Speaking at Microsoft's financial analysts meeting today, CEO Steve Ballmer was refreshingly realistic about the company's struggles in smartphones and tablets. "Mobile devices. We have almost no share."

There has been a lot of maturing technologies in FreeBSD 10, with many new features which make this release, I think, the most exciting one in years. A lot of development has gone into virtualisation support. Virtualisation with FreeBSD Jails has been available for a long time, but not so much "full virtualisation".

Let's have a look at the some of the most talked about, most requested and most interesting features that have found their way into or are planned for 10.0, but may not make the deadline.

When Apple got into the mobile business, it was Nokia’s world. The Finnish company was considered something of a miracle worker. "I'm old enough to remember when Nokia had margins of 25 percent, and there was absolutely no way they were going to be dislodged from their leadership position," says Kuittinen of research firm Alekstra. Says Cook, "I think is a reminder to everyone in business that you have to keep innovating and that to not innovate is to die."

Cyanogen, makers of popular software based on Android that extends the abilities of smartphones, is making a bid for the mainstream. The four-year-old company, which began as a one-person side project, said today that it has raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The goal is to vault past Blackberry and Windows Phone to become the third-most popular mobile operating system, after traditional Android and iOS. And the company is already closer than you might think.

At the end of the day, if you prefer iOS for your smartphone - the iPhone 5s won't disappoint. In many ways it's an evolutionary improvement over the iPhone 5, but in others it is a significant step forward. What Apple's silicon teams have been doing for these past couple of years has really started to pay off. From a CPU and GPU standpoint, the 5s is probably the most futureproof of any iPhone ever launched. As much as it pains me to use the word futureproof, if you are one of those people who likes to hold onto their device for a while - the 5s is as good a starting point as any.

With this release we've created a modern Bing.com experience - one that is faster, cleaner and more visually appealing. We believe that search can be beautiful as well as functional and efficient. With that as our goal, we evaluated fonts, spacing, color, visual scan patterns, the search box and even the underlying code.

ZFS is the world's most advanced filesystem, in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this open community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms.

With Intel's new Haswell chip, manufacturers can choose to either build slimmer notebooks or try to optimize battery life as much as possible. Dell has clearly shown its dedication to the latter with the new Inspiron 11 3000 series. Budget notebooks don't always have big batteries, but Dell claims the $379 Haswell version of the Inspiron 11 lasts up to eight hours and 20 minutes on a single charge.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, said today that Linux is the future of gaming despite the minuscule share of the market it has today.

That seems hard to believe, given that Newell acknowledged Linux gaming generally accounts for less than one percent of the market by any measure including players, player minutes, and revenue. But Valve is going to do its best to make sure Linux becomes the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms.

Users enjoying the unique gesture-based and modern Sailfish OS user experience will be able to take full advantage of the Android application ecosystem available through various app stores globally. Jolla will cooperate with leading global app stores to ensure users can seamlessly download Android apps just as they would do on any Android device.

Jolla has made a major breakthrough in Android hardware compatibility by developing Sailfish OS to run on common hardware produced for Android, particularly smartphones and tablets. Vendors interested to utilize Sailfish OS are now able to develop phones and tablets based on many different chipset and hardware configurations. This new level of compatibility will enable device vendors who use Sailfish OS to fully utilize the existing Android hardware ecosystem.

A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company's Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.

Another person said the idea of Nokia using Android wasn't a part of Microsoft’s discussions with the company about an acquisition, even though that was widely recognized as a possibility.

Michael Dell has the won the battle for control of the computer company that he created, after shareholders backed his $24.8bn offer to take Dell private and revive the struggling business away from the incessant pressure of Wall Street.

The vote clears the way for the huge buyout, in which Dell is working with private equity partners Silver Lake after seeing off a challenge from activist investor Carl Icahn.

Twitter, the 200 million user microblogging service, has filed for its initial public offering. Fittingly, the only public acknowledgement came in the form of a simple tweet.