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Daily Cuppa: Samsung, Sony release new devices

More gadgets are coming your way and some of them will have Windows 8 on them. But that's if you've still got a job, considering VMware thinks virtualising quite a few datacentre roles is the way forward.
Written by Michael Lee, Contributor

Welcome to Thursday! Let's catch you up on what you missed overnight.

VMware sees datacentres as museums, and believes that the way forward is to virtualise everything, targeting all of the physical networking, management of firewalls, disks and other components. It sounds like a repeat of when robots entered assembly lines, threatening to put a whole industry of workers out of jobs. But for those who would be affected, there are still a few years yet until the technology reaches maturity.

And speaking of things catching up to people, an alleged second member of the LulzSec hacking group has been arrested. The 23-year-old hacker, Raynaldo Rivera, who went by the online aliases of royal and wildicv, was picked up by the FBI on Tuesday. He has been charged with conspiracy and unauthorised impairment of a protected computer for the attack on Sony Pictures and the PlayStation Network (PSN). Rivera could face up to 15 years in prison.

On a brighter note, Google is now bringing Google+ to enterprise users. Some have been able to play around with it for a while, but there are now more controls that are applicable to businesses, including ensuring that posts can't be shared outside of an organisation, integration of Hangouts across other Google Apps like Gmail and Docs and better controls for Google Apps administrators.

Over in Berlin at the IFA 2012 show, Samsung has launched a new brand called Ativ, which has an emphasis on bringing Windows 8 to its devices. These include two Windows 8 Smart PCs, a Windows RT tablet and a Windows-powered smartphone. The smartphone, dubbed the Ativ S, looks quite like the Galaxy S III, and is the first publicly revealed Windows Phone 8 device. Samsung hasn't released all of the specs and pricing for all the devices, but we've covered all the known facts in our image gallery of the new devices.

The South Korean company also popped out the anticipated Galaxy Note II, which includes a redesigned S Pen stylus. Pricing hasn't been announced, as the device won't be available for sale until October.

Sony also had a few new toys to release, unveiling three Android handsets and an Android tablet, and walking down the Microsoft path with two Windows 8 tablets. An interesting fact is that Sony has included near-field communication (NFC) hardware on all of the new devices as part of its strategy to help customers use their devices together.

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