Latest Technology News

Monday, chipmaker Intel Corp. announced that its recently formed Intel Mobile Communications group has acquired "most of the assets" of privately held Egyptian communications company SySDSoft, a company whose intellectual property includes LTE Protocol Stacks for user equipment and femtocell premises equipment.

In August 2010, Intel acquired Infineon AG's wireless group for an estimated $1.4 Billion, giving the chipmaker access to a significant chunk of the global cellular baseband market. Then five months later, Intel announced the creation of its new Mobile Communications Group which would see the company working not only with its traditional x86 processor architecture, but also with the popular 32-bit ARM architecture.

Continue reading →

Everyone thinks they have a great novel inside them, but taking it from the deep recesses of your brain to a final, published state is a difficult journey. Your computer might seem the obvious tool to help here, but word processing software isn't geared towards novelists, and in trying to record and organize your notes alongside writing the actual story you can quickly become swamped.

What you need is a dedicated tool that doesn't just give you the tools to write your story, but provides you with the tools you need to organize them too. That program is yWriter; it's completely free, and version 5.1.6.4 has just been released, adding support for exporting your finished novel to ebook format.

Continue reading →

People get so paranoid about Google! Not that Google or any other large company in this industry is especially loveable, but so-called privacy advocates are especially prone to presume the most evil motives on its part. The latest example is the "Android Kill Switch."

This issue grew out of the discovery of dozens of malicious applications in the Android Marketplace on March 1st. Google removed the apps and went a couple of steps further: The company issued a program to reverse the effects of any infections, triggering the Remote Application Removal Feature.

Continue reading →

Betanews readers are an opinionated lot, and they have a lot to say about Apple's second-generation tablet, which went on sale at 5 p.m. March 11th. Yesterday I asked: "Did you buy iPad 2?" Many of you tried but found local stores sold out. Many others would kiss the devil before buying iPad 2 -- or any Apple product, for that matter.

"If you haven't bought the iPad 2 you're either broke or on drugs," Roland Jefferson writes in comments from his iPad 2. "There is no in-between or fine gray line. Take your pick: broke or on drugs. To which Hans Torm replies: "You got it wrong. You bought an iPad 2 so apprently you are on drugs and broke. :p"

Continue reading →

I did. My teenage daughter wants to use one for school. Late-afternoon yesterday, I waited for a surprisingly short time outside Apple Store Fashion Valley in San Diego, where at least 500 people lined up to get an Apple tablet. The doors opened at 5 p.m. local time, and I completed my purchase by 6:20 p.m. Apple Store employees rapidly processed purchases using iPhones.

Judging by the number of people using iPhones -- I'd say 60 percent to 70 percent -- the majority of buyers here were existing Apple customers. So in answering "Did you buy iPad 2" please also express whether or not you use other Apple products and whether or not you purchased (or otherwise own or owned iPad 1). Please respond in comments, or email joewilcox at gmail dot com.

Continue reading →

Friday at about 2:45pm local time (12:45am EST) Japan experienced a devastating earthquake, which was given a preliminary register of 8.9 on the Richter scale of magnitude, higher than any in this zone since the invention of the Richter Scale.

According to the US Geological Society, the location of this quake, known as the Japan Trench subduction zone, has had 9 events registering magnitude 7 or higher since 1973. The only one to approach this magnitude took place in December 1994, and was ranked as a 7.8.

Continue reading →

Popular microblogging service Twitter is clamping down on all the third-party client applications that duplicate the service's official apps, a statement from company developers said Friday.

Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver issued a sort of "State of the Platform" announcement on Friday, which was essentially a warning for third-party Twitter client developers that Twitter intends to be the primary interface that all consumers use. Or, as Sarver put it, the "primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices." With that in mind, the Terms of Service for third-party developers has been changed.

Continue reading →

As most of you by now know, last week the Android Market, the official store for applications on Android mobile devices, withdrew a number of apps that had been reported as harmful.

Why is Android encountering challenges where the iPhone isn't? Apps available for download on the Android Market aren't screened as stringently as they are on other public stores such as Apple's. The policy is in keeping with Android's open-source operating system, effectively allowing anyone with programming skill to create apps for mobile devices.

Continue reading →

One of the most effective ways of saving money is simply by tracking your finances. If you know exactly how much money is currently in your account you can go a long way to ensuring you always stay in the black, simply by cutting back on non-essential spending when money is tight.

But it's not enough simply to know how much is currently in your account: what bills are left to be paid before the next payday? It's no good thinking you've got hundreds of dollars left if your mortgage hasn't yet been paid, and what happens if you're the sort of person who regularly forgets to pay their bills? Financial Armageddon might ensue, but if you're a Mac user you could avoid this meltdown by investing a relatively paltry $21 in Chronicle.

Continue reading →

The Chromium-based social browser RockMelt has generated plenty of press coverage since rumors of its capabilities first appeared some 18 months ago. It was only available on an invitation-only beta, though, so you may not have had a chance to try out the program for yourself, but that's all changed today with the company's release of the first RockMelt Public beta.

The new build of the browser looks much like previous versions. Essentially it's Chrome with additional panels to display your Facebook stream, Twitter account, Facebook friends and more, so you can keep up-to-date and chat with your contacts without ever having to visit the Facebook site.

Continue reading →

Two questions for you: Which is the more powerful architecture, ARM or x86? Which one is the lower power architecture? If you answered ARM to either question, you'd be wrong. You'd also be wrong if you said x86.

Lost in the latest war of words between the two camps is that neither architecture is inherently better for smartphones or supercomputers or anything in between. True, most ARM processors have been designed primarily for low-power duty inside wireless handsets. And, yes, most available x86 processors are better suited for higher-performance applications.

Continue reading →

For years, I've asserted that in selling products and building up brand loyalty, feelings are more important than rational things. People are more likely to make purchase decisions based on emotions than intellect. Oftentimes, particularly with brands that evoke loyalty, buyers' emotional responses are irrational. I see this characteristic among hardcore Apple fans, who brisk at what they perceive to be the slightest criticism of the company or its products.

I must say that I'm feeling surprisingly good about Apple today. For the second time in nearly three years, Apple gave me a new computer to replace one recently purchased -- each a MacBook Air. But is it good customer service or faulty products?

Continue reading →

Top search engine Google on Thursday introduced an experimental feature which continues its mission to chip away at undesirable search results and information from "content farms": the ability to block all results from a particular URL.

Now, when search results are returned, there is a button next to each link labeled "Block all [URLNAME] results." When clicked, that site is sent to a block list, which can be managed in the user's Google account.

Continue reading →

For a third straight year, Google's Chrome browser has gone unhacked at a yearly event aimed at exposing the security flaws of today's modern browsers. The Mountain View, Calif. search company put its money where its mouth was too: last month it offered $20,000 to the first team able to hack the company's browser.

Pwn2Own is part of the CanSecWest security conference, held yearly by HP TippingPoint. Contestants are tasked with hacking each of the major browsers -- Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome -- and the first teams to do so not only win a $15,000 cash prize but also the computer they hacked the browser on.

Continue reading →

IDC walloped and bear hugged Apple a day before iPad 2 officially goes on sale. During fourth-quarter 2010, iPad market share fell from 93 percent to 73 percent sequentially, according to the analyst firm. However, IDC expects iPad market share to remain in the 70 percent to 80 percent range throughout 2011. Additionally, IDC released data on ebook reader shipments, which more than doubled quarter on quarter to 12.8 million units.For all 2010, 18 million tablets shipped, with iPad capturing 83 percent market share.

Well, so much for the nearly 100 tablet contenders. Then again, these mobile device markets are so fast changing, it's hard to trust any analysts' projections, particularly when there is no consensus on definitions. For example, Canalys and NPD DisplaySearch classify tablets like iPad as PCs. IDC does not. It's definition: "Media tablets are tablet form factor devices with color displays larger than 5 inches and smaller than 14 inches running lightweight operating systems (such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS) and can be based on either x86 or ARM processors. By contrast, tablet PCs run full PC operating systems and are based on x86 processors."

Continue reading →