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
Researchers are still searching for the Holy Grail in battery technology that will ultimately hold a charge for much longer than what's currently available and be affordable to the masses. One that has promise is a new all-solid lithium-sulfur battery developed by scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge...
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Mobile phones are everywhere these days, that's hardly surprising news. But what's interesting about this is that the majority of Americans now own smartphone devices, according to Pew Rsearch Center's Internet and American Life Project. It's the first time smartphones have been in the hands of the majority since Pew...
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) continues to attract high-level talent from around the industry as it gears up to compete in a new era of computing. The latest person to jump into AMD's talent pool is an old friend of ours, Sean Pelletier, a former HotHardware editor and more recently NVIDIA's Senior Technical Marketing...
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A special committed formed by an independent group of directors weighed in on the situation with Dell and the two offers on the table, one a buyout bid by company co-founder Michael Dell and the other a dividend payment by activist investor Carl Icahn. The committee's suggestion? Take Michael's money and run. Michael...
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Owning a smartphone can be crazy expensive. There's the cost of the device itself, which runs upwards of $200 (subsidized) in some cases, plus monthly data fees. And when you're talking families of three or four people, well, things start to add up in a hurry. Enter FreedomPop, a freemium wireless data startup that wants to shake up the mobile...
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Boutique system builder Maingear is banking on there being an audience outside of productivity junkies who can appreciate a high-powered 14-inch laptop. Hence the launch of Maingear's Pulse 14 with not only Haswell inside, but gaming grade discrete graphics courtesy of NVIDIA. Make no mistake, this 14-inch notebook is for users who'd rather...
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If you're more of the type who likes to hike on rugged terrain and scale mountainsides on your days off from work, then Samsung has a phone for it. It's the Galaxy S4 Active, which is essentially the same as the company's popular Galaxy S4 but with a tougher construction that's better suited for crossing rivers and...
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This has been quite the week for new product announcements, in large part because of the Computex Taipei convention in Taiwan, but also because Intel rolled out its Haswell refresh. Walking in line with the latter, Fujitsu unveiled a new lineup of FMV series PCs, one of which it claims is the world's thinnest...
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Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the Haswell headlines dominating the tech scene? Lest anyone forget, AMD still has game, and it just so happens that boutique system builder Maingear is offering the Sunnyvale chip designer's new A-10 6800K APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) in both its Potenza and Vybe line of gaming...
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Amazon is serious about shoring up its catalog of streaming titles, so much so that it went and cut its biggest check ever for a subscription-streaming license. The Prime video provider struck a deal with Viacom, forking over more than $200 million to secure the rights to hundreds of kids' shows, including the wildly...
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For some, the world came to a screeching halt Monday afternoon, from around 1:08pm PDT to 1:33pm PDT. We're talking about Twitter addicts, who had to deal with an unexpected outage and find some other outlet for their barrage of witty 140-character (or less) musings. Oh, the horror! We kid, of course -- Twitter's a...
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Give Toshiba credit for aggressively targeting the Android tablet market with what appear to be reasonably priced slates starting at $299. That's the price of the Excite Pure, a refreshed Android slate with a 10.1-inch display (1280x800), NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of DDR3 memory, 16GB of internal storage, 3MP...
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We watched Google's open source Android platform grow up right before our eyes, hitting several milestones along the way to maturity. However, there's still one more milestone yet to cross, and that's becoming the world's most dominant mobile app platform, a throne that's currently occupied by Apple and it's competing...
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Once again, word on the web is that Apple is getting ready to launch a streaming music service, which it could announce at its upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). According to various reports, Apple recently inked a deal with Warner Music Group that would give the company a 10 percent stake, following a similar deal with Universal...
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Less than five months after it debuted for iOS, Vine is now available for Android, Twitter announced in a blog post today. In case you haven't been following, Twitter snagged the video sharing service last year before it launched. The two are a natural fit, as Twitter encourages succinct posts by limiting tweets to 140 characters or less,...
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It's out with the old and in with the new over at Yahoo, which is forcing users to either upgrade from its Yahoo Mail Classic email service or jump ship. Yahoo made the announcement on its site today and also sent emails to affected users letting them know that beginning this week, older versions of Yahoo Mail...
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You probably never thought that simply charging your mobile device would make you susceptible to malware, but apparently these types of hardware hacks could be the next big thing among cyber criminals. To prove it, a trio of security researchers built a proof-of-concept charger that they claim is capable of silently...
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Microsoft had a simple formula for competing in the mobile space: Launch a Surface Pro device running Windows 8 for people that need a full fledged system for getting work done yet desire the portability of a tablet, and Surface RT for consumers who are primarily interested in a tablet. In Microsoft's mind, this would...
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Lest Microsoft has any intentions of sweeping the criticisms over Windows 8 under the rug, the Redmond outfit may want to take a long, hard look at what its hardware partners are up to these days. Acer, for example, will test the market with a multi-touch all-in-one (AIO) system running Android. Realistically, Android...
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At the beginning the year, it was easy to complain about Jelly Bean's slow roll into the Android market, which at the time was still being dominated by Gingerbread (Android 2.3.x), an aging version of Google's open source operating system found on 47.6 percent of all Android devices. Now here we are at the halfway...
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Put away the pitchforks, privacy advocates, or at least take a break from sharpening the tips. Google has heard your cries loud and clear in regards to its Glass project and has decided that, for the time being, it will not include facial recognition technologies. So sayeth the Glass team on the project's Google+...
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It's with heavy hearts that we report the tragic death of Andrew Scott Reisse, the 33-year-old co-founder of Oculus VR. A Santa Ana resident, Reisse was walking in a crosswalk when he was hit and killed at the end of a high speed police chase earlier this week, according to ABC News in Los Angeles. It all began when...
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