Paul Lilly
Paul is a seasoned geek who was first seduced into the world of computers and technology by the Commodore 64, and through the years he’s courted a number of OSes and platforms from DOS on up to the latest version of Windows. Having joined the HotHardware team in 2011, Paul is now a mainstay of the site covering the news beat and reviews, and resident wiseguy who keeps the mood light. He’s also an experienced freelance technology writer whose work has appeared in a number of online and print publications.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Though it didn't ship with every fancy new feature that was rumored and speculated prior to its official launch, the Galaxy S5 smartphone from Samsung isn't having trouble finding an audience. A Korean news website is reporting that Samsung shipped around 10 million Galaxy S5 devices in just 25 days. If that's...
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Attention online shoppers, Apple really wants your business, and one way it plans to get it is by cutting in half the wait time to give refunds to customers who want to return their iPhone, iPad, and other devices. This sounds like a small thing -- and for the consumer, it sort of is -- but it's actually a costly move...
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Market research firms have a tendency to separate traditional PC sales (desktops, laptops, and ultrathins) from tablets, but Canalys clumps them together, thereby giving us another angle to analyze the landscape. So, according to Canalys, the two categories combined to reach 123.7 million unit shipments worldwide in...
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A pair of healthcare organizations have agreed to pay a combined $4.8 million to settle charges that they potentially violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (otherwise known as HIPPA). The charges were the consequence of a data breach in which protected health information of thousands...
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Attention Yahoo Mail users, if you're rocking a browser release that's now dated, you'll need to upgrade to a newer version to continue to have access to all the same features you've grown accustomed to. Beginning June 5, Yahoo will put into effect a new policy to support only the two most recent versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome,...
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A big shout out goes to Amazon for forever changing the way we think about photography. You see, Amazon was recently granted a patent that, in short, describes taking photos of subjects and/or or objects against a white background. Brilliant! Wait, what's that? Photographers far and wide have long known about this...
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The "Poke Wars" have ended folks, as Facebook has decided that nobody really cares about the Poke app, which was only available on iOS anyway -- it was never released on Android. It's the end of a 10 year run from when Poking was first made available. It would launch to mobile in 2012 and offer users a self-destruct timer similar to Snapchat's...
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Responding to criticism on the web, Nintendo issued a statement apologizing for the inability to engage in same-sex relationships in Tomodachi Life, a game available in Japan for the 3DS handheld console. Outside of making headlines for limiting relationships to members of the opposite sex, the title isn't well known...
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Sprint prides itself on offering "data without limits" and "truly unlimited data," which are a pair of taglines you may have seen the company use when advertising its $79.99/month unlimited plan. Go ahead and put on your umpire cap because you may want to call foul once you learn that Sprint intends to throttle data...
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Depending on where you live and shop, you can buy a taco with Bitcoin, a form of virtual currency. You can also buy computer systems and even a Lamborghini with Bitcoin. Despite various shady activities and scandals associated with untraceable crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, the list of things you can buy with it keeps it growing. Heck, you...
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Mere weeks after voting down legislation that would require smartphone makers to implement anti-theft technology into handsets, the California Senate on Thursday passed a revised version of the bill. As rewritten, technology titans Apple and Microsoft, both with vested interest in such a bill, withdrew opposition to...
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Even though it was AMD that secured lucrative contracts with the major console makers, NVIDIA's benefiting from an impressive lineup of mobile and desktop GPUs for the PC. Citing growth in PC gaming as a partial reason for its profitable quarter, NVIDIA raked in over $1.1 billion in total revenue for the first quarter...
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Snapping selfies is a relatively new fad, and it's one of the things you can do on Samsung's retro-looking NX3000 Smart Camera. That's because it has a 3.0-inch flip-up display with Wink Shot -- just open up the display so that it's facing frontward, frame a face in the display, give it a wink, and capture a selfie...
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A fantasy that's fairly common among the human population is to be able to fly, soaring high above the cityscape and over rural farmlands like all those lucky winged creatures get to do on a whim. In pursuit of this desire, mankind has created many things -- airplanes, hot air balloons, wingsuits, and more. Add to...
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Do you consider yourself a storyteller blessed with the gift of gab? If so -- or if you simply have a sexy voice you want to show off -- you might be interested in Adobe Voice, a new animated video app for iPad users. Adobe's new app pits you as the engaging storyteller/narrator and allows you to create and share...
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You might recall that we recently rounded up a collection of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards and put them through a gauntlet of benchmarks and tests. Each of the cards represented brought something unique to the table and stood out in some way, but curiously missing from the bunch was an entry from ASUS. Not to worry -- we didn't...
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All Samsung's mobile division has done in recent years is build wildly popular handsets and tablets in the mobile space to the point where it now sells twice as many smartphones as rival Apple, but if you think those accomplishments come with job security, think again. Chang Dong-hoon is reportedly stepping down as head of Samsung's mobile...
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Thank you Nintendo, but your profits are in another castle. Such is the paraphrased message Nintendo's accounting team had to deliver after going over the numbers for Nintendo's fiscal year ended March 31, 2014. Sales for the year totaled 571.7 million yen (around $5.6 billion), down from a revised forecast of 590...
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It's hard not to get excited about Activision's upcoming Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare title after watching the recently released trailer showing game footage from Microsoft's Xbox One console. The storyline, while not completely new, is certainly intriguing, and the voice acting headlined by Kevin Spacey is simply...
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Hewlett-Packard this week announced plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years on cloud-related product and engineering initiatives, professional services, and expanding the global reach of HP Helion, a new portfolio of cloud products and services. HP Helion is intended to help organizations build...
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A pair of technology titans have joined forces to promote the Chromebook platform, and in doing so, multiple OEMs have lined up to support the initiative. Those titans, of course, are Intel and Google. Specifically, Intel is pushing its Bay Trial-M system-on-chip (SoC) and 4th Generation Core i3 (Haswell)...
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Thanks to the whistle blowing efforts of former CIA contract work Edward Snowden, we're now often reminded by just how little privacy we really have. Transparency reports alone provide a glimpse into how active the U.S. government is when it comes to homeland security and how interested officials are in our daily...
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