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LG has launched its Android Wear-powered G Watch around the world. The smartwatch can be ordered from Google Play and purchased at retailers in the United States, Canada, France, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Japan and South Korea. In 15 other countries -- i...

Mozilla showcased the latest developments in its plan to offer inexpensive smartphones running the open source Firefox OS at the Mobile Asia Expo this week in Shanghai. They include reference designs for production in India; plans to launch the smartphones in India within the next few months; the ad...

Samsung this week officially launched its long-anticipated Tizen phone, at the Tizen Developer Conference being held in San Francisco through Wednesday. One description of Tizen is that it's an open source Linux-based operating system from Samsung -- but that might be open to debate. The Samsung Z T...

The volunteers who developed Tails, the open source operating system used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, this week released v1.0. This is the 36th stable release of the OS since the first public version, then called "Amnesia," was released in June 2009. Various security and bug fixes have been i...

The consumer electronics industry has a secret ingredient: the Tizen operating system. It is alive and well and may control a device you now use or the next one you buy. That might surprise some early adopters who watch eagerly for the next bleeding-edge electronics device. Many of those who have he...

A new Ubuntu Linux desktop line -- Ubuntu 14.04, known as "Trusty Tahr" -- lacks much in the way of new features or eye-popping special effects. You will find, however, a fresh batch of improvements in what is already a solid distro family of desktop and server implementations. Canonical continues i...

It's been just barely a week since Google's Android Wear project made its initial debut, but already one major maker of wearable devices has snubbed the new platform. Sony this week said it will stick with its own Android-based SmartWatch platform for wearables instead. Consumer electronics manufa...

Google on Wednesday released a developer preview for Android Wear, a day after announcing the project, which Android head honcho Sunder Pichai teased at SXSW earlier this month. The preview, which includes a software development kit, an Android emulator and a preview support library, is for develo...

The Android operating system, which Google touts as open, isn't. Google imposes strict restrictions on smartphone manufacturers and app developers in its Android mobile application distribution agreement, or MADA, according to excerpts of documents revealed by Ben Edelman, an associate professor at ...

Good or bad, useful or not, implementation of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and Microsoft's Secure Boot extension might well foul the fuel driving consumer migration to the Linux desktop. I have extensive practice with installing various Linux distros on older and new computers. However,...

Consumers might soon have access to cheaper, more talented smartphones that could challenge the market dominance of Android and iOS. At least that is the promise from the Tizen Association. The growing group of phone makers and application developers recently launched a partner program with 36 compa...

Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there. If your 2-year-old, or so, phone or tablet seems a bit sluggish compared with the speed at wh...

Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there. If your 2-year-old, or so, phone or tablet seems a bit sluggish compared with the speed at wh...

It's not all photo apps and more apps when it comes to taking photographs with an Android smartphone -- there are some basics that you need to know, unique to smartphones, that have nothing to do with imaging apps. If you're finding that you're migrating from a dedicated digital camera and taking mo...

The first reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch have hit the Internet and they are generally tepid. However, "I'm not sure how anyone can give it a rating of anything until it is put through its paces over time by consumers actually using it in real-life situations," said Larry Chiagouris, a...

The Cyanogen free and open source Android firmware project on Wednesday announced that it had received $7 million in a Series A round of funding in April. The investment came from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. "What will change is our capabilities, our speed, and our size," wrote Cyanogen...

There's something eternally compelling about the ages-old story of David and Goliath, and it's one we've seen play out time and time again in modern form in the tech world. We've seen Samsung's Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab surge in popularity to challenge Apple's iPhone and iPad, respectively; we've seen...

Acer's Smart Display DA220HQL is a 21.5-inch all-in-one touchscreen released earlier this year that runs the Android operating system with a wireless keyboard and mouse and has the potential to change your desktop computing habits. I have adjusted my file handling and computing routines to adapt to ...

Google has refreshed its music app. It's a big deal, because Google has introduced custom radio and an a la carte music streaming service, All Access, for an introductory price that's $2.00 cheaper than a la carte streaming leader Spotify. Fee-based Spotify, Rdio and now Google Play Music All Access...

The Fedora Project is perhaps one of the hallmark Linux distributions. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, the commercial developer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's investment in the Fedora community is collaborative. As such, Fedora Linux releases often provide RHEL developers with a field...