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Toshiba’s premier TV range at one point was its Qosmio range, but it seems that the eight pound multimedia beast is now something of a past artefact. In its place, is now the Kira luxury brand which has the trademark Harman Kardon speakers now but is much more slender and stunning to look at with a 13.3 inch screen and an overall weight of just three pounds.

Toshiba is obviously attempting to take on the MacBook Air which is a gold standard in the industry for lightweight laptops. In order to rival the aluminium rival, Toshiba has utilized magnesium alloy and made the claim that their product is 90% stronger and more durable than the Apple counterpart.

The Kirabook also is packed with an Intel Core i7 processor, 256GB solid state drive, 8GB of memory, but a heftier price tag of just over £2000. Some of this could be due to the fact that the Kirabook has a much more impressive screen and is in fact a touch screen to boot. This makes it a bit easier to adapt to the Windows 8 format which is of course the downfall of the laptop, because Windows 8 has pretty much been hated by everyone.

On the brighter side, the software package also offers Premier Elements and Adobe’s Photoshop for easy video and photo editing and the battery life of the Kirabook is well over seven hours. The 256GB might be too small for heavy video and photo storage, but this can be remedied a bit with an external hard drive and Toshiba makes a great 750GB external hard drive that will only cost a bit over £100 to supplement for quick backups and easy storage.

Facebook might have bit off more than it could handle when it attempted to create the Facebook Home app that was supposed to turn Android mobiles into essential Facebook phones. In fact the app launcher has received such poor reviews and slow uptake that in the US AT&T has already decided to drop the HTC Facebook phone from its list of offerings.

Despite a heavy advertising campaign, Facebook Home took almost a month before it hit a million downloads in Google’s app store. Apparently those who downloaded the app were not that impressed as well as over half of the 16,000 reviews in the Google Play store offered the app a simple one star. Only a small margin of users actually gave it the elusive five star reviews.

AT&T apparently had its doubts about the Facebook mobile from the star as they dropped its price down to just 99 cents in America which was almost a $100 reduction. Despite this fact, the uptake was still so poor that the carrier decided to drop the HTC ‘Facebook phone’ altogether.

Facebook is thought to be debating internally on how to deal with this smashing failure, something the company is not known for. The mobile device was supposed to be Facebook’s venture onto the mobile market without actually creating its own mobile, but obviously this venture is not going to work.

This is the second time that HTC has actually attempted to create a ‘Facebook phone’ after they first released the ChaCha two years ago which had a dedicated button on it to allow people to instantly access their Facebook any time with just the press of a button. Despite negative reviews, Facebook product management director Adam Mosseri claims that this is just the start, however, the start of failure is not exactly a great prognosis for Facebook.

The appearance of brain control technology is not brand new, but ongoing research and development has produced results that are . . . well, ‘mind-boggling’ seems an applicable description, and we’re only in the first stages of this remarkable technology.

Brain-Computer Interface technologies has driven production by several companies in the direction of user-friendly devices that basically translate brain waves into actions; one of these pioneers is Interaxon. Founder and CEO Ariel Garten said, “I’ve never met anybody who was not excited about being able to control something with their mind.” That’s what this BCI business is all about; taking established EEG technology to the next level, in this case straight to the consumer.

Interaxon’s Muse is a lightweight headset (their website claims it’s a “slim, fashion-forward device which even Anna Wintour would conceivably wear”) that measures you brainwaves in real time and transmits them to your smartphone or other device. It tells you how well your brain is working, and it translates your brainwaves into instructions to interact with content on that device. In other words you can use a thought rather than a finger.

Very basically, it’s EEG translated into personal terms, with the Muse costing less than $200 (far less than most medical facilities charge for an EEG scan). The possibilities for this and similar devices in the field of entertainment are of course endless, but more important are those in medical and psychotherapy advances. Elevate your mood, study more effectively, do away with tension headaches . . . again, that’s only the beginning.

Already on the market is a device that screens your phone calls for you, based on the level of activity going on in your brain. It’s called Good Times, and connects with Necomimi’s Brainwave Cat Ears ($69.00) to inform your caller if you’re busy and suggest he or she call back. Developed by Ruggero Scorcioni (it took him about an hour, reportedly), Good Times not only screens calls but allows you to change the station you’re listening to or watching – just by thinking about it.

The latest news about smartphones is that they’re getting faster so fast it’s bewildering, but there may be a sticking point where speed and size butt heads. Farhad Manjoo, the American journalist and oft-quoted observer of the ‘new media’, brings up the speed versus size conundrum and says we’ve just about reached that point already.

As Manjoo points out, every year smartphones are almost doubling the speed and capacity of their functions; more apps, more powerful processors, better displays etc. so your phone can do almost everything but brush your teeth. However, the tech-wizards haven’t yet discovered a way to shrink the power supply at the same pace that the user functions multiply.

In countless surveys of customer satisfaction, one of the leading complaints is always battery life. Always. A smartphone can perform amazing feats of communication, entertainment, even education, but it can only do so while the battery is on duty. Once your power pack packs it up for the day, that’s all she wrote and all you’re going to write, watch, read or otherwise make use of the device until it’s been recharged.

According to Manjoo, smartphone users will soon be faced with a choice. One option is a super-fast processor that can handle all the apps anyone could possibly want, but only for about half a day; then you recharge or you find something else to do. The other option is a slower, less athletic performer that can go all day and into the wee hours without a charge.

The choice will be easy for many of us; not everyone who owns a smartphone is going to use all or indeed any of its capabilities often enough to drain the battery before the user would reasonably shut down and go to sleep.

However a large and increasing percentage of customers have become so digitally oriented that their electronic devices don’t even get an afternoon nap, much less a full night’s sleep. The moral of this story is: if you’re in the fast lane now, you’ll probably have to slow down and change lanes for a while, until battery technology catches up with the rest of the programme.

It was no surprise when the Samsung Galaxy S4 took the centre stage at its unveiling recently. With the success of the Galaxy S3, its predecessor, there was little question that the next one would be highly awaited, and the company delivered with a grandiose performance, providing a brand new flagship device that would continue to dominate the Android market.

But while Samsung keeps going for bigger screens, it has not forgotten those who want a smaller device. Just like prior generations, the S4 will have a smaller version called the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini. It was originally stated to come on in May, but now a new report indicates that the company had to delay its release date.

The S4 mini is now likely to come out in mid-July, two months after the set date. There are no clear reasons why as of yet, but this report comes from fan site SamMobile, and appears authentic. It seems like the smartphone maker may simply not have the right components on hand to create this smaller S4 in the time allotted.

The mini will have a 4.3″ display, slightly smaller than the full version, along with a 8MPx camera, and run Android 4.2.2 with Touch Wiz. The rest of the device is fairly on par with its bigger cousin, but there are rumours that say there will be two versions, a dual-core with a single SIM, and a quad-core with a two-SIMs option.

If you are eagerly waiting for it however, make sure you live in the right market, or know someone who can send you one. Right now it seems that the Galaxy S4 mini is aimed at China, and may not become available in western markets. There is no word yet on a price point.

As more of our daily lives end up online, in cloud services, people are starting to wonder what happens to all of this data once we die. Google may have a solution, as the company has just introduced a new service that allows you to get control of your information once you pass away, along with what happens to it.

This new digital will is a way to specify what you want Google to do with the data they have on you. This may include emails in Gmail, posts on Google+, and other content that resides on the company servers. Among the choices offered are to forward some of that information to a third party, perhaps your inheritance, or to simply delete that information after a period of time. This period can be 3, 6 or 12 months.

Before anything is done, Google will be forwarding a warning notice to an email or phone number of your choice, to make sure you did not just disappear, and if no reply is received, the service will be executed. Andreas Tuerk, a product manager at Google, announced the new service on the company blog. He says that Google hopes that once setup, you will be safe knowing what will happen to your cloud data once you die.

A new plan from O2 may please a lot of mobile phone users as they will now be able to refresh their current contracts and upgrade handset whenever they want. This new project is called the Refresh Traffic Plan and it will allow customers to change their smartphones, getting the latest handset, whenever they wish, regardless whether their contract is at term or not. This new way of doing things means that users who take part in this new programme will have two separate plans side by side which allows this change to occur.

This new type of plan will come into effect in May and be available for any current or new customer who wants to sign up. The idea behind it is that you do not have to pay the whole cost of the phone, or renew your whole contract for its whole duration. These plans come in a 24 months or 2 years at a time, and provide 600 minutes of airtime, unlimited texts and 750MB of data usage, all of which for £12 per month.

A higher tier is also available at £17 per month and includes unlimited minutes and 2GB of data. Thanks to this secondary plan, alongside your main one, you can get the lower costs for phones and devices, which you normally would not be able to get if you are not at the end of your current contract. People can end their airtime contract without paying a penalty, or get a new phone any time they want.

For now, this new service will only cover a select set of handsets, but will expand to other devices in the future. Right now, the options will include the Samsung Galaxy S3, S3 Mini, Note 2, Ativ S, iPhone 4, 4S, 5, the Nokia Lumia 820, the HTC One and a couple more. These devices cover a broad range and most of them are very recent, which should satisfy most customers, according to what O2 is saying. In order to get into this new plan, all you have to do is contact your O2 reseller when the program starts in May.

Facebook has teamed up and joined forces with HTC to create a software that can win over any phone with Android OS. It is anticipated that Facebook will tailor and modify functions from home menu to camera utilities. The software is called Facebook Home and any Android users can download and install the application on their phones. Furthermore, this software is expected to be shown on a gadget created by HTC called Myst.

Facebook will divulge and make known how it plans to carry on with the routines of its 680 million users who access Facebook from a smart phone, at an event in its office in San Francisco, California. Eric Tseng, Mobile Head of Facebook, and other employees have been active organising exclusive rights which tip-off at some of the immense aspects that may possibly materialise.

Eric Tseng has even suggested classifying Facebook entries in the contacts section of a standard smart phone according to closeness or how near they are to the mobile user. If you think this feature violates your privacy, Facebook has added a button to turn off it off. Otherwise, if left on, all the things that you do is transmitted and broadcasted over the Internet.

No matter what Facebook is planning to do, Mark Zuckerberg has stated that the smartphone will be his main concern in the year 2013. He said, “We want to be good at creating innovative, original, and modern mobile experience so you can get all the Facebook aspects and features that you want on your phone.

A large number of people access Facebook on a smartphone instead of using a desktop computer. Just in the year 2012 alone, it was documented that 57% of Facebook users use their phones to access the world’s largest social networking site. Facebook is definitely ready and all set to take a huge leap into the mobile industry.

Samsung Electronics is a massive global corporation with its centre of operations located in Seoul, Korea. Samsung has gained a lot of success in the recent years because of the abundant deals of its merchandise such as Note and Galaxy S series.

This year, Samsung looks forward to earning revenue of $7.7 billion just for the first 4 months of this year. This revenue is 53% higher than the company achieved in the year 2012 and extremely higher than what shareholders predicted.

Conversely, Windows Phone has also faced a lot challenges with its sales because no one really wants to own one. Android phones and Apple’s iPhone has literally outperform Windows Phone due to the fact that the latter does not actually have any distinctive selling point.

According to Brian Hall, “The sale of Windows Phone has gone futile and terrible because there is no excellent motive for it to subsist. Microsoft have created a smartphone that may function superbly but only for those Microsoft apps such as Microsoft Office and Xbox play. It does not have the things that consumers fancy and require.

Last of all, more and more students are now taking into consideration the use of technology to deceive and cheat by downloading thesis and copy-and-paste homework. However, teachers and professors, too, are taking advantage of the technology to alleviate their job and workloads. At Harvard MIT, a tool has been created and developed to grade and evaluate thesis as well as essays.

This tool can display results in a matter of seconds so that the students can be informed of the evaluation and be given a chance to alter their work to get higher grades. This tool is built based on the platform of Artificial Intelligence but there are still some cynics that contest the initiative.

It cannot be denied that shopping trends and patterns have changed drastically in the last few years. As online shopping rates go on the rise, investors on commercial properties may be in danger of losing out on some major revenue.

Because online retail shopping has become a very strong trend, there has been less demand for actual physical shops. This fact has recently been confirmed by the people over at Aviva Investors, who also say that this new trend could mean an end to very strong income growth on rentals, for at least the next 20 years.

If the estimates are correct, at least 20 percent of all retail space in the country are expected to become surplus. This basically means that there will be 20 percent more available shops than will actually be needed. This data was based off research conducted by the British Council of Shopping centres.

A representative for the organisation, David Skinner, also the Aviva Real Estate Chief Investment Officer, adds that this online shopping trend has become a major issue that has been brought up by commercial property investors. No one actually expected the pace, as well as the scale of change to be this great, but unfortunately, present rates seem to have surpassed estimates, which have been a cause of alarm.

David Skinner adds that fewer demand for retail spaces will cause rental value growth rates to fall anywhere between 0 to 1 percent every year, for the next 20 years. This fall will lead to other ill effects including risks on incomes, as well as a risk on effect leases.

The phenomenon will also force many landlords to give renters more flexible tenant agreements, which may work against their favour. So, while there are obvious benefits to online shopping, and the rise of the trend, there are also unforeseen downsides to the phenomenon too.