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It’s not often that we revisit a recommendation here, but we the more we use dropbox, the more amazed I become with the myriad of uses for this simple, yet quickly becoming irreplaceable app/service.

I just almost cannot believe the things I am now doing with dropbox and not having spent a dime yet to upgrade I have around 5GB of space. You start with the free account and they just continue to give out free space and the apps are absolutely amazing.

I am now syncing every photo I take automatically from both my iOS and Android phones and tablets. I never connect anything anymore and every photo is on every device as well as on my PC and my MAC. This has saved me more time than you could ever believe.

I also now have a shared folder with my wife that allows her to drop anything in it at anytime and no matter where I am I have instant private access. If she is at a doctor and needs insurance information I just drop a scan of the card in and she has it in seconds on her phone. The uses for the shared folder are amazing when you start really using the service. I am going to be setting up shared folders with others as its amazing how easy this is to use for quick editing and the like.

I have even created a notes folder and am now dropping every note to myself into dropbox and they are available wherever I am, no applications to download it just works.

If you are not using dropbox, give it a try, its free and quite possibly the number one app/service we can recommend. If you do, please click through here so we can keep adding to our free space

Micro-reviews service, which awards stamps of approval instead of stars, adds more social features, along with investors Ryan Seacrest, Ellen DeGeneres, and Justin Bieber.
[Read more]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/tcoc/~3/aeENtrkjdH0/

Social-networking app for family and close friends adds new sharing features to Android and iPhone apps.
[Read more]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/tcoc/~3/Q9nMy6aCORE/

As reports of sagging profits came out for the second quarter, the security software giant’s board of directors decides to swap CEOs.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/tcoc/~3/-b1q7KFZb-E/

The mobile app analytics company aims sky-high and launches its new cloud services collection — hooking it into the company’s analytics, which helps developers increase app engagement.
[Read more]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/tcoc/~3/4B3jIR4SjHo/

Apple’s dominance over the global chip “supply chain” is increasing, fast enough that nobody’s even close, says iSuppli.
[Read more]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/tcoc/~3/oEUDIbXA1zM/

Microsoft has a competitor coming for the iPad, but it is too little, too late. The battle for the heart and soul of the tablet market is lost already and Microsoft is just spinning its wheels now.

It’s not the new iPad (3rd generation) that is putting the dagger into MSFT. It’s the strategy that Apple is taking by keeping the iPad 2 on the market at a reduced price. Microsoft used to beat Apple at the pricing game, those days are over now.

There is zero chance that we will see a product that can compete with the iPad 2 on specs and price now and Microsoft used to blow Apple out of the water on pricing. To compete, they are going to have to come up with a tablet at a $199.00 price point and that is not going to happen. Who in their right mind will spend more to but a Microsoft tablet with no ecosystem at a price point higher than an iPad?

They can no longer argue that the iPad is a toy as Windows 8 is… well a toy, especially on ARM where they may be able to sell at around $450.00 or $50.00 higher than an iPad 2 with a ecosystem that is mature.

Microsoft has one choice and it is the tact that it looks like Google is going to take to get their Play stores out in the world and that is to take the Amazon route and try to undercut on price. History says this is how Microsoft has done that, but these are not overpriced Apple computers where you get twice the performance on MSFT at half the price. Suddenly the situation is completely reversed and the price/performance is all in the favor of Apple.

So is Microsoft going to try to subsidize a tablet in the $250.00 price range? That’s what it will take to make a dent now that you can buy an iPad2 for $399.00 ($349.00 refurbished). We don’t see that happening. In fact it may get worse than that if Apple continues to drop the price of the iPad over the next several years.

The iPad 2 is going to put a serious hurt on Microsoft and since they have abandoned the enterprise with Windows 8, it may be time to run far away from Microsoft stock. Who is left as a customer for Microsoft in 2 years?

It’s  a little early for a full review of Windows 8, but we have had it installed for a few days now and here are our first thoughts.

There are some quirks that take some getting used to when first using W8. The largest one of these for the home user is the lack of flash support in the Metro browser. For me this is really not a big deal as I understand the work around, but I handed over my laptop to my wife and said go visit HULU and she was completely lost. Tried the same thing with my mother and had the same issue. This is an easy fix for Microsoft, but must be fixed or they risk losing the mom and pop base. Simply either turn on flash in Metro, or auto open the desktop version if flash is detected. A simple fix, but one that will cause enormous problems with non techie users.

What’s worse is Microsoft itself is clueless, when you go to the video store there is a big ad for 21 Jump Street’s site. Guess what, it does not work with Metro IE. For me no big deal, but still an unnecessary extra step. For my wife, impossible to navigate.

Second if you have not got your Microsoft account perfectly set up, and I do mean perfectly there can be some problems. Hotmail does not work on my system, nor do the backup and restore from SkyDrive stuff. Why? Well I have had my live mail account for 11 years and there was an 11 year old phone number on there, guess how they verify your new computer.. you guessed it, from a text to your phone which you can not change if you do not have access to that phone anymore, and since the laptop I set up Windows 8 on was my “trusted computer” it is no longer recognized so I must wait 30 days to change it by deleting all my contact info from the MSFT servers. Brilliant setup there.

The other quirk is the lack of 50-50 support in metro apps, this makes it impossible for me to keep two useful sized windows open at once. I love researching in one window while typing in the other. That cannot be done in Metro. Unless you can type and do layout in a 30% window. So I find myself in the classic desktop 90% of the time and with no start menu, everything I do requires an extra step. I have to mouse to the lower corner, open the Metro UI, scroll to find the app I want and open it there. If it’s a desktop app, no problem as now I can resize it in the classic interface and go on working. If it is a Metro app, I now have to switch back and forth from Metro to the Classic interface to work with multiple programs. This is a nightmare in general and once again an easy fix. Run Windows classic apps in a window within Metro. Maybe this can be a third party add on, but without 50-50 support it may still not work well for working within.

Unless MS has lost their mind completely and has decided to cast off the entire business/corporate customer base, there has to be a Windows 8 "Professional" version, suitable for the desktop environment, sans the Metro interface or at least something that allows corporate or power desktop users to switch it off to work and back on for fun stuff.

There is also a lot positive about the experience from a consumer point of view, The Metro tiles are useful and informative, the Metro apps look beautiful in general. Honestly this operating system works much better than iOS in a touch environment and I love my iPad, but am looking forward to a win8pad when they become available.

Windows 8 is snappy and much faster than Windows 7 on the same device as well so there is a lot that Microsoft is doing right here.

The quirks are not enough for me to not want to keep trying and see what workarounds I find for the above noted problems, but my wife and mother will not ever be able to get around the flash issues and that’s a shame as MSFT has the right idea here as flash is dying, but they are just a couple of years early. Put flash back into Metro in x86 editions and disable it in ARM for now and let the market come to you first. Consumers use their hardware for HULU, Crackle and the like and until you get those sites to switch to HTML5, you cannot make it this hard for your base to use your product.

We will report further after some more extensive testing, but the early thoughts are that this is a fantastic tablet operating system and a quite good desktop system where multiple monitors mitigate a lot of the problems with task switching, but leaves a lot to be desired in a laptop operating environment when used for business tasks.

Microsoft released its brand new operating system to the general public today, you will not see the word beta in the consumer preview but remember that it is actually a beta product so there may be some bugs yet to be worked out so we will not be running benchmarks or passing judgment too much on this release however, we will be doing some extensive testing over the next few days and will be sure to pass along what we find.

To download the preview and test for yourself click the image below

Dropbox announced an update to its Android app on Friday that automatically syncs a user’s photos on the phone. A complementary update to the desktop app also auto-syncs photos stored on cameras or SD cards.

The service will be added to Apple’s iOS soon, Dropbox said.

On Android, the photo-upload function mirrors one already built into phone: Google+ already can be set to automatically upload photos and store them in the cloud. On the other hand, Google won’t allow any photos over 2,048 pixels wide, so high-resolution cameraphone images won’t be stored on Google+ in their full resolution.

However on Dropbox they are uploaded at original size and full quality, and saved to a private folder called Camera Uploads in your Dropbox

Users will receive 500MB of Dropbox space, for free, just for downloading the app. As users upload more photos, the available space will increase, up to a total of 3GB, the company said.

So if you have not signed up for dropbox yet, use this link and get an extra 250 MB of space on top of the 2.5GB you will get normally.