The final builds are available for download here, but my life was made a little easier: Today I received a USB stick from Microsoft with an installation that won’t expire, along with a license to review the software. A few weeks ago, the company also sent me a loaner kit comprised of a Samsung Windows 7 slate, dock, keyboard and mouse, all of which turns the tablet into a full desktop solution. I’ll be upgrading Windows on that device for my tests and putting aside my daily device; current a Google Chromebook.

Granted, I’m very interested in trying out the new Microsoft Surface tablet, as well as new Windows RT slates from Asus, Samsung, Lenovo and Dell, so my testing will really be on the software, not the hardware. From my usage so far on a netbook, the new Windows 8 interface will likely appeal more to those with a touchscreen device, but it is usable with mouse and keyboard.

For those who take advantage of the free Windows 8 evaluation, Microsoft recommends running it in a virtual machine or on its own partition on your PC because this edition can’t be upgraded to the full version. This is simply a first-look for a short amount of time and it’s a smart move by Microsoft: The company can build buzz early for its new operating system in advance of the actual launch.

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Apple on Thursday released a developer edition of Mountain Lion, the next upgrade of it’s operating system that will go on sale sometime in summer this year. As part of the news, the company shared some metrics about OS X Lion (version 10.7). For instance, the operating system that was released in July 2011 has so far shipped 19 million copies.

According to Apple, about 20 30 percent of Mac users are currently using Lion, while 50 percent of Mac owners are using Snow Leopard. The brisk sales of Mac machines over past two quarters — 10.1 million in the past two quarters — has helped the penetration of OSX Lion.

The company also touted its Mac App Store as a success and added that more than a 100 million apps have been downloaded from the store. OS X Lion was the biggest test for digital downloads and the company had pushed hard to make Lion downloadable from its app store. It sold a million copies of the software within a week of the release of the OS.

Apple has seen a nice bump in sales for its own software — iLife, iWork, FinalCut Pro and others — as a result of the growing popularity of the app store. Nearly 25 percent of the apps in the Mac App Store are games, indicating that Mac is becoming a major force in desktop gaming as well. With the upcoming version — Mountain Lion — which supports cross-platform gaming via GameCenter, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mac and its hardware brethren start to get more attention from the game development community.

For more information on Mountain Lion, read Erica Ogg’s news report on OS X Mountain Lion.

Updated: I had incorrectly mentioned that Lion OS-X share was 20 percent when in reality it is 30 percent as per Apple. The error is deeply regretted.

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The company is also working closely with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), which is providing the software for its new top-end smartphones, to co-ordinate software details such as tile colours to match its hardware accessories, Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s head of design, told the Guardian.

New versions of the Lumia design, introduced to showcase Windows Phone in November, will also remove the flip-up plastic tab that presently covers the micro-USB charger for the phone – one of just two moving parts on the Lumia 800 phone.

“If you can take away a moving part and make it [the phone] more beautiful in the placement of the components, we’ll do it, so that’s something where we can certainly keep improving,” Ahtisaari told the Guardian. “Take it to the extreme, and why are there any connectors?”

Ahtisaari is extremely influential within Nokia (NYSE: NOK), having been appointed last week to its leadership team, reporting directly to chief executive Stephen Elop.The removal of the USB connector would imply the use of wireless charging – a system that has already been demonstrated by products such as HP’s TouchPad, which had a wireless charging system. A Nokia spokesman said the company declined to comment on future product features.

Speaking in Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, earlier this month, Ahtisaari said that new elements will “ship with the product that we will ship in the future”. Nokia already has “open NFC” incorporated into a number of its smartphones to enable rapid, password-free setup of Bluetooth pairing between phones and accessories such as speakers and headsets.

Although current versions of Windows Phone do not include NFC elements, Microsoft has indicated that it could be included in versions shipping by October 2012. And Elop also said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that although the current Windows Phone Lumia models – the 800 and 900 – do not have NFC, “it is growing in importance, and I personally believe in it”.

NFC “open” allows Bluetooth pairing without the use of password by tapping the devices to be paired together: an exchange of electronic tokens takes place, so that Bluetooth connection – for a hi-fi, speakers or headset – can occur within seconds with virtually no other interaction. Current secure Bluetooth pairing otherwise requires the user to enter a password of up to eight digits.

Nokia has shipped more than a million Lumia phones since introducing them in November. The company decided to abandon its Symbian platform for high-end smartphones in January 2011 after Elop decided it could not compete against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems.

He also suggested that touchscreen interaction is in its very early days, comparing it to the early days of the automobile: “In the 1880s in the car industry cars had tillers – it took 15 years to agree on the steering wheel controlling the front wheels. We’re in the middle of that part of the evolution of interaction.”

Charles Arthur’s trip to Finland was paid for by Finnfacts, an independent media service organisation that provides contacts between international media and Finnish business.

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

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Predictably, the company’s stock rose on the news by some five percent when the report emerged yesterday, originally at the Fox Business site. RIM’s stock has declined in value by some 75 percent in the last year, as its share of worldwide sales of smartphones has declined. The latest figures from Gartner, covering Q3, 2011, note that RIM’s BlackBerry platform had an 11 percent share of smartphone sales, down from 15.4 percent of smartphone sales in the same quarter a year ago.

The Fox (NSDQ: NWS) report says that Goldman will be exploring “strategic options” for the company. If it is true, it could mean RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) merging with another company; or it could mean a sale of parts. One investor, Jaguar Financial, has advocated RIM selling its handset business, and its many valuable patents, and then focusing on services — although it is questionable whether those mobile services like email and BBM have enough steam in them to run on their own without the direct link to the devices designed for them. That would also be a massive step away from the “vertical” company model, used by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), that so many hold up as essential for success today.

Perhaps more significantly than the 4.4 percent decline in smartphone market share that RIM has faced is the fact that many investors, and a sizable-enough swathe of the general public, have largely seemed to lose confidence in the company after a disastrous year.

Problems included a less-than-spectacular entry into the tablet market with the PlayBook; legal hiccups surrounding the launch of the next OS for its phones BlackBerry 10; and a major international service outage that knocked out email, BlackBerry Messenger, Internet and other data services for thousands of its customers.

The role that BBM played in helping enable communications between rioters last year in London was not the company’s fault, but it didn’t exactly heap good PR on the company, either.

On top of all that, there are many lingering questions over whether the company’s longtime management structure, with co-CEOs, is really the best way to move ahead in the current market climate, faced as RIM is with competition from all sides: on platforms in the form of iOS, Android and potentially Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7; and in devices again from Apple, plus the many licensees making devices using those other operating systems. RIM is now apparently changing how it runs things, but perhaps not soon and drastically enough.

As for would-be buyers for RIM, names that have been floated include the usual suspects among large companies that might be on the hunt for a bolt-on acquisition that would give it instant scale in mobile: among them, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), presumably to beef up their mobile push and for the enterprise services part; and a joint bid from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK), which would probably be more for the mobile enterprise customer base, and a complement to the handsets Nokia makes already.

And while we’re throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, what about LG, or Dell?

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1. Clean that screen

You’ve got a gorgeous screen on that iMac, but it’s covered by dust, debris and who knows what else. You may be tempted to use a bottle of glass cleaner — but don’t. That can harm the screen. My recommendation is to use Klear Screen kits, along with their microfiber cloth. They remove the debris while protecting the finish. If you don’t use Klear Screen, make sure whatever you do use is designed for glossy screens. For laptops, I highly recommend Radtech’s Screensavrz to prevent transfer of oils from the laptop keyboard onto the screen.

Let’s not even talk about that keyboard and how dirty it is. If you can shake it out, go ahead and do it. Then give it a good wipe with a safe, keyboard-specific cleaner.

2. Check the hard drive and keep it running right

Your hard drive stores your digital life and is a common point of failure in Macs. When’s the last time you checked the status of yours? Lion’s recovery partition makes this extremely easy. Hold down command-R at startup, and choose the recovery partition so that you can run Disk Utility on your main drive. For more information, check Apple’s detailed site about Lion Recovery.

Computers running operating systems older than Lion will need to boot from a CD or external hard disk to fully check the computer’s hard drive and perform minor repairs. If you want, you can also use third-party programs to expand your recovery and repair options.

Both Tech Tool Pro 6 and Drive Genius 3 have background monitoring of your hard drive to give you early warnings of problems, but if you want a free simple SMART warning program, check out the free SMARTReporter. Advance warning of a hard drive failure can be crucial to saving your data.

3. Replace that surge protector and test the battery backup

Do you know how old your surge protector is? Are you using one? If you don’t know when you bought it and you don’t know the amount of joules it protects against, it’s time to get a new one. Remember that a power strip isn’t necessarily a surge protector. One well-placed electrical “event” can turn that wonderful Mac into a glorified paperweight. As a general rule, when you get a new Mac, it’s also time for a new surge protector. I prefer name brand protectors from providers I trust such as Belkin, APC, and Tripp-Lite.

Similar to a surge protector, battery backups (UPS) tend to be set it and forget it. But batteries have limited life spans, and you don’t want to find out your battery is bad the hard way. It’s time to test the battery. Save your work and unplug your UPS from the wall. Did your Mac stay up? If it didn’t then your battery may be at end of life. Some vendors have software that will check the battery’s health and provide for graceful shutdowns during a power outage.

4. Clean up your cables

While you’re behind your Mac or on the floor checking your UPS and surge protector, do you know what each of those cables back there do, or if you still even need them? Organizing cables isn’t just about aesthetics. Disorganized cables tangled together creates the potential for chain reaction disasters: Pull too much on that iPod, and the entire string of computers and hard drives comes tumbling down. I’ve seen it, and it isn’t pleasant.

It’s time to trace those back, get rid of the ones you aren’t using and organize the rest. Lifehacker had a great article about how to get these under control. Oh, and you might as well dust that area, too, while you’re at it.

5. Check those logs

Your Mac has a little black box that records all sorts of problems and errata. Open up your Console app and it’s all there. It might be an application crash, a slowdown, or just general weirdness. For those of us who have trouble reading the logs and what they mean, Log Leech is well worth the $10. It makes your logs more Mac-like, and easy to find.

6. Lighten your load

Like many of you, I’m embarrassed with the collection of old manuals, disks and obsolete tech in my basement. It’s time to get rid of it. Old disks and manuals can usually be donated to libraries for their inventory or their big tent sale. While Apple has a recycling program, it’s limited to certain items, but your local Goodwill will usually take most items via the Reconnect partnership with Dell as will most Best Buy  locations.

These six tips will ensure that your Mac has a happy and healthy 2012. Anything you would add?

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