The news was reported by CNET earlier this month, with additional details, including the cost, trickling out in recent days. Our sources confirm that Microsoft will offer $15 Windows Pro 8 upgrades to those buying a new PC with Windows 7 Home Basic or higher.

Redmond has offered these kinds of coupons with the past several releases, so it is not a shocker.

But with Windows 8 coming this fall — possibly as late as November — and with current license sales slowing, and Microsoft losing share to both Macs and iPads, the upgrade program could be even more important this time around.

Redmond and the PC makers are hoping that the promise of a guaranteed and easy upgrade will convince back-to-school shoppers to stick with Windows, rather than head to the competition.

The upgrade program is important for another reason: Microsoft needs Windows 8 to get off to a fast start in order to convince developers to write new Metro-style apps that only run on Windows 8. Getting more Windows 7 users on the new operating system would help that cause.

A big change this time around is how the program will operate. In the past, Microsoft has been the driving force behind the cheap upgrades, but the company left it up to computer makers to handle the specific pricing, timing and fulfillment. With Windows 8, Microsoft will handle all of those items, sources say.

Microsoft declined to comment on its upgrade program plans.

The other piece of preparing for Windows 8 is what is taking place on the hardware side. Windows 8, with its Metro user interface, is tailor-made for touch devices, though it will also work with a keyboard and mouse.

So far, this summer’s laptop offerings are punched-up versions of the same PCs that have been on the market for months, with upgrades to Intel’s Ivy Bridge chip line, and PC makers all trying to put their stamp on the trend toward thinner, lighter laptops.

Lenovo has announced more consumer-friendly versions of its business-minded ThinkPad laptop. Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, has expanded its Ultrabook line and has slapped the term “Sleekbooks” on another set of new laptops that fall into the ultra-thin-and-lightweight category but have innards that don’t meet Intel’s specifications for Ultrabooks. Sony’s new Ivy Bridge-equipped Vaio laptops will be made with lightweight materials, include larger displays, and offer optional accessories such as an extended battery.

But PC makers will clearly be gearing up for Windows 8 so that they can start pitching the new operating system as soon as it is ready.

This fall, some hardware makers will introduce convertible PCs that function as both tablets and laptops, as noted here, or will add things like touch sensors to existing displays, in order to bridge the two operating systems.

One company that has already announced a Windows 8 laptop is Lenovo. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January of this year, the China-based PC maker showed off the IdeaPad Yoga, a laptop with a 10-finger touchscreen and a full range of motion at the hinge so when fully folded it turns into a 13.3.-inch tablet.

Overall, one can expect a lot of Windows 8-ready machines to be part of the back-to-school lineups. But expect most PC makers to hold off on design overhauls for the Windows 8 launch.

According to NPD, Apple shipped 17.2 million mobile PCs* worldwide during the first quarter of 2012, enough to capture a 22.5 percent share of the market — more than double that of its closest rival, Hewlett-Packard. During the same period, HP shipped just 8.9 million mobile PCs for an 11.6 percent market share.

How did Apple manage to dominate PC leader HP in the mobile PC market? The iPad.

Of the 17.2 million “mobile PCs” Apple shipped, 13.6 million were iPads. And in that particular segment of the market — tablets — Apple’s domination is unrelenting. In the first quarter, Apple claimed a stunning 62.8 percent share of the tablet market, dwarfing every single one of its rivals. Samsung, its next closest rival, shipped just 1.6 million tablets during the quarter, for a share of 7.5 percent. Amazon followed with 900,000 tablets shipped and a 4 percent share. Bringing up the rear: Research In Motion and Asus, which sold 500,000 tablets each, for a 2.3 percent market share.

*NPD defines mobile PCs as tablets and laptops.

Now, Lenovo, which bought the ThinkPad brand when it acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, is stripping away some of the weight of the ThinkPad, with a new lightweight model that falls into the Ultrabook category.

The China-based PC maker is also introducing new ThinkPad X, T, W and L Series models, including the lightweight X230, and the ThinkPad X230t, a 12-inch convertible tablet that comes with a fully attached keyboard.

First, the X1 Carbon: Lenovo is claiming the featherweight title with this one, calling it the world’s lightest 14-inch professional Ultrabook. It clocks in at three pounds and, as one might expect from the name, is built with carbon fiber. It has an HD display and backlit keyboard, and is running Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors. Business users will appreciate the option to connect to 3G wireless networks via the laptop, provided that they’ve subscribed to a data plan through a carrier, for those times one needs to get work done and Wi-Fi is as unavailable as water in the desert.

While Lenovo says the laptop can be fully charged in 30 minutes, it’s unclear how long the battery charge is expected to last; and a few other details about the product — such as price and the number of built-in ports — are still unknown. The X1 Carbon Ultrabook will hit the market this summer.

Lenovo’s first entrant in the Ultrabook market, the IdeaPad U300s, which AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg reviewed late last year, costs $1,095 and comes with a 128 gigabyte drive, 4GB of memory and Intel’s i5 processor. And at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Lenovo showed off the $849 ThinkPad T430u Ultrabook, which is 12mm thick and weighs less than four pounds.

And then there are Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X, T, W, and L Series laptops, which also include Intel’s third-generation Core processors, Dolby audio, HD displays and ThinkPad Precision keyboards with optional backlighting. The T430s is the ThinkPad line’s lightest 14-inch (non-Ultrabook) laptop, while the T530 has a 15-inch full-HD display. But the most notable feature of these laptops is probably the addition of 4G/LTE broadband availability through Lenovo’s upcoming contract-free broadband service. The laptops will go on sale in June, and will range in price from $879 to $1,399.

A punched-up X230 ThinkPad will hit the market in June for $1,179, claiming up to 24 hours of battery life in a 12.5-inch form factor and weighing less than three pounds. This laptop also comes with 4G/LTE mobile broadband access.

If you’d rather have your X230 in tablet form, Lenovo has thought of that, too: The ThinkPad X230t has a rotating display that can be folded over to create an instant tablet. It is touchscreen enabled, comes with a stylus pen and also works with a ThinkPad laser mouse. (Lenovo has been playing with this form factor for a long time, actually. For an idea of how it works, check out this YouTube video.)

The convertible tablet (tabtop? laplet?) will start at around $1,479.

For the most part, these new entrants are still geared toward the professional market. But Tom Butler, Lenovo’s global director of product marketing, says the company is looking to appeal to consumers, too, in what Lenovo calls the “PC-plus” era. “From a ThinkPad perspective, we’re looking at the ‘consumerization’ of tech, so we’re addressing not only the IT departments but also the consumer,” he said.

Given the growing BYOD trend in corporations, it seems like a wise move. But whether workers given the option to work on their own laptops would prefer to bring in a consumer-ized Lenovo ThinkPad or a MacBook Air — or another, thinner Mac laptop reported to be on the way — is still to be seen.

Revenues dropped 3 percent for the first three months of the year, while operating income shrank by 38 percent.

Corporate parent Time Warner blamed the decline on both slowing ad sales (down 5 percent) and newsstand sales (circulation revenue was down 2 percent).

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes occasionally calls out Time Inc.’s efforts to get its titles onto the iPad and other tablets, and the unit has some digital success stories on the Web. But no one expects Time Inc. to turn into a high-growth business again.

Still, over the last few years it has managed to at least show improvements in its operating profits, as a result of layoffs and corporate restructuring.

Laura Lang, the unit’s newly appointed CEO, is Time Inc.’s third boss in two years. She has her work cut out for her.

Well, anything can be forced to converge. … You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not gonna be pleasing to the user.

– Apple CEO Tim Cook, on Windows 8 tablet-laptop hybrids

The chipmaker has already sold 7 million of its rugged Classmate PCs, and now it is taking aim at tablets. On Monday, it announced the Studybook, a 7-inch tablet capable of running either Windows 7 or Android.

Intel’s tablet packs a multitouch LCD screen, front and rear cameras, light sensor and, of course, an Intel Atom processor. Other features include 1 gigabyte of memory and up to 32GB of solid-state storage.

And, since it’s aimed at students, it’s designed to be dust- and water-resistant, and able to withstand a pretty good-sized drop.

Intel isn’t alone in going after this market, of course. In addition to the traditional PC and tablet makers, the One Laptop Per Child project has taken aim at the same area. OLPC also got its start in rugged laptops, and is moving on to tablets.

This according to Piper Jaffray’s 23rd semiannual survey of 5,600 American teenagers, which finds continued, rising interest for the device in the high-school demographic. The percentage of teens who own an iPhone rose to 34 percent from 23 percent in fall 2011, and 17 percent in spring 2011. Meanwhile, the percentage of those who hope to own one rose from 38 percent and 37 percent during the same time periods. The likely driver of those increases: The cheaper iPhone 4 and 3GS.

Good news for Apple, since the teen demographic is a critical component of long-term growth and, as Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster notes, “historically interest in buying an iPhone has correlated to future market share gains among teens.”

Not surprisingly, tablet interest in the teen market is also on the rise, with much of it focused on the iPad. Thirty-four percent of the teens Piper surveyed said they already own a tablet, up from 29 percent from fall 2011. Of those, 70 percent had iPads, 19 percent some model of Android tablet and 11 percent a Kindle Fire.

Among teens who don’t yet own tablets, 19 percent said they planned to buy one in the next six months, with 80 percent of that group saying they planned to buy an iPad. And though there was a 3 percent decline in respondents interested in purchasing tablets between fall 2011 and spring 2012, the fact that most of them are leaning toward the iPad reveals a clear trend here. So again, good news for Apple, as Munster notes.

“We expect Apple to remain popular with younger users, which we believe could help establish a continually growing base of loyal users,” said Munster. “We believe that as Apple continues to discount prior model iPads (i.e. iPad 2 to $399) and eventually releases a smaller screen, lower priced iPad, iPad ownership will continue to rise.”

The pitch is simple and intuitive: All the magazines you want, delivered digitally to your tablet, for a flat fee of either $10 or $15 a month.

There are catches, of course, and we’ll get to them in a minute. But the thrust of what NIM and its publishers are trying to do here is heartening, because it shows that they’re willing to experiment, for real.

They’re keeping their core business model — curated bundles of content sponsored primarily by advertising. But they’re making a key concession by not requiring consumers to make a commitment to any particular title and letting them swap out magazines at will.

Not a coincidence: Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation. Publishers need to do something.

Now, on to the catches. The good news is that most of these are solvable. The bad news is that there are a few, and for now, they’re big:

• The digital magazines require an app that will only work on Android tablets running Honeycomb. Next Issue says it will submit a version to Apple soon and hopes to have it available this summer. No word on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which run earlier — and heavily modified — versions of Google’s operating system.
• You can’t get any magazine you want: Just 32 titles from the four magazine publishers in Next Issue’s joint venture: Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast. (News Corp., which also owns this Web site, is a Next Issue backer, but hasn’t put anything it owns into this offering.) That said, the list includes lots of the publishers’ best-known titles: Sports Illustrated, Fortune, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Elle, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Next Issue says it will add more “later this year,” and also plans to bring outside publishers into the offering.
• If you like reading magazines in both print and digital form, this offer won’t work for you. While publishers have recently started bundling print and digital subscriptions for the same price — essentially giving away digital in exchange for full-priced print subscriptions — these deals don’t include any print issues at all.

But for all of that, there’s plenty here to be optimistic about, whether you’re a magazine maker or a magazine reader.

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of the iPad and other tablets, and for now they’ve ended up with something that looks and works almost exactly like a paper magazine, with a couple digital bells and whistles.

That’s not a terrible thing — some of the tablet issues work well, and publishers tell me they think they are selling them to new readers, which is a good thing.

But for two years there haven’t been many compelling reasons to pick up a tablet issue instead of a print one. Changing the basic subscription proposition, though? That makes things very interesting.

It’s also very much an experiment, which is the word every publisher I talked to about the launch used in the last couple days. “No one has done this before, and there are lots of practical reasons for that,” says Hearst’s John Loughlin, who oversees the publisher’s tablet efforts.

And publishers still have basic stuff to figure out, like how they’ll get paid for their titles. The rough idea is that they’ll get a share of revenue based on the amount of time consumers spend with their magazines, but they still need to hash out details.

The same goes for conversations about circulation and advertising. Right now, for instance, the magazines you read when you give Next Issue $10 a month (if you want monthly titles — if you want weeklies like the New Yorker, it’s $15 a month) won’t be counted in publishers’ official totals.

But all of that sounds good to me. It sounds like an industry ready to try some stuff and see what works. Just like all the start-ups that insist they want to disrupt it.

“Anybody that tells you that they have the answer, or that their model is the model that would be successful 5 years from now — they’d be suspect,” says Loughlin. “We’re very much in a learning mode.”

In the interim, the Cupertino, Calif., company agreed with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to clarify claims that the new iPad is compatible with 4G telecommunications networks, and to offer refunds to early purchasers who feel they were misled.

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Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds, for example, have made their way from the small screen to the computer and browser.

One company, BlueStacks, is trying to do even more. The company’s plan is to let most Android apps run on Windows. The company has reached a milestone, as its software has reached the beta-testing phase.

There are a bunch of improvements from the prior test version, including the ability to run more Android apps, including some like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja that have been written with code that talks directly to an ARM processor.

Also new are the ability to more easily synchronize apps with an Android device, as well as in-app integration with app stores, including those from Amazon and GetJar. A “popular downloads” section in BlueStacks also makes it easy to grab the most popular apps.

BlueStacks recommends that people run Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, though it should also run on the beta of Windows 8. The company promised that it will be fully ready when the final version of Windows 8 comes out later this year.

A number of Android Apps come preloaded with the BlueStacks beta, including Evernote, Pulse, Nook and Documents To Go.

Indeed, BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma said that the code itself is in pretty good shape. What still needs work, he said, is the company’s business model.

BlueStacks is still trying to figure out whether — and how much — to charge consumers for the software, versus the amount it might be able to get through touting promoted apps. One of the features in the beta is the ability to download recommended apps with a single click.

“That has begun to influence our thinking a lot in terms of how we monetize,” Sharma said. “Maybe our opportunity is to own the right column for the apps.”

To fund its efforts, BlueStacks announced last year that it has raised $7.6 million in Series A funding from investors from Ignition Ventures, Radar Partners, Helion Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

The update, which AT&T says is the first to be made available by a U.S. carrier, is for owners of the HTC Vivid phone. In the coming months, AT&T said it will also update 10 other phones and tablets, including the LG Nitro, two versions of the Motorola Atrix, Pantech’s Burst and Element, as well as five Samsung devices.

Google released Ice Cream Sandwich some time ago, but few phones — other than its Nexus series of devices — are actually running the software. ICS adds a number of features to Android, including a revamped look, support for phones and tablets with the same operating system and improvements to voice recognition.

Customers can download the update directly to their phone via Wi-Fi, or pull it down to a PC and then install it on their HTC phone. AT&T said it plans to notify users of the update via text message starting on Friday.