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
There probably won't be a cameo by Michael J. Fox, nor should you expect to man the DeLorean in Blizzard's "Warlords of Draenor" expansion pack for World of Warcraft, but if you jump on board, you will experience time travel. Announced at BlizzCon 2013, the fifth expansion to Blizzard's incredibly popular WoW game...
Read more...
AMD Releases Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2 Driver to Address Radeon R9 290 Series Performance Variance Bug
AMD came out swinging when it launched its R9 Series of graphics cards, including the Radeon R9 290, which goes toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 card. In our review of the Radeon R9 290 part, we recorded solid performance throughout our batch of benchmarks, and we couldn't help but be impressed by its...
Read more...
Here's a bit of good news for you Windows Phone 8 fans heading into the weekend. AT&T on Friday said it has begun taking pre-orders on Nokia's giant Lumia 1520 phablet device. It's available to order exclusively at AT&T online or in any of AT&T's retail stores. Pricing is set at $199.99 with a two-year...
Read more...
If you stop a random stranger on the street and ask that person what a Bitcoin is, you might get a confused stare. Try asking that same question a year from now and maybe every person you ask will say, "It's a digital currency that's decentralized and uses cryptography to use control transactions to prevent double-spending." Or they'll simply...
Read more...
Mashing away on a virtual keyboard is fine for the occasional email or browsing the web, but if you want to get any type of real work done on a tablet -- be it via Google Docs, QuickOffice, or whatever -- a physical plank suddenly becomes a necessity, not a luxury. There are many to choose from, but few as flexible as...
Read more...
There's no denying that Android is absolutely crushing Microsoft's Window Phone platform in the mobile space, yet the better Android performs, the more Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank. That's because Microsoft makes big money off of Android patent royalties, and if you can fatten your pockets off the success...
Read more...
As I sit here writing this, I'm thinking, "Should I depressed that it's a newsworthy topic when Facebook changes its 'Like' button, or just accept that it's a sign of the times we live in?" I'm not sure of the answer, but as silly as it sounds, in this case, a revamped icon is kind of a big deal, and for a number of reasons. The first, of...
Read more...
"Would you like a 3D printed toy with that?" That's a question that doesn't yet exist inside any McDonald's fast food restaurants, but give it time and it may become a mandatory query, at least when ordering a Happy Meal. In this day and age of the Internet of Things, society is becoming increasingly connected, and companies are harnessing...
Read more...
If you've been jonesing for Amazon's recently announced 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX tablet, we have good new for you today. Amazon has begun shipping out its large screen slate, which up to this point was available as a pre-order item. It's now in stock, and if you didn't reserve one via pre-order prior to today, you can still have one arrive...
Read more...
Many years ago, I helped run a local mom-and-pop video rental store. Business was okay, but not great. By the time I came onto the scene, chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video had started putting the squeeze on independently owned stores by inking revenue sharing deals with movie studios. While we analyzed...
Read more...
Let's face it, the Call of Duty franchise is practically a license to print money at this point. As if we need reminding of that, Activision sent out a press release today announcing that it sold more than $1 billion of Call of Duty: Ghosts into retail stores worldwide on the very first day of availability. Helping to...
Read more...
With just over a week to go before Sony officially joins the next generation console wars, the hardware company announced that it has sold 80 million PlayStation 3 systems, while making sure to point out that it took 7 years to do it. That's a bit of a jab at Microsoft, which recently announced reaching the 80 million...
Read more...
Pretty soon, you won't be able to walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without tripping over half a dozen Internet connected devices. Perhaps that's already the case for some of you. If not, just give it some time. Phones (smartphones), eye glasses (Google Glass), and cameras are just the beginning; one day your...
Read more...
Sorry, Sony fans, but the free ride for online multiplayer on the company's flagship console will come to an end when the PlayStation 4 debuts to retail next week. In order to frag your friends online, you'll need to pony up for a PlayStation Plus subscription. It's been reported recently that the fee for online...
Read more...
ARCHOS on Tuesday announced the availability of its ARCHOS 101 XS 2 tablet, the latest model from its Gen11 family of slates. It's a 10.1-inch tablet with an IPS display, 1280x800 resolution, quad-core A9 processor clocked at 1.6GHz (and quad-core Mali 400 GPU), 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage supplemented by...
Read more...
My first smartphone was a T-Mobile G1, otherwise known as the HTC Dream. Not only was it my first, but it was also the introductory Android phone. It didn't take long for better and faster Android devices to come out, many of which were built by HTC. If you followed the tech scene back then, you would have seen stories about HTC posting record...
Read more...
Other than the fact that demand is currently outstripping supply, there's not a whole lot to dislike about Google's Nexus 5, at least on paper. Spec for spec, it's a better version of the Nexus 4, and there are many happy Nexus 4 owners in the wild, You might be one of them. Of course, it would take a hands-on...
Read more...
It looks like Apple is trying to drum up some good will and earn brownie points as of late by expanding its manufacturing presence in the U.S. Following a recent announcement that its revamped Mac Pro will be assembled in the Texas, Apple now says it's planning to erect a manufacturing facility further west in...
Read more...
Nintendo's Wii U console isn't selling as well as the company might have hoped, but luckily for Nintendo, it has other game systems that still garner plenty of interest. Among them is the original Wii, and in an effort to breathe new life into its last generation game system, Nintendo announced it will launch a Wii...
Read more...
The line continues to blur between what constitutes a smartphone with a built-in camera versus a camera with smartphone functionality. I'd argue we're still entrenched in the former category, though Samsung's Galaxy S4 Zoom isn't playing games when it comes to taking pictures. This thing wields a 16-megapixel...
Read more...
Wondering what the next major release of iOS will look like? It will be even more interesting to find out following news that Henri Lamiraux, Apple's Vice President of Engineering for iOS on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has decided to step down and retire after serving the Cupertino firm for 23 years. His...
Read more...
By the end of the week, there's a good chance Twitter will be a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Twitter's bigwigs are targeting Thursday, and barring any surprises, it will go down as the biggest tech IPO since Facebook, making several people very wealthy over night. However, it's what...
Read more...
