Software, Operating System | featured news

Apple told us that Mac OS X Lion — the next version of the company's popular operating system — will become available sometime this month. Rumors had our hopes up with assumptions that it'd be here last week. But now? Now reports are telling us that it's coming tomorrow.

Microsoft might have shown us its new operating system, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Microsoft plans to restrict the number of computer hardware makers that initially can make tablets using its Windows operating system, requiring five select chip makers to pair up with one development partner each.

Google on Wednesday began fixing a security flaw that affects some 97% of Android smartphones.

Mike Cleron, a Google software engineer for the Android operating system, made an ambitious pronouncement onstage at the company's annual conference last week.

"Mango," the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.

In the nature of Microsoft product updates, Window 7 is entering its middle years. Generally, Microsoft comes out with a new update to Windows every three years and Windows 7 is currently 18 months into its game. In that time Microsoft has sold 350M licenses to the operating system making it perhaps the fastest selling software of all time.

Microsoft's dominance is starting to fade as Macs, smartphones and tablets grow more popular.

How long does a Chrome notebook battery last? Eighteen days, in the case of my test model. Sad. I know that this is a beta product, but that is a major fail, even in beta. This is the cloud-computing dream, the Microsoft headache that could challenge the ecosystem from Dell to Firefox.

Microsoft plans to discuss a new version of its Windows operating system that targets low-power devices and adds support for ARM microprocessors.