Foxconn and Mozilla announced a partnership Monday under which the Chinese electronics manufacturer will build not just Firefox phones, as others have announced, but tablets, too. The Chinese electronics manufacturer plans multiple devices, including tablets and phones, as part of a strategy to supply software and services along with hardware.
Apple's AirDrop tool, which allows OS X users to share files between computers quickly and efficiently, is on its way to the company's mobile platform, a new report claims. Apple is currently in the process of testing AirDrop on iOS 7, 9to5Mac is reporting, citing people who claim to have knowledge of its plans.
Asus has announced the Transformer Book Trio, a notebook that can be separated and used as an Android tablet and desktop PC simultaneously. In its notebook form, the 11.6-inch Transformer Book Trio can switch between Windows 8 and Android. Separated, the 1,920 x 1,080-pixel screen portion acts as an Android tablet, running off its 2.0GHz Intel Atom Z2580 processor.
Windows 8.1, which will be available for download in a preview version on June 26, will feature the good old Start button in desktop mode. Users who dislike the new Modern UI/Metro interface will also be able to boot right to the desktop. While rumors about the return of the Start button had long been making the rounds, Antoine Leblond, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Windows Program Management, made the official announcement on the Windows Blog this morning.
Mozilla and Foxconn have sent around an press event invitation that declares that the two companies will be debuting a new device that runs on a Firefox operating system, according to Focus Taiwan. The event is to take place on June 3. Someone with knowledge of the matter told Focus Taiwan that the new product will most likely be a tablet.
Opera has built a new Web browser from the ground up, and it's available now on Windows and Mac. The new Opera, which the organization is calling Next, its channel for what used to be known as "beta," was built from scratch, it claims. What has resulted is a much cleaner interface and a host of features that Opera says, will make it easier for users to find contents.
Samsung has yet to officially confirm the Galaxy S4 mini, but the smartphone’s brief appearance on the company’s app store yesterday backs up rumors of a summer launch. The listing was spotted and screencapped by TGspot before it was removed. The Galaxy S4 mini appeared with the model number GT-I9195 as part of a line-up of Samsung smartphones on the company’s app store site. The handset is a smaller, cheaper version of Samsung’s fastest selling phone ever, which recently hit 10 million channel sales less than a month after its international launch on April 26.
HTC will sell a Google Edition version of its flagship One smartphone with the stock Android operating system, CNET has confirmed. Word of a version of the phone without its trademark Sense user interface popped up earlier Friday on Geek.com, with a reported time frame of two weeks. HTC is indeed planning to launch the phone, but the only indication of timing was summer, a person familiar with the company's plans told CNET.
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has hit 10 million channel sales one month after its release. The company announced its latest milestone today just eight days after confirming that it had shipped over 6 million units of the S4 since its international launch on April 26. According to Samsung, this is the fastest ever sell rate for any of its smartphones.
Google is enabling a more naturally spoken question-and-answer interface to its search service for people with a new version of Chrome. Google demonstrated conversational search at Google I/O a week ago, a style of search designed to be more like natural human speech than the technically constructed search queries that people often use today to retrieve information from a search engine.