CPU-Z is now available for Android, a tool that has been used for many years by people like myself and other enthusiasts to get information on their systems and to check their latest overclock and what not. The app is now available for Android, which is a refreshing change.

CPU-Z for Android provides a slew of information about the internals of your Android-powered device that you can use for debugging, optimizing or tweaking, just like you would on your Windows-powered PC. There are different tabs for your SoC, system build information, battery stats and live sensor data. There are obviously other apps that provide users with a similar experience, but this is CPU-Z, something that has been a long time companion of PC tweakers and enthusiasts.

I'll be installing this on my phone this afternoon for a tweak or two! You can grab it, here.

The final box art for the next-gen consoles has been released by Microsoft and Sony. It doesn't look too bad at all, but I think Microsoft can at least have props for having the better box art this generation. First up, we have the Xbox One box:

Not bad, eh? Nice and to the point, with a great shot of the controller on the side. The PlayStation 4 box art we have below:

I think we have a lot of wasted space on the left side - and just a quick tease of the console. I'd really like to see an up-close shot of the PS4 instead of the floating shapes. Oh well, that's not my job now, is it? What are your thoughts on the box art of the next-gen consoles?

Microsoft are having to go into some serious damage control post-E3 2013, as the Xbox One is really losing steam with gamers. Xbox Live director of programming, Major Nelson, took to Reddit in r/games and during an interview answered the following question:

After the Xbox One servers are shut down at the end of the new generation, will Xbox One games still be playable?

Interesting question, which should have an interesting answer, right? Well, Nelson answered with:

I'll just say this: We haven't even started this generation, so it's kind of early to talk about the end of the generation. That's certainly something we would not do. That's not the way the system is designed. It's designed for flexibility. But let's get the system out there first.

This is Microsoft talking now, but what about in 5 or 10 years time? The Xbox 360 games can't be played on the Xbox One, which is kinda of sucky for people who have pumped thousands of dollars into their current console. I guess we'll see in a few years time, but right now I have no confidence in Microsoft. Especially if your account gets banned you lose your games...

Google aren't the only ones working on wearable computing, with Acer's smartphone boss, ST Liew, saying that the company will release their first wearable device sometime in 2014 during an interview with Pocket-Lint.

Liew also noted that wearable technology has huge potential for companies, which right now should be obvious to most. The Acer exec says that the industry hasn't exploded yet, but when it does it would be a multi-billion dollar market. I agree, and I think wearable technology is going to be the new smart device market. Smartphones will slowly fade away as they can't really get thinner or faster, or introduce anything that will make you go "wow, I want that", yet wearable computing (watches, eyewear like Glass from Google) are going to be the next big thing.

Apple are still adding piles of new users to iTunes, but just how many are they adding on a daily basis? According to Horace Dediu of Asymco, the Cupertino-based giant are adding around 500,000 new iTunes accounts each and every day.

If they keep this pace, they'll have added another 100 million iTunes accounts before the end of the year. There may be more users on iTunes, but revenue per account has actually dropped over the last couple of years. Dediu noted that each of the 575 million accounts generates half as much revenue, or $3.20 per month compared to Apple's 100 million iTunes accounts did in 2009.

BlackBerry has the great position of being able to brag that their mobile OS runs Android apps, but BB10 only runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread apps (and earlier revisions of the OS) which isn't all that great.

BlackBerry have announced that BlackBerry 10.2 will add support for Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, which will see BlackBerry owners with the ability of running a bunch of the latest Android apps. There's a beta release of the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and Plug-in for Android Development Tools that was made available for developers, but the actual updated OS isn't expected until later in the year.

We reported about Project Loon yesterday, part of Google's Project X's plan to provide Internet access through floating balloons in the sky. The first trials are happening right now in New Zealand, but these balloons could be floating above Australian skies by as early as next year.

Google have discovered that the best place to test this is in favorable weather conditions, which his 40th parallel south. This covers New Zealand, and Tasmania - which is south of Australia. Google are reporting going to have this technology floating above Australian skies in the second half of 2014.

The game at the top of my most-wanted first-person shooter list is Battlefield 4, and the various gameplay trailers have me absolutely salivating. Well, it looks like us mere mortals aren't the only ones wanting to get in some time with DICE's latest FPS.

Steven Spielberg, director of some of the biggest movies released and director/producer of his FPS Medal of Honor, was caught playing Battlefield 4 at E3 2013. The director was rocking along BF4, but only a picture was snapped. I'd love to see if he has some FPS chops and have a game with him one day - Spielberg, hit me up on e-mail, brah!

Intel have just launched their Haswell processors, or fourth-generation Core processor, but they will never stop. The 2014 platform known as Haswell-E will launch as an 8-core processor, oh baby, yeah.

Intel's Haswell-E platform will launch in 2014 and will be their enthusiast platform, we're going to get into some specs now so you'd better put a book on your lap or something. Haswell-E is set to debut in the second half of next year and will be Intel's first 8-core desktop CPU, so expect some serious CPU performance. We should see an offer of between 6- and 8-core CPUs with up to an amazing 20MB of L3 cache.

But, wait, there's more! 8 physical CPU cores means we're still greeted with Hyper-Threading, meaning 16 logical cores. Maximum TDP for Haswell-E should sit at around 130-140W with the processor itself sitting on the 22nm second-generation Hi-k process. Performance-wise, with the additional two physical CPU cores and the usual improvements in the architecture, we should expect a 33-50% performance increase over the 2014 platform.

Ah, Kim Dotcom. Thanks for the laugh this morning with your latest tweet, which reads "NSA WARNING: Do NOT retweet this #Megaupload raid video. We know where you live." Check it out below:

You can see that Dotcom, and everyone on his land, had no chance but to surrender to the police. We all know this story, but Dotcom is using this time where the NSA is under the Internet's microscope to spread his story. I still can't believe this happened, but at least Dotcom is a free man. I'm sure the NSA have been watching his every move for quite some time now.

Thank you NSA, for not being as secure as you wanted to be, because all of this news is showing the world that user data isn't as secure as we thought it was. Facebook have now come out stating they received between 9000 and 10,000 requests for user data from US authorities in the second half of last year alone.

These requests ranged from child disappearances to petty crimes, all the way to terror threats and saw between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. Facebook didn't state how often they complied with the requests for users' data. The social network have said they "aggressively" protect their users' data, according to Facebook's general counsel, Ted Ullyot. He added:

We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested. And we respond only as required by law.

I think mainstream science has been suppressed for a very long time now, and it's about time that we find out, as a human race, what the reality of our existence really is. The first steps in this, are reversing the mainstream points of science. It looks like NASA could do something good here, with their latest field test that could prove that there is a possibility of faster-than-light travel.

Harold White and his team at NASA have been working on something called the Alcubierre Drive. This new method could use a solution which would see a craft placed within a space that is moving faster than the speed of light. This means that the craft itself isn't moving at the speed of light, meaning the craft itself doesn't need a propulsion system capable of travelling at that speed. This is where things get a little confusing, so grab your white lab coat and come on a walk with me.

The Alcubierre Drive is based on Einstein's field equations, which suggest that a spacecraft could indeed travel faster than the speed of light. But, instead of the craft itself pushing past the speed of light, it would do so by contracting space from in front of it, and expanding the space behind it - a nice trick. It's this type of science that I love reading about, and I think this is the future of space travel - thinking outside the box, which this kind of is.

Google's super-secretive but super-cool Google X labs have designed some amazing things so far, such as Google Glass and the self-driving cars from Google. Google X have just outdone themselves today by announcing Project Loon, which would see balloon-powered Internet access to parts of the world where Internet access is hard, or impossible to come by.

Google even started testing this new initiative during the week, which would provide users with 3G-like speeds using balloons blasting Internet down to the people below in New Zealand. Google have said that they've found a way to let these balloons "sail freely in the winds" and would steer them by moving them up or down to catch the right winds. Of course, this means that Google still have some work to do, which I can see them creating the technology to at least automate this process.

The Mountain View-based search giant have said that they're solving this problem "with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power." Google would be using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to give the balloons their flight paths. The search giant are currently using 30 balloons to test the project with around 50 tests in New Zealand who are using the service on the ground.

Microsoft have just dug a few more inches of their own grave for the Xbox One by stating that if you get banned from Xbox Live on the new Xbox One, you'll also "forfeit the licenses to any games that have licenses tired to it as listed in the ToU."

This means that if you get banned, you're pretty much handing over your physical discs to Microsoft. Of course, not everyone gets banned - but this is actually quite serious as you're having physical media get banned from the XBL service altogether. Microsoft, whatever you're smoking, you could make more money selling that than you will with the Xbox One.

I've finally moved into a house with solar power and enjoying the benefits of our star for my power consumption, which is a lot. But Sharp Corporation have just achieved something of a milestone in that they've reached the world's highest solar cell conversion efficiency of 44.4%.

They achieved this by using a concentrator triple-junction compound solar cell. These solar cells, in laymen's terms, use a lens-based concentrator system that focuses sunlight on the cells which in turn, generate electricity. Sharp's huge breakthrough is part of a research and development effort that are a part of the "R&D on Innovate Solar Cells" project which is promoted by Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Hopefully this means we'll see a bright future for solar power, which I hope someday powers everything from our smartphones to buildings and houses. You can read some more detailed information at the source.

E3 2013 - At this year's E3, Popcap announced a new version of their popular Plants vs Zombies franchise. Known as Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, the new game takes a twist on the older tower defense game. The new game makes use of the Frostbite 3 engine, which allows for excellent graphics. The trailer is embedded below, and I suggest you watch it before moving on in this piece:

In all reality, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is probably my official highlight from the 2013 E3 show. The graphics look great, the gameplay looks interesting, and it was probably one of the biggest surprises at the show. Everyone expected most of the other games, but I hadn't heard of this until EA's press conference on Monday.

EA and Popcap tried to merge the best of the FPS world while still keeping what people loved from the original: EA took "everything you love about action games and matched it with everything our fans love about Plants vs Zombies."

It will launch on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 first, with plans to bring it to PC coming sometime later. It's not clear if it will make its way to any other systems. We saw a demo of the online cooperative mode that allows you and your friends to play together to defeat the waves of invading zombies. It will also feature matchmaking, meaning those of us without friends will be able to still play online cooperatively.

This is something that could be like pulling a thread from a very large ball of wool, but defense lawyers for Terrance Brown, who is a south Florida man currently facing bank robbery charges, have requested the NSA to provide them with Brown's mobile phone surveillance records to support his claim that he wasn't anywhere near the bank at the time of the robbery.

The reason this request has been done is that we now know that the NSA requires all American phone companies to hand over the complete records of all of their clients' calls, including the GPS location data of the calls themselves.

The prosecution had told defense attorneys that they were unable to obtain Brown's cellphone records from the period before September 2010 because his carrier, MetroPCS, had not held on to them.

 

Not so fast, Brown's attorney Marshall Dore Louis argued in court documents filed in Fort Lauderdale days after the National Security Agency surveillance program was revealed last week...

 

...Louis argued in court Wednesday that the government should be forced to turn over phone location records for two cellphones Brown may have used because it could prove he was not present for one of the attempted bank robberies, on July 26 on Federal Highway in Lighthouse Point.

We know that Sony 'won' the next-gen console war at E3 this year with their PlayStation 4, but it looks like this strong surge in interest might hurt consumers' dreams when it comes to purchasing a PS4 on day one.

Sony Computer Entertainment CEO, Andrew House, has said that PS4 "demand may well outstrip supply" after the huge presence the next-gen console made in the last week. He spoke with the Wall Street Journal where he said that Sony have raised their internal sales forecasts for the PS4 after the supremely positive feedback by tech sites, consumers and retails over the last week.

E3 2013 - TweakTown got a chance to capture some extended in-game action of the upcoming FPS Battlefield 4 at E3 2013. Before watching the video, let me add a disclaimer that I am not much of a Battlefield player, preferring the older classic Unreal Tournament 2004. The graphics and "levelution" make Battlefield 4 an excellent game and I will soon become a seasoned veteran.

With that said, this is still an early build. I noticed various graphical glitches throughout the game that should end up being fixed by the time BF4 launches in October. I didn't get a good chance to experience the Commander mode, but it does look to be a nice addition to the game, especially since it allows the Battlefield 4 experience to be taken to tablets and mobile devices.

Researchers in the Czech Republic have unveiled a 95kg (210lb) remotely-controlled bicycle that can hover a few meters above ground for five minutes. Carrying a dummy rider, the electric prototype successfully took off, flew around and landed inside an exhibition hall in Prague.

The bike is powered by two battery-run propellers on the front, two on the back and one on each side. The 'pilot', Jan Spatny, said the weight of the craft made it tricky to control. "It's not as easy (to control) as a toy or RC (Remote Control) model. It's quite a complicated thing, you have to take into account that it weighs 95kg", Spatny said.

The machine could help two-wheeled commuters avoid zigzagging through traffic jams - but it is not quite ready to hit the road - or the air above it - just yet. The batteries only allow for a few minutes of flight before needing to be re-charged. "Because the capacity of batteries doubles about every 10 years, we can expect that in the future the capacity would be enough for the bike to be used for sports, tourism or similar things," said the technical director of Duratec Bicycles, Milan Duchek.