Latest Technology News

Canadian smartphone pioneer Research in Motion announced a refreshed product lineup with five new BlackBerry smartphones that will be the first crop of devices capable of running the new BlackBerry 7 OS.

RIM hasn't exactly been having the best time with BlackBerry recently. The formerly leading smartphone brand has been rapidly losing market share to Android and iOS, and the repeatedly delayed BlackBerry Playbook tablet has reportedly missed sales targets by a mile. RIM stocks lost over 50% of their value in the month of June, and most recently the company had to begin laying off 10% of its workforce.

With hacking becoming an increasing concern as of late with the work of decentralized groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec making headlines, concerns over state-sponsored intrusions has abated. McAfee has brought those fears back to the forefront thanks to a whitepaper released on Wednesday.

McAfee says that it has uncovered a massive hacking operation that has targeted at least 72 government agencies, companies, and organizations in 14 countries since 2006. Worse yet, McAfee has reason to believe a single foreign government may be behind the attacks.

Yes, they are. But I think it's the right decision.

I recently acquired an iPad -- 16GB, 3G with an AT&T data plan. After three days of use I found myself thinking about all the things I wanted to do with it but could not simply because it's a mobile OS and is primarily used for content consumption and not content creation. That's not to say there are not content creation apps for the iPad because there are. I'm simply saying that the majority use for this device is content consumption; and it does it very well.

SUPERAntiSpyware 5 has just been released, in what the authors are calling "our most significant update ever". This isn't just marketing hype, either, just about every area of the new build has been enhanced and improved.

This starts with the revamped interface, which no longer hides its functionality behind a host of buttons. Easier access to key features means you can now launch the scan you need in a couple of clicks.

According to Xinhuanet (the official Chinese news agency) "Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday".

This is an old story and you could see it coming for Foxconn. A few months ago when I talked about the problem of labor conditions at Foxconn, where products for Apple, Sony, Nokia and others are made, I suggested that a need to improve labor conditions might end up with a lot of jobs being eliminated. This seems to be the case.

One year ago, the Federal Communications Commission began a widespread test of American broadband service providers to see if consumers were getting what they paid for.

It packaged together a handful of free network diagnostic tools that let users check the downlink/uplink speeds and latency of their broadband network provider and then submit it to the commission for review. It also launched a campaign called TestmyISP.com; and conducted a hardware-based test of wireline broadband performance with Whitebox maker SamKnows.

With the focus lately being on the security holes within iOS, media attention on flaws within Android has subsided. That ended Monday as security firm CA revealed a new Trojan, aimed at the mobile OS, that records the details of incoming and outgoing calls as well as the actual audio itself.

There are already Android Trojans in the wild that have the capability to store call information. This Trojan in particular however stores the audio of the phone call in .amr format on the SD card within the device. Worse yet, it appears to store a configuration file in the phone's memory, complete with remote server details.

Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, aliens with anal probes, and Mac malware: long-rumored, but short on confirmed sightings. Until recently.

In May we had our first genuine Mac malware outbreak with Mac Guard a.k.a. MacDefender and a bunch of other names. It followed the tried-and-true Windows malware method of fake anti-malware software. Once installed, it caused a lot of problems and then demanded money to solve them. Apple created a signature check system that can't really work in the long run, but within a few weeks the attacks ran their course. They weren't followed up, at least not in a big way.

It's hard to imagine, but Windows 8 beta could come as soon as next month's BUILD conference. One of the new features it looks likely to sport is the stripped-back Metro UI interface, which debuted in Windows Phone 7, and which will ensure Windows 8 works across a variety of devices including smartphones and tablets, not just computers.

As details of Windows 8's features start to emerge, programmers and enthusiasts are busy coding their own mock ups of how these new features will work. And if you'd like to see how Metro UI might look on your Windows 7 PC, check out Pulmon Beta 3, which was released just a few days ago.

Apple's tech support ain't what it used to be, says Vocalabs, a company that measures customer satisfaction by interviewing customers immediately after service calls, retail store visits or IVR (automated) interactions. According to the company's report for the first six months of 2011, Apple continued to deliver better telephone support than HP and Dell, but its customer satisfaction dropped 15 points in one year.

"Apple has long had a reputation for exemplary service and support, and consistently tops rankings of service among consumer electronics companies. While the company is still ahead of the pack in many metrics, it has experienced a significant--in some cases precipitous--drop over the past year," Vocalabs' report says.

It's finally here: Skype for iPad has released on Apple's App Store. After months of waiting, iPad users can finally ditch the iPhone app and download this optimized build that takes full advantage of the extra screen real estate provided on the iPad.

Skype for iPad features everything you'll find in the iPhone app, including messaging and voice calls as well as video chat, but takes advantage of the superior hardware of the iPad 2 to deliver full-screen video chats using both front and back video cameras.

AVG's Internet Security 2011 offers all the major components you'd expect from a security suite: antivirus, a decent spam filter, effective capable firewall, browsing protection, identity protection and a range of interesting extras. Sounds great, and it's just as good in real life.

Plainly AVG wasn't satisfied, though, and the company has now released an enhanced version, AVG Premium Security 2011, which extends the original suite with a couple of additional functions. And the most important of these, by a considerable distance, is AVG Identity Alert.

Google on Tuesday released Chrome 13, adding its Instant Pages functionality to the stable build of its browser for the first time. The feature had been part of beta builds of Chrome since June, and aims to make surfing to top search results in Google much faster.

Instant Pages works by preloading the first search result after entering a query into Google. Of course, the functionality would truly be helpful when the result is what the user is looking for: all other search results on the page would not be preloaded.

Sync is the killer application for the connected world, an assertion I've been making for about six years now. With iCloud, Apple has the chance to catch up sync ground lost after becoming an early leader and falling away.

Late yesterday, iCloud launched in beta to developers. The service is slated to release this autumn, presumably concurrent with iPhone 5 and iOS 5.

Windows XP still has a solid three years left before it reaches End of Support (EOS), the point at which the formidable desktop operating system will be forced into retirement.

On the 24th of this month, we'll be celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Windows XP's release to manufacturing, and even though it seems like it will be a "this is your life" kind of retirement retrospective, the operating system still has a massive userbase in the enterprise.