Apple's Spring Forward event this week gave us plenty to chew on.
There was a new design of laptop, new MacBook Air and Apple announced it had sold 700 million iPhones. But it was all about the Apple Watch.
The Cupertino company well and truly spilled the beans on the device, confirming the price, release date and more. So what do you need to know? Read on and find out.
First, Apple said the device was coming "early in 2015". Then Tim Cook narrowed that down to April. Now we have a firm release date: April 24th.
Us Brits will be able to get one then, as will those in the US, Australia, France, Japan, China, Germany, Hong Kong and Canada.
Want to register your interest? Pre-orders kick off on April 10th – that's just under a month away.
That also happens to be the day the Samsung Galaxy S6 goes on sale. We foresee a war of words...
Except that unlike the slew of incremental upgrades that followed the original glitchy version of iOS 8, the just-released 8.2 edition of Apple’s software is about a lot more than sticking plasters and botched 'fixes'.
From the addition of Apple Watch support to a fully functional version of Health that doesn’t keel over in the face of any sort of exertion, this is a major upgrade by anyone's definition.
Naturally, that means there's an awful lot to get your teeth into.
For those of you who haven’t time to pore over tech blogs or spend hours exploring the crevices of the OS, here’s our one-stop, need-to-know guide to iOS 8.2.
I’m not sure exactly how much my shonky experience is shared by the wider world of iPhone 6 owners. But for me, Health has been more of a bugbear than a boon so far.
Slow to update and prone to crashing and taking everything with it, it's a major blight on iOS 8.
iOS 8.2 should see Apple finally get a grip, however.
Health is now more stable (especially when dealing with large amounts of fresh data and making adjustments), offers support for third-party apps and lets you change units of measurement.
And you can now turn off the automatic step-counter too, which was previously ‘always-on’ whether you wanted it or not.
Whenever you've got that economic atmosphere around a company, then people will read things into things that are said.
"[But] what he [Kazuo Hirai, Chief Executive of Sony] was basically saying was 'look, we're a grown- up company, so we've got to leave all our options open'.
"He was not saying, at all ‘we are up for sale’. Categorically, we are not up for sale.”
The firm denial from Sony comes after ‘sell-off’ rumours were stoked further by its decision not to unveil a flagship phone at Mobile World Congress or at the CES expo.
Here’s hoping we do see a Xperia Z4 this year and that the missing top-of-the-range phone doesn't mean trouble is looming for the company.
Perhaps it will arrive later in the year, 12-months or so after the Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact phones.
Back in November, Sony unveiled a new camera module for use in mobile devices. And where better to implement it than with the Z4?
The module is called the Emor RS IMX230. It's the first for a smartphone to feature image plane phase detection autofocus.
In other words, it's very nippy at capturing quick-moving objects for both stills and video.
This is handled by dedicated phase detection autofocus pixels which are incorporated into the screen of the image sensor and track the distance to the subject.
It supports up to 192 focus points.
It's smaller than the sensor in the Z3 – meaning the Z4 could be slimmer – and captures HDR videos at full 4K.
This is a given, but it's important to realise just how fast we're talking. It's expected to run around 10Gbps, which is fast enough to download an HD film in a couple of seconds.
Theoretically, it could be much faster, however. Some tests have hit a whopping 800Gbps.
At that speed, you could download 33 HD films in one second.
It's also fast enough to stream 8K films in 3D. 4K is only just starting to trickle out now, and it has four times as many pixels as standard HD.
So 8K will have eight times as many. That will be mighty sharp.
More devices will be using the internet (between 50 billion and 100 billion are expected by 2020) so network capacity will have to be upped.
It won't just be mobiles and tablets using the spectrum. Inanimate objects like cars, fridges, trains and more will also use it. Which brings us on to...
5G doesn't just mean even faster network speeds. It will also usher in smart cities.
In other words, driverless cars, the internet of things, and plenty of other technologies that have been tipped as the next big thing will finally be able to unfurl their wings.
This is thanks to a harmonisation of the radio spectrum. At the moment, the radio spectrum is a mess of different bands serving different types of communication.
For the launch of 5G, the entire spectrum will be restructured, which should make all forms of network data communication more efficient.
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