Not that the rumor mill ever slows down, but the arrival of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet seems to have spurred unconfirmed reports that both Apple and Amazon are working on updates to their own tablet lines. “Smaller for the iPad, thinner for the Kindle,” so go the rumors. Time will tell, but remember, video on iPods was once debunked, y’know.
While tablet touchscreens seem to be popular in the 7- to 10-inch range, Microsoft is also betting big with its purchase of Perceptive Pixel, which makes touchscreens up to 82 inches in size. Hopefully, Microsoft can lower the price down from the current $80,000 to grab some new customers. The company also confirmed this week that PC and tablet computers running its brand-new Windows 8 operating system will arrive in late October.
Apple is also rolling into a new Mac OS X release, passing along the golden master for Mac OS X 10.8 (Cougar, er, Mountain Lion) to developers. This usually means that the system will show up in the Mac App Store within a few weeks — plenty of time to hit up the Roaring Apps Compatibility Table page to make sure al your mission-critical Mac programs play nice with the new cat.
Google is paying the price for blowing by the privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser. And the price is $22.5 million to the Federal Trade Commission for that little indiscretion. (On the topic of Google, if you’re already fretting about next year’s announced demise of the iGoogle portal project, check out PC World’s pages for three alternatives, plus two more.)
So much for the DNSChanger Trojan that was supposed to knock hundreds of thousands of people and their infected computers off the Internet this week. The security company F-Secure estimated that about 47,000 computers in the US were still infected with the malware. If you think you may be one of them, check out these instructions. On a more annoying security note, some phish factory is spewing fake account-billing notices from United Parcel Service. (UPS is ON it.)
Mobile may be grabbing a lot of the gameplay these days, but don’t count out the consoles, with their motion controllers and other new forms of inventive interaction. On the horizon: the new Android-based Ouya console, which sports an attractive $99 price tag. (It also has a Kickstarter page with an infovid.)
Ah, game consoles. You always remember your first.
