At the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston today, Tami Reller of Microsoft announced that the Windows 8.1 update, previously carrying the Blue moniker, is going to be free.

Microsoft will launch the update through its Windows Store with a public preview becoming available on June 26 (coinciding with the Build conference). In the meantime, the company will unveil the update’s newly added features and fixes. Read more »

NVIDIA surprised everyone at CES with its Project SHIELD handheld gaming console and now the chip maker released the full specs along with launch date and price. SHIELD is powered by NVIDIA’s own Tegra 4 chipset, which packs for Cortex-A15 cores, a fifth power-saver core and a mobile GeForce GPU.

The gadget runs pure Android 4.2 with TegraZone pre-installed – this is a repository of Tegra-optimized games. In an impressive demo, SHIELD ran a ported PlayStation 3 game with better graphics than the PS3. Read more »

CyanogenMod’s official statistics page shows that the custom ROM platform has surpassed the 5 million installs mark.

The official installs amount to around 1,884,851 with almost twice as much for unnofficial (read nightly) installs at 3,196,212 million. Read more »

Nokia just announced the Lumia 925 in an event in London. The phone is basically a thinner, lighter version of the Lumia 920 with aluminum frame and some new software features.

Among the new software features are several new additions to the camera. Even though the hardware seems identical to the one on the Lumia 920, the new features do let you play around with it a bit more and get some interesting results. Read more »

Nokia made its Lumia 925 official and as usual the company released a few of promo videos, highlighting its key selling points.

With this being the new flagship of the Finnish company, it’s unsurprising that the number of clips it higher than usual – five. Read more »

Just like its predecessor, the Canon EOS 5D Mark III is known for its quality video recording performance that rivals professional video cameras. Now, thanks to a little software tweak by Magic Lantern, the Mark III can not just rivals them, but even exceeds them.

Magic Lantern is a custom software for Canon DSLRs that runs alongside Canon’s firmware and adds additional features not present by default. In case of the Canon 5D Mark III, this firmware adds the ability to record RAW video in 24fps at 14-bit quality per frame. Read more »

The BLU Life View is certainly not what passes as a budget-friendly Android smartphone these days. With a 5.7” HD IPS display, quad-core CPU, dual-SIM functionality, and a metal clad body, the handset looks like anything but a device with a sub-$300 price tag.

Roughly a year ago, the BLU Studio 5.3 turned our idea about a budget smartphone upside down. This time around, the Miami based manufacturer launched a trio of Life series smartphones, and the 5.7” View is leading the way as the flagship of the bunch. Read more »

In its continuing quest to streamline its online services, Google brought three of its most popular goodies under the same roof. In its official Gmail blog, the search giant announced that, beginning over the next couple of weeks, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ will merge into the same 15GB pool of shared cloud storage.

The move by Google, allows users to allocate their available storage any way they like between the three services. An updated Google Drive storage page will be updated to show the usage of the storage space. Read more »

Some lucky fellow apparently had a Nokia Lumia 928 for quite a while, as he took it to a large number of concerts and shot videos with it. Concerts are dark venues with bright flashing lights and loud music – just about as bad as it can get for a video camera. The Lumia 928 however, actually did a pretty good job at it.

The camera has been optimized for low light, but the HAAC microphones are perhaps even more impressive as they captured clean audio despite the thundering music. Read more »

A new update to popular news-consuming application Flipboard brings about a handful of new features. Magazine curators can now make fuller standalone profiles and readers can easily find what magazines their friends have created thanks to the new Friends category in the Content Guide. But that’s not all.

Flipboard opened the magazine curation feature to iOS users some 2 months ago with v2.0 of their app, but Android users only got it last week. Read more »

It seems that screen size may be more than just a numbers game played between smartphone makers, as the most recent poll from Strategy Analytics reveals that most users now prefer a 4.5-inch screen.

This is up from 4.3 inches when the last time the poll was taken, back in 2011. Read more »

Sony has just announced its new project – 13.3-inch slate with e-ink touchscreen and stylus input support.

The tablet features a 13.3-inch flexible e-ink display with a resolution of 1200×1600 pixels, stylus-enabled touch panel above the screen, 4 GB of internal storage expandable via a microSD card slot, and Wi-Fi b/g/n connectivity. Read more »

With Google I/O getting close (it kicks off in just two days) we were bound to see Motorola X rumors heat up. A device claiming to be it surfaced in GFXBenchmark scores as Motorola XT1058 (supposedly AT&T’s version of the Motorola X).

The X phone already showed up in AnTuTu scores, showing an uninspiring result for a 1.5GHz processor. Read more »

Sony announced the younger sibling of Xperia Z, the Xperia ZR earlier in the day. And as the tradition goes on such occasions, the first promo videos of the waterproof and dust-resistant smartphone are now live.

The first video ad of the Xperia ZR talkes about the experience of underwater filming in Full HD resolution. The commercial also promotes the sleek design of the smartphone along with its single touch sharing feature. Read more »

Skype’s BlackBerry Z10 version leaked a few weeks ago and now, the app is officially available in the BlackBerry World.

Skype for BlackBerry Z10 comes with the ability to send pictures, videos and files to any of your contacts. The app also allows you to talk to your Windows Live Messenger friends on Skype. Read more »