Samsung's Galaxy S4 will soon be available in five new colors

To go along with the slew of new products Samsung is announcing today, the company also took a few moments to tout its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone. Samsung also took a moment to introduce the phone in a number of new colors, much as it did last summer for the Galaxy S III. As shown on stage, the five new colors are blue, purple, red, brown, and pink — each with an appropriately goofy adjective added on for good measure. Samsung first announced that it would be bringing new colors out last month when it trumpeted Galaxy S4 sales of 10 million, but unfortunately it didn't say when or where these new colors would be available. If last year was any indication, we'd expect international territories to get them first, with different colors eventually trickling down to various US carriers a bit later.

Google Will Soon Start Selling Chromebooks At Walmart And Staples, Other Retailers Coming Soon

Google sure isn’t giving up on its Chromebook initiative, even though it’s not clear that the company’s Chrome OS-based laptops are selling all that well. Today, Google announced that it’s expanding its brick-and-mortar retail efforts for Chromebooks through partnerships with Walmart and Staples.

Over 1,500 Staples will feature them starting this weekend and about 2,800 Walmart stores will carry Chromebooks later this summer. In total, Google says, this will triple the number of stores that carry its Chromebooks and bring the total number to 6,600 stores around the world.

Walmart, it seems, will only make the cheapest Chromebook — the $199 Acer Chromebook — available on its shelves, though. Staples will feature “a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung” and will also make them available online. The more expensive Pixel, Google’s high-end Chromebook, won’t be available at any of these retailers, it seems.

The company also announced that select Office Depot, Office Max, Fry’s and Tiger Direct locations will begin selling Chromebooks in the “coming months.” Previously, only Amazon and Best Buy carried Google’s laptops.

Expansion Outside Of The U.S.

Google is also expanding the availability of Chromebooks internationally. In the U.K., for example, 116 Tesco stores are now selling Chromebooks; in the Netherlands, Mediamarkt and Saturn will carry them and France’s FNAC stores will also get Chromebook displays. Google is also adding partners in Australia (JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman) and Sweden (Elgiganten).

YouTube Says It Will Bring Advertisers Into Its Partner Program, Starting This Fall

YouTube just announced (as part of this week’s Cannes Lions advertising event) that it’s expanding its partner program to include advertisers.

The program already provides the top YouTube content creators with access to resources for improving their production skills and distribution (and as a result improve their monetization).

YouTube says the advertising program will be structured identically to the existing partner program — just, y’know, for advertisers. The program will start in September with a week-long workshop in Los Angeles. Each advertiser will be assigned a partner manager to help them develop their content strategy.

“By inviting advertisers into our partner program, we hope to give them access to resources and expertise that will help them develop even more compelling and authentic content on YouTube,” said Lucas Watson, YouTube’s vice president of video online global sales, in the announcement press release.

With this program, YouTube-owner Google seems to be encouraging businesses to create advertising that’s designed specifically for the video site, rather than just repackaging existing TV ads and video content. Those kinds of custom campaigns could potentially be more lucrative for YouTube and its content partners. The company also says it will “facilitate the development of strategic alliances with some of YouTube’s top creators” so that advertising and content can be integrated in new ways.

The initial advertising partners are American Express, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo, along with their ad agencies. This is currently just a pilot program, but YouTube plans to expand it to include 100 advertisers by the end of 2014.

The Mini HTC One Will Be Called The HTC One Mini

There’s plenty of information swirling about theHTC One Mini thus far, especially considering it’s not an officially announced handset by any means. Still, we’ve seen pictures, learned about rumored specs, and today it would appear that we’re one step closer to confirmation.

The folks at TNW spotted a User Agent Profilethat was published to a website owned by HTC, the Taiwanese htcmms.com.tw.

According to the User Profile, the new phone will be called the HTC One Mini. Not much else is glaringly obvious from the profile, save for the fact that the phone will have a 720p display and run Android 4.2.

Past that, there isn’t much else to be plucked from the page full of code. However, there have been numerous leaks and rumors that have surfaced over the past few weeks.

Just last week, we got to see a picture of the alleged device in all its glory next to an HTC One. The HTC One is the Taiwanese handset maker’s latest flagship, following on the successes of the HTC One X that came before it. The One Mini is expected to pack lesser power into a similar design, for those looking for a smaller or more affordable handset with the same style.

That leak also surfaced some rumored specs, including a dual-core Snapdragon processor and dual front-facing speakers.

Before that, early in June, we stumbled upon a whole bevy of photos of the HTC One Mini, or at least a phone that looks incredibly similar to the HTC One Mini.

Phone makers are clearly aiming to spread out the love in terms of phone sizes, with a number of “mini” handsets making their way into stores recently. The HTC One Mini, though unconfirmed, is expected to be the latest to join that category of smartphone.

Sometimes, small size matters in a big way.

Sony says it will fix unusable PlayStation 3 software with a June 27th patch

A couple of days ago, many PlayStation 3 owners found that the latest version of Sony's firmware locked up their systems, causing the PS3 to hang indefinitely at startup. Sony quickly took version 4.45 of the software offline, saying it would work to resolve the problem. Now, PlayStation Europe has said that a fix is coming on June 27th, hopefully across all regions — though it hasn't been posted on the main PlayStation Twitter account
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How Windows 8.1 upgrades will get to you

With the public preview builds of Windows 8.1 due out later this month, a number of users are wondering how Microsoft plans to handle the upgrade.

At TechEd North America, officials shared some details on that topic in a session entitled "Windows RT in the Enterprise."

Microsoft officials have said previously that the company plans to deliver the public preview of Windows 8.1, codenamed "Blue," via the Windows Store on June 26.

What's new in Windows 8.1 (pictures)

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Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager Michael Niehaus reiterated that message in the RT in the Enterprise session on Tuesday. When the 8.1 preview is available, Windows 8 and Windows RT users will receive a Windows Update notification. That update will trigger the new bits to show up in the Windows Store, where potential testers will be able to read the description and choose whether or not to install.

Once the final versions of Windows 8.1 are available, after their release to manufacturing, those who have downloaded the preview will get the same Windows Update plus Windows Store notification. While their data and accounts will be preserved if and when they choose to install the free, final 8.1 release, all their apps must be reinstalled, Niehaus said Windows 8 users who do not install the preview build and opt instead to go straight from Windows 8/Windows RT to Windows 8.1 will not have to reinstall their apps. All settings, data and apps will carry over, a spokesperson said when I asked. Users will be able to decide when and if they want to move from Windows 8 and Windows RT to the 8.1 versions, officials stressed.Even if testers opt instead to roll their devices back to Windows 8 after installing the preview bits, they still will have to reinstall their apps once they move to the RTM version of Windows 8.1.

Niehaus characterized the Windows 8 to 8.1 upgrade as "a little better" than how Microsoft handled the Windows 8 test build to RTM upgrade. A Microsoft spokesperson said the Windows 8 to 8.1 upgrade would be "comparable" to the Windows 7 to Windows 8 upgrade, in terms of how the upgrade dealt with user settings, data and apps.

Niehaus also told session attendees that Microsoft expects to have a reduced footprint size for Windows 8.1 as compared to Windows 8. He said the team has been working on removing old components, temporary files and improving NTFS compression to free up more space on users' machines. He noted that 4 GB of free space will be needed to install the Windows 8.1 preview builds. And he said that installation of Windows 8.1 will not result in the replacement of the recovery partition in Windows 8.