Windows

The profile of Chromebooks is likely to get a boost after the world’s largest PC manufacturer, Lenovo, announced its first Chromebooks aimed at the consumer market. Pricing starts at $279.

Lenovo, best known for its Windows laptops, launched its first Chromebook in January – but that one was pitched at the education market, selling in bulk to schools and colleges. This is the first time it has pitched a Chromebook directly at consumers – something which may worry Microsoft. Lenovo has 18.6 percent of the PC market, ahead of HP, Dell and Acer … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google has just promoted Chrome 34 to the beta channel, bringing with it a few new features and a lot of new apps/extension APIs for developers. Perhaps the most notable new feature for users on Mac, Windows, and Linux is hands-free Google Voice Search, allowing users to initiate a voice search on Google using the “Ok Google” command without the need of an extension:

• Responsive Images and Unprefixed Web Audio
• Hands-free Google Voice Search in Chrome
• Import supervised users onto new computers
• A number of new apps/extension APIs
• Lots of under the hood changes for stability and performance

While users have been able to download a browser extension for Chrome since November that allows them to activate a voice search with the “Ok Google” voice command (just like on Android), it the native feature without the need of the extension will land for all Chrome users soon. Here’s how to enable it:
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google announced a partnership with virtualization software maker VMware today that will bring Chromebook users access to Windows desktops and apps. The deal means enterprise Chromebook users will have access to Windows apps through VMware Horizon DaaS and an upcoming Chrome Web Store app:

Cloud applications allow flexibility, scalability and security and enable a work-anywhere environment, but many of our customers still use traditional desktop applications. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) helps bridge the gap between the cloud and a traditional desktop by allowing you to run your traditional software in the cloud and have applications appear on your Chromebook similarly to how they run today. An example might be your Windows based accounting application.

It might sound a little bit like Google is admitting that enterprise customers need more than just Chrome apps to get the job done, but it’s also embracing the upcoming end of life for Windows XP and encouraging business customers to upgrade to Chromebooks. Giving businesses access to the Windows apps many rely on is certainly a good argument for upgrading to Chromebooks. In a statement in VMware’s press release, Google’s president of enterprise Amit Singh said “Chromebooks can save businesses about $5,000 per computer when compared to traditional PCs.”
Expand
Expanding
Close

The latest version of Picasa includes an additional bit of software called Google+ Auto Backup, as reported by Google Operating System. The new software can be used to automatically backup photos and videos from user-selected directories to your Google+ account. Interestingly, the app has nothing to do with the Picasa service, even though it ships exclusively with the Picasa app.

The app can save unlimited 2048px photos to your account, or upload full-quality versions at the expense of Google Drive space. It can also intelligently copy media from storage cards and other devices that are attached to the system. Furthermore, the app can be configured to backup all media to a designated location on the local hard drive, putting all of your backed-up media in one convenient place.

You can get the Google+ Auto Backup app by downloading the latest version of Picasa.

With the tablet world continuing to claw away at PC market share, a new report suggests Samsung could launch up to four new tablets in the first quarter of 2014.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google began tightening saved password security in Chrome for Mac almost one month ago. Now, it looks like Windows users will soon be able to join in on the fun. For the second time today, Google’s “Happiness Evangelist” Francois Beaufort is breaking the news. According to Beaufort, the “Reauthentication dialog for passwords” has been added into Chromium and is now ported over to Windows in the latest Chromium build.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google announced today on its Chrome Blog that it is beginning to roll out smarter omnibox suggestions for Chrome users that it says will provide “more timely and contextually relevant suggestions.” The feature has been available for a while in beta and Google noted the improved suggestions are based on websites users recently visited. The new features come alongside the release of the Chrome 29 stable release for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which also brings support for new apps and extensions APIs.

Another new feature coming in Chrome 29 is the ability to reset Chrome back to its original state, disabling all added extensions, through an easy to access option located in Settings:
Expand
Expanding
Close

Last month we reported that Google’s slick new “Google+ Photos” app that launched exclusively on the Chromebook Pixel could possibly be making its way to Mac & PC. The proof came from a newly posted listing on the Chrome Web Store that made references to auto-uploading features specifically for OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, launching the app would give users a “not supported on this platform” error message. While Google has yet to officially launch the Mac and PC versions of the Chrome app, there is a way to bypass the error message and enable the app now.
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google on Tuesday began rolling out Chrome 28 to Windows and Mac users, though the main selling point of the update is only available to the former of those operating systems. With this update, Windows users will begin to see richer notifications than in previous builds. The rich notifications have been available in the beta build of Chrome for Windows for over a month, but only now is it rolling out to all users.

The new notifications offer a way to easily and quickly reply to emails, see calendar alerts, control music, and more. If you miss a handful of alerts, you can open up the new “notification center” to view them all at once.

We’ve designed these notifications to be beautiful, useful and engaging. They can display formatted text and images, and can include actions directly inside the pop-up (so you can respond to that email right away). Missed a bunch of notifications while you were taking a coffee break? No problem — you can open up the notification center to see them all in one place.

Acer’s C710. A bigger, thicker battery and more RAM (compared to Pixel and Samsung Chrombooks)

I’m an Apple snob – I’ve been using MacBook Pros and Airs almost exclusively for over a decade – in fact, it has gotten so bad that I can barely use or figure out Windows anymore. I often find the experience with anti-viruses, updates and crapware infuriating to the point where I’m no longer curious what happens in the Windows world.

On the other hand, I never have a problem jumping on a Chromebook (or Box) because it is almost exactly like using a browser in a desktop OS.  That makes using Chromebooks quick, easy and productive for me. I liked the cheap, ARM-based Samsungs and loved the decked out Pixel even though I’m still not able to give native apps up entirely (Twitter, Skype, iTunes, etc keep pulling me back). But for a second computer to use as either as a backup or special occasion device or for light computer users, I wholeheartedly recommend Chromebooks.

Acer initially had a bad rep in their Chromebook department because the initial offerings seemed to be repurposed Windows netbooks (and the problems that come along with them – including little RAM, bad battery life, HDDs instead of SSDs and cramped plastic-y keyboards). To be fair, I’m going on a few minutes of use at a Best Buy and a bunch of online reviews for those assumptions.

Last month, I finally got my hands on the updated Acer ‘C710-2055’ version which has a 50% bigger battery pack than earlier models, 4 GB of RAM, and an Intel Celeron 847 processor. The price was also bumped to $279 from $199.

So, $80 later, does Acer have a compelling Chromebook here?

Expand
Expanding
Close

Research firm Canalys is out today with its latest report tracking worldwide smart mobile device shipments for Q1 with Android accounting for almost 60% of smart mobile devices shipped by OS. That’s compared to a 19.3% share for Apple and approximately 18.1% for Microsoft. Keep in mind Canalys’s report also includes notebooks, in addition to tablets and smartphones, which account for the majority of Microsoft’s share. When looking at tablets alone, Apple continued its lead with 46.4% share in the quarter, although Canalys warned Apple “lost share to its Android-based rivals for the third consecutive quarter.”

‘Spearheaded by Google and Amazon, the commoditization of the tablet market has happened far quicker than that of the wider PC market,’ said Canalys Senior Analyst, Tim Coulling. ‘Profit margins are being squeezed and vendors without a low cost structure will find it hard to compete. A solid range of must-have accessories and a software and services strategy are vital as vendors will increasingly need to make revenue around their devices.’

When it comes to smartphones, the report has Android at roughly 75.6% of shipments with around 32% of those shipments coming from Samsung. We know Apple sold around 37 million iPhones in the quarter but, as always, we warn that the stats from Canalys don’t include shipped vs sold data. 
Expand
Expanding
Close

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=63u-RG-31B0&list=UUal1Fb7cnd1bE9sMKdFcJcg

On top of officially announcing the launch of Outlook.com today, Microsoft is making the rounds with the press by offering some stats on the newly launched service. While announcing the service has grown to 60 million active users in just six months of the limited preview release, Outlook.com Senior Director Dharmesh Mehta told Bloomberg that a third of those users are ex-Gmail customers. The news follows the launch of Microsoft’s latest Google smear campaign with a series of “Scroogled” ads depicting security and privacy concerns related to Google scanning users’ email to display ads.

While free e-mail isn’t a huge money-maker — Mehta said Outlook.com carries about 60 percent fewer advertisements than Microsoft’s previous Hotmail product — the Redmond, Washington- based company considers it critical to gaining and retaining consumers. Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, has been losing users of its Windows operating system to smartphones and tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad.

According to Mehta, roughly 20 million of Outlook.com’s users  have switched from Gmail and now use the service as their “primary free e-mail account.” There is of course no real way of knowing how many users have actually decided to make the switch, and how many of those users are continuing to use both accounts. As for the Scroogled campaign, Mehta shared that Microsoft is spending “tens of millions” on many TV, online print, and bus ads in the US, as well as TV ads in Europe slated to debut in the coming weeks.

Googler Ami Fischman, a self-dubbed “Watt Wrangler”, just announced a new battery-saving Chrome Stable release.

“We recently enabled GPU-accelerated video decoding for Chrome on Windows,” wrote Fischman on the official Google Chrome blog. “Dedicated graphics chips draw far less power than a computer’s CPU, so using GPU-accelerated video decoding while watching videos can increase battery life significantly.”

Fischman noted test results show batteries last 25 percent longer with GPU-accelerated video decoding switched on. So now, Chrome users on Windows can watch more YouTube videos, as Fischman noted, without worrying about dwindling battery life.

Chrome users can even access website permissions, such as geolocation, much more easily with the new release:

This saves you from having to dig through settings pages to find these permissions. Now, simply click on the page/lock icon next to a website’s address in the omnibox to see a list of permissions and tweak them as you wish.

This latest release also includes an option to send a “do not track” request to websites and web services. The effectiveness of such requests is dependent on how websites and services respond, so Google is working with others on a common way to respond to these requests in the future.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Skatter Tech’s Sahas Katta wrote a blog post yesterday about his Windows Phone challenge experience and explained how he beat the contest using a Galaxy Nexus, but Microsoft employees withheld his prize “just because.”

Katta claimed he beat a “Get Smoked” Windows Phone challenge at the Santa Clara Microsoft Store yesterday. The assigned quest was to “bring up the weather of two different cities” faster than a competing Windows Phone user. Katta cold booted his smartphone as instructed, accessed his unlocked screen, and quickly viewed two separate weather widgets for San Jose and Berkeley that were luckily running on the device’s home screen.

Despite executing the task first, Katta was immediately told the Windows Phone “smoked” him:

I excitedly thought I won out of pure luck. However, I was quickly told that I lost. I asked for a reason and was told Windows Phone won because “it displays the weather right there.” That was rather unclear. I showed her my device which also was showing off the same information with two side-by-side weather widgets on the center home screen. After pressing for a better reason, I was told that Windows Phone won “just because.”

After trying to push for a real answer since I clearly won the contest by their rules, another Microsoft Store employee (possibly a manager) came by after noticing me asking more questions. Thinking on his feet, he quickly gave a ridiculous out-of-thin-air reason that I need to display the weather of different cities in different states and that “my phone could not do that”.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google can now check the University of Pennsylvania off its ever-growing list of ivy leaguers wielding Google Apps for Education, because the school just announced a recent move from Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail to Gmail.

The Philadelphia-based private university ranks No. 5 in National Universities, according to U.S. News and World Report, and it joins over 60 other leading institutions from the nation’s top 100 to use Google Apps. Harvard College, Yale, and Brown University are a few of the more prominent schools to top Google’s list.

Penn changed services after studying student email trends:

“We just saw more than 50 percent of students forward emails from their Hotmail to Gmail accounts and thought it would be more convenient this way,” said Director of Social Sciences Computing and Student Technology Chris Mustazza to The Daily Pennsylvanian.

More information is available below.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Microsoft requested European Union antitrust regulators to probe Motorola Mobility on claims that the United States phone manufacturer is blocking sales of Windows and Xbox products.

“Earlier today, Microsoft filed a formal competition law complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Motorola Mobility and Google,” wrote Microsoft’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel David Heiner in a blog post this morning. “We have taken this step because Motorola is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products.”

Microsoft’s post, “Google: Please Don’t Kill Video on the Web,” lambasted Motorola Mobility for not making industry standard patents available on reasonable and fair terms, and for using those patents to block competitors from shipping products.

The industry apparently agreed many years ago to define common technical standards for everyone to use and build compatible Wi-Fi and video products. However, Heiner contended, Motorola is backtracking on its word and attempting to use standard patents for “killing video on the Web.”

More information is available below.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google rolled out a nice little update for Google Cloud Print support today. While mentioning a number of new features added to the service such as the ability to control printer access, save to Google Docs, and a new tablet-friendly UI for the management page, they also announced site owners can now add the print button element for smartphones and tablets to their sites.

Other new additions to Google Cloud Print– those using the latest release of Chrome on Mac, Windows, or Linux can print any webpage, and Chromebook users will now have access to print preview. Google also notes they look forward to rolling out the service across products and platforms.

These features continue the rollout of GCP, which has connected more than 6 million printers since launch, and added a number of new supported products from companies like HP, Epson, and Kodak. You can get a full list of supported products here, and check out Chrome extensions and apps that currently have access to the service.

Expand
Expanding
Close

In addition to an updated iPad app, VMware has also announced today that the Android version of their mobile View client is officially available for public consumption. Until now, the Android client had only been available as a tech preview.

“Whether you are using a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 or 10.1, an LG/T-mobile G-Slate, a Motorola Xoom or any of the other newly available Honeycomb-based Android tablets or the Cisco Cius, you can get the most of your View desktop on the Android tablet you choose.”

Available as a free download in the Android Market, the VMware View for Android client allows you to access a Windows-based virtual machine running in the VMware View 4.6 (or later) desktop software over WiFi or 3G.

Much of the look and feel of the Android client mirrors the recently updated iPad version. The client supports multitasking, (allowing you to switch to another Android app without losing your current session), and the majority of other features including quick connect VM list, an overall similar UI, embedded RSA soft tokens, and support for the PCoIP display protocol.

The app currently includes support for German, French, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese languages, as well as local input mode as explained below:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Ever wished you could run your favorite iOS app on your Mac? What about your Windows machine or Android device? If creators of new Kickstarter project iEmu reach their funding goals, it may be possible sooner than you think.

iEmu is a new project based on the open-source QEMU emulator, currently accepting donations through Kickstarter, that aims to emulate the S5L8930 chipset used in iPhone 4 and first-gen iPads. It will support a number of platforms including “Linux, Windows, Mac, mobile platforms such as Android, and even on iOS itself”.

The goals of iEmu? Well the end goal is an emulator capable of running “most iPad/iPhone apps” that even supports  peripherals like the compass, accelerometer, and GPS. It would also “be extended with plugins for custom iOS exploration” and able to be reflashed in iTunes.

Expand
Expanding
Close