If you are thinking of buying a laptop for a bargain price, you are likely not going to have much luck with Apple. Discounts on Apple products are scarce and often not too compelling, yet Best Buy is making an exception by selling MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros for up to $700 off, at least for the next 2 days.
Over the last few years, there have been rumors of a cheaper, lower-end iPhone to complement the standard model, in order to appeal to lower-budget consumers. These rumors have intensified over the last few months, leading the analysts at the firm Detwiler Fenton to predict that Apple may ditch the A6 processor, used in the iPhone 5, for a third-party chip such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon, used on other lower-end phones.
Samsung pushes out a quite phenomenal number of handsets during the course of a year, and adding to its mammoth collection is the robust Xcover 2, built purposely for those who may regularly encounter the brunt of the varying terrain in the great outdoors. Unveiled today, it runs on Android Jelly Bean (4.1), boasts a 5-megapixel camera, and offers a 4-inch display. More details after the break.
With Windows 8, Microsoft made some different (if not difficult) choices, especially when it comes to licensing. You would already know that Windows is a closed-source operating system, and hence, when you purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows, you’re basically acquiring a ‘license to use’ for the operating system, and not the OS itself. When the company released Windows 8, one of the approaches that they took to making it even more popular (and combat piracy at the same time) was making it available for lower prices as compared to previous versions. This, at the same time, brought on some tough licensing choices, too. For instance, Microsoft had to do away with native DVD playback capability in Windows 8, because the patent holder for MPEG-2/4 (the video codec required to play said media) charges Microsoft $2 per copy of Windows 7 (the relative figure) sold. They had to cut back on such costs to achieve the pricing point that Windows 8 claims.
We are almost into the end of the first month of the year, and if you are like me, every year you set out to be more productive than the year before, ending needless hours of watching useless online content. Apple is making it just a little bit easier to stick to the promise that you have made to yourself by offering some of the most popular productivity apps on the Mac App Store at a discounted rate in a promotional series known as Get Stuff Done.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday record revenue numbers for the quarter ending on December 31, 2012. The full amount totaled at $21.46 billion, an increase from $20.89 billion in the same quarter in the previous year.
It's the archetypal cycle of an upcoming device; the talk begins, the rumors start to swirl, and after a certain period of time, the supposed 'sightings' begin to emerge. In the case of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, which has already been confirmed as arriving at MWC by the Korean company's Vice President along with a set of leaked specs and images, that point of a leaked image looks to be upon us, and unsurprisingly, it looks almost identical to the Galaxy Tab 10.0.
By means of a press release, Twitter has officially announced Vine, an alternative way for its user base to share video clips through tweets. Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo gave us a glimpse of the services via his Twitter feed only yesterday, and now it would seem it's ready for the official roll-out. Currently, its app is only available for those on iPhone and iPod touch, but will be heading to the Google Play Store, as well as the stores of other platforms in the near future. More details after the break!
As most of you will know by now, Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher will be playing the late, great Steve Jobs in a movie about the Apple co-founder, and although we've seen stills of Kutcher clad in his Jobs get-up, we finally have the opportunity to see him in action. In a clip courtesy of EntertainmentWeekly, he's seen having a heated debate with Josh Gad, who plays Steve Wozniak in the jOBS movie, and although it's only a short snippet, it gives a general idea as to how both actors represent their respective characters.
It's hard to ignore the increasing wave of iWatch concept ideas. It's almost as if the community is not-so-subtly hinting at something, and one designer operating under the Twitter handle @ipavel has come through with one of the best we've seen yet. It combines cutting-edge finesse with a logical, innovative set of features to back it up, and we've got all the details after the break!

