Latest News - Page 2713

Huawei, the No. 2 largest smartphone manufacturer in China, plans to begin increased sales and marketing efforts in the United States. The company wants to focus on promoting smartphones and wearable devices, including sports team sponsorships, advertising and online promotion of its products to US consumers.

To win over US consumers, Huawei will launch cheaper low-end phones and higher-end smartphones, while creating partnerships with US wireless carriers - and major retailers. Analysts are curious to see if carriers and e-tailers will be reluctant to partner with Huawei, though there is time for relationships to be nurtured.

Just two years ago, the US said Huawei was a national security threat - a lesser concern following increased knowledge of US surveillance operations. However, Huawei faces a bigger battle trying to compete with Apple and Samsung in the United States, as both companies aren't willing to give up market share without a major fight.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden wants to return to the United States in the future, but needs guarantees of a fair trial. The only promise he has been given is that he wouldn't face the death penalty if he is convicted - and privacy advocates believe the US government, which wants to do anything to get him into custody, cannot be trusted.

"He is thinking about it," said Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer representing Snowden, during a recent news conference. "He has a desire to return and we are doing everything we can to make it happen. Snowden is ready to return to the United States, but on the condition that he is given a guarantee of a legal and impartial trial."

Kucherena also noted that he is working with a group of international lawyers to determine the best method for Snowden's potential return to the United States. Snowden has a three-year Russian residency, but would likely face immediate arrest if he tried to leave Russia.

MWC 2015 - Lenovo announced its VIBE Shot recently, which the company describes as a '2-in-1 camera smartphone' that is meant to help blend the worlds of smartphones and point-and-click cameras.

The way the VIBE Shot does this is by having buttons on the sides of the smartphone, like a point-and-click camera would. We have a full-frame 16:9 16-megapixel low-ligiht sensor, and tri-color flash, too. There's a 5-inch 1080p display on the front, and inside we have a Snapdragon 615 processor, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage.

There's a 2900mAh battery, LTE Cat-4 and Android 5.0 Lollipop on the Lenovo VIBE Shot. All of this will arrive in a dual SIM offering, weighing in at 145g and just 7.3mm thin. A microSD card slot is provided for expanding upon the 32GB of on-board storage.

MWC 2015 - Early benchmarks have shown that Samsung's new Exynos processor in the new Galaxy S6 is just completely smashing the competition, even against the likes of the Snapdragon 810-powered HTC One M9 smartphone.

In a video captured at MWC, the Exynos processor in the new Samsung flagship handset is reaching around 70,000 in AnTuTu benchmark. This might not sound like much if you don't benchmark smartphones, but with most flagship handsets from 2014 scoring around 40,000 - 50,000, this is big news. Even the HTC One M9 smartphone scores 55,000 and is powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor.

These handsets are being tested on the show floor, so we might not be seeing final software from HTC or Samsung just yet. But early numbers are showing that Samsung has quite the powerhouse processor in its Exynos SoC.

MWC 2015 - Security software maker AVG has shown off a pair of concept glasses at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that can get around even the most advanced facial recognition technology.

In the image above, Facebook's facial recognition technology can detect a face on the left, but when the infrared LEDs are switched on, it cannot detect a face at all. The infrared LEDs are positioned around the nose and eyes, which emit light at wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye, but to camera sensors, they are very bright and disruptive.

Better yet, the glasses have a retro-reflective material on their rim, something that bounces light back to where it came from. If a wearer of these glasses from AVG is hit with flash photography, the retro-reflective material will bounce back most of that light into the camera's sensor. This is purely a proof of concept right now, but it's an interesting thing for AVG to be showing off at MWC 2015.

Epic Games has moved away from its subscription model for Unreal Engine that it unveiled last year, where it has just announced that it is providing its graphics engine to developers for free. Yes, for nothing.

There is a slight catch, with Tim Sweeney explaining: "You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It's a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed".

This provides Epic Games with the great chance of helping the community grow, getting more and more developers to use Unreal Engine. Sweeney continues: "The past year has been a whirlwind for everyone at Epic Games. Our community has grown tremendously. The quality and variety of creative work being done has been breathtaking. When we asked people to submit their projects to be shown this year at GDC, we had the challenge of picking just 8 from over 100 finalists that were all good enough to show".

Hewlett Packard (HP) is about to spend $2.7 billion on an acquisition of Wi-Fi specialist company Aruba networks, reportedly "in an effort to help boost its share in the wireless local area network market" as claimed by iTNews.

In a bid to catch up to Cisco Systems, HP is hoping this purchase will bring them a little closer and help them with the development of bring your own device (BYOD) structures worldwide. This market is expected to grow by 40 percent to $13 billion by 2019 as according to Dell'Oro Group and HP wants a larger portion of this to be theirs.

Aruba currently services large-scale clients such as California State University and the Dalian Wanda Group, who are responsible for controlling China's largest property developer and cinema chain.

HTC's chairwoman, Cher Wang, has the Internet in a frenzy right now by teasing that the company is working with Valve on something to do in the Half-Life franchise.

Wang said that HTC was "cooperating with Half-Life" but didn't elaborate on whether this was Half-Life 3, or another Half-Life game set in the VR world for its just-announced Vive headset that it partnered up with Valve on. Valve's own employees were reportedly "surprised by Ms Wang's comments as they were not working on a Half-Life game for the new helmet at the moment" reports the BBC.

I've said in various OpEd's that for VR to go mainstream the software is the most important part, and that a "killer app" is required. I've even said that Half-Life 3 would be that killer app, but are we really on the Eve of the announcement of Half-Life 3? Someone pinch me.

MWC 2015 - The Game Developers Conference is beginning to kick off, where we should find out much more about HTC's Vive, Steam VR and everything Valve + VR related. But, one of the more exciting tidbits to come out from the show is that VP of Content at Jaunt, Scott Broock, has played around with Steam VR at MWC 2015 in Barcelona, Spain.

Broock posted to Twitter after he had used HTC and Valve's VR solution at GDC 2015, where he tweeted: "Just experienced HTC and Valve's VR solution at #MWC15. Utterly phenomenal. The controller solution is intuitive and precise". While we've been briefly introduced to the VR headset, we don't know much, if anything at all about the controller.

GDC 2015 kicks off this week in San Francisco, where you can be sure we'll be delivering you the hottest content around.

You're probably pretty confused by the title, but that's ok. There's three main ways of holding a computer mouse - these being the palm, claw and fingertip grips.

In this very useful graphic released by the French ASUS Republic of Gamers, you can help identify exactly what type of grip style suits you best.

Why does it matter? Many different mice are made for certain grip styles and hand sizes. If you're looking at a fingertip or claw grip, something like the smaller-sized SteelSeries Kinzu would suit you better than Logitech's good old faithful MX518 which is more suitable for a palm grip.

EA has officially announced Battlefield Hardline Premium, which is virtually identical to the other Premium services for the previous titles in the Battlefield franchise.

Battlefield Hardline Premium will cost $50, offering gamers four new "super features" which include: masks, gun bench, competitive play and legendary status. Not only that, but you'll get two weeks early access to the four story-themed DLC packs, as well as monthly rewards and access to "exclusive in-game events and items".

Here's a detailed list of what Battlefield Hardline Premium has on offer:

BlackBerry is transitioning focus from smartphone hardware more towards software, building business partnerships with Apple and Google. The struggling manufacturer wants to develop business applications able to run on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. It's not a surprise BlackBerry wants to create enterprise products for other platforms, after its hardware efforts slid over the past few years.

"I have a lot of software assets that are really good," said BlackBerry CEO John Chen, when speaking with Bloomberg. "We're going to build a business on putting it on other peoples' devices. As our market share in hardware is shrinking, I think there's a much bigger opportunity to make our software and package it correctly to be available on cross platforms."

Since becoming CEO in November 2013, Chen has looked for strategies to expand BlackBerry's product offerings. The company's smartphone market share has dropped below 1 percent, as Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers fight for control.

MWC 2015 - We knew it was coming, but Sony has made the Xperia Z4 Tablet official at MWC 2015 in Barcelona, Spain. The new Xperia Z4 Tablet is one of the most powerful slates on the market, and some.

We have a 10.1-inch 2K display (2560x1600) giving us a pixel density of 299PPI, but inside we find the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor (an 8-core 64-bit CPU) at 2GHz. There's 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage which is expandable through microSD right up to 128GB. Sony will be offering the new Xperia Z4 Tablet as a Wi-Fi only tablet, as well as an LTE-capable model.

On the back we have an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, backed up by a 5.1-megapixel selfie shooter with a wide-angle lens. Sony has crammed a 6000mAh battery inside of the Xperia Z4 Tablet which the company says is good for around 17 hours of video playback. Out of the box we will have Google's latest Android 5.0 Lollipop.

MWC 2015 - Samsung announced the Galaxy S6 smartphone yesterday at Mobile World Congress 2015, but our man on the ground Johannes Knapp has gotten some hands-on time with the new super-fast smartphone, with that video below.

As you can see, even with TouchWiz on top, Android 5.0 Lollipop on the Galaxy S6 is super slick and doesn't slow down. This would also be thanks to its incredibly quick 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM. We also have that 5.1-inch QHD 2560x1440 display, a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera with OIS backed up by a 5-megapixel camera for selfies, a 2550mAh battery, and comes in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB with no expandable storage unfortunately.

It looks like Microsoft will soon announce officialy support for USB 3.1 Type-C for Windows 10, with both the standard and USB Dual Role to be supported. The company will be hosting its WinHec conference next month, with the official website teasing the new USB connectivity scenarios in Windows 10 to be discussed.

The page says: "Windows 10 introduces support for USB Dual Role and Type-C, which will enable new wired connectivity scenarios such a phone interacting with USB peripherals, or laptops connecting to an external display using the USB Type-C connector. This session will go into detail on how Windows supports these technologies and what you need to do to enable them. Topics include: Overview of the new use cases introduced with USB Dual Role and Type-C, What scenarios are and aren't supported for Dual Role devices, Using Alternate Modes (e.g. DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, or MHL) over Type-C, Support for Power Delivery, enabling devices to provide/consume up to 100W over USB, Hardware and software architecture changes for Dual Role and Type-C, and Building a Windows system with Dual Role and/or Type-C support. Intended Audience: OEMs, ODMs, IDHs, IHVs, Peripheral Manufacturers, Driver Developers".

USB 3.1 will be delivering a huge increase in transfer speeds, right up to 10Gbps, up from the current ceiling of 5Gbps that USB 3.0 provides. Thunderbolt is still faster, but the adoption of USB 3.1 should hopefully be much higher.

Apple may be the largest company in the world, but when it comes to the global smartphone OS market share, Google completely owns it with Android according to the latest report from the International Data Corporation (IDC).

With Google pushing out over 1.1 billion smartphones in 2014, a number that is up 32% from the 802.2 million Android devices shipped in 2013, Google is simply not stopping. Its mobile OS dominance was already there in 2013 with 78.7% of the global smartphone OS market share, but Google is out for more in 2014 with a huge 81.5%.

IDC has noted that Samsung is the top OEM of Android-powered devices, shipping more units than the five vendors under it. The report says: "At the same time, Samsung's total volumes for the year remained essentially flat while Asian vendors including Huawei, Lenovo (including Motorola), LG Electronics, Xiaomi, and ZTE fueled the most growth for Google's platform".

Now in its sixth season, the crazily irreverent Cartoon Network animation 'Adventure Time' has only become increasingly popular as audiences embrace the show in the millions weekly, and gobble up all manner of merchandise.

Not content with all that, Cartoon Network's owner, Warner Bros. is now preparing a feature length movie adventure to be produced by 'The Lego Movie' duo Chris McKay and Roy Lee. 'Adventure Time' creator Pendleton Ward will serve as writer, as well as a producer.

It's not yet confirmed if Jeremy Shada and John DiMaggio will return to voice their roles of Finn and Jake respectively, but it's hard to see that they won't. "Mathematical!"

HP has started off 2015 with a bang, announcing its new 13.3-inch Spectre x360 convertible laptop, with the aforementioned 13.3-inch display rocking a QHD resolution of 2560x1440, which also happens to feature Panel Self-Refresh technology, which lets the laptop power down when the display is not changing.

There will be two models of the Spectre x360 released, with one bumping the 13.3-inch screen down to 1920x1080 touch-capable display, while the higher-end model features the QHD panel. There are also two choices when it comes to the processor, with HP offering up the Intel Broadwell-ULT-based Core i5-5200U and Core i7-5500U. The Core i5-5200U is a dual-core part with HT enabled at 2.2GHz or 2.7GHz with Turbo Boost, while the Core i7-5500U is also a dual-core part with HT at 2.4GHz, or 3GHz with Turbo. HP has provided just 4-8GB of DDR3 RAM on the Spectre x360, while storage options range from a 128GB SSD up to 512GB.

HP has priced the Spectre x360 competitively, with the starting price of just $900 for the Core i5 model with 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD and 1080p touchscreen. HP will offer up the Core i7 model with 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD and the same 1080p touchscreen for $1150, while the best model will feature the Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD and the QHD touchscreen for $1400.

Ubisoft doesn't have much trust with gamers, especially PC gamers, but The Division is still continuing to shape up nicely - even if it looks like its graphics have been watered down over time. A closed beta of the game is currently active, with a bunch of people playing The Division and discussing specific gameplay details and more.

The participants have detailed the way players will enter 'Dark Zones' which are public combative spaces within The Division, which are both cooperative and competitive, filled with friendlies and enemies. Players must pass through a decontamination chamber when entering and leaving the Dark Zone. There are special weapons are gear that you can collect in the Dark Zones, but you must pass through the decontamination process in order to have these weapons and items become a permanent part of your kit.

These Dark Zones in The Division feature up to, or around 100 players. Other players in here can act as friendlies, but hostile players can be killed, which build up something called a reputation meter. Once your reputation meter begins to build, you become more visible on the in-game mini map. You and your team can choose to work together with another team, with alpha players saying that there have been scenarios where players hide on rooftops, scale up and down buildings with grappling hooks, and more.

Google has reportedly reached a milestone in its artificial intelligence research, showing off an algorithm that could beat a human being playing Atari video games. Not only playing it, but it was learning from the experience, just as we would, according to a paper published by Nature last week.

Demis Hassabis, one of the authors from the paper said: "We can go all the way from pixels to actions as we call it and actually it can work on a challenging task that even humans find difficult. We know now we're on the first rung of the ladder and it's a baby step, but I think it's an important one". The team started their work at DeepMind, which is the London-based start up that Google acquired back in January 2014. When they joined Google, they began looking at ways of baking their intelligence into Google products.

The researchers then began working with Atari games, which had more complicated 3D environments, which Hassabis says the algorithm would be able to beat those games within the next five years. Hassabis added: "Ultimately the idea is that if this algorithm can race a car in a racing game then also essentially with a few extra tweaks it should be able to drive a real car. But that's again, even further away than that".