Latest News About Mobile Technology

Microsoft has announced today that the Windows 8 development goes according to schedule and shed some more details on the actual market availability of the platform. Windows 8 will reach the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) stage in the first week of August. This means the OS will be ready by then and Microsoft will seed it to its OEM partners.

Microsoft has announced its intention to acquire Yammer for $1.2 billion in cash. The company will be part of the Microsoft Office Division and will be headed by the division President Kurt DelBene. For those who are not aware, Yammer is an enterprise social networking service. Think of it as Facebook for the corporations. The company was started four years ago and currently has 5 million corporate users, which includes employees from 85 percent of the Fortune 500 companies.

No, this is not the big announcement Mozilla will be making at tomorrow’s Google I/O, although judging by the new features, it easily might have been. Instead, Mozilla has ditched the Beta and launched v.14.0 of its native Firefox browser for Android. Just as usual, some bugs are squashed and stability is improved, but most notably, the look of the browser UI has changed.

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the Surface and Surface Pro tablets at its event in Los Angeles and now the full keynote has been uploaded online for your viewing pleasure. The event goes on for about 48 minutes and demonstrates the cool Touch Cover and Type Cover and how they function on the Surface and Surface Pro.

Opera released the latest version of its desktop browser, Opera 12, which brings support for themes. Setting a new theme for your Opera browser will add a new background image on the speed dial and new tab page and would also change the colors the tab bar and the browser chrome. It’s not a terribly unique feature, with both Firefox and Chrome being able to do this for a long time now but it’s good to see it arrive on Opera as well and the implementation is actually pretty good. The few themes available on Opera’s site also look pretty good.

Microsoft has sent out invites to the press for an event that they are holding in Los Angeles on Monday, June 18, just a couple of days before the Windows Phone Summit. Although the subject of the event has not been officially announced, AllThingsD believes that it will be about Windows RT. According to sources outside the company, AllThingsD found out Microsoft will be showcasing some of the devices that will be running Windows RT, presumably devices that were announced at Computex last week, and also talk about some of the programs and services that will run on these devices.

yesterday, Microsoft kicked off E3 2012 with some major announcements for the Xbox 360, the best selling console in the world. The first of the bunch is Internet Explorer for Xbox. It’s surprising that until this point there was no web browser on the Xbox, even though its rival PS3 had one since launch. Microsoft is now making up for it by bringing the Metro version of IE that we saw in Windows 8 on the Xbox. It will have full integration with Kinect so you would be able to use your voice to control it instead of using cumbersome keyboards in your living room. Next up is something called SmartGlass, which works similar to Apple’s AirPlay feature. Basically it allows you to stream content wirelessly from your mobile devices to your Xbox, which will then display them on the big screen. It then turns your mobile device into a remote control for your Xbox and also shows information regarding the content that is being currently being streamed. SmartGlass also lets you us...

Just like we said yesterday, Microsoft has released the Windows 8 Release Preview on the stipulated date. As with the Consumer Preview, you can download the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant that analyzes your computer and provides a smaller download or you can download the full 32-bit or 64-bit ISO files. Among the major changes in this new version includes a bunch of new apps that include Bing Travel, News and Sports apps, as well as Gaming and Music Xbox apps that integrate with your Zune pass. The Mail, Photos and People apps have also been updated

A lot of people have complained about the discrepancy between the two modes on Windows 8. As you may know, Windows 8 will ship with the new Metro UI as well as a standard desktop mode for legacy apps. While the Metro side of the OS looks modern and fresh, the desktop version looks almost similar to older versions of Windows and the two couldn’t be more different. Microsoft has heard your complaints and although they won’t be redesigning the desktop side in Metro they have made some changes to the existing UI to be more in sync with the Metro design language.

Microsoft has released the list of editions that Windows 8 will be sold in. As of now, there will be four editions, Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows RT. The first three will be available for PCs and tablet users running x86/64 processors and will be on sale whereas Windows RT will be exclusively for PCs and tablets running on the ARM platform and will not be sold but would rather ship built into the devices. According to Microsoft, all editions of Windows 8 offer a no-compromise experience, which has sort of become their slogan with Windows 8

In fact, as we told you earlier, the company is also introducing its new , which will allow customers to use the products by paying smaller monthly fees, as opposed to spending a large chunk of cash upfront buying them

Obviously feeling the heat of Google Drive, Dropbox has brought an update for its service, featuring a new Photos page for its web interface. And that’s not all, if you update now and use the auto upload feature for pictures and videos you can get up to 3 GB of free storage

Google has just released a new version of its Chrome web browser, giving it some extra weapons in the battle for dominance of the browser market. Three and a half years after its initial release, Google Chrome hits version number 18 and brought further-reaching GPU-acceleration support and extended WebGL support. Google Chrome 18 enables GPU-accelerated Canvas2D on Windows and Mac computers with a discrete GPU or an APU, which should lead to a dramatic performance improvement in some web applications. Gaming has been specifically mentioned, but all graphic-intensive web apps should feel better on the new Chrome browser

As of today, the long-awaited Adobe CS6 suite is available for purchase online. The beta versions of some of the products have been around for some time but it’s time for the real thing with all the promised magic tricks. The Adobe Creative Suite 6 is one of the most major releases in recent times Photoshop CS6, for instance, brings about 60% more feature changes than CS5. Visually, there are over 1,900 icons that have been replaced, and the engineers have also tweaked alignment, cursors, buttons, layout and even grammar throughout the application. And there’s a lot more

One of the best features of Chrome is the ‘Most visited sites’ view in the new tab, where the browser presents you with a grid of thumbnails of sites you visit most often. This is a derivation of the speed dial function in Opera, that allows the user to manually set any site they want as a speed dial on the new tab page for quick access. Mozilla has recently taken to borrowing every good feature from Chrome in their new release. The recently released Firefox 12 brought the silent update feature. With the Firefox 13 beta, Mozilla has added the most visited sites to Firefox’ new tab page