Latest Technology News

Just over a month ago, U.S. regional wireless carrier Cellular South changed its name to C Spire wireless in a move to become a more data-centric carrier.

Today, scrappy C Spire Wireless announced it will be getting the iPhone 4S "in the coming weeks" before its larger competitors T-Mobile, MetroPCS, and U.S. Cellular do.

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Today in Hong Kong, Google formally launched Android 4.0 in an event cosponsored by Samsung. The new operating system replaces Android 2.x "Gingerbread" for smartphones and 3.x "Honeycomb" for tablets. During the event Andy Rubin, Android chief, laid out "three defining terms" -- goals -- for new version "Ice Cream Sandwich: "simplicity", "beautiful", "we want to go beyond smart". Android 4.0 looks smart and acts smart, too. Many people will look and remark how suddenly outdated is Apple's iOS 5, which only launched last week.

Ice Cream Sandwich will be available in November on the new Google phone, the Samsung-manufactured Galaxy Nexus. Presumably, Android 4 will soon be (or soon after be) available for stock "with Google" devices, such as Nexus S and Motorola XOOM. Meantime, we thought you'd like a peak at what's coming your way.

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To celebrate the introduction of the newest version of Android, called Ice Cream Sandwich, Google and Samsung introduced the flagship Ice Cream Sandwich phone Tuesday evening, the Galaxy Nexus.

Continuing Google's naming culture where "Nexus" represents the most cutting-edge Android phones, the Galaxy Nexus offers impressive hardware to back up the impressive Android software update.

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In Hong Kong today, Google and Samsung unveiled Google's new flagship Android device, the Nexus Prime, a 4.65" Super AMOLED-toting, 1.2GHz LTE and HSPA+ smartphone. However nice the hardware of the new device is, it is second to the fact that it is the first device to run Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), the newest build of Android that unifies tablets and smartphones under a single OS for the first time.

"People like Android, they need Android…but they didn't LOVE Android," said Google's Matias Duarte in today's presentation. To remedy this, Google has not only introduced new and practical functions to ICS, but gave it a slicker look, faster responsiveness, and some extremely impressive bells and whistles.

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Google is expanding its use of the SSL encryption protocol, saying Tuesday it will begin redirecting all searchers to its secure search when signed in with their Google Accounts over the next few weeks.

"We’ve worked hard over the past few years to increase our services’ use of an encryption protocol called SSL, as well as encouraging the industry to adopt stronger security standards," product manager Evelyn Kao says. "As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver."

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Today, after the closing bell, Apple announced another blow-out quarter -- and the first with Tim Cook officially as CEO. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company also closed fiscal 2011. While Wall Street waited with interest for today's results, fiscal Q1 2012 may be more interesting -- Cook's first full quarter as chief executive and when Apple launched iPhone 4S.

The quarter broke a longstanding trend of Apple beating Wall Street's over-inflated estimates, not just revenue and earnings but also for numbers of prominent products shipped. Only Macs exceeded analyst projections among the top-tier products.

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On the first day of its BlackBerry developer conference in San Francisco, smartphone maker Research in Motion announced the next generation of BlackBerry platform will be called BBX and it will combine QNX, the platform RIM acquired in 2010 and used in the PlayBook tablet with the more traditional BlackBerry smartphone platform, a move not unlike the one Google has taken with Android "Ice Cream Sandwich."

BBX will be a complete platform made up of the operating system known as BBX-OS, and the related BlackBerry cloud services and development environments. BBX will support all the QNX tools that were used for PlayBook development, including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5. It will also include support for the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps.

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Samsung is set to release the highly-anticipated Nexus Prime on Wednesday. The device was set to debut at the CTIA conference on October 7, but was delayed due to the passing of Steve Jobs. The new event takes place in Hong Kong on Wednesday at 10:00 am local time -- 10:00 pm tonight Eastern Time.

While it has never been confirmed that Samsung's event will be about the Nexus Prime, Google-Samsung teasers and loads of rumors surely point to the device's release, along with Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich." The Prime would be the first device to run the new version of the mobile OS.

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Every PC user would like their system to run a little faster, but making that happen yourself usually requires time, effort, and an in-depth knowledge of how Windows really works.

Does that sound too much like hard work? Then maybe you should just install a copy of TuneUp Utilities 2012, which the authors say can restore "over 50 percent of speed and free space" on cluttered PCs, while improving "battery life by up to 30 percent".

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Motorola Mobility on Tuesday revealed its newest flagship Android smartphone, the Droid Razr, a device that combines Motorola's most lasting brands in a single package.

Droid Razr has a 4.3" Super AMOLED qHD display with Corning's Gorilla Glass protecting it. The original Razr's claim to fame was that it was flat and dramatically thinner than other flip phones available at the time of its release. The Droid Razr attempts to do the same thing for touchphones, and comes in at a slim 7.1mm in thickness. Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha on Tuesday said it will be the thinnest smartphone on the market.

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While iOS has supported Portable Document Format for some time, there has been no official app from the king of the PDF, Adobe. With the release of Adobe Reader for iPhone and iPad, this has now changed. As you would expect, the app provides support for the opening of PDF files that have been created on other platform, including those that have been password-protected, and PDF portfolios.

Lengthy files can be easily navigated using bookmarks and text searching, and a thumbnail preview section at the bottom of the app makes it easy to jump to a specific page without having to scroll through a document in its entirety. It’s good to see that the iPhone and iPad versions of the app are, apart from the differences in screen size, indistinguishable from each other.

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Businesses aren't exactly busting open their coffers, but IT spending will rise next year. Gartner predicts a 3.9 percent increase -- to $2.7 trillion, from $2.6 trillion this year. The analyst firm had expected 5.9 percent spending growth for 2011, and that's not happening.

What's important now isn't so much how much is spent but where. Social media, cloud computing and virtualization are disruptive technologies forcing IT departments and business leaders to re-evaluate technology adoption. Then there are the relentless, lingering effects of the global downturn. As such, Gartner claims that more enterprises are making IT a competitive, business priority -- and that affects who makes the decisions and how technology investments fit the top and bottom lines.

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Even though Palm is a dead brand, and the future of WebOS is uncertain now that HP is reconsidering its position in the consumer electronics market, the vanishingly popular TouchPad tablet today is receiving an over-the-air update to webOS 3.0.4.

According to HP on Tuesday, this update brings the TouchPad a new camera app, the ability to pair non-webOS devices with the TouchPad for call routing, improved support for Bluetooth keyboards, support for the OGG Vorbis music file extension, and the addition of online/offline status in the messaging client.

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2BrightSparks has just released SyncBackSE 6, and it boasts a raft of new features. These include the ability to detect changes in the case of file and folder names, SmartSync options to skip or ignore specified changes and the ability to use Windows 7 taskbar features amongst many more.

You can test all the new features alongside its existing functionality with a free 30-day trial. SyncBackSE helps you to protect data via backup and synchronization profiles, which enables you to create a back-up copy of your data in a variety of different locations; helpful wizards guide you through the process of both backup and restore.

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Google and some of its retail partners have rolled out an updated experience to the four-week old Google Wallet payment-by-phone system that now includes coupons and rewards points, which can all be redeemed with a single tap of the user's NFC-enabled smartphone. Google is calling the updated experience "SingleTap."

In this updated experience, Google Offers has been incorporated into the wireless payment system. In the "Offers" tab in the Google Wallet app, there are deals exclusive to users of the wireless payment service, and whenever a user scans his Google Wallet wireless device, these deals are automatically activated whether or not he's actually checked them out in the tab.

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