Seagate has begun to ship the world's first 4TB hard drives that feature 1TB platters. Seagate says that the four platter design is one that allows for the highest performance possible, while doubling capacity and reducing cost.

The drives are said to also feature the highest average data rate of any desktop hard drive that is currently sold on the market today. The new design consumes 35-percent less power than competing drives, and features 64MB of total cache space.

To put things into perspective, a 4TB HDD can house 450 hours of HD video, 1 million+ songs and 800,000 DSLR quality photos. The 4TB model has more than 800,000 times the storage capacity of the first Seagate HDD introduced in 1979 and is hundreds of times smaller in physical size.

Today Amazon announced that it will be adding vinyl records to its AutoRip service. AutoRip is a service by Amazon that offers purchasers of music on physical storage, free MP3 downloads of the same album.

From now on, any physical disc purchased on Amazon will include a free digital copy of the same album, which is placed in your free Amazon Cloud Player. In addition, digital copies of purchased tracks will not count against your storage total on the cloud service. Amazon says the service is available now for "thousands of records," including titles from every major label with more titles being added daily.

"We're thrilled to extend this experience to vinyl records," said Steve Boom, Vice President of Digital Music for Amazon "Many of our music customers are vinyl fans and it's traditionally been very difficult to make digital versions of vinyl records-now customers can enjoy the albums they buy wherever they are, not just when they have access to a record player."

A new Nexus 7 from Google could arrive as soon as this coming July, if rumors we are hearing are true. Reuters is citing two separate sources that claim that Google is preparing to ship roughly eight million new tablets by the end of the year.

The sources say that the new Nexus 7 will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon instead of an NVIDIA Tegra 4. One source says that we could see a the new Nexus 7 drop down to the $150 price point, while the other stated that $200 was the magic number.

If these rumors are true, then we will most likely see the device surface at next month's Google I/O event, which has been sold out for months. Last year's event saw the original Nexus 7 unveiled as well as a demo of Google Glass.

BlackBerry is hoping to convince Android and iOS users to switch over to the dark side by offering up a demo of key BlackBerry 10 features through a new HTML5 web app. Dubbed BlackBerry Glimpse, the app walks users through 10 demonstrations that include the BlackBerry Hub, Screen Share, Time Shift and the unique BB10 predictive keyboard.

I tried out Glimpse on my very dated Sprint Motorola Photon 4G and the "demo" felt more like a slideshow that used gestures to control rather than a true interactive demonstration. The keyboard demo was so fast that I barely caught what it was trying to illustrate.

Not all was bad though, I actually do like the UI that BlackBerry has created. It does have a very Android feel to it which is something that I prefer. Will this "demo" cause a mass migration to BlackBerry 10? I doubt it, but it is a pretty cool marketing idea. If you would like to try it out for yourself head over to the Source #2 link below.

This morning the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it has revised the way it believes companies should use social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook to inform their investors about company information.

The revision comes after the commission investigated Netflix CEO Reed Hastings over a post on Facebook about his personal holdings in the company, which caused the company's stock value to rise. The revision requires companies to notify investors that their social media accounts could post information that could affect stock values.

"Personal social media sites of individuals employed by a public company would not ordinarily be assumed to be channels through which the company would disclose material corporate information. Companies should review the Commission's existing guidance - it is flexible enough to address questions that arise for companies that choose to communicate through social media, and the guidance does so in a straightforward manner."

Forty years ago today, then Motorola exec Marty Cooper walked out of his office, met with a reporter on the sidewalk in front of his office building and proceeded to make a world-changing phone call to the CEO of Bell Labs (a division of AT&T).

This event was most likely one of the top 3 most significant phone calls in the history of the world, as it was the very first cellular phone call ever made. Sure there were car phones at the time, but this was a completely mobile, hand held all-in-one device. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that Cooper used went on to be known in pop culture as "The Brick" because it resembled one in both size and weight. The 2.5lb device would set you back a cool $3,995 and featured a single line LED text display.

Fast forward 40 years and Google now owns Motorola's mobile division and modern smartphones are tens of thousands of times more powerful. Instead of being limited to the uber rich, now even the poorest people communicate via cellular phones. If you were wondering, in the first cellular call Cooper said to the Bell Labs CEO "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end."

Quickoffice is definitely one of the better office suite apps out there at the moment and now users of Google's Apps for Business subscribers can now download the productivity suite for free.

This morning Google announced that Android and iOS users of its Apps for Business service would be able to download Quickoffice for free. This is something the iPad version has had for some time now, and Google felt that it needed to be extended to the full range of devices used in the business environment.

Quickoffice has also received a few improvements in preparation of the announcement. The software now shows Google Drive folders such as Recent, Shared With Me, and Starred. Subfolders are also visible and there is an option to zip folders.

It looks like Nokia need to make a bigger smartphone if they want to succeed in the increasingly sharp smartphone market, according to analysts. During an interview with Bloomberg, IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said that big-screen devices are "a trend that can't be missed" because "people are using smartphones in different ways now, consuming media by streaming over faster mobile networks."

CSS Insight research director, Ben Wood, chimed in with a similar opinion stating that phablets are an important trend and he has told Bloomberg that "Nokia needs to make sure they don't miss the boat" by not building one of their own.

If you haven't been keeping up with the current affairs of the world, North Korea are testing the waters of war at the moment - all while South Korea and their very tight and even more capable ally, the United States, play their war games with B2 Stealth Bombers, among other expensive military toys.

All while this is happening, Anonymous are jumping into the ring where the hacking collective are said to have started an initiative called "Operation Free Korea" and they're demanding that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un resign and install free democracy in the country.

Anonymous have also demanded that North Korea abandon their nuclear ambitions, and for the NK government to give universal and uncensored Internet access to their citizens. The hacking collective have claimed they've hacked into the North Korean intranet, mail servers and Web servers, threatening to wage war if their demands aren't met. The group has written:

We got all over 15k membership records of Uriminzokkiri.com and many more. First we gonna wipe your data, then we gonna wipe your badass dictatorship 'government.'

Get ready for some serious bandwidth to hit us in the near future, with the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium publishing their HMC Specification 1.0. This will allow companies to build platforms and RAM with 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB chips baking in the stacked, power-efficient technology all without those pesky compatibility issues.

The HMC Specification 1.0 has some impressive potential with eight links, a memory cube can push a peak 320GB/sec of aggregate bandwidth - opening up a can of whoop ass on the current 11GB/sec that DDR3 gives us.

The Consortium have decided to lift the dress a little higher on HMC, saying that the next-gen blueprint is already getting scribbled on, and that it is due early 2014. This should give us double the individual data link speeds - pushing the 15Gbps to 28Gbps. Let's hope this isn't some pipe dream, and we see actual consumer products with even close to these insane speeds in the near future.

Registrations for Microsoft's upcoming BUILD conference are now open, with the first 500 registrations scoring a nice $500 off of the price of admission. The BUILD conference will take place on June 26-28 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

The three-day event will see sessions held on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Blue and a bunch of other topics. The Redmond-based software giant are also hosting a hackathon that starts the night before, at 7pm. Attendees can work by themselves, or team up to build apps from scratch using Windows, Windows Phone or Windows Azure, where they can win prizes.

We should also see the Windows 8 update codenamed Windows Blue to be shown off at BUILD, with the unveiling of the update to Windows 8 reportedly set to be the only public preview of the OS before it is ready for public consumption later in the year.

During a Branch chat, Daring Fireball's John Gruber has said that iOS 7 is running behind schedule, and that when it is released it'll include a big change to the user interface (UI). He said:

What I've heard: iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it. (Let me know if you've heard this song before.)

Gruber also noted that iOS 7 is set to have a "significant system-wide UI overhaul" and that iOS engineers who are toting the next-gen mobile OS from Apple are required to have a special privacy filter on their devices that reportedly limits viewing angles on their devices. This stops others from getting a look at the new-look iOS.

iOS has needed an UI overhaul for a while now, something I've been itching for since the iPhone 3GS. Android has been making strides in the UI department, something Apple should've been on the ball about. iOS 7 should hopefully be quite striking to both look at, and use.

If the 5.5-inch screen on the Galaxy Note II wasn't big enough, get ready for some even bigger phones from Samsung if the latest rumors are true. SamMobile has the news from their 'insider', stating that Samsung has changed the name of their upcoming Galaxy Fonblets to Galaxy Mega.

There will be two new smartphones introduced, the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and Galaxy Mega 6.3. The Mega 5.8 has the codename of GT-I9152 while its bigger brother, the Mega 6.3, has the codename of GT-I9200. The Mega 6.3 is reported to have a 6.3-inch display, which is what the rumored Galaxy Note III smartphone was meant to have.

We should expect the Mega 5.8 and 6.3 to be unleashed in June.

Google have now enabled the ability for users to upload full-sized photos from any web browser to Google+. All you have to do is enable the option and let it do the photo uploading for you.

There are limits on the file size of the photos, with anything over 2048 pixels across (and videos over 15 minutes long) will still count toward your Google Drive cap.

It's that time of the month again, when we find out just how the Android OS is doing with its users. Google have changed up the way they collect these numbers, where they now only collect data from devices that have visited the Google Play store in the last month.

Previously, Google used to count all phones that checked into their servers. This change in collection methods hasn't changed the numbers that much, with Jelly Bean sitting pretty at 25% of the Android market share. Ice Cream Sandwich actually climbed a little, with 29.3% of devices running the deliciously-named OS.

The War Z has had its fair share of troubles, but it has just gotten much more serious with its forum and game database being hacked. This has put users' data at risk.

The user data include e-mail addresses, forum passwords, both of which OP Productions has said were encrypted. E-mail addresses to log into The War Z, game passwords, in-game character names and the IP addresses of gamers on both the forum and in the game were also leaked. OP Productions has said that they don't collect names and passwords of their customers, so unless it was posted on the forum itself, you should be okay.

So if you're using the same (or similar) passwords as your The War Z account, or the forum, we would suggest you change all of your passwords just in case.

According to ZDNet's sources, Microsoft's upcoming Windows Blue will be known as Windows 8.1 to the public. As you can see in the screenshot below, the operating system is clearly labeled as "Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro." It looks like Windows Blue could be similar to the service packs of yesteryear.

The update appears to follow along the lines of Windows Phone 7 and 7.5. Windows RT is said to be known as "Windows RT 8.1." Microsoft envisions Windows 8 as a multiple selling season product meaning these refreshes every year or so, somewhat like how Apple updates Mac OS X in that they have 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 each with their own codename.

It's not clear whether Microsoft intends to charge customers to update, though I would venture to guess they will charge a fee. If I had to guess a number, I'd guess $20.

I've got a spot of bad news for Nokia Lumia 810 users on T-Mobile. Even though the Lumia 810 hardware has support for LTE, it looks like users won't be getting access to T-Mobile's LTE network, despite earlier remarks that the device would be upgraded to LTE in the future through a software update.

T-Mobile said in a statement:

While the Nokia Lumia 810 features a chipset, which provides the hardware capability to support both HSPA+42 and LTE, the device will not automatically access our LTE network and, at this time, it will not receive an update to do so.

 

T-Mobile is committed to enhancing customers' experience with our devices, including providing upgrades to device features and operating systems, and T-Mobile aims to deliver software upgrades when it will provide a better experience for our customers. We'll share additional information on upgrades for the Nokia Lumia 810 when they are available.

I'm pretty sure that LTE counts as a better experience. Who wouldn't want faster mobile Internet speeds? Another issue is some users may have purchased the Lumia 810 because T-Mobile had promised it would receive an update to enable LTE in the future. It's not clear what T-Mobile might do to compensate customers who purchased the device because of future LTE support.

Mozilla has updated its Firefox web browser with per-window private browsing that functions much the same as Chrome's private browsing feature. In addition to per-window private browsing, Firefox 20 comes with stability improvements, bug fixes, HTML5 additions, and a new download experience.

As part of the stability improvements, users can now close a frozen plugin without the entire browser crashing. This is also similar to how Chrome handles plugins. The improved download experience features a new interface and a button that makes opening the downloads list much easier. When downloads are active, the button shows an estimated time to completion.

Probably the largest change with Firefox 20 is the ability to have both normal Firefox windows and private browsing Firefox windows open simultaneously. As previously stated, this new method is how Chrome has handled private browsing from the get-go. Firefox used to require the entire session to either be a normal session or a private browsing session.

When Finding Dory arrives in 2015, it will have taken Disney just 13 years to make the sequel to the widely popular Finding Nemo movie. Ellen DeGeneres confirmed that Finding Dory would be arriving at a theater near you on November 25, 2015 with DeGeneres remaining the voice of Dory.

"I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time," DeGeneres said in a statement Tuesday. Some might say that she just kept swimming for this day. References aside, she says that she isn't "mad it took this long." With her usual humor, she added, "I know the people at Pixar were busy creating Toy Story 16."

But the time they took was worth it. The script is fantastic. And it has everything I loved about the first one: It's got a lot of heart, it's really funny, and the best part is - it's got a lot more Dory.

You can expect to see many of the favorites from Finding Nemo. Marlin, Nemo, and the Tank Gang, along with new characters, will be present and help with the telling of Dory's story. The movie will reunite Dory with her family and teach her a few things about the meaning of family.