Upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $39.99

We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the “add features” option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade. When you use Windows.com to purchase an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant makes upgrading simple by walking you through the upgrade process step-by-step from purchase to download and then of course installation. The Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant will check to make sure your PC is ready for Windows 8. It will provide a detailed...

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Android Phones Take a Power Trip

You know the old techie joke, right? If you don’t like the Android phones on the market, just wait a minute.     Pogue's Posts   There are dozens of Android phones, and newer, better ones appear every few months. Google subscribes to the Microsoft Windows scheme: write the software, and let other companies build the phones. The result is a lot of choice, but also a lot of fragmentation. There is no one Android phone. Some models can be updated to new Android software, some can’t. A certain app might or might not run on your particular version. That master plan differs quite a bit from the iPhone’s. Apple designs “the whole widget,” as Steve Jobs used to say: both the software and the phone. The result is clean,...

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Apple supplier Foxconn's website hacked

  Apple's controversial Chinese supplier Foxconn was battling on Thursday to contain a security breach after hackers joined the mounting protest. WASHINGTON: Apple's controversial Chinese supplier Foxconn was battling on Thursday to contain a security breach after hackers joined the mounting protest over iPhone factory conditions by leaking the login details of its entire staff. A group calling itself Swagg Security taunted Terry Gou, the chief executive of Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai Industries, by posting his username and password along with a mass of other sensitive information on the PirateBay and Pastebin websites. According to The Guardian, the hack, publicized in a series of Twitter alerts, came as campaigners delivered...

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RIM: BlackBerry OS 10 to rival iOS, Android

  RIm said, "The new operating system could be RIM's answer to other OS software like Windows Phone, Android, iOS and Samsung's Bada." NEW DELHI: Facing competition from smartphone-makers like Samsung and Nokia, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) has chalked out an aggressive plan for India where it will be increasing its footprint to 160 cities, besides launching new devices and the latest Operation System 10 soon. The BlackBerry maker has a presence in 80 cities in the country now and is keen to tap the burgeoning demand for smartphones here. "In terms of expansion, we would like to strengthen our existing presence. As far as new cities are concerned we would like to double our presence this year and go to every city...

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Apple now worth more than Google, Microsoft combined

LONDON: Tech giant Apple's market capitalization is now bigger than the values of Google and Microsoft combined. The iPhone maker's market cap is around 462 billion dollars as of mid-Friday. Tech giant Apple's market capitalization is now bigger than the values of Google and Microsoft combined. Microsoft's is about 257 billion dollars and Google's weighs in at about 197 billion dollars, The Washington Post reports. According to the paper, tech bloggers have been coming up with all kinds of statistics to put Apple's market cap in context. Fortune's Philip Elmer-Dewitt pointed out that Apple's now worth more than the gross domestic product of Sweden, which is 458 billion dollars. According to earlier reports, Apple's revenue...

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Microsoft's India store hacked, usernames & passwords stolen

NEW DELHI: Hackers, allegedly belonging to a Chinese group called Evil Shadow Team, struck at www.microsoftstore.co.in on Sunday night, stealing login ids and passwords of people who had used the website for shopping Microsoft products. While it is troublesome that hackers were able to breach security at a website owned by one of the biggest IT companies in the world, it is more alarming that user details - login ids and passwords - were reportedly stored in plain text file, without any encryption. Following the hack, the members of Evil Shadow Team, posted a message on the Microsoft website saying "unsafe system will be baptized". The story was first reported by www.wpsauce.com. Later, the website seemed to have been taken offline...

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1 of every 3 phones shipped worldwide now is a smartphone

  Sales of computers and TVs may be hurting, but smartphones keep the tech economy chugging along: Worldwide, the smartphone market grew 54.7 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2011, and 1 out of every 3 mobile phones shipped worldwide was a smartphone, says IDC Research. "The launch of Apple's iPhone 4S played a key role in smartphone growth to capture pent-up demand, and smartphone launches from other vendors also provided a broad selection to meet varying preferences and budgets," said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team, in a release. While the iPhone 4S was certainly the leading smartphone in the U.S., it also helped spur sales worldwide, along with high-profile...

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Calibrate your computer's monitor for the best picture

How can you make sure you're getting the best picture on your computer monitor? There are a couple of ways you can go about this, depending on how serious you are about color calibration. If you're an average computer user and just want your colors to match up approximately, there's an easy way to go about this. If you do any photo or video editing, you may need to drop some cash into this process, but we'll get to that in a moment. Let's start with the basics.   Familiarize yourself with your display's controls Before you begin, make sure your display has been on for at least a half-hour (so it's properly warmed up) and is set to its native screen resolution. Even if you use it at a different resolution (and we can't imagine...

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First-time smartphone buyers choose Android over Apple

Apple surged past Samsung and LG to have the best-selling phone brand in the United States, capturing 43 percent of the smartphone market in the last quarter of 2011. But among first-time smartphone buyers, 57 percent purchased Android phones compared to 34 percent who bought iPhones. The information comes from The NPD Group, which said that combined, Android-based phones and the iPhone "accounted for over 90 percent of smartphone sales" in the fourth quarter. “Android has been criticized for offering a more complex user experience than its competitors, but the company’s wide carrier support and large app selection is appealing to new smartphone customers,” said Ross Rubin, executive director, Connected Intelligence for The NPD Group, in...

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Leaked: Nokia Lumia 910

Mobile giant Nokia seems all set to reaffirm its re-entry in the smartphone battle. The company which according to analysts estimates sold 1.3 million Lumina units to operators and retailers globally in 2011, recently unveiled Lumia 900 at Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas. Close on the heels of Nokia 900 announcement, the internet media is abuzz with rumours that the Finnish cellphone maker is readying Lumia's fourth-generation called Lumia 910. According to a Dutch online site Typhone.NL which published the details and later pulled it off, Nokia Lumia 910 is likely to sport a 12 megapixel camera, 1.4 GHz processor, 16GB of storage and HSDPA speed. The phone will reportedly feature a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack touchscreen display...

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Samsung Transparent Smart Window floats Twitter over your garden

Samsung had plenty of smart TVs that it hoped people would stare eagerly at last week at CES 2012, but it was a display you can gaze right through that was arguably the most exciting. Samsung’s Transparent Smart Window, the 22-inch LCD panel can not only show you everything your regular computer display does, but is also clear so that you can look through at what’s outside your home. Samsung actually showed off the transparent display technology back in March 2011, suggesting at the time that it could be used for advertising. Unfortunately that application proved too mundane to catch the public’s attention in quite the way Samsung hoped for, hence the return of the tech last week and the far more exciting prospect of your double-glazing...

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iPad 3 debut in March plus “strange” February event tip sources

Reports of an iPad 3 reveal this month may have been premature, sources now claim, with Apple tipped to unveil its third-gen tablet in March but squeeze in a “strange” event before then. Although a February press event is still apparently on the calendar, Macotakara now says, it won’t see the debut of the new iPad: instead, that will take place the following month, reducing the expected time between the big reveal and sales starting. The rumors leave the purpose of the February event unclear. Details on the February press gathering are unknown, and only described as “strange”; however, it’s said to be a non-product related event. That could mean services, similar to the iBooks event earlier this month. The new iPad, meanwhile, will be shown...

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Online petition asks Apple for 'ethical' iPhone

An online petition asking Apple to "address dangerous conditions in factories" making the next iPhone has gotten 35,000 signatures in the first 24 hours of the effort. “I use an iPhone myself. I love it, but I don’t love having to support sweatshops, and neither do millions of other Apple consumers,” said Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of the group behind the petition, SumOfUs. The working conditions at Apple factories in China were detailed in a recent New York Times article. In the article, a former Apple executive is quoted as saying, “We've known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they're still going on…Why? Because the system works for us.”   SumOfUs, which describes itself as a "movement...

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Firefox 10 now available for download

Firefox 10, the latest version of Mozilla's popular Internet browser, is now available for download. To download Firefox 10, you simply have to hit the update button on your browser or head to the Mozilla downloads page.   The latest version of the browser doesn't appear to be incredibly different from its predecessor — which was released a little bit over a month ago. Firefox 10 offers an automatically hidden "forward" button, better add-on management and compatibility, some stability fixes, and tweaks which will make life easier for developers. If you're wondering why on earth there's a new version of Firefox available already, remember that Mozilla is working on a "rapid release process," as announced in July 2011. This means...

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Android users most likely to use phones on toilet

The next time an Android user mocks your shiny new iPhone or BlackBerry, just smile, nod ... and avoid touching his phone. Because odds are quite high that the device has been used while its owner sat on the toilet at some point — and who knows if he even washed his hands. According to a survey conducted by marketing agency 11mark, about three-fourths of Americans with mobile phones admit that they have occasionally used their devices in the bathroom. 74 percent of men and 76 percent of women reported that they took their mobile phones into the bathroom, so there wasn't a large gender gap. Instead it was their device types which divided the toilet texters (and talkers) from those who prefer to disconnect while in the lavatory. advertisement...

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