Clint Boulton

Acer wants to challenge Apple’s Macbook Air with the Aspire S5 ultrabook, a thin, low-weight computer running Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows 7 operating system that boots up fast. Unveiled Jan. 8 at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Aspire S5 measures 15 millimeters at its thickets point and has a 13.3-inch LCD display. […]

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) mobile ad revenue could top $4 billion alone in 2012, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, whose estimates come from the company’s huge industry footprint on Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and iPad and smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system. Thanks to platforms such as AdSense for mobile and the AdMob unit, Google […]

A Spare, 7-Inch Slate This is one of the smaller 7-inch tablets we’ve gotten our mitts on. It weighs only .78 pounds, making it a super lightweight in terms of portability. It measures 7.4 inches long, 4.4 inches wide and 0.48 inches thick. The white plastic back cover made frequent clicking and creaking noises when […]

John Battelle offered this great chart above summarizing by strengths and weaknesses in the areas where Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon compete. He calls these the Internet Big Five. “For me, these product lines, taken together, are the basis of what we might call ‘the operating system of our lives,’ Battelle wrote. Indeed. It’s […]

Fresh off of the release of Chrome 16 Web browser to the stable channel, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Jan. 5 made Chrome 17 available to the beta channel with a focus on speed and security. Google applied its Instant Pages predictive search technology, which prepares the top search result in the background while a user chooses which […]

If one of themes of the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show was the rise of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android tablets, this year’s CES event will be the year the Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows laptop market is revitalized with so-called ultrabooks. Ultrabooks are not supercomputers packed in small frames, or super electronic reading devices. They’re simply less expensive, Windows […]

As much as Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system has been a rainmaker for Samsung’s financial results, HTC shows the other side of the story. South Korea’s Samsung, which emerged as the top seller of Android smartphones and tablets, reported a major 73 percent gain in operating profit to 5.2 trillion won (U.S. $4.5 billion) for […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) TV is getting a revival at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, where LG, Sony, Vizio and Marvell will show off products running the Web television platform. Google TV is an Android-based service that lets users surf Websites and TV channels and access Web applications. The first version of the platform launched in October […]

Antitrust Investigation Should we fault Google for getting too big, or at least too big on the Web? More than 1 billion people use Google worldwide. Partly for this reason (the victim-of-its-own-success factor), Google is being persecuted (not prosecuted, yet) by the European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission for, among other things, favoring its […]

Lithium Technologies, which makes social software for businesses, Jan. 5 said it landed a $53.4 million round of financing led by New Enterprise Associates and including SAP Ventures and other investors. NEA partner Pete Sonsini has joined the board of directors for Lithium, which will use aid the new funding to pad its sales and […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) made 30 improvements to its search engine through December, including upgrades to Image Search, the +1 button and Google Instant search. The +1 button, Google’s tool for signaling to users that they approve of something they find on Google, will now only appear when a user hovers over a result or when the […]

The Google Nexus tablet rumor I wrote about here two weeks ago after Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt made some comments received new life from this brief DigiTimes report, which noted: “Sources believe that Google will launch the own-brand tablet PC in March-April, featuring a 7-inch panel and Android 4.0 with a price less than […]