You’d be rolling in money right now if you took World Cup gambling advice from Microsoft’s virtual personal assistant. As Business Insider points out, Cortana still has a perfect record at prediction World Cup elimination round matches after correctly forecasting the United States’ defeat at the hands of Belgium on Wednesday. There’s absolutely nothing mystical about Cortana’s prognostications, of course, since it’s making assessments based on a variety of tangible factors including team records, the weather and home-field advantage. Nonetheless, this is a neat feat for Microsoft’s version of Siri and we wouldn’t be shocked if this perfect record carried over to Friday since Cortana has predicted that Germany will beat France and that Brazil will beat Colombia.

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Apple’s next-generation iPhone 6 and iPhone phablet are expected to be significantly larger than the company’s current smartphones. Millions of customers will be delighted by the fact that they can now purchase an iPhone with a bigger display, but millions more don’t want a larger smartphone. For them, now may be the perfect time to upgrade their old iPhone 5 handsets — but trading in your iPhone 5 at the Apple Store for credit toward your new iPhone 5c or iPhone 5s is no longer a good idea.

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What does it say about Comcast and Time Warner Cable that some of the people most opposed to their merger are those who know them the best: Namely, their customers. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin has been digging through some of the public comments that have been filed with the New York Public Service Commission and has found that many TWC customers are absolutely pleading with the government to block the merger because they worry the combined companies will provide even worse customer service and will raise prices even higher.

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Are you still driving a ridiculously large Humvee that gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 miles per gallon? If so then you’re going to absolutely hate the new smart parking meters that have been unveiled in Madrid that charge you more money if you drive a big gas guzzler.

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Siri has gotten a lot of competition since its debut in late 2011 in the form of Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. Now it looks like Apple has started taking some more aggressive steps to make sure Siri keeps up with its other voice-enabled assistant rivals, as Wired reports that the company has been going on a big hiring spree aimed at improving Siri’s overall intelligence and reactivity.

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In recent years, Microsoft has consistently been late to the game when it comes to mobile devices. It’s reentry in the smartphone market following the iPhone’s debut in 2007 was painfully late, and its tablet efforts with Windows RT have been both late and lackluster. According to a recent report, however, Microsoft has no plans to be late again when it comes to the smartwatch market.

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In terms of monthly shipments, Android devices surpassed Apple’s iOS lineup long ago. Apple executives and Apple bloggers repeatedly point to a different stat, however, that paints an interesting picture: Despite Android’s huge lead in terms of shipments, iOS remains the global leader in usage as measured by companies that monitor web traffic.

Unless the current trend is reversed in the next month or two, however, there will soon be a changing of the guard.

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The announcement of Amazon’s Fire Phone was met with a mixed reaction. Many of the innovative features of the device were intriguing, but we questioned whether Amazon was innovating in the right areas. GeekWire has been keeping track of the Fire Phone’s rankings on the Amazon Best Sellers list, and it appears that consumers are also questioning the viability of Amazon’s new hardware.

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The latest Kantar Worldpanel numbers for smartphone market share may not be surprising, but they are grim indeed for Microsoft. In the heart of the Windows empire in the United States, Windows Phone’s market share dropped from 4.7% to 3.6% between May 2013 and May 2014. In Germany, the decline was from 6.2% to 5.9%. In Brazil, the share remained flat at 5.5%. In China, Windows Phone saw a collapse from 3% to o.6%.

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Samsung is clearly the king of phablets. It wasn’t the first smartphone vendor to launch a handset with a larger than normal display, but there is no question that the South Korean giant is single-handedly responsible for popularizing the category. Over the past year or so, however, Samsung has begun to get out-phableted by devices like the HTC One max and Nokia Lumia 1520, which are even more gigantic than Samsung’s Galaxy Note line. Not one to be outdone, Samsung introduced its Galaxy Mega phablet line — and it looks like the company will soon launch a new and improved version of its previous Mega handsets.

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