As technology continues to standardise and move online, the value proposition of alternatives to Microsoft Windows has grown. One of these alternatives, Ubuntu - a Linux-based operating system that was founded in 2004 - has grown to the point where it has at least 20 million users worldwide, including large-scale business and government deployments.
Ubuntu is something like a hybrid of its competitors, Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Like Windows, Ubuntu is designed to work on any PC (whereas Mac OS X runs only on Apple Macs); like Mac OS X, Ubuntu doesn't run Windows software. Unlike either of its competitors, however, Ubuntu is free to install and use, and ships with a...

Nokia has been pummelled in the market of late as the Apple iPhone and Google Android continue to gain ground. However, the company has started to fight back by standardising on a single software platform - Symbian^3 - across all of its smartphone, and by developing an impressive software upgrade that will work with all current devices: the N8, C7, E7, and C6-01. That said, the software upgrade for Symbian^3, known as Symbian Anna, has taken almost five months to actually be released; Anna was announced back in April but is only now starting to be rolled out to Nokia owners.
The good news is that Symbian Anna has been worth the wait. It is faster to use, boasts an updated web browser,...