PC and Components: News

Forget Glass, self-driving cars or a smartwatch. Developers, not physical consumer products, were Google's darlings at the company's annual I/O conference this week.

A strong stock market could open the floodgates for more tech IPOs in the wake of Friday's solid debut of Marketo and Tableau, but not all segments of IT may be able to ride the wave.

Dell's thumb-sized PC called Project Ophelia, which is the size of a USB stick, will start shipping in July for around US$100.

Google I/O is getting most of the attention this week, but a conference at the other end of Silicon Valley showed there's plenty of innovation happening in the word of data centers, too.

Dell intends to move workstations into the datacentre and then serve up intense multimedia and engineering applications to remote users over the cloud or in virtualized environments via thin clients.

Windows 8 faces an uphill battle to become a standard corporate operating system because many businesses are in the midst of or have recently completed the move from Windows XP to Windows 7 and don't have the stomach for another transition anytime soon.

Intel worldwide reseller channel organisation general manager and sales and marketing group vice-president, Steve Dallman, has acknowledged the company is "behind and playing catch-up" in the tablet and smartphone space, and said it must crank up its activity across the product segment to become more competitive.

Warp drives, teleporters, helpful holograms - the new frontier is a lot closer than you might think

Employees at the Chinese factories of Apple supplier Foxconn continue to work beyond the country's legal limit of 49 hours a month, according to a report from the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But the Taiwanese manufacturer is making overall steady progress in improving the working conditions at a select group of factories in China, it said.

Google is facing some tough questions from Congress over the privacy concerns raised by Glass, its fledgling augmented reality system for recording and receiving information on the fly. But on the ground at the company's I/O conference for developers, attendees are largely enthusiastic about the technology.

Even before summer, the iOSphere languishes in the iPad rumor doldrums, apparently having exhausted itself with hopes for a Retina display iPad mini 2, and the A7 chip for the iPad 5. But there is hope: The Rollup uncovered the radical iPadiGlasses, in an exclusive report.

Members of a U.S. congressional group on privacy wrote Thursday to Google CEO Larry Page requesting information on how the futuristic device handles privacy issues.

Dell reported another quarter of declining profits and revenue Thursday as CEO Michael Dell continues his fight to take the company private.

We may not have a new version of Android to drool over, but at least we've got more feature-filled, better-looking maps. At its Google I/O keynote, the company announced an enhanced version of its popular Google Maps service. The demos shown on stage drew some applause out of the otherwise listless attendees, and I was itching for the chance to put this improved version of Maps through its paces.

Google beat Apple to the music subscription service punch this week, perhaps the doing of record labels who wanted to put Apple in its place, an analyst said

Samsung's AllShare Play application, which allows file sharing among the company's mobile devices, has been renamed Link, and it has a new user interface and search features.

Google is working to build out the app ecosystem for its upcoming Glass, showing off work today at Google I/O from partners like Twitter, Facebook, CNN and Elle.

Brandon Ashmore, who calls Mentor, Ohio, home, has just had a very good day. Apple has announced that Ashmore download the 50 billionth app from the App Store.

Windows 8, the most significant upgrade to Microsoft's operating system since Windows 95 and one of the most important products in the company's history, will not achieve enough adoption in enterprises to be considered a standard, according to Forrester Research.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich admitted Thursday in his first speech in that role that the company has been weak in smartphones and tablets, but aims to improve by advancing chip and manufacturing technologies.