks up a range of new features. The ZIP format is getting pretty elderly now and other more efficient compression standards have overtaken it, but it’s still a popular choice. WinZip 16 adds a few more carrots to tempt users by making full use of today’s 64-bit processors and adding the ability to zip directly to Blu-ray disc amongst other new features.

Also new is the ability to avoid email size limits and send files of up to 2GB directly. There’s no need to worry about the limits set by your email provider as the program integrates fully with ZipSend, a web based delivery service that stores your file and shares a direct download link with your email contact. All this is done seamlessly so there’s no need to interrupt your work and switch to a different program. It’s also possible to share Zip files on Facebook directly from the WinZip window.

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Resizing multiple images manually is a tedious business. You must open an image, choose the resize option, configure it appropriately, save the image, close it, then start all over again. While there are plenty of batch image resizing tools around, they also require at least some significant configuration before you can get started.

Picture Resizer, though, takes a very different approach, which can at least let you carry out simple resizing operations without ever seeing a single dialog.

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Ninth in a series. Few products have impacted more people than Windows XP. Microsoft officially launched the operating system -- the first for consumers based on the NT kernel -- on Oct. 25, 2001. That's right, 10 years ago today. But PC manufacturers started offering XP systems in early September 2001, a week before terrorist attacks against New York City and Northern Virginia. XP is the most popular Windows version ever released. Even today, depending on the analyst crunching numbers, more people use Windows XP than any other PC operating system (although Windows 7 is nearly tied).

Windows XP is a workhorse. Microsoft kept it in market longer than any other Windows version, allowing a very stable ecosystem of third-party applications and products to evolve around it. The operating system fulfilled the vision set for Windows 95 six years earlier -- release of stable, 32-bit code suitable for businesses and consumers. Microsoft's biggest development challenge: Providing compatibility with games and supporting hardware drivers that wanted access to the kernel, which NT blocked for security reasons.

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