Google drops Flash in Jelly Bean and other news [News round-up]

Product launches and announcements this week

This week finally saw the long awaited launch of YouView, but that wasn’t all. Acer announced the Aspire 5600U all-in-one PC  as reported by The Inquirer. The desktop PC is less than 35mm thick and the body is designed to recline to a 60 degree angle to improve the experience of using the touchscreen.

Google drops flash in Jelly Bean

First Google made Chrome (which doesn’t support Flash) the default web browser in the latest version of the Android operating system, and now Adobe has revealed on it’s own blog that Flash player will no longer be available for products running Jelly Bean – version 4.1 of the operating system.

Ebook readers

Ebooks are becoming more and more popular and now according to the Telegraph a hotel in Newcastle has decided to replace the usual Gideon’s Bible with a Kindle preloaded with the  text.

The Kindle can also be used to download other religious books free (up to a value of £5) or customers can pay to download regular books.

Court cases of the week

It wouldn’t be a week in tech without some high profile court cases, particularly ones surrounding Apple. This week the Guardian reported that Apple got the Samsung Galaxy Nexus banned in the US, but it wasn’t all good news for Apple – as it also lost a battle against HTC in the UK high court as hightlighted by the BBC.

Thankfully though, this week hasn’t all just been about companies squabbling over patents. CNET reported that the European Court of Justice has ruled that it companies can’t legally stop people reselling software they download. This could have wide ranging effects and means consumers could be free to sell second-hand ebooks, apps, music and films downloaded from the internet.

Gmail overtakes Hotmail

Google has announced on its official blog that it now has 425 million active monthly users, overtaking Hotmail and becoming the most popular email service in the world. Hotmail has long been the number 1 email service, but the last available numbers from May suggest it has 325 million monthly users – putting it firmly in second place, ahead of Yahoo with around 298 million users.

Three wins mobile broadband road test

While there hasn’t been a lot of good news recently for Three – after it upped its prices and started reporting its complaining customers as spammers – this week brought a ray of sunshine as it beat the competition in a mobile broadband road test from Broadband Genie.

The contest saw Three’s mobile broadband outperform dongles from O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange and Virgin in a series of tests on a round trip from Cambridge to Exeter to simulate the performance you will receive on the move.

More on this…

• YouView’s best new features – a first look at the on-demand TV service
• What’s new in Android Jelly Bean – the best new features
• Ebook reader reviews – see which models performed best in our labs