Operating System | featured news

Android Open Accessory creates platform APIs for standard devices, such as phones and lightbulbs. With this, Android joins the ever-growing list of protocols (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Insteon, X10) competing for attention in the connected home.

"Mango," the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.

Microsoft announced today via its Windows Phone Developer Blog the release of a new tool designed to help developers migrate iPhone applications to the Windows Phone 7 platform.

In the nature of Microsoft product updates, Window 7 is entering its middle years. Generally, Microsoft comes out with a new update to Windows every three years and Windows 7 is currently 18 months into its game. In that time Microsoft has sold 350M licenses to the operating system making it perhaps the fastest selling software of all time.

Tablet operating system is set to make its debut on Motorola Mobility's Xoom.

Hewlett-Packard showed the fruits of its acquisition of Palm on Wednesday. The technology giant demonstrated a new tablet device and two new smartphones, as well as disclosing plans to bring its webOS software to computers and printers.

Microsoft's dominance is starting to fade as Macs, smartphones and tablets grow more popular.

How long does a Chrome notebook battery last? Eighteen days, in the case of my test model. Sad. I know that this is a beta product, but that is a major fail, even in beta. This is the cloud-computing dream, the Microsoft headache that could challenge the ecosystem from Dell to Firefox.

Microsoft plans to discuss a new version of its Windows operating system that targets low-power devices and adds support for ARM microprocessors.

In the past two weeks, Google has started sending out its pilot notebook for testing. It is little more than a Web browser tucked inside a netbook. Yes, all it does is surf the Web. And it's going to be huge.