Anxious to get that full Start menu back? Well, you may have a while to wait for that but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other good Windows 8.1 updates coming in the near future. Neowin’s sources say that the next major update to Windows 8.1, which will likely be called Windows 8.1 Update 2, is likely coming in either August or September. This lines up with earlier reports we’ve read about the next major Windows update coming in late summer, although it seems that Microsoft has now scrapped its original plans to bring back the Start menu with the next release.

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Last month, we combed through the Moto 360 design competition in order to find a few concepts worth highlighting. With the Design Face-Off, Motorola gave its fans a chance to show off their own vision of Android Wear on the upcoming smartwatch, competing for the grand prize of a free Moto 360.

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Smartphone theft has been a growing problem in recent years but apparently a key feature that Apple introduced last year is helping to stop it dead in its tracks. The New York Times reports that law enforcement officials in London, New York and San Francisco have all credited the addition of the Activation Lock feature in iOS 7 with leading to a sharp drop in smartphone thefts in their cities. In all, police found that iPhone robberies dropped by 38% in San Francisco and by 24% in London in the six months after Apple introduced the new feature.

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Shares of HTC stock have lost 90% of their value since hitting an all-time high in 2011. But that’s not why investors are angry. The struggling smartphone vendor’s revenue has continued to plummet in 2014, even after it launched its new HTC One (M8) flagship phone. But that’s also not why investors are angry. According to a report on Thursday from The Wall Street Journal, investors at HTC’s shareholder meeting were fuming… because HTC wouldn’t give them free phones.

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Halfbrick is one of the most consistently great iOS game developers in the industry, so you’d be foolish to pass up on this limited time offer. As of this week, every Halfbrick game has gone temporarily free on the App Store, from the classic Fruit Ninja to the recently released Colossatron. The other free titles include Shrek crossover Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots, endless runner Monster Dash, the sea creature-tossing Fish Out Of Water and the bullet-riddled Age of Zombies.

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In case you missed it, T-Mobile on Thursday announced a new program called Music Freedom that will let T-Mobile customers stream as much music as they like from select streaming services without any of it counting against their monthly data caps. This is obviously a great deal for T-Mobile customers but it does raise some troubling questions when it comes to net neutrality.

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With each new beta release of iOS 8, Apple details both open issues and fixes for developers in the developer release notes, but for most people, these don’t mean much. Thanks to one of our sources at Apple, we have received an internal change log with release notes to help explain some of the changes from iOS 8 beta 1 to the newer iOS 8 beta 2 release.

There are some incredible new features that have never been discovered before, including the fact that Find My iPhone can now tell you if a phone is indoors and what floor of a building it is on.

Additionally, Apple has made general enhancements to the system as a whole covering all of the major apps like Messages, Phone, Safari, Mail, FaceTime and others.

Stay tuned for more iOS 8 information as one of our guys has returned from holiday and it’s open season again.

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It seems positively bizarre to type, especially since I have been covering the company for nearly a decade now, but Nokia is no longer a cell phone maker. Once the largest phone vendor on the planet by a staggering margin, Nokia sold its devices and services business to Microsoft and will now wear a number of new hats as it looks toward the future. One of those hats, as it turns out, is that of an Android developer — and the company’s first big software announcement is a shockingly impressive one.

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Google has yet to release its next-gen Android OS version, but it looks like one major feature of the new operating system has been confirmed. Xda-developers has discovered that commits made to the AOSP master branch on Wednesday night show that Dalvik will be replaced with ART as default. None of that will make sense to many readers, but more experienced Android fans already know what Dalvik and ART are, and why it’s good news that Android will replace the former with the latter.

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