Latest Technology News

Someone stole my daughter's iPhone 4S on Wednesday. We recovered it today, Saturday. The phone was a lost cause if not for Apple's cloud recovery service, which worked in an unexpected way overnight.

The saga started in the school office, where my daughter works for one period every other day. She often has out her phone and feels comfortable leaving it at the table where she busies; the teens working there are all fairly honest. On this particular day, she stepped out for five minutes and returned to find the phone gone. Sitting where she had been: Another teen applying to attend the school, with her mom close by. My daughter used a friend's phone to call hers, but the sound was off. The iPhone 4S was gone.

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Aiming to get out ahead of the the news crush that is the Consumer Electronics Show, Vizio on Saturday made the rounds of the major news outlets hawking its latest line of products: computers. While the company all but created the budget market when it comes to HDTVs -- building a considerable amount of positive brand equity as a result -- the PC business is much different.

Vizio will debut two desktops and three notebook computers at CES. While an official announcement has yet to appear, we do know that the desktops will come in 24- and 27-inch sizes, with the PC components tucked behind the display in an all-in-one design that looks quite similar to Apple's iMac desktops. A wireless keyboard and mouse are included with the package, along with a subwoofer and remote control.

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We might all be feeling slightly sluggish after overindulging throughout the holidays, but the software release schedule continues apace. Your thoughts may have already turned to Windows 8 and if you’re yet to try out the Developer Preview, PCmover Windows 8 Beta Assistant is here to make things easier for you. If you have been put off by the idea of having to set up a virtual a machine or updating your existing installation because of the prospect of transferring your files and installing all of your favorite software, this handy utility can help to automate the process.

Whether you’re upgrading Windows or not, everyone needs a backup tool, and EASEUS Todo Backup Free 4.0 fits the bill perfectly. You can backup individual files and folders or entire partitions, and you can create incremental backups to save space. If you’re sticking with your current version of Windows for the time being, SharpKeys 3.5 enables you to disable keys on your keyboard that you do not use or find that you press accidentally -- a much easier option that editing the registry. You may well be more interested in customizing the look of your computer rather than customizing the way your hardware works, and this is something that Kuvva 1.1 can help with, making it possible to automatically change your desktop wallpaper on a schedule.

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While the release of a new operating system is generally quite exciting, even computer users who are keen to have the latest and greatest version of Windows installed are filled with a slight sense of dread at the prospect of the installation. While the installation process for Windows 8 is one of the fastest and easiest yet, there is still the problem of having to install the apps you need and transferring all of your files. PCmover Windows 8 Beta Assistant from Laplink helps to ensure that things go as quickly and smoothly as possible by enabling you to more easily migrate your existing files, settings and user profiles.

PCmover has been around in various versions for some time now, but this beta release has been designed specifically with the pre-release versions of Windows 8 in mind. It can currently be used to make the move to the Developer Preview version of Windows 8, but it will also work with the Beta version when that it released in the near future. For reasons best known to Laplink, there is only support for 64-bit versions of Windows, both as source and destination operating system, and it can only be used with Windows 7; there is no support for XP or Vista.

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Finally, after a two-day delay, we have a winner for a shiny, new Galaxy Nexus smartphone. We asked you to offer 2012 New Year's resolutions for Google -- and you did, and some too late to qualify (you missed the deadline, sorry). Among the many on-time submissions, we chose 25 resolutions that Google should consider for the year ahead.

The resolutions aren't as broad as we expected and perhaps the prize is reason. More of you offered suggestions about Android than anything else. In the list below, some submitters appear more than one time, but they were only considered once in the prize drawing. We randomly chose from among all submitters meeting the deadline. In the interest of time -- and preparation for next week's Consumer Electronics Show -- we didn't check to see if all submitters met the other qualifications. We qualified the winner only and would have drawn another name had he failed to meet them (The two absolutely required with the resolution submission: Tweet the post and follow BetaNews on Twitter).

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We're just a few days away from another installment of the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, where thousands of companies from all over the world come to show off their wares for the new year.

One of the device types everyone is expecting to see a lot of this year is the Ultrabook, or the ultra thin and light notebook class that Intel classified just about nine months ago.

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If you’re a web developer who would like some assistance with your more complex development tasks then a good first step might be to install Firebug, an amazingly powerful Firefox extension which enables you to inspect and modify HTML in real time, debug JavaScript, analyse site performance and a whole lot more.

There are plenty of other Firefox extensions which you might find useful, though. Obviously you could research and install these individually, but a quicker option might be to download a copy of OWASP’s Mantra, a customized portable version of Firefox which includes more than 50 well-chosen web development tools.

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There are a number of Office compatible office suites to choose from in Apple's App Store, so anything that wants to stand out from the crowd needs to offer something special. After a brief appearance followed by a rapid vanishing act, CloudOn for iPad has returned to the App Store. What makes this app different from any of the other suites you could choose to install? Well, not only is it free of charge, but the suite is not only Office-compatible, it is a cloud-based version of Microsoft’s flagship suite.

The app integrates with Dropbox that is used to store all of your documents, and you have access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The app interface is almost exactly the same as using the desktop version of Office, but working with an on-screen keyboard is vastly different to typing in the usual way. It is unlikely that you will want to use the app for extended periods of typing, but the ability to review existing documents and make changes to spreadsheets, presentations and text documents in a familiar environment is big news.

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One of the most overlooked components when choosing your next Windows PC is its keyboard. You get so caught up in making sure it’s fast enough, feature-packed enough and with enough storage to forget that something as fundamental as the keyboard could make it practically unusable.

Often it’s not the keyboard itself that’s the problem, but rather the way certain keys are laid out. If you find yourself accidentally hitting one key when you mean to hit another, or find the Caps Lock keeps mysteriously coming on, then SharpKeys 3.5 is for you.

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Next week, the biggest trade show of the year opens in Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of people will make the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. My inbox already bursts with press releases, and it can only get worse. I hate CES. Trade shows like this one are anachronisms. Microsoft is right to bow out after this year. There's too much noise and too many vendors trying to yell louder than the next one. Logistically, from a reporter's perspective, it's a nightmare to coordinate. There's too much to cover and not enough time.

So in that spirit, I've come to spit on CES and offer a list that juxtaposes colleague Tim Conneally's. Earlier this week, he posted: "10 things I genuinely want to see at CES 2012". Tim offers an excellent list of want-to-sees. I'm taking a different tact: Things I don't want to see -- or hear about -- during CES 2012.

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There are plenty of TV stations all across the world that stream at least some of their content online. And a quick Google search will deliver plenty of interesting possibilities. Or you could just install TVNations, a tiny tool which makes many of them directly available from your Windows desktop.

Like many similar applications, the program organizes its channels by both genre and location. So you can click Movies, Music or News in the left-hand pane to find offerings of a particular type, for instance, or just choose your preferred location in the right-hand pane to see everything from that country.

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Almost a month after releasing Google Chrome 16 Final, Google has finally pushed Google Chrome Beta to version 17. This latest build concentrates on delivering speed and security enhancements with background preloading of web pages and downloading screening functionality added.

A number of other, more minor changes and the usual slew of bug fixes are also included, including adjustable margins in Print Preview and a prompt to confirm the cancellation of incomplete downloads when the user closes the last window of an incognito profile.

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It is important to keep your computer in good shape if you are going to get years of use from it and there are various techniques that can be used to ensure that you are getting the best possible performance from your hardware. While it is fairly easy to use the various tools that are built into Windows to keep your hard drive optimized, when it comes to the registry it is something of a different story. Windows includes a tool that can be used to edit the registry, but nothing that enables you to optimize it. This is precisely where Auslogics Registry Defrag can help and today we’re giving you a free copy of this powerful app worth $19.95.

Auslogics has a great reputation for producing powerful maintenance tools, and Registry Defrag falls very neatly into this category. The registry is an area of Windows that many people do not feel comfortable tampering with -- and with good reason, as any incorrect changes could have disastrous consequences for your computer. But just like your hard drive, your registry is prone to fragmentation as software installation and uninstallations leading to bloating and an increase in size that impacts negatively on performance.

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That's the gist of an advertisement running at CNET right now. It's the "first 4G LTE phone from Sprint", according to the banner advert, on the carrier's, ah, coming-sometime-really-soon LTE network. I dunno if the ad spills a pending CES 2012 announcement or what. But leaks don't get much funnier than this.

On the other hand, Sprint held a little event late this afternoon announcing big, splashy LTE network deployment. I suppose the carrier could offer Galaxy Nexus with LTE capability ahead of the bigger pipes. But the handsome smartphone may look a little old in the tooth when quad-core beauties start selling around the time Sprint offers LTE.

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AT&T LTE is now available in San Diego, which means I'll soon conduct speed test comparisons around the city against Verizon's 4G network. It will be the Wilcox household network speed test face-off, the wife's Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket against my Galaxy Nexus.

San Diego joins 10 other cities, which LTE service AT&T announced today. They are: Austin, Texas; Chapel Hill, N.C.; New York City metro area; Los Angeles; Oakland; Orlando, Phoenix; Raleigh, N.C.; San Diego; San Francisco; and San Jose. They join 15 others: Athens, Ga.; Atlanta; Baltimore; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Dallas-Fort Worth; Houston; Indianapolis; Kansas City; Las Vegas; Oklahoma City; San Antonio; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Washington, DC. AT&T claims its LTE network reaches 74 million people; Verizon, 200 million.

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