Microsoft has announced that they will be launching the beta version of Windows 8, called the Consumer Preview on Wednesday, February 29 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The fact that Windows 8 has been designed from the grounds up for tablets suggests why Microsoft would want to announce its next operating system at a mobile event.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s application store for the Windows 8 is also expected to go live on the same day. As you may know, the Windows Marketplace will be the only place to download Metro-style apps on Windows 8. Read more »

The OneNote Mobile app has been available for some time now on Windows Phone and iOS but it has now finally arrived on Android as well. Functionality-wise it is identical to the iOS version. You log in to your Windows Live account and the app will sync all your OneNote items automatically. You can then also access these notes while the phone is offline.

The OneNote Mobile app for Android is free but like the iOS version you will only have access to all the features till the first 500 notes. After that you can only view, delete and sync your notes, unless you pay $4.99 to be able to create and edit notes again.

The OneNote Mobile app is now available worldwide for device running Android 2.3 and higher and can be downloaded from here.

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Olympus has announced the first model in its new OM-D series of Micro Four Thirds camera, the Olympus OM-D E-M5. It features a delightfully retro design, similar to the other Micro Four Third cameras from Olympus. Olympus claims that the E-M5 is the world’s first camera to feature 5-axis image stabilization and has the world’s fastest autofocusing system.

The EM-5 features a 16.1 megapixel, Live MOS sensor, built-in 120fps refresh rate, high resolution electronic viewfinder, dustproof and splashproof magnesium allow body, tilting, 3.0-inch OLED touchscreen, RAW image capture and 1080p60 video recording. Read more »

After Sony, Panasonic and Nikon have had their go, I was starting to wonder when Canon was going to open its big bag of cameras and shower us with an unnecessarily large number of point-and-shooters. But it looks like I don’t have to wonder any more because Canon has just gone ahead and announced no less than eleven cameras.

Let’s start with the more interesting ones, that is the PowerShot ELPH 530 HS ($349.99; pictured above) and the ELPH 320 HS ($279.99). The main difference between the two is that the former has a 10.1 megapixel sensor and 12x optical zoom whereas the latter has a 16.1 megapixel sensor and 5x optical zoom. Both cameras, however, have a 3.2-inch touchscreen display and more importantly, Wi-Fi for sharing your images. Read more »

Nikon has officially announced the new D800 full-frame DSLR camera, something that was first leaked back in November. The new camera has a 36.3 megapixel (7360 x 4912) FX-format, CMOS sensor, the highest resolution sensor on any Nikon camera so far. The sensor’s size is 35.9 x 24mm, which is almost the same as the one on the D4, which is 36.0 x 23.9mm. But then the D800 has more than twice the resolution of the D4′s sensor (16.6 megapixel) so the actual pixels are going to be half the size, which does worry me a bit about the low-light performance of the camera. However, I’ll reserve my judgement till I see some high-resolution sample images.

The other important features of the D800 include Full HD 1080p video recording at 30/25/24p with stereo sound, ISO range of 100-6400 (expandable to 25,600), 4 fps burst rate, Advanced Scene Recognition System with 91,000-pixel RGB sensor, EXPEED 3 image processor and a 3.2-inch, 921k dot LCD. Read more »

Continuing its ongoing ‘The Next Big Thing’ series of ads designed to ruthlessly mock the iPhone-line-waiters comes what seems to be the final chapter. But this is no ordinary ad, it is the Super Bowl ad, which is a pretty big deal in the US as millions of people watch these games.

So is the ad any good? Well, I’ll leave that for you to decide. This time, however, Samsung is using it to advertise the Galaxy Note instead of the Galaxy S II. I’m using the term ‘advertise’ loosely here because you barely see what the phone is capable of in it. Then again, that hardly seemed to be the point of these ads to begin with. You can check out the ad for yourself after the break. Read more »

A screenshot from the upcoming build of Windows 8 has been leaked and although it seems similar to the developer preview available right now, conspicuous by its absence is our long time friend, the Windows Start button.

The Windows Start button, which took the form of an orb since Vista, has been around since the days of Windows 95, so it would feel a bit strange for any long time Windows user to not find it in its usual place in the corner of your display when he or she upgrades to Windows 8. However, even if Microsoft may have done away with the actual button, some of its functionality will still be available to the user. Read more »

In a rather embarrassing blunder, Motorola has admitted to selling refurbished Xooms to new owners without wiping the data off of them, left there by their previous owners. The ‘affected’ devices include those that were resold through Woot.com between October and December 2011. This includes about a 100 devices out of the total 6200 devices resold by Motorola so far.

To make up for this gaffe, Motorola will give previous owners of the affected tablets a complimentary two-year membership of Experian’s ProtectMyID Alert to mitigate any risks. This applies to those who returned their Xooms between March and October 2011. Those who bought these refurbished devices will be getting a $100 American Express gift card. All you have to do is ship the device back to Motorola (they’ll pay for it) and then they will wipe it clean for you and send it back. Read more »

The malware situation on Android has been discussed to death, to the point where there are now more articles written on it than the actual malware. Having said that it is still a very serious issue and Google understands this better than anyone. So they have announced a new service called Bouncer.

Bouncer is basically a program that automatically check newly submitted apps. However, there is no App Store or Windows Marketplace like vetting or approval process. Developers submit their apps as usual, which then appear on the Market and Bouncer then checks these applications to see if they are malicious. Read more »

Google has updated the Google Docs app for Android and introduced the much needed offline access support for documents. Now, you can mark a document for offline viewing and the app will download it to your device. You can set the app to automatically update the offline documents when the device is connected to Wi-Fi or you can also manually refresh the document at any time.

Another change brought by the update is an improved experience on tablets. Read more »

Amazon has announced its Q4, 2011 results. The positive news is that the net sales are up by 35% to $17.43 billion compared to last year, helped no doubt by the truckload of Kindles that Amazon shipped. Although they did not release specific numbers, Amazon did mention that during the nine-week holiday period, Kindle sales increased by 177 percent over last year, most probably due to the new low-price Kindle and the Kindle Fire, which has been quite a big hit.

Unfortunately, though, as Apple will tell you, selling products at a low price isn’t the best way to earn money. This means all those $199 Kindle Fires would have had a major role to play in the drop of net income for Amazon, which was down by 58% over last year. Read more »

After Sony and Panasonic launched their new point-and-shoot cameras, Nikon was probably feeling left out of all the fun, so they too launched a whole bunch of new cameras, nine to be precise.

The first of the lot is the new Coolpix P510, which comes with a massive 46x optical zoom, the highest for any point-and-shoot camera in the world. Considering how even the tiniest shake gets magnified when you zoom in, it will be interesting to see how the camera copes with that at the maximum zoom level. Read more »

Point-and-shoot cameras may be a dying breed but companies sure aren’t going to give up that easily. Yesterday, Sony announced three new point-and-shoot cameras (oddly after predicting the aforementioned impending death of the category) and now it’s Panasonic’s turn.

The new range includes six new Lumix cameras, the ZS20, the ZS15, the TS4, the TS20, the FX80 and the LS6. The ZS20 (TZ30 outside the US) has a 14.1 megapixel, 1/2.33-inch CMOS sensor sensor and 24mm wide angle lens with 20x optical zoom. Panasonic claims that it is actually the world’s slimmest 20x zoom camera. The ZS20 can also do 1080p60 video recording and has built-in GPS. This camera will be available in March for $349.99. Read more »

Google’s Android Developers program has just landed on Google+. It’s a bit strange that it took so long because they have had a Twitter profile for a while now.

The new Google+ profile is meant for “Android developers everywhere to meet, share, and connect with the people behind the Android developer experience”. Read more »

The hit mobile game Cut the Rope has now landed on your desktop browser. The game developers have partnered with Microsoft to release the game for their Internet Explorer 9 browser. Having said that, the game works just fine on other browsers too.

This version of the game seems to be identical to the one that we saw for Windows 8. It uses a landscape layout unlike the mobile versions. Right now, you only have 25 levels available, with the last seven only available if you pin the game through IE9 to your Windows 7 taskbar. Additional levels are expected to arrive soon. Read more »