The Download Blog

Samsung will unveil its new Galaxy S4 smartphone at a launch event on March 14.

The news was tweeted by Samsung this morning via an invitation announcing the event, dubbed "Samsung Unpacked 2013 Episode 1." The tweet says Samsung wants people to "come and meet the next Galaxy," and further teases the new device with the numeral 4 in the phrase "Ready 4 the show." The current version of the company's signature smartphone is, of course, the Galaxy S3.

The event will be take place in New York on Thursday, March 14, at 7 p.m. ET. It will also be live-streamed on Samsung Mobile's YouTube page.… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Laying the groundwork for its nascent Firefox OS, Mozilla has won over a sizeable list of allies including LG Electronics and China Unicom, and the first phones with the browser-based operating system should arrive in the second quarter of the year.

Mozilla announced today at the Mobile World Congress show here that it's persuaded 18 mobile network operators and four mobile phone makers to back its open-source mobile operating system. That's not enough to unseat the incumbent powers of Google's Android and Apple's iOS slayer, but it is enough to ensure Firefox OS at least … Read more

Google removed the ability to display a custom background image on your Google Search homepage. However, there's a Chrome extension that can help you regain your little slice of customization.

Aside from allowing you to change the background image, the extension will let you do some other neat things, too. You can remove the Google logo, search and lucky buttons, footer, and promotional links.

Head to the Google Chrome Web Store and install the Custom Google Background extension.

After installing the extension, you can select where you'd like to use an image from. You can also … Read more

Apple's Preview program in OS X is a very convenient tool for quickly editing image and PDF files. It supports a number of options for annotating images and adjusting colors, cropping, and otherwise editing them, it can also be used to quickly convert an image to another format.

Preview supports reading most common image format types, and likewise allows you to export them to these same types, so even if Preview is not set to be your default program for handling images, you can still use it to quickly make an image conversion.

To do this, right-click the image … Read more

Are you still flying solo instead of jumping on the Mailbox or Mailstrom bandwagon? That doesn't mean you can't get a little help from Astrid, your friendly squidface to-do list app, when using Gmail in Chrome.

Each time you read your Gmail, you may star or label some of the messages that you want to get back to. This is a great idea in theory, but messages can easily be forgotten. Instead, you can add a reminder to your Astrid that will keep up with your lack of focus on the Internet.

Here's how to get started:… Read more

If you own an Android tablet, or just a phone with a huge screen, watching YouTube videos while you perform other tasks can be superconvenient. Perhaps you're checking e-mail and watching videos from your favorite band, or maybe you're watching a scene from a play and following along in the script. This split-screen feature is available on the Samsung Galaxy Note II, but hasn't rolled out to many other handsets. Ready to add more multitasking power to your device?

First you'll need to install a copy of Floating YouTube Popup Video on your Android device, then … Read more

Apple has released a new beta of iOS 6.1.3 for developers.

Dubbed iOS 6.1.3 beta 2, the update is supposed to fix a hole that can let someone gain access to your iPhone by sneaking past the lock screen. Through a small series of steps, including making an emergency call, a person could bypass the passcode in order to make phone calls, listen to voice mail, and check contact photos.

Apple acknowledged the bug last week. promised to squash it in a future iOS release. iOS 6.1.3 will fix that problem, the company said, … Read more

Browsing and installing all of the free software we offer at Download.com can potentially bog down your computer over time. It can be hard to resist installing something just because it is new, looks useful, or simply, is free. It is a good idea to do a house cleanup and getting rid of junk that you don't need once in a while to improve the performance of your computer. But how do you know what to remove?

It can be easy to forget which program does what and why you have it installed, making PC cleanup a nightmare. … Read more

Google's Chrome OS app launcher is now available to Windows users, the search giant announced today.

Available through the Chrome dev channel -- which means it's not a final build -- the application houses all of a user's Web-based apps in one space and allows the user to open them outside of the browser. The apps that work with Chrome's app launcher are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS but can be opened while a person is offline.

According to Google, the app launcher icon will show up on the Windows taskbar. However, in order to … Read more