Business Tech

The Android version of Chrome has begun carving a niche for itself in the mobile browsing market.

In May, usage of the mobile version of Google's browser on smartphones and tablets accounted for an all-time high of 3.2 percent, according to Net Applications' usage statistics. That figure may not sound like a lot, but the browser only crossed the 1 percent threshold in November 2012, and it's now surpassed Microsoft's IE at 2 percent of mobile browser usage.

At the same time, Google's unbranded Android browser, which predates Chrome, appears to be waning. Its usage … Read more

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- 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 1,920x1,080-pixel screen portion acts as an Android tablet, running off its 2.0GHz Intel Atom Z2580 processor.

The keyboard part, rather than just being a dumb accessory, is actually a full-fledged Windows 8 PC complete with an Intel fourth-generation Core i7 processor. It needs to be hooked up to an external monitor for … Read more

ARM, the designer of most of the world's smartphone processors, announced new silicon that will likely find its way to future mobile devices.

Mali-V500: This video encode/decode chip is designed to prevent piracy of 1080p class video. Using TrustZone technology, the V500 was developed after consultation with Hollywood studios, according to a report in the Financial Times. Hollywood movie studios and content distributors like Netflix "are demanding [that]...their highest value content...be protected not just by digital rights management but by the hardware, all the way from download through to display," the Times wrote, citing … Read more

Update: This article was originally posted on May 30 at 1:31 PM PDT.

Updated on May 31 at 1:35 p.m. PDT: corrects processor. Though the system as listed on reseller sites was confirmed with Acer on Thursday, those specs are incorrect. Resellers are incorrectly showing the AIO with an Intel 4430 processor. It is a Texas Instruments 4430 ARM chip.

Less Windows, more Android. Acer is about to give us a taste of this trend, as Android PCs begin to creep onto the market.

The Acer DA220HQL, which is already live on Acer's site, comes with … Read more

Microsoft's XP operating system is still used on more than a third of the installations out there, according to figures from Net Applications. Is it really still that popular?

XP was released in August of 2001, more than a decade ago. It got a new lease on life when its successor, Vista, was declared -- at least initially -- a disaster back in 2006.

On Friday, figures from Net Applications (see graph at bottom) showed XP with a robust 37.74 percent of all Windows and Mac OS installations worldwide, down only slightly from 38.31 percent in April. … Read more

Pop open the champagne. Windows 8 may be on the verge of claiming installation share victory over Vista.

The latest figures from Net Applications show Windows 8 with a 4.27 percent share of PCs installed worldwide in May (up from 3.84 percent in April) versus 4.51 percent for Vista.

Vista, one of Microsoft's least popular OSes, was introduced in November of 2006.

Then again, maybe we're breaking out the champagne too soon. Windows 7 still leads by a long shot at 44.85 percent and it actually made gains in May, up from 44.72 … Read more

Intel's Atom is getting a makeover.

In more ways than one. First, when Intel speaks to customers internally about micro-architectures, Atom is out, Silvermont is in, Intel told CNET on Friday.

Second, some upcoming Silvermont silicon will be branded Pentium and Celeron -- which is the value end of Intel's Core-based mainstream chips.

The chipmaker's reasoning is that some variants of Silvermont now offer performance comparable to current mainstream Celeron and Pentium. That's quite different from the Atom of old, which had a reputation -- particularly in Netbooks -- for being slow.

Higher performance varieties of … Read more

The Android laptop is coming. Does that mean more market-share pain for Windows PCs?

Hewlett-Packard's upcoming notebook offerings speak for themselves. For $480, there's the SlateBook x2 Android "notebook". At $800, we have the Windows 8-based Split x2.

For me, the choice gets easier every time I pick up the Nexus 10 tablet that I've been using for the last month. In other words, if I'm spending about 50 percent of my time -- and doing limited-productivity stuff -- on the Nexus 10, it's not a giant leap to an Android laptop.

Nor … Read more

With a project called Portable Native Client now making its way into Chrome and potentially onto the Web itself, Google is violating its own principles for its Blink browser engine, a Mozilla programmer said Friday.

Portable Native Client, or PNaCl, is a Google technology to let Web apps run specially created software at nearly the speed of the native apps that run on operating systems like Windows or iOS. It plugs into the browser with an interface called Pepper.

Mozilla representatives have been frosty toward Native Client for years, but one programmer, Robert O'Callahan, issued a new criticism Friday, … Read more