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Microsoft officially launched Windows 8 and Windows RT across the globe today. Along with the new operating systems, the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation also makes its branded Surface tablet available at all Microsoft 27 retail, 34 holiday and online stores across United States and Canada.

Microsoft Surface starts at $499in the United States, AU$599 in Australia, CDN$519 in Canada, EUR479 in Germany, EUR489 in France, and GBP399 in the United Kingdom for the 32GB version without the Touch Cover.

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The Samsung Galaxy Note II launched barely two months ago at IFA and local US carriers such as Sprint and T-Mobile already make it available for purchase. Verizon is now in the same boat and is accepting pre-orders for the 5.5-inch "phablet."

The Samsung Galaxy Note II will arrive at the big red sporting 4G LTE connectivity and similar specs to the international model. That means the same 5.5-inch HD Super AMOLED display with a 1280 by 720 resolution, 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos processor with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable internal storage and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with TouchWiz running on top of it. On a two-year contract it will cost $299.99 at Verizon Wireless, and is currently available for pre-order in both Marble White and Titanium Gray.

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Rather than beat a dead horse by continuing "The Next Best Thing is Already Here" campaign Samsung is playing the cool card in three new commercials for the Galaxy S III smartphone.

If the idea is to deliver memorable video ads, Samsung probably is on the right track by highlighting various functionality in different contexts that actual customers can relate to (or at least wish they do). Let's take the working dad that is about to leave on a "Work Trip". The family walks him to the car, but just before leaving the kids say they made a video for him to watch on the airplane, which is shared afterwards using S Beam. Then the wife steps in and tells her husband that she also made a video that he "probably shouldn't watch on the plane," then yet again uses S Beam. Pretty cool without overdoing it.

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Little more than a month ago Dell introduced the Latitude 10, a Windows 8-based tablet aimed at business users, but withheld the price. Two days ahead of the Windows 8 October 26 launch, the US company slapped a price-tag on its XPS 10 and Latitude 10 tablets.

Unlike the Latitude 10, that runs Windows 8, the Dell XPS 10 is aimed at consumers and will ship with the ARM-compatible Windows RT, similar to Microsoft Surface.

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US wireless carrier T-Mobile announced two weeks ago that the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note II will come its way "this fall," and surprise, surprise -- it's available starting today.

Unlike AT&T, that announced the "phablet" alongiside the LG Optimus G a week ago and priced the Galaxy Note II at $299.99 on a two-year contract, T-Mobile will sell the Samsung-made quad-core smartphone in Marble White and Titanium Gray for a marginally higher $369.99 on a new two-year contract, basically $70 more than what the former charges for it.

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The ASUS Windows 8 tablet roadmap leaked little more than a month ago, giving pundits reason to speculate on whether the rumored pricing would hinder the success of the Windows 8-based devices.

The Taiwanese company has officially announced pricing for its VivoTab RT (Windows RT-powered) tablet and put previous pricing rumors to rest.

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Microsoft launches Windows 8 in just two days, and manufacturers such as HP are putting all their cards on the table, and announcing pricing for their Windows 8 lineups.

Even though there were models introduced long before today, HP chose to keep quiet about their pricing. But after Microsoft priced its Surface tablet, the company has finally announced that its similarly-sized Envy x2 sporting an 11.6-inch display and the Intel Atom Z2760 processor will be priced starting at $849.99. One of the most recently introduced devices with attractive accessories, the business-oriented ElitePad 900 running the same type of processor bearing the "Clover Trail" code-name, is still a no-show in terms of pricing, and instead will be announced closer to its availability.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wants 2012 to be "the most epic year" for the company determined to make a splash in October with the launch of Windows 8, Surface, and Windows Phone 8 all within a few days of one another.

To complete the package, Microsoft has announced a major update for the Xbox dashboard, the launch of Xbox SmartGlass, and a cheaper Xbox 360 console.

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Whether some might people like it or not, we live in the cloud era and there the key role is played by services. But what happens when there's an outage? Yesterday I tried to log into Flipboard, but unlike what would usually happen, the message "service is currently down" greeted me.

It wasn't a scheduled maintenance. Flipboard announced via Google+ that the service was down and it "only" took roughly five hours to get it back up. So what happened? According to Data Center Knowledge and Wired, when Amazon Cloud went down so did Heroku, Flipboard, Foursquare, Reddit "and others", with problems reported to its North Virginia-based servers. But the cloud is supposed to be the future, and it doesn't include pulling the plug and sending people off: "Go to sleep, I'm incapable of anything now!"

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Following an earlier tweet from Omar Shahine, Group Program Manager on SkyDrive at Microsoft, the Redmond, Wash.-based company announced the availability of the new Office Web Apps across Outlook and SkyDrive which sport a refreshed look and feel in line with Microsoft's modern design language deployed across its various services.

It also features expanded device support with touch-friendly editing from tablets, co-authoring and collaboration support across the Web apps, as well as more editing and formatting controls. The latest version promises general improvements to the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Web apps.

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Ahead of the public unveiling of the new Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system, Nokia has unleashed the Lumia 510. It's the Finnish company's entry-level smartphone, which surprisingly runs Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and is priced to take on less expensive devices, a decidedly different market from its bigger brother the Lumia 920.

With a suggested retail price of $199 (before any tax or operator subsidy) the Nokia Lumia 510 is packed with a 4-inch TFT display with an 800 x 480 resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 processor with 256MB of RAM, a 5 megapixel auto-focus back-facing camera with VGA video recording, 4 GB of internal storage. As far as connectivity goes, it comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS, and HSDPA/WCDMA cellular radios. For the 1300mAh removable battery Nokia quotes 38h of music playback, 8.4h of 3G talk time and 6.2h of talk time using 2G networks.

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Microsoft obviously wants Surface to be a home run, and to encourage prospective buyers to queue up for the October 26 launch of Surface alongside Windows 8, the Redmond, Wash.-based company is throwing in a nice bonus for the first hundred Surface buyers at its retail stores.

These select customers will get a one-year Xbox Music Pass valued at $99.99; Microsoft's way of ensuring that its Surface tablet will get public attention on launch day and rewarding those waiting to purchase the not-so-cheap Windows RT-powered devices. Because after all, long snaking queues are indicative of a company's ability to drum up excitement for a new product or event, and that is a sign of overall popularity.

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Almost a week ago Sprint announced that it will carry the LG Optimus G for $199 starting in November, and ahead of its release a developer already posted a method to gain elevated rights (also known as "root" among modders) for the quad-core powerhouse coming Sprint's way.

According to the developer rooting the Optimus G for Sprint is done in the same way as for the South Korean version, and only requires to install the LG Android drivers and download the necessary file that performs the process itself. Gaining elevated rights is fairly simple judging by the involved steps that need to be performed, but using this method users will receive a number of prompts in Vietnamese that have to be accepted in order for the process to complete.

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Three weeks have passed since the Android Open Kang Project team released a new build, and after a long wait AOKP Jelly Bean Build 5 is now available, bringing along the latest version of Android with it. Also released is a new app named Kangerator for following and downloading new AOKP releases.

The latest build is based on Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, build number JZO54K and apart from introducing support for the AT&T variants of the Samsung Galaxy S III (d2att) and Galaxy Note (quincyatt) and removing support for the HTC One XL/X (evita), it also brings a number of features from the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich builds, such as NavBar widgets.

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Here at BetaNews, we expected that Motorola Mobility would embody a new attitude about Android updates following Google's acquisition -- fast upgrades for Android smartphones and more developer-friendly approach, similar to the Nexus lineup. That hasn't come to pass. A number of developers are rising with the "Support My Moto" campaign, designed to grab the Google subsidiary's attention and eventually make the company deliver on its promises.

"Support My Moto" campaign claims Motorola promised Android updates, but never delivered. Among the devices: Droid X2, Atrix 4G, Photon 4G, XT882 and MT8720 that are currently left running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Not too long ago, Motorola promised a $100 credit for smartphones that will not receive the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update, and according to the XDA Developers user that started the campaign the company is still figuring out how the program will be implemented for non-Verizon users. But according to the supporters of the campaign, these are not the only problems that they are trying to get resolved.

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