Latest News - Page 2334

ASUS has been releasing weird and at times very wonderful tablets over the years, but the company hasn't been making profits on them, so starting in the first half of 2016 the company began restructuring its tablet business.

DigiTimes reports: "Asustek started reorganizing its tablet business in the first half of 2016 and has greatly reduced the number of its new tablet projects as well as tablet shipments in 2016. Since Asustek still has a few hundred R&D and sales staff in its tablet department, Asustek has been trying to relocate them to new businesses such as virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and smartphone and the process is expected to be completed by the end of first-half 2017".

This leads me to be wondering what ASUS will do about tablets at CES 2017 next week, and whether we might see a shift away from slates by ASUS.

Lenovo are teasing the future of their laptops ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week, with an entire lineup of new and refreshed laptops rocking Kaby Lake processors, and more.

We have the totally new ThinkPad Yoga 370 2-in-1 convertible, refreshed T-Series (T470, T570, T470s, and T470p) and L-Series (L470 and L570) models, the new X270, and an updated version of the ThinkPad 13.

What to expect from Lenovo's new laptops:

HTC is quickly spraying out the rumors that it will be unveiling and launching the Vive 2 at CES 2017 next week, with reports stating that the Vive 2 would rock dual 4K displays at 120Hz, which would've been amazing.

UploadVR have confirmed with HTC that the Vive 2 will not be shown off at CES 2017, with HTC's official statement reading: "There is no truth to the rumor of launching Vive 2 at CES 2017. At Vive, we are laser focused on building out a strong and growing ecosystem for current and future Vive owners so they can experience the best room-scale VR with the most compelling content available".

Now, HTC have said that they're not going to be launching Vive 2 at CES 2017 - but what if HTC aren't naming the Vive successor 'Vive 2'... does that mean we could see it teased as Vive 4K or something new? Maybe that's just me wishing out aloud.

Global entry! MSI joins us again for another video card giveaway. This time one lucky winner will be sent a GeForce 1050 GAMING X 2G. This time the rules are a bit different. Being the end of the year, MSI wants feedback on how they did with their video cards. See Step 6 below for details.

THE ULTIMATE PC GAMING PLATFORM

Get Game Ready with GeForce® GTX.

Tesla has announced alongside Panasonic, that they will start production of solar cells in a factory on American soil - in Buffalo, New York.

The two companies have settled on an agreement for Panasonic to pay the capital costs for the manufacturing, while Tesla has made a "long-term purchase commitment" to Panasonic - but no official figures have been thrown around. The production factory in question is under development by SolarCity Corp., a solar power company that Tesla owns.

The announcement said that the photovoltaic cells and modules that are used in solar panels for non-solar roof products and solar glass tile roofs that Tesla will soon be making. Production kicks off mid next year, with Tesla creating 1400 jobs in Buffalo, and 500 more jobs in manufacturing as it expands its operations in Buffalo.

If you haven't played through the Resident Evil 7 demo, you really need to - it looks awesome, and teases what could be a fresh injection of new into the franchise when it lands in less than a months time.

Capcom have patched the Resident Evil 7 demo with support for CPUs without SSE4.1 technology (AMD Phenom, and Intel Core 2 series CPUs), as well as some performance improvements with HBAO+. The new patch will also fix issues surrounding the screen size change, when switching from full screen to windowed mode - should now be fixed.

Resident Evil 7 PC Demo Patch Changelog:

Microsoft is apparently working on a new Windows 10 'game mode' that's designed to optimize the performance of PC games on a system-wide hardware and OS level.

According to Windows Central, the new Windows 10 'game mode' will "enhance the PC gaming experience by minimizing resources used by running apps to almost nothing and allocating freed up resources to the game, making it run faster, better and smoother overall."

We're not sure if Game Mode will be available across all PC games, or if it'll be an exclusive feature of Microsoft's UWP Windows Store PC games--likely the latter, as Microsoft is keen on pulling more gamers to its unified framework, and this will be a pretty hefty incentive if it's done right.

Tesla recently released its new Autopilot v8.0 technology in September, with the company teasing its new radar processing technology that was pushed out over-the-air to all of its electric vehicles with the first-gen Autopilot hardware.

This new update allows the system to see ahead of the car in front of you, tracking multiple cars on the road - as it's able to bounce underneath, or around the car in front of the Tesla. There haven't been any videos of this taking place, but unfortunately - today it happened, and for the Tesla Model S owner Hans Noorsdij had his vehicle avoid an accident for him.

Tesla's Autopilot Forward Collision Warning can be heard sending an alert out for something, and less than a second later a massive accident happens, with the Model S coming to a safe, and to a not-so-abrupt stop. Amazingly, everyone "turned out to be OK" after the accident - even with the SUV rolling over. We now have an amazing demonstration of what Tesla's still-early-days Autopilot technology is capable of in the real-world.

Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid has been certified by the FCC, showing some interesting new features such as a non-removable 3.7V Lithium Ion battery, 5GHz Wi-Fi, the apparent requirement of an Ethernet to USB adapter for wired internet connections, USB Type-C fast-charging while docked, and more.

Check below for a breakdown of all the info including in the Switch's FCC filing, as well as source documentation, but also remember that the FCC filing was based on a Nintendo Switch devkit. The filings ascertain that the HAC-001, aka the Nintendo Switch's model number, matches the final hardware that will ship in March 2017.

*Basic formula to convert volts to watts is Watts = Volts x Amps, so we plug in the Switch's 15V times the 2.6A to get 39W, meaning the Switch will draw a max of 39W while docked.

I've been excited for AMD's next-gen Zen CPU architecture since day one, and that excitement has built up over the last 12 months into the official Ryzen CPU architecture AMD teased earlier this month.

Ryzen will rock up to 16 threads of CPU performance with an 8-core processor starting at 3.4GHz, and performance in the levels of the Core i7-6800K and 6900K from Intel. Now we're hearing that motherboard makers have been "rather aggressive about placing orders" for Ryzen-capable motherboards, as they "believe demand for the new platform will increase AMD's share in the worldwide desktop processor market in the second quarter of 2017", reports DigitTimes.

Better yet, we're getting an idea of how far along the Ryzen CPU and compatible motherboards are, with DigiTimes' report continuing: "The sources pointed out that they have started receiving high-end X370, mainstream B350 and entry-level A320 chipsets from AMD and are now in the final stage of finishing related testing and motherboard designing".

AMD appears to be ringing in the New Year bell a little early this year, with a tease on the official Twitter account for Radeon, with a simple tweet of "New Year. New architecture", teasing its next-gen Vega GPU architecture.

AMD recently held their Tech Summit 2016 event in Sonoma, California - with our first look at a Vega 10-based graphics card with 8GB of HBM2, capable of driving DOOM at 4K 60FPS+ on its highest graphics settings.

It was only a week ago that a Vega 10 GPU of some sort received RRA certification, but so did a 'Polaris 12' graphics chip, too. Performance wise, we should expect Titan X level performance from a Vega 10 graphics card with 8GB of HBM2, and most likely ready to compete against NVIDIA's unannounced and unconfirmed - but teased GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

If there's one thing that electric cars need, it's faster charging - and it looks like that's in the immediate future for Tesla Motors. Elon Musk, or the real life Tony Stark, has teased that the next generation is Superchargers will be pushing somewhere above 350kW.

Musk fielded some questions over Twitter, Fred Lambert suggesting that Supercharger V3 will have 350kW output - but Musk had the reply of a lifetime, teasing: "A mere 350 kW ... what are you referring to, a children's toy?". If Tesla does indeed hit a doubling in power output, charging up their growing family of electric cars could be faster than ever before.

We could be looking at a stop at the service station, or a specific carpark, being able to charge your Tesla electric vehicle in minutes - impressive stuff.

LG will be teasing something really quite futuristic during CES 2017 next week, with an easily-named "Levitating Portable Speaker"... which is exactly what it sounds like - a levitating speaker.

The upcoming Levitating Portable Speaker is an egg-shaped Bluetooth unit that has a round base, something LG calls the Levitation Station. The aptly-named Levitation Station (seriously, give that person a raise) includes electromagnets that provide the floating effect, as well as a subwoofer for bass. LG touts 360-degree sound with a 10-hour battery life, and it's also rated IPX7 for water resistance.

The coolest thing out of it all is that the speaker will automatically descend into the base when it needs to recharge, and I will buy one as soon as I can to test that out. Awesome stuff, LG.

We've been reporting about Crytek more than ever before, with mostly bad things - but then a great spark of excitement from a nearly secured $500 million investment from the Turkish government - and now, we have confirmation on Crytek developers' unpaid wages.

According to an industry insider friend of ours, TweakTown can exclusively reveal that Crytek will pay 100% of their unpaid staff to all unpaid staff by January 13, 2017. This is just over two weeks from now, which I'm sure will coincide with Crytek's recent $500 million deal with the Turkish government. Not only that, but Crytek reportedly holds no debt - which means it should effectively be very steady with this new load of cash coming in, for what will hopefully be a very long time.

Google might be spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising for its new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, but people are experiencing issues all over the place - including me. Even after AUD$1249 outright, to say I'm mad at the situation of my Pixel malfunctioning like this being disappointing, would be an understatement.

In the last week my Pixel has been really quite bad, matching up with reports online that Pixel owners have been having their phone freeze, and you can't do anything with it - and it takes up to 60 seconds before the phone starts working, very randomly. The only way to get out of it is to hard reset Pixel by pressing the power and volume down buttons at the same time, and holding them down for 10 seconds.

Not only that, but I've been noticing glitches with the camera and the fingerprint sensor not recognizing my fingerprint. A few weeks ago I was sitting in the cinema watching Arrival and at the end of the movie, I went to unlock my Pixel with my fingerprint - which was rejected, and so was my 4-digit security code. I couldn't get into my Pixel at all, and had to hard reset and wipe the entire smartphone and start again.

Apple will be opening up its new spaceship campus is nearing completion, with a beautiful 4K video shot with his drone, providing a Christmas/New Year update for us all. Check it out.

The footage looks great, showing that Apple is using 100% renewable energy for the campus, with the entire ring around Apple's new HQ plastered with solar panels. Matthew Roberts, the person behind the 4K drone footage said that there's around 65% of the total solar panels installed so far.

Apple has designed the campus where it will feature 3000 specially designed, and engineered curved glass panels that will measure in at around one mile in circumference. Steve Jobs said during a Cupertino City Council meeting a few years ago: "There's not a single straight piece of glass in this building. We've used our experience in building retail buildings all over the world. We know how to make the biggest pieces of glass for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building... It's pretty cool".

Oculus is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons today, with Oculus' Head of Computer Vision Dov Katz being arrested in a sting involving a police officer who was posting as a 15-year-old girl.

TechCrunch reports that Katz meeting with what he thought was a 15-year-old girl at Embassy Suites in Tukwila, Washington - aftrer he had text messaged the 15-year-old girl agreeing to pay $300 with her for sex without a condom. The police officer pretended to be a 19-year-old who, closer to the time of meeting Katz, said she was being honest and act ually a 15-year-old. The Oculus engineer responded saying "sure", adding: "do you have another pic?".

Some sickening stuff right there, with Katz ending being arrested without incident, with $600 found in the room along with his smartphone. The police officer in question said he arrested Katz for 'Commercial sexual abuse of a minor', but Katz said he was a hero, and instead was "there to rescue her and call the police".

Crytek have had a turbulent year, but with the news that Turkish government will be investing a massive $500 million into the German developer, something Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım announced on December 24, without naming Crytek.

PM Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım did say that three brothers living in Germany, "who own a leading company in the gaming sector, were planning to invest in Turkey during his speech at the "Turkey's 500 Large Service Exporters" ceremony", according to reports.

The three brothers in question are Cevat, Avni, and Faruk Yerli - who founded Crytek in 1999. The company spread into Istanbul, Budapest, Kiev, Seoul, Shanghai, and Sofia, but closed 5 of them just days ago. Crytek recently said the closures were so that it could refocus on its core strengths, developing innovating games and the technology that drives them.

The holidays can be an interesting time, with Intel rumored to be retiring its Core family of processors in 2019 with the release of Tiger Lake, which will be succeeded with a more efficient, faster approach to the x86 architecture.

Bitsandchips.it is reporting that Intel's next CPU family will be similar to what AMD has done with its Zen architecture, blending in power consumption/performance /price - and in order to save physical space (smaller die), and improve the power consumption/performance ratio, Intel will reportedly get rid of old SIMD and legacy hardware.

This means that we might not have 100% backwards compatibility, but these CPUs won't be here until 2020 - a long time from now. Intel will be able to make a lean, efficient x86 architecture that will compete with AMD's nearly-here Zen architecture. What I'm taking away from this is that AMD will be ahead of the game for a few years until Intel can get their act together with a new architecture to begin competing against the star-studded launch of Zen.

The Huawei Mate 9, unveiled in November, already comes in multiple colors, but the Chinese giant has now added another one - obsidian black.

Other than the new color, the specs of the phone remain the same - Kirin 960 chip, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The phone has a 5.9-inch full HD display, 4,000 mAh battery, fingerprint sensor and rear-dual camera system - 20MP (monochrome) + 12MP (color) with an aperture of f/2.2. The front camera is 8MP with an aperture of f/1.9.

The phone is also available in gray, silver, gold, brown and white color at a price of $776.