Managing battery life on an Android device can be frustrating. Many applications run in the background and system processes suck a lot of power, even when the phone is idling. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich did a lot to improve the transparency of what apps are affecting performance and battery life, but there are still a few tricks to squeeze out a few more hours of battery life out of your Android phone.

Enter JuiceDefender.

This battery management application claims to save hours on your battery, but how exactly does it work? Does it actually work?

DAEMON Tools has finally released DAEMON Tools for Mac. The free CD/DVD emulation software has been available for many years on Windows and is an excellent tool for emulating CD or DVD drives if you don't have a physical drive available or don't want the hassle of burning one.

DAEMON Tools for Mac Lite is free and has been initially released in beta. Like the Windows version, The Lite version of DAEMON Tools for Mac lets you emulate up to four virtual drives at once.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) announced a new partnership with the San Francisco Giants during a press conference on Wednesday at AT&T Park, pertaining to video games and their respective ratings.

ESRB is the non-profit entity responsible for assigning ratings to video games, based on the content within them. ESRB’s ratings serve as a helpful guideline for parents to decide what games may or may not be appropriate to purchase for their children.

On Wednesday, ESRB revealed a new public service announcement (PSA) campaign, starring two popular baseball fan favorites – catcher Buster Posey and pitcher Ryan Vogelsong, both of the San Francisco Giants.

Chrome 19 - version 19.0.1084.46, to be precise - was released this week, bringing with it one major addition: tab syncing. This nice addition means that you can access your current tab session across multiple devices.

That means, for instance, that if you're researching hotels in Barcelona at home, you can access the same selection of tabs from your Android device or tablet while you're traveling. It's a really handy feature and a welcome addition to Google's star browser.

Microsoft Publisher is often peoples’ go-to program when they want to create brochures and other printed presentations. Unfortunately, many users feel as though its usability could be greatly improved, particularly for beginner designers.

If you find creating printed material with Publisher a little too complex, there are alternatives available that might make your creation process a little easier.

Here are four great alternatives to Microsoft Publisher for people looking to make the switch.

Here’s a round-up of the best mobile apps we tested on Softonic this week. Check them out now!

N.O.V.A 3

The latest version in the N.O.V.A series of games proves to be one of the best first-person-shooters on the iOS platform to date. It boasts shiny 3D graphics, smart controls, surprisingly good voice acting, and, most of all, lots and lots of alien scum to blast. If you’ve got the latest iPad this will blow you away and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were playing Halo on an Xbox.

iOS

CCleaner has been one of my favorite tools to maintain PCs. It is simple to use and offers powerful tools. It has a small footprint and it can be installed on a USB drive to clean up PCs on the go. CCleaner can clean up files that are left behind from uninstalled apps, fix the registry, and uninstall apps but it is by no means the last word in PC maintenance. There's no defragmentation or optimization option within CCleaner. Enter Mz 7 Optimizer, an app specifically designed to tune up your Windows 7 PC. Can it replace CCleaner as our PC maintenance app of choice? Let's find out.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Wolfenstein, Bethesda Software has released Wolfenstein 3D free to play online.

The browser version is the full Wolfenstein 3D in which you play the part of an American soldier in World War 2 trying to escape Nazi Germany's Castle Wolfenstein.

Internet Explorer 9 is a big improvement over its predecessor. Unfortunately, the newest version of Microsoft’s popular browser isn’t compatible with Windows XP. For that, you’ll need to use Internet Explorer 8, which is still a solid browser by anyone’s estimation.

Cookies are pieces of information stored on your computer that personalize your experience every time you visit a website. If cookies are disabled on IE 8, you will often encounter problems such as being unable to complete an online purchase, among other important actions.

Fortunately, managing cookies in IE 8 is a relatively simple process. I’ll show you how to enable, disable and even delete your cookies entirely in a few simple steps!

Do we really need another app for staying in touch with friends and family? Telefónica certainly seems to think so. Today, it launched TU Me, which bundles free messaging, voice calls, photo sharing, and more together in a simple-ish iPhone app.

TU Me's main advantage over similar WhatsApp is its voice calling, apparently based on Jajah which Telefónica bought in 2010. Photo sharing, location sharing, audio messages - these all feature in both apps. But WhatsApp also offers video sharing, contact sharing and it's multi-platform.

GIMP has been one of my favorite image editing tools for years because of its price (free) and powerful feature set. Still, GIMP drew plenty of criticism for having a confusing interface. The developers of GIMP are well aware of these issues and have targeted this issue in the latest release of GIMP. Besides some interface tweaks, GIMP also comes with slew of technical improvements. Let's take a look at some of the major changes in version 2.8 of GIMP.

If you’re a user of UC Browser 8, you might be wondering how to delete the history of the sites you’ve visited. This process has changed from version 7 of the popular Android web browser, so it might be confusing if you’ve just upgraded from the previous release. Actually, it’s very easy to remove your history in UC Browser.

Besides deleting your browsing history in UC Browser, you can remove cookies, clear form data, and wipe the cache (or a combination of all of these). Here’s how:

Codemaster's have excellent pedigree for racing games, and with DiRT Showdown, they've resurrected the ghost of 1995's classic Destruction Derby. You can play the demo now on Windows via Steam, which features one race and a multiplayer arena event.

DiRT Showdown comes out 24th May and as well as the derby events featuring fictional old bangers, there will be Gymkhana events like those seen in DiRT 3. I'm not sure if these will fit with the rough and tumble of the derby events, but we already know how much fun they are.

Check out some gameplay from the multiplayer mode 'Rampage' after the break below - it's a demo and still need some polishing, but you'll see how much fun it is. I think DiRT Showdown could be the multiplayer racing game of the year:

ZoneAlarm has long been a household name for great firewall protection but they have never been known for antivirus. ZoneAlarm's first foray into antivirus was its ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2012 and now they have bundled their antivirus functionality into ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus + Firewall (rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?). Since Microsoft introduced Microsoft Security Essentials, security firms have been worried that consumers would no longer look for third party security programs. Can ZoneAlarm win over consumers' hearts and minds with their new, free program? Let's find out (and be sure to read our full review here).

Ultrasurf is a freeware program designed to evade internet censorship that exists in some countries. In this post I'll explain how it works, and what Ultrasurf can and can't do. It's a standalone .exe file - so you can run it from a USB stick without installation. When it's running, you access sites through Ultrasurf's own servers. This can make browsing slower, but this seems to be the price to pay for avoiding online censorship and filtering.