Welcome to the Weekly Tech Update with me, Mike Walmsley. It’s a look at everything that has happened in the world of technology, the Internet, Search Engines and social media over the last week.
Technology
The techsphere has been completed dominated by one thing in this last week and that thing was Apple’s new phone, the iPhone 5. It will be available in 16, 32 and 64GB flavours. The first thing you’ll notice with the new model is that it is longer than current models, so it looks as though size does matter after all. Other features include:
- A6 chip that is twice as powerful as the current A5 chip
- 4G LTE connectivity – 4G will give you mobile broadband speeds that are comparable to your home broadband
- 4” retina display with 16:9 aspect ratio in landscape mode, perfect for watching movies on
- Improved battery life boasting 8 hours of talk time and LTE usage
- Deep integration with Facebook
The iPhone 5 will run iOS6 which will be released on 19th September.
In the UK the iPhone5 will be available from Everything Everywhere, formerly T-Mobile and Orange, taking advantage of the 4G network that they are starting to roll out across the UK. The network will be available in 16 cities by the end of the year. Apple say the prices to buy the new iPhone will be:
- 16GB model £529
- 32GB model £599
- 64GB model £699
Good news for those waiting to upgrade their operating system to Windows 8. Micfrosoft have said that they have reduced the installation time for their soon to be released operating system. Microsoft claim that it will operate seamlessly across both desktop and tablet devices. If you are looking to upgrade to Windows 8 you will probably only need to set aside about 20 minutes of time to complete the task.
Internet
Google have launched a new YouTube app for the iPhone. They say that they were working on the app before Apple announced last month that it would be removing YouTube from its new iOS6 operating system. The new app is based on the same technology as the Google+ app and is much quicker than the existing iPhone app at loading new content.
Google have purchased security company VirusTotal who offer an online malware scanning software. They say that the VirusTotal team will still operate and product support will continue. One possible way that VirusTotal could be integrated into Google’s portfolio of products would be if when you clicked on a link in a search engine result page you were warned that the site may contain malware. Another would be to scan pages that Google indexes and throw them out of the rankings if malware is detected.
Search Engines
Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg, has told a conference this week that Facebook will eventually provide a search engine. Zuck said that Facebook handles a billion searches a day at the moment. While most of these searches are people looking for other people they do also search for brands and this is where Zuckerburg feels that there is an opportunity. His concept is that you could ask facebook a question such as “Where is the best restaurant near here?” and the results that you would get would be based upon your friends likes and recommendations.
Social Media
Mark Zuckerburg, at the same conference in which he spoke about search also said that Facebook has 235 million users who are playing games on Facebook every month. This figure dwarfs the 40 million users that use Microsofts X Box Live platform. He went on to say that although Zynga, creators of Farmville and many other social games, was suffering at the moment other companies had made up the difference and that he was really optimistic about the future of social gaming. Do you have a favourite game on Facebook? Leave me a comment and let me know which it is.
Blackberry manufacturers, RIM, have just released an update to their Facebook app. Among the changes is the ability to get birthday reminders about your Facebook friends without the Facebook app being open.
And finally, singer Kelly Clarkson has started to take song requests via Twitter.If you want to request a song use the hashtag KCrequests.