"Team,

I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.

The tech world has lost one of its greatest visionaries: Apple has confirmed that Steve Jobs died on Wednesday due to complications from pancreatic cancer at the age of 56. Apple confirmed his passing on its website, although immediately did not give any further details.

A statement from Jobs’ family said that he died peacefully surrounded by those he loved, and noted how much he cherished his family. They expressed their thanks to those that had passed on their well-wishes during his extended illness.

Sparrow, the majestically minimal mail app for Mac OS has received a bit of a revamp in its latest release at version 1.4. Both its user interface and its back end have been significantly improved to deliver enhanced performance and more intuitive controls.

The latest release also provides integration with CloudApp, the file sharing service enabling you to link to attachments so recipients only download them when they decide to. Your attachments won’t cause a bottleneck when fetching email which should make you more popular with all your contacts.

New Apple CEO Tim Cook made his mark yesterday, with the launch of iPhone 4S. This isn't Chairman Steve Jobs' baby but Cook's. While Jobs technically remained chief executive through August, he was on medical leave from January , with Cook responsible for day-to-day operations. The world expected iPhone 5, but Cook and company chose to give something less. From a purely logistical perspective -- and for maximizing margins -- iPhone 4S is sheer brilliance.

Competitively, however, Apple has bet iPhone's future on sameness and demonstrated corporate arrogance that create opportunity for other phone makers. For them, iPhone 4S is another kind of brilliance -- a shining light of opportunity. They may also see in Cook weakness, that the genius of logistics lacks the qualities that made Jobs a visionary leader and in process an uncharacteristic risk taker among CEOs.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced it will be rolling out an update to Xbox Live that brings live streaming pay television to the Xbox 360 without any additional hardware required.

Microsoft first launched live TV on the Xbox 360 to limited audiences last year, and earlier this year announced its intention to bring live TV to a broader range of XBox Live subscribers in the fall (i.e. now).

The Zune saga continues. Is the music player really dead? The drama got a little weirder today, as Microsoft seems to be making a concerted effort to erase any evidence that it said Zune hardware is finished. Passed on. No more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and has gone to meet its maker. It is a late media player. An ex-media player, if you will.

A support page which said that the company was focusing on Windows Phone for entertainment and "will no longer be producing Zune players" was deleted from its website (see the cached version here). Furthermore, in a tweet from the official Zune Support team, it continued the walk back.

According to statements made by Hewlett Packard's new CEO Meg Whitman yesterday, the fate of HP's Personal Systems Group could be sealed by the end of October.

HP's board of directors has been strategizing effective "alternatives" for the PSG (also known as the group that handles the company's market-leading consumer hardware), and announced on August 18 that these alternatives could include a separation of its PC business into a separate company through a spin-off, outright sale, or other transaction.

Mozilla has unveiled the next two pre-releases of its messaging client. Thunderbird 8 Beta follows sibling browser Firefox 8 Beta in changing the way it handles add-ons. Other changes are less noticeable. Attachment lists are said to be more accessible, while a number of unspecified platform fixes and user interface tweaks have also been implemented.

The key change in Thunderbird 8 is how it handles add-ons. Like Firefox 8, add-ons installed by third-party programs will now be disabled by default -- the user will be prompted to review and enable the add-on manually the first time Thunderbird runs after it’s installed. The add-on can also be managed from the Add-ons section of the program.

Samsung is using Apple's release of the iPhone 4S on Tuesday as a way to gain increased leverage in the heated patent battle underway between the two companies. On Wednesday, it filed requests for an injunction banning the sale of the device in both France and Italy.

The choice of these two countries is not by accident: patent laws in both allow for an affected company to request injunctive relief before an infringing product is officially released. That said, it's not unreasonable to believe that Samsung may look for injunctions elsewhere once the iPhone 4S ships.

Paramount Software (UK) Ltd has updated Macrium Reflect Free Edition, its free-for-personal-use drive imaging tool, to version 5.

Macrium Reflect Free Edition 5.0.4033 sports a completely redesigned drag-and-drop user interface, plus adds a number of new features, including the ability to clone drives, set alternate backup locations and create WinPE-based recovery media, allowing users to recover from USB 3.0 drives outside of Windows.

Webroot is describing its new SecureAnywhere 2012 range as being “the fastest and lightest virus and spyware protection you can buy”. And while this sounds like more security company hype, on first glance at least it looks like they may have a point.

The core antivirus engine is a compact and ultra-lightweight cloud-based affair, which makes smart choices about the files it checks to minimize scan times. Webroot say this means system scans will typically be under two minutes, something that we confirmed (they were closer to 30 seconds on our test PC). And the program is very careful about its use of RAM: we found it peaked at around 50MB when scanning, and when idle was closer to 5MB (private working set).

I suspected for some time that rumors of iPhone 4S were correct. That meant, based on past Apple release schedules, the new handset would be more evolutionary than revolutionary and likely nothing more than catch-up to newer Android models from HTC and Samsung. So on Sunday, while the InterWeb filled with excitement and speculation about iPhone 5, I trucked over to AT&T and bought Samsung Galaxy S II, which went on sale that day.

Apple announced iPhone 4S yesterday, and I have no regrets choosing the S2. I have absolutely no interest in Apple's new handset and wouldn't if I still owned iPhone 4. For Android users tempted by Apple marketing, don't be. Nexus Prime is coming, and Galaxy S II is here now. It's an exceptional smartphone by most every measure. With iPhone 4S, Apple is the innovation follower, not leader here.

Woe is you.

You've waited 16 months for this announcement, and all you get is a stinking upgrade to the iPhone 4? You know, that doubling of processor speed and drastic increase in graphics handling isn't enough. The fact that CDMA customers will have worldphone capability thanks to dual-mode functionality? Pshaw.

Apple’s product announcements are a tale of two iPhones: the iPhone 4States and the Immortal 3GS.

Today at Apple’s annual event, new CEO Tim Cook unveiled evolved iPods, a new dual-core iPhone 4S, and the voice-controlled virtual assistant based on Apple’s acquisition of Siri. He also recapped on iOS 5 and iCloud which were announced back in June. Although Apple sells two-thirds of their iPhones outside the US, I fear that the most innovative new parts of the iPhone 4S product design will appeal most to a US audience. Apple will still do well globally, but it could do even better with some tweaked product thinking.

According to data from market research firm NPD, 45 million iPods sold last year, and judging by this season's iPod refresh, unveiled on Tuesday, Apple isn't trying to change anything about its market-leading portable media players yet.

The "New" iPod Nano is exactly the same size as the model that debuted one year ago, except for three moderate changes. First, it has a slightly new UI with bigger icons, and 16 more watch faces for users who wear their Nano on their wrist. Second, fitness mode can now be used without the Nike+ accessory, and can track steps with the built-in accelerometer. Third, the price has dropped $20. The 8GB comes in at $129 and the 16GB costs $149.