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Netflix subscribers in the UK and Ireland will be able to watch a variety of movies from The Walt Disney Company, the streaming service has announced.

Disney and Disney Pixar favourites including Ratatouille, Wall-E, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, as well as Disney classics like Dumbo and The Aristocats, are available to watch instantly, whenever and however members want.

In the coming months, further titles from Disney, Marvel and Dreamworks SKG will be made available, including The Help, War Horse, People Like Us and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

"We are delighted to be able to offer our members an incredible variety of fantastic family films, from recent hits like Marvel's Avengers Assemble to beloved classics like Mary Poppins," said Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

"We aim to make Netflix better all the time and hope members enjoy the rich offering of films we are making available from the Disney studios."

Samsung Electronics has claimed a breakthrough in development of wireless communications technology that will be at the core of 5G networks.

It has developed the world's first adaptive array transceiver technology operating in the millimeter-wave Ka bands for cellular communications. It has been long believed that the millimeter-wave bands had limitations in transmitting data over long distances due to its unfavorable propagation characteristics.

Samsung claims its new adaptive array transceiver technology has proved itself as a successful solution. So far, the South Korean electronics giant claims it can transmit data in the millimeter-wave band at a frequency of 28 GHz at a speed of up to 1.056 Gbps to a distance of up to 2 kilometers.

The adaptive array transceiver technology, using 64 antenna elements, can be a viable solution for overcoming the radio propagation loss at millimeter-wave bands, much higher than the conventional frequency bands ranging from several hundred MHz to several GHz.

Don't start thinking about waiting on 5G handsets however, since these networks are still years away from being feasible. Samsung's new developments are promising but the rise of 5G networks will require so much more innovation from all areas of industry and government-funded sources before it is ready for mass usage. 5G services are not expected to be available until around 2020.

Google has decided to pool the free storage you get with Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ Photos, amounting to 15GB you can use for anything.

The change makes perfect sense as Google seeks to make all of its services work seamlessly together; inserting Drive files into e-mails or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+, and so on. It doesn't matter now how much of the 15GB you use on any of the services.

The Google Drive storage page has also been updated to make it clearer how you are using your storage. Simply hover over the pie chart to see a breakdown of your storage use across Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.

Google also has premium storage offers, starting at $4.99 per month for 100GB.

Netflix has updated its Netflix Player for the PS3 console, with a design more akin to the Web Player and those that run on tablet devices.

The key feature in this update is the ability to easily manage your audio and subtitles selections. You can now do that directly in the player on the PS3, without having to return to the browse experience.

Select "Audio & Subtitles" and all options for that title are presented. Members who use the accessory Sony PS3 Blu-ray remote control can access "Audio & Subtitles" directly from the remote control by pressing "Subtitles." Users of the social features can also easily disable sharing of the currently playing Title.

The design and performance of "trickplay" have also been enhanced. The images load much faster, allowing you to quickly find what you are looking for. Also, you can easily go back 10 seconds in the title anytime by simply pressing the left arrow button once on your controller or remote control.

File locker service Mega has removed publicly available 3D gun designs from its service, following orders by founder Kim Dotcom.

The designs were made available by US-based company Defense Distributed, and can be used with certain 3D printers. The company successfully fired the world's first 3D printed gun recently, and made the design available on its website.

The Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanded that the design be removed, and a probe to establish whether the company broke arms control laws relating to overseas shipping is underway.

The design is still being hosting by other sites however, such as the Pirate Bay. Mega's controversial founder, Kim Dotcom, opted to order his staff to remove public copies of the designs from the file locker's servers after being made aware of them.

He denied that he had been contacted by anyone from the U.S. government about the matter, and said the decision was made out of public concern.

"I think it's a serious threat to security of the community. I think it's scary that people can print 3D guns that can't even be detected by metal detectors ... This should concern everybody," he told Radio New Zealand.

According to sources, Disney will begin allowing livestreaming of ABC broadcast content to iOS devices in NYC and Philadelphia.

If completely accurate, the news would be huge as major broadcasters have never allowed the viewing of live content via mobile devices.

For the first six weeks, the streaming will be free if you have an iOS device but will eventually only be available to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers.

Dubbed the "Live" button, the company's app will be updated for cities where ABC owns stations, which at this time is only six metro cities. Disney is in talks with the companies that own ABC affiliates, which would give access to fans in 200 other cities.

The streaming will be made available to Android in the coming months.

E-commerce giant Alibaba has paid $294 million for a 28 percent share in AutoNavi, China's top auto navigation mapping system.

Says the press release: "AutoNavi announced that the company and several entities affiliated with Alibaba Group have agreed to form a strategic alliance to jointly explore and develop location-based e-commerce opportunities. In addition, AutoNavi announced that the parties have entered into definitive agreements whereby Alibaba, through a wholly owned subsidiary, will invest approximately $294M in newly issued preferred and ordinary shares of the company, representing approximately 28% of the company's total issued and outstanding shares on a fully-diluted basis."

AutoNavi has a dominant position in China's growing GPS space, but the deal actually sent the company's shares falling as it was lower than expected. AutoNavi recently surpassed 100 million downloads and competes directly with Google Maps, Baidu and others while controlling a 45 percent share of the China GPS market.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has announced that the city will be moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, the company's own suite of software for enterprise (and government) users.

The mayor has over 20,000 city employees. Boston is not the first municipality to make the switch as a number of large cities, agencies and large corporations have already made the move.

"We are continuing to drive it forward," added Bill Oates, Boston's chief information officer. "We've been ready, willing, and able to leverage any of these new capabilities."

The CIO says it costs about $100 per year per employee for Microsoft's products. The city says it will cost about $800,000 to move to Google Apps, but the move will save the government $280,000 per year moving forward.

Furthermore, Google's contract terms are said to be much simpler than Microsoft's. Additionally, Google updates all of its software via the Internet, which Microsoft only just began doing, and not even with all of their products.

Google has said this week that it is finishing defining the open-source VP9 video codec standard, with a final date of June 17th.

The company will begin using the next-generation compression codec in Chrome and YouTube on that date.

"Last week, we hosted over 100 guests at a summit meeting for VP9, the WebM Project's next-generation open video codec. We were particularly happy to welcome our friends from YouTube, who spoke about their plans to support VP9 once support lands in Chrome," added Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the WebM Project.

WebM currently combines VP8 for video and Vorbis for audio but is much less used than the H.264 codec.

VP9 will transmit video much more efficiently than VP8 and H.264 and will also be completely royalty-free.

Verizon has announced this week that it will sell the new high-end Nokia Lumia 928.

The Lumia 928 will sell for $99 after rebate and with contract.

Nokia's latest is very similar to the Lumia 920 sold through rival AT&T, except it is lighter and has a slightly different screen.

The 928 weighs 5.7 ounces compared to the 920 at 6.5 ounces. Additionally, the 4.5-inch screen extends to the edges of the phone compared to the curved edges of the 920.

Under the hood is a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, a 2,000mAH battery and 32GB internal storage. The camera is impressive with a Carl Zeiss f/2.0 lens, 8.7-megapixel sensor and Xenon flash.

Verizon is also offering $25 in Windows Phone Store credit with purchase that can be used on apps and games.

For the fith time since the 1950s, the RIAA has changed the way they calculate gold and platinum certification for single tracks.

Under the new system, 100 streams of a track will count as one digital download.

To go gold, you need to have 500,000 downloads (or physical copies), one million for platinum, and 2 million or higher for multi-platinum.

The RIAA says they will accept streaming data from YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, VEVO, MOG, Xbox Music, Slacker and Rhapsody with others to be included soon.

"Including music streaming in Gold & Platinum awards marks the continued evolution of the industry's premier program for recognizing artistic achievement, and it reflects the wide spectrum of ways consumers enjoy music from their favorite bands," said Cary Sherman, Chairman & CEO, RIAA. "The music business, along with its incredible array of digital service partners, is offering fans more access to music than ever before. We're thrilled that our awards will now more fully recognize artists' commercial success today."

During their most recent earnings conference call, Sony CFO Masaru Kato confirmed that unlike the PS3, the PS4 will not be a black hole of profits at launch.

The PS3 had an expensive and proprietary Cell processor and included a high-end early model Blu-ray drive before Blu-rays were mainstream.

"Unlike PS3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4," said Kato. "At the time we developed PS3, we made a lot of in-house investments to develop the Cell chip. Development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities [as internal investments]. This time, we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate. All the facilities will now be invested by our partners, other foundries, so we don't have to make all the investment in-house."

The new system, set for release in November, will use an x86 AMD Jaguar CPU.

According to research firm Canalys, 308.7 million smart mobile devices were shipped in the first quarter, a huge growth rate of 37.4 percent year-over-year.

Google's Android remained king for operating systems, with 59.5 percent share of the devices shipped. Apple took 19.3 percent between iOS and OS X and Microsoft took 18.1 percent share with its Windows 8 and Windows Phone device.

While those numbers may seem odd, it is because of how Canalys defines a "smart mobile device;" notebooks, tablets, and smartphones.

Notebook shipments decreased to 50.5 million units, smartphones grew to 216.3 million and tablets grew to 41.9 million.

On an OEM basis, Samsung unsurprisingly took first place with 26.6 percent share, followed by Apple at 19.3 percent and Lenovo at 5 percent.

Just a day after the WSJ reported that Microsoft's oft-rumored set-top box was dead in the water, Verge has a different story, claiming the company is preparing an "Xbox TV" set-top for release this year.

The set-top would be a cheap (think $99 or less) alternative to the current-generation Xbox 360, giving users access to all the core entertainment services including content streaming, casual gaming and Web access.

Microsoft will allegedly use a chipset that will allow for an "always-on" device, meaning near instant boot times and quick access to TV and entertainment apps. The current-generation of Roku devices are "always-on," as well, and use shockingly little electricity.

The device will be launched alongside the next-generation Xbox, which will be unveiled on May 21st and be released in November.

According to sources, Microsoft is exploring purchasing the rest of the digital assets of Nook Media that it does not own for $1 billion.

Nook Media is the division of Barnes & Noble that controls the digital book store, Nook hardware and college book stores.

If the report is accurate, Microsoft would control the division and phase out the Android-based tablets (such as the Nook HD+) by the end of the 2014 fiscal year. Nook Media would then move to a model where all Nook content is distributed through dedicated apps and 'third-party partner devices.'

Most likely, Windows 8 tablets will be the partner devices, with a Nook app pre-installed. The more popular Nook e-readers will eventually phase out, as well, following the general trend of consumers moving to tablets and smartphones as "all-purpose" devices.

Microsoft has currently invested $300 million in Nook Media, with another $180 million being used by Nook to develop content for Windows 8 devices. The $300 million gives Microsoft a 16.8 percent stake in the company.