PCWorld Feb-14

THE PRESENT IS looking quite futuristic. Over the next year, we’ll see technologies quickly ramping up toward a tipping point, after which life could change in big ways. Here are several developments that will make headlines very soon. Smartwatches atract the masses A friend of mine said that she bought a watch recently because she was tired of pulling out her phone to see the time. She prefers the familiar motion of swinging her arm up so that she can glance at her wrist. With the right device, people would probably like to get lots of other information with that same quick gesture. We’ve already seen Samsung release a smartwatch that largely failed to capture the public imagination (go.pcworld.com/galaxygear). Now it’s time for the other heavy hitters—Apple and Google—to swoop in and take…

DO YOU KEEP a phone or tablet at the ready when you’re watching television? I do. I imagine that TV executives get giddy at the thought of fans tweeting and liking and otherwise “engaging with the brand,” but I’m mostly just scouring Wikipedia to figure out what aging actors are up to nowadays. The industry calls a phone or tablet used in this way a “secondscreen device.” You can find plenty of third-party apps and services (go.pcworld.com/second) that will work all sorts of dark magic, analyzing audio streams and the like from your television set in an attempt to serve up episode guides and contextualized socialnetworking fluff on your “second screen.” In mid-November 2013, however, Amazon announced Kindle Fire OS 3.1, and Sling Media upgraded its SlingPlayer app to version 3.0. And…

IN WHAT COULD be one of the more startling reversals since New Coke, Microsoft may bring back a Windows 7–style Start menu in what is currently being called Windows 8.2. Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite recently reported (go.pcworld.com/win82start) that Windows 8.2, also known as “Threshold,” will include a Start menu, as well as the option for Windows 8 “modern” apps to run on the desktop. As of this writing, Microsoft has yet to confirm the report, and given that rumors suggest Windows 8.2 will be an early-2015 release, the company certainly has time to cancel such a decision (or to redesign the Start menu several times). As a technical achievement, adding a Start menu to Windows 8 would be small potatoes. But if the report is accurate, the move seems to reflect a recurring…

ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES is looking to move away from providing CPU-only chips for gaming PCs, instead switching to the manufacture of accelerated processing units that integrate CPUs with graphics cores. For many years AMD has sold the FX series, which consists of CPUs that lack integrated graphics processors. Those chips—the company’s fastest—have been popular with gamers who overclock their CPUs, use discrete graphics cards, and build high-end gaming rigs. Intel’s Core Extreme Edition lineup of high-end CPUs is similar. Now, however, AMD is strategically moving over to the production of APUs, to take advantage of the integration of CPUs and graphics cores in a single piece of silicon, says Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager of the client business unit for AMD. “It’s not like we’re deemphasizing the FX line, but…

GOOGLE’S BIANNUAL COUNT of government takedown requests on its Transparency Report website (go.pcworld.com/googletake) is revealing a disturbing trend. The latest report shows a 68 percent increase in takedown requests from government agencies around the globe in the first half of 2013, compared with the second half of 2012. Overall, Google says that it received 3846 requests asking for takedowns of more than 27,000 pieces of content during that period. In the end, Google removed more than 18,000 pieces of content from its search index and from other properties such as Blogger, Google+, and Orkut. Political speech wasn’t the only reason that governments requested takedowns, however. In this report, the eighth since Google began publishing them in 2010, only 93 of the 3846 requests concerned criticism of governments, according to Google. Among other reasons for…

A SWITZERLANDƪBASED STANDARDS group wants to stop the madness of having to manage a different charger for every laptop, and will publish a technical specification for universal laptop chargers this year. The specification from the International Electrotechnical Commission will cover “a wide range of notebook computers and laptops,” and will define elements such as the connector plug, safety concerns, and environmental considerations, according to a press release (go.pcworld.com/ieccharger). The IEC already deserves some credit for its role in defining a standard for mobile phones about two years ago, but that effort was largely assisted by the prevalence of Micro-USB connectors in smartphones. Creating a standard for laptop chargers could be trickier. Today’s laptop chargers come in all shapes and sizes, and cater to a wide range of power requirements. For example, HP’s Chromebook…