Latest Technology News

HTC continued to diversify its product portfolio on Thursday, announcing it had purchased a majority 51 percent stake in Beats Electronics, a US company that produces high end headphones and speakers. The company is a joint venture of rapper Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine.

In monetary terms the investment comes to about $300 million USD, according to reports.

Web-based file storage and content sharing service Box.net on Thursday unveiled three new apps for the tablet world: one for Android Honeycomb, one for BlackBerry PlayBook, and one for HTML5-compatible browsers. These new products bring Box to essentially all mobile platforms in some way and round out its app offerings which already included iOS, Android, and WebOS.

Like Amazon has done with its Kindle e-book platform, Box is attempting to attain what it calls "mobile ubiquity," or a meaningful presence on any mobile device that comes along, irrespective of platform.

TeamSpeak Systems GmbH has released TeamSpeak 3 for Windows, Mac and Linux. This powerful teleconferencing tool is designed to allow users, both home and business, take part in group voice conversations on a large scale.

Version 3.0, which coincides with the release of mobile client apps for both iPhone/iPad and Android, boasts a dedicated 64-bit build for Windows and Linux users for the first time. It's been rebuilt from the ground up in C+++ to improve compatibility and performance, and boasts improved voice quality and latency, 3D sound effects, improved security and privacy and a new feature that allows users to share files during voice chats.

Whoa, that can't be good.

Today, Gartner released worldwide handset sales for second quarter 2011. To be clear these are real sales. IDC and most other analyst firms measure shipments into the channel, not sales to end users, which Gartner does. These aren't good numbers for Microsoft.

Your friend's PC has been hit by malware, and you're trying to help him out. He doesn't have any security apps installed, though, and so normally that means a lengthy browsing session around your preferred vendors, locating and downloading the tools they need.

Unless, that is, you've a copy of the free, portable SSDownloader to hand. It's a small and easy-to-use download manager that can grab your choice of 50 security applications in just a few clicks.

Bloggers with Gizmodo will escape prosecution surrounding the receipt of an iPhone 4 prototype last year, which the site paid for and ultimately reported on. Two other individuals will be charged however, as they allegedly were behind the sale of the device to the blog.

Brian Hogan, 22, of Redwood City, Calif. and Sage Wallower, 28, of Emeryville, Calif. both face one count of the misappropriation of lost property, with Wallower also charged with possession of stolen property. Their arraignment has been set for August 25 according to a statement from San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe.

Yesterday's cat-and-mouse chase, where Apple and Exxon Mobile kept passing one another, didn't last today. Apple's market capitalization surpassed Exxon's early in the day and stayed that way though market close.

Apple's market cap is $337.17 billion, compared to Exxon Mobile's $330.77 billion

It would appear that U.S. companies are ready to abandon WiMAX.

At the end of July, Sprint made the bombshell announcement that it had entered a 15-year partnership with LightSquared to share its network infrastructure with the new network, and that it would essentially be receiving a free LTE network if it agreed to build it on top of its existent towers. Sprint's WiMAX partner Clearwire, has laid out no further plans for its WiMAX expansion, and also has committed to incorporating LTE into its network, and eventually upgrading to LTE-Advanced several years down the road.

Mark this day -- Aug. 10, 2011 -- on a calendar, for it may be remembered as a turning point for Apple, when it finally claimed and maintained largest market capitalization and the beginnings of a developer revolt broke iOS mobile apps dominance. What's that axiom about Rome declining at the height of power and rotting from corruption within?

Yesterday, several times, Apple's market valuation topped Exxon, making it the world's biggest company. But Exxon closed a few billion bucks ahead of Apple. As I write early this afternoon, Apple has surged ahead of Exxon and is set to close the day of trading with higher market cap.

As of today, Amazon's Kindle e-reader is available on all platforms. The retailer on Wednesday launched Kindle Cloud Reader, an HTML5 Web app that gives users browser-based access to their Kindle library and the Kindle store on platforms that have no dedicated Kindle app, such as Linux and ChromeOS.

Similar to the Amazon MP3 Cloud Player, Kindle Cloud Reader gives users the option to read their e-books while connected, or to cache content to their local machine for offline consumption, and the bookstore has been integrated into the web app's experience.

If the security of your system depends on users making intelligent security decisions then you're basically doomed. After all these years of experience with end users on the Internet we know that they can't be trusted to make those decisions correctly. At least not often enough.

That's why the best security technologies are the ones that happen in spite of the user. These have been a focus for Microsoft over the last 10 years and remain the last, best hope of userdom.

PC shipments have been downright glum over the last couple quarters, with tablets (c`mon, friggin' iPad) sucking away consumer dollars. But that hasn't stopped Windows 7's advance, which is getting a boost from the huge corporate Windows XP install base moving onward. Today, Gartner predicted -- and, frankly, it's no shocking palm reading -- that Windows 7 will become the "leading operating system" this year.

Yeah, tell me something less obvious than my nose. But summer is a slow season even for analyst firms. Gartner needs to say something, so customers will keep buying those expense reports and that journalists (yeah, like me) write about the data -- lest somebody forget Gartner still exists.

Over the last couple of years, companies have come to view me as a writer who mostly covers Android. I suppose it's pretty true, but I like to think that I'm not exhibiting any sort of bias toward it, but rather just covering Android stories because there are simply more companies utilizing it than any other mobile OS, and more interesting stories are born from it every week because of this.

At any rate, I get pitched A LOT of Android gear, and trust me on this one, most of it is not worth even talking about, much less using.

The Mac and PC versions of Boxee provide a wonderfully versatile means of accessing your media collection -- music, photos and movies -- in a delightful interface. The app can be used in conjunction with your computer, or linked to your TV and stereo. Now there is an iPad app available that brings the flexibility of the desktop software to Apple's tablet. Boxee for iPad has been unleashed, and it has plenty to offer.

The idea behind the iPad app is very much the same as the desktop software, although this time around there is an even greater emphasis placed on streaming media. As is almost expected of any app these days, Boxee for iPad integrates with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This is not just so that you can interact with your friends, but also so that you can access videos that have been posted to these sites in the same app you will use to access the rest of your media collection.

Piriform has released the third public beta of its forthcoming CCleaner for Mac. Based on the popular Windows version, CCleaner for Mac offers various cleaning tools for parts of the operating system, and is a freeware release.

Beta 3's headline feature is that it introduces support for Mac OS X Lion, but it also includes a number of new cleaning options, including Google Chrome and Firefox 6, plus a selection of system caches.