Silicon Valley startup BlueStacks on Tuesday officially launched the alpha version of its App Player for Windows, which lets users run Android apps right from their Windows desktop.

It is as easy to understand as it is to appreciate. It's an application that virtualizes Android inside Windows, and can be run with a touchscreen, or can convert mouse actions into virtual touchscreen actions.

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The Next branch of Opera’s development has been updated to build 1090, with a number of interesting changes that see alterations to the skin’s appearance and improvements made to the plugin installation process. Of course, there is also the usual swathe of bug fixes and performance enhancements, and despite the fact that this is a fairly early glimpse of the next version of the browser, it already seems surprisingly stable and polished.

There are a number of changes that can be summed up as polishing -- icons and buttons have been updated as has the badge graphic. The overall size of the skin has been reduced in terms of file size, and the padding around some screen elements has been adjusted to improve alignment.

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The wait is over. You heard the rumors and saw the leaked screenshots. You believe in unicorns and UFOs. But it was growing hard to keep believing in Facebook for iPad. Today, the social network rewards your faith and anoints your pad with Facebook 4.0. Surely aliens will land tomorrow and unicorns will be found in some remote jungle. If so, you can more easily tell all your friends from iPad.

Facebook 4.0 is the long-anticipated remedy for what ills iPad: FB iPhone app. The social network released Facebook 3.5 for iOS in early September and to the disbelief of many unicorn and UFO hunters (and plenty other people) without the long-anticipated iPad support.

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Motorola Solutions on Monday debuted the ET1, the company's first attempt at an Android tablet specifically for use in retail solutions such as point of sale, planogram management and compliance, item location, and general retail manager assistance.

The tablet has a 7" (1024 x 600) display with Corning's Gorilla Glass covering the LCD, a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of onboard flash memory and support for microSD up to 32GB. It has a barcode scanner, credit card reader, front and rear cameras, a hot-swappable battery pack with 15-minute RAM backup when the main battery is removed, and the whole thing runs an "enterprise-ready, hardened" version of Android 2.3.4

For Motorola, there are a couple of reasons why this is a big product. The company's handheld computer class of devices (which it describes as being "designed for retail, public agencies, logistics and mobile fleets…") has been dominated by Windows Mobile and Windows CE for a long time, so the introduction of Android in this space is especially noteworthy.

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Comodo has launched its online backup solution -- releasing a new dedicated desktop client, Comodo Online Storage, as well as updating its desktop backup tool, Comodo Backup, to version 4.0.6.

Comodo Backup 4.0.6, which had been split into separate free and paid-for versions during its beta testing phase, has been released as a single, free tool in the same manner as its predecessor, version 3 was, which will please those who had championed it as one of the best free backup tools available for Windows.

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BlackBerry services such as email, Web browsing, and BBM instant messaging have been knocked out of commission for most of Monday in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and even extending into parts of India.

The outage began around 10am Central European Time (approximately 6am Eastern) and Research in Motion did not acknowledge the problem until some four hours later.

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In late August, Betanews published a series of seven stories, sharing memories using Windows XP. The majority came from readers like you. The first set of recollections commemorated the tenth anniversary of XP's release to manufacturing. Another date remains. Microsoft launched Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001, and we'd like to celebrate the decade since with even more Windows XP memories.

Ideally, we want to publish your recollection as its own story with your name, photo and bio. You write it -- we edit and publish during the launch week anniversary. Please email your stories to joe at betanews dot com -- or, if you must, comment below. The first round, we only posted stories received for publication with author identified. During the second round, we will also post from the many memories shared in comments. The majority of these will be collections rather than stories written by you.

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Acer's American arm announced on Monday that the brand's first thin-and-light ultrabook, the Aspire S3, has landed in North America, and it will be available for $899.

In addition to being Acer's first ultrabook, The Aspire S3-951 is the first ultrabook that has both an HDD for storage and an SSD integrated into the main board for instant on capabilities.

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San Francisco-based Nitro PDF has released version 2.1 of its freeware Portable Document Format viewing and creation tool. Nitro PDF Reader 2.1, which is also available as a separate 64-bit build, is a feature-rich PDF viewer with built-in PDF creation functionality, including the ability to directly convert over 300 document formats if the document’s parent application is installed.

Version 2.1 introduces a number of notable new features, including a new 64-bit build of Thumbnail Preview, the standalone tool that generate navigable thumbnail previews of PDFs in Windows Explorer, that works in 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista. Previously the tool only worked in 32-bit versions of Windows.

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Is iPhone 4S perhaps a worthy upgrade after all? Are all the people who waited for iPhone 5 (and didn't get it) coming clamoring for 4S? Is Apple benefiting from the rock star effect following cofounder Steve Jobs's death last week. Take your pick of reasons, but one thing is certain: iPhone 4S is off to a seemingly good start. Today the Cupertino, Calif.-based company announced that preorders topped 1 million during first 24 hours of sales. AT&T didn't wait, boasting about 200,000 units on Friday, when preorders started.

That 1 million surpasses the record set by iPhone 4 -- 600,000 preorders -- in June 2010. But before you believe the Apple Fanclub of reporters and journalists claiming it's the end of Android -- "this time for sure!" -- consider this: That 1 million number, while an achievement, comes from considerably broader distribution. From that perspective, 1 million first-day sales is no guarantee that iPhone 4S will be a hit.

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If you’re looking for a free PC maintenance suite then there’s not exactly any shortage of options. A few moments at your favorite search engine will turn up a long list of potential candidates, each promising that they’ve the technology to best improve your PC’s performance, and for no charge at all.

All this free competition makes it difficult for the vendors of commercial PC maintenance packages to stand out from the crowd. But iolo technologies is now fighting back with the new System Mechanic Free, a cut-down version of the company’s flagship System Mechanic suite.

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Anyone who has tried to provide computing assistance over the phone will know just how frustrating an experience it can be. Without the ability to interact with a problematic computer, it can be hard to diagnose just what the problem is, and having to rely on someone else to explain what the issue is can be all but useless. There are a number of remote access tools that can be useful in these circumstances, but Chrome Remote Desktop Beta is an extension for the Chrome browser that brings remote access to the web browser.

The extension can be used from a Windows, OS X or Linux based machine, and the only requirement is that both computers involved need to have both Google Chrome and the extension installed. As things stand, Chrome Remote Desktop Beta is unlike many other remote access tools in that someone needs to be in front of both the host and client computers.

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on Monday morning that the movie rental company's plan to spin off its DVD-by-mail rental business into a new company called Qwikster has been promptly cancelled.

"This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster," Hastings said in the Netflix blog. "While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes."

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On October 6, I made a dramatic, personal computing switch. After more than two months using the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook running Google's Chrome OS, I didn't go back to the Mac but to Windows 7. Mac OS X 10.7 -- aka "Lion" -- is major, but not only, reason. Lion is the first Mac operating system that I don't like. Also, I find the hardware options, particularly the all-important display and resolution, to be much better from Windows PC manufacturers than Apple in the same price range.

Others will disagree, but I see in Lion many uncharacteristic user interface and file system changes that smack of Windows Vista. Priorities aren't all in the right place, compared to previous OS X releases, with changes made for Apple's benefit -- such as trying to unify many behaviors with iOS -- and increased complexity where simplicity should be priority.

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Symantec has revealed the first public beta of Norton 360 6.0, the company’s do-everything security suite.

The Norton site claim this build offers “our best protection and performance ever” and “improved local or secure online backups”. If you’re familiar with the package you’ll see it’s also had a few interface tweaks, but there are no other specifics regarding new features available just yet.

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