Google's Marissa Mayer will try to save Yahoo as CE)

Longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer will become CEO of Yahoo, thrusting the prominent 37-year-old executive into a public highwire act as she tries to turn around the languishing company.

"There is a lot to do and I can't wait to get started," Mayer said in the official announcement.

Mayer's eagerness aside, the move is a gamble for her. Employee number 20 at Google, Mayer became a key executive at the company, overseeing search products and user interface for five years and eventually taking over local and location services. In 2010, she ascended to Google's elite operating committee.

Mayer's personal wealth from pre-IPO Google stock has allowed her to buy a penthouse in San Francisco's Four Seasons along with a home in well-to-do Palo Alto and a posh Vogue wedding. There's little doubt she could remain at Google, or quit conventional work entirely, and live in considerable comfort. She doesn't need to try and revive Yahoo.

"Marissa has been a tireless champion of our users," Google CEO Larry Page writes. "We  will miss her talents at Google."

By the end of 2011 Mayer's influence seemed to be waning. She was among several executives pushed out of the operating committee, Reuters reported, and wasn't visible at Google I/O this past June despite having keynoted in prior years.

Still, it's likely Mayer could have continued to make significant contributions at Google if she'd chosen to hang in. Her oversight of local put Mayer in charge of a crucial crossroads for Google.

At Yahoo, Mayer is rolling the dice on a much more daunting challenge. The company's C-suite has been a revolving door and Yahoo has bled top talent.

"Marissa has the energy and drive Yahoo needs," says YCombinator's Paul Buchheit, who worked closely with Mayer during the creation of Google's Gmail. "I can't wait to see what she does with the company."

A former Yahoo executive who left the company in recent years says Mayer will have to move quickly to repair Yahoo's reputation and bolster its flagging momentum. "Her joining Yahoo! is like a bomb," this person says. "The 'shock and awe' will briefly destabilise the legacy elements and parties that have been holding the company back. She needs to use her first 100 days aggressively to confront entrenched interests."

Mayer's ascent is a sign that Yahoo will compete aggressively on technology development rather than retreating into becoming an online media company that merely sells advertising, says Morningstar analyst Rick Summer. That means going up against formidable competitors like Microsoft, Facebook -- and Mayer's former employer.

"Yahoo has had declining use in its communications services and not much mobile success," says Summer. "It is the polar opposite from Google... She'll need to lead a team that creates a few strong technology products that will engage users and stem the loss in Yahoo's search business."

Mayer certainly has the chops to lead tech product development. She helped oversee the development of Gmail, Google News and Google Images. She has a master's degree in computer science from Stanford and is famous for her data-driven approach to product decisions.

But in other ways the job will be an odd fit. For one, Mayer has no real professional experience outside of her six different jobs at Google, a sort of parallel corporate universe where the gusher of profits from contextual advertising has subsidised virtually all of the company's operations for more than a decade.

Also, Yahoo has for the past decade operated not like Google, which is obsessed with software development, but as a sort of media company. Since Terry Semel took the reins in 2001, Yahoo's leadership has focused on advertising and marketing initiatives over technical advancement (with the possible exception of Jerry Yang's brief stint as CEO). In 2009, Yahoo ceded its once-core search engine to Microsoft, whose servers began powering Yahoo searches.

Restarting Yahoo tech development might have great long-term potential, but in the meantime it's relatively low-tech display ads that keep the lights on at Yahoo. Mayer will need help to keep that lifeline strong.

If she does pull off an unlikely turnaround, of course, Mayer's reputation in Silicon Valley will be sterling. She'll join turnaround gods like Steve Jobs at Apple and Louis Gerstner at IBM in the top tier of tech's pantheon.

Former Yahoo employees say Mayer needs to get climbing now if she'll ever reach those heights.

"It's not like she needs the money," one wrote in a closed Facebook group for Yahoo alumni. "She has to honestly feel like she can turn this ship around after it's already hit the iceberg, which is a pretty monumental challenge."

iTunes in the Cloud brings movie redownloading to the UK

iTunes in the Cloud for movies has today launched in the UK and 36 other markets globally.

Apple launched iTunes in the Cloud earlier this year. The free service allows users to redownload content previously bought from iTunes. Although the US launch included movies as part of this offer, UK customers were limited to music, apps and TV shows.

As of today, movies finally now form part of that offer. If you have bought films from Apple in the past and deleted them either by mistake or to save disk space, you can down redownload them for no extra cost. This is a particular advantage to Apple TV users, as it means the tiny set-top box becomes a conduit for streaming all past movie purchases.

www.techbuz.net  understands that almost all movies are available for use with iTunes in the Cloud, with the remaining few due to go live shortly.

In Europe, the service is now available in the UK, Ireland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Other countries now supported include Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

Get the cheapest UK iPad: A buyer's guide

So you've decided you need an iPad, but your bank balance isn't having any of it, so you desperately need to find the cheapest way to get one.

Don't worry. Wired.co.uk is here to look after you.

We have scoured the pages of Apple's website, the tariffs of the five UK networks that are offering iPad data-only tariffs, and fed it all into a big number-crunching machine. The result: we know the rock-bottom, most affordable ways to get a cheap iPad legitimately into your hands.

We've had to make a few assumptions -- the biggest being that you don't need more than 16GB of storage on the device itself, and that you're going to use it for 24 months before it becomes useless to you. Tweak the figures a little if you don't think that's true, though be aware that some of the contracts have 24-month minimum terms.

It's also worth saying a little more about the 3G packages on offer from the different networks. O2, Vodafone 3, T-Mobile and Orange all offer data bundles and a microSIM, but they're not created equal -- each has different little tweaks that make them better or worse than the others.

On the surface, Orange looks good because it comes with "unlimited" access to more than 150,000 Wi-Fi networks across Britain. But a fair usage policy limits access to those hotspots to 10GB per month -- this is Wi-Fi, for crying out loud. Why are there limits at all?

Before we give you the prices we need to know a little more about you. How much are you going to use your iPad, and where? If you're primarily thinking of buying the device for use in the home, and can't see any situations where you might want to take it somewhere else that doesn't have free Wi-Fi, then there's no point buying the model equipped with 3G access. If you do want 3G, then how much are you going to use it? Every single day, or maybe once a week?

Pick whichever category over the page applies to you best, and we'll point out your cheapest option -- you can bookmark that page to get back to just the prices quickly.

The housebound user
For users who just want the cheapest of the cheapest options. No 3G at all.
Limits: There isn't any 3G.
Data plan: None
Total cost over 24 months: £399
Effective monthly cost: £16.63

The light user
Very occasionally you'll take the iPad out of your house -- no more than once a fortnight.
Limits: We've costed the below such that you only use 3G once a fortnight, and you don't use more than 250MB each time. More use will cost you more.
Data plan: T-Mobile's PAYG Micro-Sim
Total cost over 24 months: £595
Effective monthly cost: £24.79

The connected user
A reasonable amount of usage, in case you want to get on the web from the train ride home.
Limits: 1GB per month, but you can use that whenever you want -- you can use a little bit every day if you like, rather than having to pay for a new chunk of data every time you use it. It's also a 1-month rolling contract, meaning you don't have to commit to a full two years of payment.
Data plan: Three's 1GB Pay Monthly Micro-sim
Total cost over 24 months: £679
Effective monthly cost: £28.29

The road warrior
For the all-consuming, data-hungry user who's almost never in range of Wi-Fi.
Limits: If what you want is bang-for-buck when it comes to data, you can't get better than Three's 24-month, £25-per-month that comes with a whopping 15GB of data. That's a price-per-month-per-gigabyte of £2.30, including the cost of the iPad itself -- far below its competitors. Of course, you need to ask yourself whether you're going to use all that data.
Data plan: Three's 15GB 24-month iPad 2
Total cost over 24 months: £829
Effective monthly cost: £34.54

So there you have it. The full range of possibilities. If you want to see our datasheet, which covers all offerings from all providers (that we found) then you can see it here, ordered by monthly cost. If it's an iPad you've got to have, then this is the cheapest you're going to get it.

Google Nexus Q review

The Google Nexus Q is a device most of us can ignore for the time being.

It does generate a lot of curiosity, which is deserved, as it’s a gorgeous product that demonstrates Google is getting more serious about two things: selling digital content, and making Android devices without touchscreens.

The Q is

an austere, matte black sphere that streams music and videos from the cloud. The entire top hemisphere is an endlessly rotating volume knob that’s also touch-sensitive. (Tap it to mute the audio.) Around the equator is a ring of bright, colorful LEDs that dance to the music. The lower hemisphere is a die-cast zinc base with a number of ports — micro HDMI, micro USB, optical audio, Ethernet, and analog speaker connections — machined into the back. Inside are the guts of an Android smartphone and a 25-watt amp for powering a pair of speakers. It represents a huge milestone for Google, as it’s the company’s first consumer product developed and manufactured entirely in-house.

It’s a visual and tactile joy, and a marvel of engineering. ….But beauty is only skin-deep, and the Nexus Q’s functionality is so severely limited out of the box, it’s difficult for all but the most hardcore audio gadget fanatics to justify the price tag (currently $300 (£190) in the US, with a UK release as yet unconfirmed).

But the eyebrow raising doesn’t stop there. It’s only capable of streaming content from Google Play and YouTube. Confoundingly, you can’t use it to play any of the MP3s on your local network, nor can you stream music from Spotify or other services. It requires an Android phone or tablet running a special app to control it. There’s no support for iOS or Windows Phone. It forgoes regular analog speaker posts in favor of banana plug sockets.

So, it’s an enticing device — if you’re fully committed to buying and renting stuff from Google’s music and movie store, if you’ve bothered to upload all of your music to Google‘s cloud service, if you have an Android phone or tablet, and if you have a pair of speakers sitting around that happen to be able to accept banana plugs. That’s a lot of ifs.

The price tag seems shocking, but when you think about it, that’s actually not too bad. I see a lot of audiophile devices, and for something that feels, looks and sounds this nice, is made in the United States, and has a high-quality 25-watt amp and a fully capable Android circuit board inside — complete with a dual-core OMAP 4460 chip, 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM — that price is reasonable.

Performance
First off, the Q sounds great. I have about 500 tracks stored in Google‘s music cloud (currently US-only, but an international launch is expected), so I listened to dozens of songs across multiple genres. The Q’s amp is efficient and clean, and gets plenty loud without growing distorted. I hooked the Q up to a pair of vintage Advent speakers. These have regular speaker posts instead of banana jacks, so I had to buy a set of adapters and fashion my own connections.

Queueing up tracks using the Google Play Music app is an easy enough experience, and I like the design of the player. If you have two (or more) friends on the same Wi-Fi network, you can all take turns throwing your music onto the Q. Whatever songs each individual has access to in Google’s cloud, just select them and add them to the queue. You can also select entire albums at once.Anyone can reorder the list to make their songs play sooner, and anyone can play songs from their own individual cloud-based libraries, sort of like you can do in iTunes DJ.

After your friends leave your house, you can keep listening to whatever songs they loaded onto your Q for a full day after they walk out the door. All the sharing is, of course, reliant on everyone having Android phones or tablets with the Nexus Q app installed. (If their phones have NFC chips, they can tap the Q to initiate the app download.) Regardless, the sharing features are very cool, and they turns the sleek orb into a social listening device (though this orb is probably more fun at parties).

I hooked the Q up to a television (using the included HDMI cable) and my surround-sound system, and things got less rosy. Setup was easy at the Wired office, but took around 20 minutes when I hooked it up at home and required a factory reset. The three HD movies I rented played fine and looked great, with totally accurate colors and no perceptible artifacts. Shopping in Google’s online store within the Movies & TV app is a messy experience, though. The app’s inscrutable navigation makes casual browsing a head-spinner, and title categories are muddled — J. Edgar is a documentary?

Once you find a movie, the controls for pausing and rewinding during playback are frustratingly poor. YouTube videos are served through the YouTube app, which is better. But the streams don’t look as good, and I experienced multiple hiccups during playback on both of the Wi-Fi networks I used for testing. One other frustration: You’d expect the video to pause when you get up and tap the Q, but instead, a tap just mutes it.

I’m guessing the majority of the people buying a Q are going to plug it straight into their televisions and surround-sound receivers. So it’s a shame the video experience is weaker than the audio experience, and that the sweet-sounding amp goes unused unless you hook up a pair of speakers.

The Q doesn’t compete with Roku or Apple TV — it only plays music and videos stored within your Google Play account, and you can’t throw video or audio from any apps other than YouTube. So no iTunes content, no Netflix, no Spotify. It doesn’t really square with AirPlay or DLNA devices either, as those also allow far more streaming options than just Google Play and YouTube. A Sonos Connect Amp? Maybe, but the Q also plays video and allows your friends to stream their Google Play music while they’re on your Wi-Fi network, neither of which Sonos does. But if you hook up multiple Qs on one network, they can all only play the same track — unlike Sonos, which lets you send different tracks to different speakers.

So, what does the Nexus Q compete with? Nothing, really. At least nothing that’s available on the shelves right now. It’s an entirely unique product made for a very narrow audience, and its limitations will likely prevent it from succeeding as a consumer device.

There’s no way people are going to run out and snatch these up at the same rate they’re buying Apple TVs and Sonos speakers. Audiophiles probably won’t bother, either — there are other 25-watt Class D amps out there that don’t limit you to 320k MP3 streams, which is as high-fidelity as Google Play gets.

So, who will buy this thing? Android nerds. Developers truly excited about hardware design, platform extensibility and embedded software. The types of people who will immediately hook it to their PC instead of their TV, and fire up adb instead of The Muppets. Google has made the device easily accessible, and it has the ports to accept hardware controllers and external displays. Hackers have already gotten it to load games, and we’ll surely continue to see video demos of marvelous experiments bubble up from the developer forums.

So what if we see it as a snooze? To them, it’s a dream.

mac notebook review(Apple)

• Apple's Retina MacBook Pro has a stunning display but doesn't come cheap, writes Shane Richmond.

Apple used the WWDC keynote to announce more details of Mountain Lion - the next version of its Mac operating system, which is released next month - and iOS 6, the latest update to the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. But the most groundbreaking announcement was the new MacBook Pro with a 'Retina' display.


What WWDC demonstrated was how, after several years of rapid expansion into new product areas, Apple’s products are now starting to come together again. Mountain Lion and iOS 6 share plenty of features, particularly the iCloud integration that allows content to flow freely from, say, smartphone to laptop.


Meanwhile, Apple’s MacBooks are starting to show the influence of iOS devices in numerous ways, whether it’s gesture controls on trackpads, high resolution displays or the fact that the computers are more likely to be sealed units, not upgradeable by users once they leave the shop.


Apple is not the first to do these things but it is doing them with an elegance and simplicity that many of its competitors struggle to imitate.


The screen on Apple's new flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro with Retina display, has to be seen to be believed. At 2880 x 1800 pixels, it can deliver double the screen resolution of the previous MacBook Pro and the difference is like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time.

Text looks as if it is printed onto the glass and pictures are extraordinarily sharp. There will be plenty who say that you don't need this kind of resolution but once you have tried it, you won't want to give it up.

Photographers and video editors will find the resolution especially useful. The screen can display a full 1080 video image and still have three million pixels to spare, meaning that tasks that used to require a much larger screen are now practical on a laptop of this size.

The screen has fewer reflections than previous models and offers a wide viewing angle. However, many apps will need to be updated to take full advantage of the new resolution and, as with the new iPad, browsing on this machine quickly reveals the low quality of images on most websites.

It is the screen that will grab the headlines but this is a powerful computer too. Its specifications match, and in some areas exceed, those of the standard 15-inch MacBook Pro and yet it is thinner and lighter than the 13-inch model. I've used an 11-inch MacBook Air as my main computer for a year now so this new machine feels like a cinema display sitting in my lap. But it took just a brief comparison with my old 15-inch MacBook Pro to make me realise just how much the machine has slimmed down.

Conversely, after a few hours using the new MacBook Pro, the 11-inch Air then feels impossibly small. Switching between the two machines, as I've been doing for the last couple of days, can be disorientating.

Apple has changed the way it builds its machines in order to make this new slimline Pro possible. The display is built-in to the unibody construction, reducing weight and thickness, while the cooling system uses asymmetrical fans to reduce noise.

Gone are some features that many users will still consider essential. Like the MacBook Air, this machine doesn't come with an optical drive. Those who really need to use DVDs and CDs will need an external drive. Anyone who needs an ethernet port or a Firewire port will have to get an adaptor. Even Apple's power lead has changed, so anyone who typically connects their laptop to an external display will also need an adaptor.

The hard drive is gone too - again, as in the MacBook Air. It is replaced by up to 768GB of flash memory. The 256GB default offering assumes that most people will store the bulk of their content on external drives or in the cloud. The benefit is speed; this computer is noticeably faster and more responsive than previous models.

Many who equate the 'pro' designation with flexibility and the freedom to customise your machine will baulk at Apple's decisions here. You cannot replace the battery on this machine yourself - something that has been the case with Macs for a few years - and you cannot upgrade the RAM after purchase either.

And none of this comes cheap. The standard model, with a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7 processor, starts at £1,799. The 2.6GHz version starts at £2,299. That said, a Sony VAIO with similar specs and a smaller, lower-resolution screen, will cost you around £2,000.

Those users who are willing to spend the money will get an exceptional machine, one that points to the future of laptops as much as the MacBook Air did before it. Just as the MacBook Air is now being emulated by PC manufacturers as the 'Ultrabook' so you can expect ultra-high resolution displays to be standard on top tier laptops before too long.

Microsoft Surface Tablet First Impressions: Awesome

LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft debuted a new tablet today, or rather a tablet family based on its upcoming Windows 8 OS. We get a behind-the-scenes tour at some of the tech that went into making the device, which arrives later this year.

Earlier today, Microsoft held a mysterious event in Los Angeles. We talked about a Microsoft tablet, but to be honest, we were expecting a Windows RT (for ARM) demo with different vendors rather than a full-blown Microsoft launch with their own tablets 

The essence of the two Windows Surface tablets is that “it’s the Windows you know” -in a tablet- but in a fashion that does not get in the way of productivity. The cover/keyboard which comes in two variants illustrates this extremely well: one keyboard is super-thin and another keyboard has deeper key travel space and is one of the best keyboard setup in terms of compactness/effectiveness ratio. Both have an awesome design, and once the cover is on, they feel like a book cover, really. 

It’s funny because this the type of keyboard integration that we always wanted with the iPad, but never got. Also, this is not a wireless keyboard, so not only it does not require a battery, and it is connected to the tablet with a low latency link (1/1000s). This is hands-down the best productivity apparatus that we have seen on a tablet thus far. For sure, the keyboard is going to be a best-selling accessory. Microsoft would not confirm if the keyboard was bundled with the system or not, but given that there are multiple color options, a bundle seems unlikely.

The keyboard also serve as a display cover and this should make most people happy. Despite the fact that modern displays are often resistant to scratches, even from a combat knife steel tip, people do feel better about having some kind of protection for their tablet screen.

Last, but not least, Microsoft has managed to add a full-size USB 2.0 port to make this easy to connect and transfer data from USB keys, cameras and other things that you have grown accustomed to with your PC. Microsoft integrated a full-size USB port in a 9.3mm-thick body, something that was deemed “impossible” not so long ago by major tablet makers.

  In terms of functionality, the Microsoft Surface tablet line-up comes in two versions: one of them is equipped with a Tegra 3 ARM-based processor that runs Windows 8 RT (ARM version). This particular tablet can only run the Windows 8 Metro applications, but it is very thin and light, just like you would expect from a modern tablet. In theory, the Surface for Windows RT will come with MS Office and the Mail application.

The Surface Pro tablet is powered by an Intel Core i5 CPU and runs the desktop version of Windows 8, which means that it can run any Windows or DOS application that were ever created (games too). In addition to being a tablet, the Surface Pro can connect to a large display, keyboard and mouse and turn into a full-blown Windows computer

When we played with the Tegra 3 based tablet running on Windows RT, it felt like a very high-quality device. Instead of aluminum, Microsoft has used VaporMag, a magnesium variant that allowed the tablet to be very rigid and solid. We could feel how rigid it was when trying to apply twist and sheer force on it. It is also scratch-resistant, more so than bare aluminum in our opinion (aluminum bodies often scratch with a strong nail pressure).

Specifications Highlight

Surface Windows RT
676g
9.3mm thick
10.6” display (resolution unconfirmed, looks like 1366×768)
Tegra 3 chip
31.5Wh battery
microSD slot, full-size USB 2.0 port, micro HD video out
Dual WiFi antenna (higher throughput)
Integrated stand
32GB or 64GB of internal storage

Surface Windows 8 Pro
903g
13.3mm thick
10.6” display (resolution unconfirmed, looks like 1366×768)
42Wh battery
microSDXC slot, full-size USB 3.0 port, mini DisplayPort video out
Dual WiFi antenna (higher throughput)
Integrated stand
64GB or 128GB of internal storage

A brief history of failed Window pc tablet

The Microsoft Surface tablet will find the bar set fairly low by previous Windows slate

Seeing all the attention (and unexpectedly lavish praise) heaped on Microsoft's just-announced Surface tablet reminds me of all the great Windows tablets I've tested and reviewed over the years.

Wait, that's not right. The vast majority of Windows-powered tablets I've tried have been terrible. Some hit minimum levels of functionality, but nearly all were underpowered, lacked touch-centered software, were too expensive, or had terrible input hardware

It's interesting to note that many of these examples date from the pre-iPad era. Once Apple's tablet hit the scene, there was a sharp drop-off in Windows tablets. Did PC makers decide they needed time to regroup and rethink after seeing what Apple could deliver for $499? 

One of the only high-profile Windows tablets announced post-iPad was the HP Windows 7 Slate. After a teaser campaign of YouTube videos and promotional photos, the actual product was essentially cancelled, but revived as the underwhelming HP Slate 500, a business-only tablet that didn't do much for us, and the WebOS HP TouchPad, one of the most infamous tech flameouts in recent history.


,microsoft surface tablet
Microsoft may fare better with the new Surface (perhaps it really is easier when you make both the software and the hardware), or it could just as easily go down as yet another Windows tablet that didn't live up to the hype.

In this gallery of Windows tablets, you'll see many of the touch-screen PCs we've tested, reviewed, or reported on over the past several years. Why is this important? Because those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.