Good news for anybody in the UK who bought an iPod in 2001 and has waited 13 years to copy music onto it: it's legal at last! Maybe this new-fangled MP3 stuff isn't a passing fad after all. In other, slightly more timely news, eBay and PayPal are splitting, the PS3 is about to become Home-less and nobody at Microsoft can count. It's Week in Tech!
Windows 10, because 7 8 9
This week Microsoft announced that the successor to Windows 8 would of course be called, er, Windows 10. It's not that Microsoft can't count; it's that a surprising amount of apps check for Windows versions 9.x to detect Windows 98 or Windows 95, so calling the next version Windows 9 would have been disastrous. Is W1nd0Ws any good? Mary Branscombe can tell us: while it's "not exciting", it's packed with "practical productivity improvements designed to win over the desktop and mouse users". It's "designed to make power users happy, not change the world."
This is the new Nexus
Are you ready for a new Nexus? The Nexus 6 is nearly here, and it's intriguing to say the least. We're hearing that it has a 5.9-inch, 496ppi QHD display, a stabilised 13MP camera, a 3200mAh battery, and we've already seen what appears to be a prototype. Official info is apparently just days away.
HTC's new best M8
We like the HTC One M8 a lot, so we're intrigued by the imminent launch of the HTC M8 Eye: it's due to be launched next week and appears to have a better camera with a secondary sensor for measuring depth of field and producing special effects. HTC tends to be quite leaky in the run-up to announcements, so keep your eye on our Eye news over the next few days.
eBay: from PayPal to nae pals
Auction giant eBay is spinning off its payment business, PayPal, and investors appear to approve: eBay's share price has gone up since the announcement. But PayPal appears to have missed one big opportunity already, and that may be Samsung's fault. According to reports, PayPal's hook-up with Samsung for mobile payments in the Samsung Galaxy S5 means it's been uninvited from the Apple Pay party. It appears that Apple has chosen to partner with PayPal rival Stripe instead.
Go home, PS Home
Windows 9 wasn't the only thing that got cancelled this week. PlayStation Home, the "social hub that let users spend real money on pointless crap for no reason", won't be sticking around on PS4: the service will shut down in March. As Michael Rougeau explains, the shutdown is for "no particular reason besides that it was useless."
At last, your right to rip
Good news for music and movie fans in the UK: the British government has made it legal for you to turn your legally purchased discs into digital files, provided the files are for your own personal use. Until this week CD ripping was as illegal as firing a cannon close to a dwelling house (the Met Police Act 1839) or keeping a pigsty in front of your house (the same law) - although if you do rip tracks while firing cannons or keeping a pigsty, you can still get nicked. Stuart Houghton explains what's changed and what you can and can't do.
