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The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

Asking for opinions on the best budget tablet. Something big enough for me to work on -- i.e., be able to type easily and see the display without holding it six inches from my face. Not worried about communications -- as long as it's got WiFi built in (which I'm sure they all do), I can use my cellphone as a mobile hotspot to transfer/send files. This is intended to be a replacement for a working laptop/notebook. And again -- "budget" is the keyword. Thanks all!.

After a steep – 33% – decline in unit shipments in the second calendar quarter of the year, Acer Group now wants to shrink its Microsoft Windows-based offerings and expand product lines that utilize operating systems from Google, such as Android or Chrome. The company seems to be serious about the plan as it wants to grow its “non-Windows” business as quick as possible. "We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible. Android is very popular in smartphones and dominant in tablets. I also see a new market there for Chromebooks," said Jim Wang, the president...

x86 all the way Acer is gearing up to introduce the Iconia W500 tablet, the world’s first slate based on AMD’s Fusion platform. Unlike most tablets, the W500 is based on AMD’s C-50 APU. This is a proper x86 dual-core with on-die HD 6250 graphics. Thanks to this, the W500 runs Windows 7 rather than Android, which should come in handy for a wide variety of users who rely on the Windows environment and cannot transition to Android for practical reasons.The W500 packs a 10.1-inch 1280x800 touchscreen, but crucially it also ships with a full-sized chiclet keyboard, which doubles as...

This year, Acer appears poised to overtake Dell as the world’s second-largest seller of personal computers, which would put a real dent into one of America’s favorite dorm-to-empire business stories. And if this comes to pass, Acer would trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.

Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, Acer will purchase all of Gateway's outstanding shares for $1.90 per share. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors at both companies and should be completed by the end of this year, subject to government approval, Acer said in a statement. Gateway's shares ended at $1.21 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange. "This is the biggest acquisition in Acer's 30 year history," said J.T. Wang, Acer's chairman, speaking at a news conference in Taipei. "After this acquisition, we are solidly number three in the global PC market," Wang...

"The similarities are almost eerie. This year, readers gave us the lowdown on over 13,000 desktop PCs—enough data to rate eight of the country's leading brands. And the final tally looks an awful lot like last year's survey results," Cade Metz reports for PC Magazine on "The 19th Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey." Metz reports, "This year, you diehard PC Mag readers detailed your experiences with nearly 20,000 PCs (notebooks and desktops) and more than 6,500 printers (from mono lasers to color ink jet all-in-ones). And what you say about the leading manufacturers isn't always what we'd expect. No big...

Still think the Mac mini’s not a good value compared to budget PCs? If you want to compare Apples to, well, apples, you might want to have a look at Aopen’s new MiniPC, once it’s unveiled tomorrow at the Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco, Calif. In 2005 AOpen generated interest when it unveiled its MiniPC, a Pentium-based Windows-compatible PC computer with a stunningly similar design as Apple’s Mac mini. Now AOpen is countering Apple’s Intel Mac mini introduction with its new MiniPC, the MP945. It costs a bit more, but sports some features the new Mac mini doesn’t have....