Alexa is poised for a major breakout. Over the past few months, Amazon’s AI assistant has expanded to the iPhone in the Amazon app, Android with the Huawei Mate 9, and gotten a camera upgrade with the fashion-minded Echo Look. But a new leak suggests Amazon has even bigger plans for Alexa. To read this…
Amidst a budding controversy surrounding the module system planned for Java, Oracle’s chief Java architect, Mark Reinhold, lashed out today at Red Hat and IBM’s opposition, saying the companies are just guarding their own self interests. In an open letter to the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Commitee published Friday morning, Reinhold was highly critical…
In a slowing PC market, Chromebooks siphoned market share away from Windows PCs in 2016 as their popularity grew outside the education market. Chromebook shipments grew by a stunning 38 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Gartner estimated 9.4 million Chromebooks shipped, compared to 6.8 million units in 2015. The number is just a fraction…
The few Galaxy S8 and S8+ models that were seeing red shouldn’t do so for much longer. T-Mobile is the first to push out a fix for the strange tint that appeared on some users’ new phones. It was a busy week for updates on other fronts, with the monthly patch out for Google’s devices…
Unsurprisingly, the Android tablet market on the decline. You don’t have to be an analyst to see that usage is dramatically down, and a new report confirms that very fact. But that’s not stopping Motorola from trying to resuscitate it. According to Android Police, Motorola is working on a new Moto tablet, it’s first in…
Microsoft’s hardware partners will flood the market with Windows Mixed Reality headsets by the holiday season this year, offering up a new way to enjoy Windows 10. A Windows Mixed Reality headset from Acer is already being seeded to select developers by Microsoft, but isn’t available to consumers yet. So far three PC makers —…
It could put an end to end-to-end encryption in services such as WhatsApp: The U.K. government wants telecommunications providers to help it tap their customers’ communications, removing any encryption the provider applied. The government’s desires are set out in a draft of the regulations obtained by Open Rights Group (ORG), which campaigns for digital civil…
Over the past year, a group of attackers has managed to infect hundreds of computers belonging to government agencies with a malware framework stitched together from JavaScript code and publicly available tools. The attack, analyzed by researchers from antivirus firm Bitdefender, shows that cyberespionage groups don’t necessarily need to invest a lot of money in…
In America, landlines aren’t the norm anymore. A recently released survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PDF) estimates that during the second half of 2016 50.8 percent of U.S. households were wireless only. That’s up from 48.3 percent during the same time period in 2015—a rise of 2.5 percentage points. The story…
Facebook is on track to surpass 2 billion monthly active users (MAU) before the end of this summer. The company ended the first quarter of 2017 with 1.94 billion MAUs and 1.28 billion people using the social network every day. While the monthly user base grew 17 percent year-over-year, daily usage jumped at a slightly…