Latest News - Page 2927

Oh the days of flip phones were glorious - you felt like a king. You whipped your phone out, flipped it open and started being the cool person on a flip phone. Not anymore, though.

Well, Samsung is going backwards with the new SCH-W2014 smartphone, which is the most powerful flip phone on the market. It features Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 SoC - a 2.3GHz quad-core part, 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, and 2-megapixel front-facer, with dual-SIM connectivity. Storage-wise, we have 32GB of on-board flash backed up by microSD expandability.

The screen itself is lacklustre, at just 3.7 inches it features an 800x480 resolution. It does win some brownie points back by being a Super AMOLED display, though. We have a removeable 1900mAh battery, and Android 4.3 as its OS. All of this comes in at 173.5g. Where it'll hurt you is the price: $1640 or so. This is absolutely insane, but there'll be some people who will cough up this money to own it.

Germany nearly turned into Australia there for a minute, with Deutsche Telekom attempting to introduce Internet throttling, where users' Internet speeds would be capped once they downloaded a certain amount of data.

But the Cologne Regional Court ruled that this would not happen, strengthening the rights of consumers. Deutsche Telekom has enforced users downloading over 75GB be throttled, something which will take place in 2016. The industry thinks Deutsche Telekom could split its customers into two groups: those who don't mind the capping, and those who consume digital data in many forms, especially the growing web form - YouTube, streaming services (music, TV, movies), and next-generation gaming.

The problem here is that the term Deutsche Telekom is using, is 'flat rate' where consumers connect to an Internet service through the fixed network, with a fixed price, for a pre-defined surfing speed, and 'do not expect restrictions' which is where the Civil Chamber of the Court will base its decision. At the moment, the judgment is not yet final.

The original Ouya console didn't really aspire to much, mine is sitting on my shelving since I finished my review, completely untouched since. But, the company is pushing forward, announcing that a new, redesigned controller will ship in 2014.

The refreshed controller will hopefully fix most of the problems found in the origin, offering textured thumbsticks, more responsive triggers, and face buttons that don't get stuck in the controllers' faceplate. The problem with the new 'Ouya 2.0' is that it will be hard to differentiate between the current model and the model with the new controllers because the packaging will not reflect this change.

Ouya founder Julie Uhrman spoke with Polygon where she said: "The feel of the controller today is actually probably a lot better than in June. Our goal is to build a great controller. We wanted to build something that was ergonomic, that had great weight, that had a great feel, that offered developers a different way to develop games by including a touch pad in the design."

After this mornings Android 4.4 announcement many were left wondering which of the top Android phones would be getting the update. Google said that its Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices would be receiving the update but its Galaxy Nexus would not. It appears that the HTC One will be the first non Nexus device to receive the update, beating Samsung's Galaxy S4 to the punch.

HTC has confirmed to Engadget that its HTC One will receive the update within the next 90 days and that the Google Play edition of the device will get its update within the next 15 days. Developer and Unlocked versions of the One will get their updates within the next 30 days. It is unclear if or when other HTC Devices will see Android KitKat pushed to them. Samsung, Sony, and LG have not yet released any update into either, though I fully expect to see update information from them in the next few days.

Shortly after Google announced it's new Nexus 5 smartphone this morning, the company unveiled the latest version of Android, version 4.4 KitKat. Unlike the 4.3 update we saw earlier this year, Android 4.4 is much more than a minor update, and ushers in some features that many have been requesting for some time now.

The first major change that one might notice is that the notification bar is now translucent, and when full screen in an app, the bar disappears entirely which is part of what Google is calling "Immersive Mode." This new mode hides everything on the screen except what the user wants to focus on. Furthermore, the overall look and feel of KitKat is akin to that of Jellybean, but it appears to be slightly more refined.

Google is also now making calling easier than ever by helping you search across your contacts, nearby places, or even Google Apps accounts (like your company's directory), directly from within the app. Furthermore, the new Hangouts App for KitKat merges your SMS and MMS messages together to a single screen in which you can receive Google Hangout messages and Video calls.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, the two co-founders of Technical Illusions, the company behind CastAR. Many of you might remember Jeri Ellsworth from her many exploits in the Maker community, or from her time at Valve where she worked alongside Rick Johnson developing the early prototype of CastAR.

I won't go into much detail on CastAR in this post, but you can read my initial report on the next-gen gaming system which I wrote when Technical Illusions launched their Kickstarter campaign. Since its launch on October 14th, the CastAR project has raised over $674,000 and is well on their way to reaching their stretch goal #2 of $700k. The campaign still has 14 days left and a third stretch goal of $800,000 still needs to be met. Head over to the Kickstarter source link below and back the project.

I would like to thank Jeri Ellsworth, and Rick Johnson for taking time out of their busy schedule to sit down with me and wish them the best of luck with Technical Illusions and CastAR. With the gaming innovation we have seen appear in 2013, the future of gaming is here and I feel that Technical Illusions is right at the front of the pack leading the way!

This morning Transcend announced the release of two new high-capacity USB flash drives in 64GB capacities. The new JetFlash 770 is a USB 3.0 compatible flash drive that features a innovative capless design. With a capacity of 64GB, the JetFlash 770 is capable of housing 30,000 images 23 hours of DVD quality video or 16,000 MP3 audio files.

The JetFlash 770 features a USB 3.0 interface that provides transfer speeds up to 80MB/s which means that file transfers will be quick and painless. The new Jetflash 520 is also available in 64GB capacity and is the epitome of luxury USB flash drives. The drive is constructed out of a single solid piece of metal, and is fully water-resistant while maintaining an excellent shock and vibration resistance. The JetFlash 520 features a USB 2.0 interface, but does come in silver or gold plated versions. Both new drives are available now and retail at an MSRP of $69.

According to some documents supplied to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden, Google and Yahoo data centers across the world are intercepted directly by the NSA and GCHQ. The program is known as "Muscular" and can tap into the main communications link that connect Google and Yahoo data centers.

A documented dating back to January 9, 2013 says that the NSA captured millions of records from the search giants each and every day, sending them to NSA data warehouses. Within a 30-day period, over 180 million records were collected, all of which included metadata, text communications, audio and video, too.

The Washington Post did say that the NSA doesn't keep everything, which should help you sleep at night (so much sarcasm intended). Both search giants maintain multiple data centers around the world for redundancy reasons, with data shared between the data centers all the time. Google has said that it was not aware of the NSA activity, with a Yahoo spokesperson saying that it has strict controls in place to protect the security of their data centers, and that it has not given the NSA or anyone else access to their data centers.

We've heard some rumors in the last couple of weeks, but unfortunately they've been confirmed: Call of Duty: Ghosts on the Xbox One will indeed run at 720p, but at 60FPS.

The main problem here is that the PS4 version will run at the much-cranked-up 1080p resolution, at the same 60FPS frame rate. On the technical side of things, the Xbox One will bump the resolution up to 1080p, but it's still being rendered at 720p which is definitely not "next-gen" to me. Ghosts' producer, Mark Rubin, said through Twitter:

So with one of the biggest game releases, ever, with the next-gen console launch, Sony has the upper hand in terms of graphics horsepower right now.

Earlier today, Toshiba announced a new SSD from its Storage Products Business. The new PX02SS is a new 2.5-inch enterprise-grade solid state drive that is available in capacities up to 800GB. Toshiba says that this new SSD is designed for various write-intensive enterprise applications and is an ideal solution for large workloads.

The new PX02SS is built around a 12Gb/second interface with select models utilizing self-encrypting technology. Toshiba says that the drive is capable of supporting up to 30 full drive writes per day, and that features a layered error code correction approach which improves reliability.

"Toshiba's unique integrated SSD design and manufacturing capability ensures that key components of the SSD, including NAND flash, are designed by Toshiba," said Don Jeanette, senior director of product marketing at Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit. "Component and design commonality reduces qualification time for our customers and reflects Toshiba's partner-driven approach to SSD design and manufacturing, helping our customers save time and money."

There was once a time when many of the big game developers said that Valve's Steam gaming network would never succeed and that no one wanted to buy a digital copy of a videogame. Fastforward a few years and Valve has just announced that Steam now has a record breaking 65 million users accessing and playing games on its platform.

Over the last year, Steam has seen over 15 million new accounts registered which equates to a rise of about 30-percent over the previous year. With 65 million users, Steam is now a bigger social and gaming platform that Microsoft's Xbox Live service. Sony's PlayStation Network is still larger with about 110 million users though. With SteamOS and Steam Machines coming in 2014, it appears that only the sky is the limit for what Steam can grow to in the next 12 months.

Over the years, Lenovo has given celebrity advisors honorary positions in the company and it appears that Ashton Kutcher is the company's latest honoree. A press release from the company this morning states that Kutcher will work with engineering teams around the world to develop and market the all new Yoga line of tablets.

"This partnership with Lenovo brings together my love of technology and design that makes your life better. I can't wait to dig in and help Lenovo develop future mobile computing products, starting with the Yoga Tablet," said Ashton Kutcher. "Lenovo is all about innovation and strong leadership. Entrepreneurship is part of their DNA, and I couldn't ask for a better fit."

"Ashton Kutcher's authentic, creative appetite for technology and keen consumer insight combined with our innovation engine make this a very natural and powerful partnership," said David Roman, chief marketing officer, Lenovo. "This partnership goes beyond traditional bounds by deeply integrating him into our organization as a product engineer as we look at developing the next wave of products. As we continue to push into new PC Plus product areas and lead in multimode computing, Ashton will help us break new ground by challenging assumptions, bringing new perspective and contributing his technical expertise to Yoga Tablet and other devices."

It appears that the leaks around Google's upcoming Nexus 5 are never ending and beginning to form more of a stream than the slow drip we have seen all week. Today not one, but two independant leaks have surfaced that depict the Nexus 5 being unboxed as well as showing the world what a speed demon the device really is.

Google's Nexus 5 has been rumored to be the fastest Android phone ever made, and our first leak this morning seemingly confirms those rumors. Benchmark screenshot have been leaked from the Basemark X benchmarking program and the results show that the Nexus 5 beats out the Samsung Galaxy S4 by more than six whole points and falls under the iPhone S5 by just about a single point. It edges out the HTC one by more than seven points and the Sharp Aquos SHL23 by about one point.

Our second leak is a little less exciting, but still newsworthy nonetheless. A photo has popped up in a Photobucket album that is showing off the Nexus 5 unboxed from its packaging and apparently being powered on. Its unclear where this image was taken, but the phone and packaging does look like it is resting on an office chair and you can see some sort of network cables in the background. My guess is that this is either from a PR firm, developer, or Reviewer who let their phone upload to their Photobucket account by mistake.

The Oculus Rift is in my opinion, one of the biggest game changing pieces of technology to hit the PC gaming world since the introduction of the discrete GPU. Until now though, the Rift has officially been slated for the PC, but this morning a new report has surfaced that suggest we will be seeing a mobile friendly version quite soon.

Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe spoke earlier this week at the GamesBeat conference held by VentureBeat, and during his speech, Iribe said that his company has plans to launch a production version of the Oculus Rift that is both PC and Mobile compatible. He went on to say that the this version would be lighter and smaller in size than the existing developer units, and that it would be compatible with any device running the Android OS.

Iribe says that Id Software founder and Oculus CTO John Carmack has been working on the mobile side of things and that development is coming along quite nicely. "We have some exciting plans on the mobile VR side as [well as] the PC VR side,' Iribe said. 'We're really looking at hitting the consumer market. We're very excited about what we're seeing," Iribe said. "We were sceptical about how good mobile VR could be on such a small platform, but it's pretty incredible what Carmack has been able to do."

The day has come for Dell, which is now a private company. Starting today, Dell has just two shareholders: Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners. Michael Dell has been attempting to shift his company from being on the share market to a private company for nearly the whole of 2013, with his day of reckoning now here.

After 25 years of being a publicly traded company, it'll be nice to see where Dell goes from here. From here on out, it won't have to worry about impressing shareholders, it can hopefully do some impressive, bold moves to stand out in the industry once again. Michael Dell has already said we can expect a bunch of new tablets from the company.

One of these is the Intel Bay Trail-powered, Windows 8.1-featured Dell Venue 8 Pro, which is priced quite competitively at $299 and is available now for pre-order.

Lenovo held an event today, where it announced a bunch of new slates including the Yoga Tablet 8 and Yoga Tablet 10. Our man on the ground with a sultry, seductive accent, Johannes Knapp, captured the two new slates on video, which you can check out below.

The two new slates feature a 1280x800-pixel display, and the MTK 8125 quad-core processor clocking in at 1.2GHz. Both slates feature 1GB of RAM, 16GB of on-board flash which is expandable through microSD, the usual Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. We already know it has Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and camera-wise, we have a 5-megapixel rear-facing snapper followed up by a 1.6-megapixel for the usual selfies and video chat.

The 10-inch model has an optional Bluetooth-powered keyboard, and will arrive in a 3G model which will come out later in the year. The 8-inch model will have a 229 euro price tag, while the 10-inch slate will feature a 299 euro price tag.

Facebook has just launched a new version of its Messenger app for Android and iOS. The newly update app has been completely redesigned from the ground up and appears to have removed many of the stylings it shares with Facebook itself. The new Messenger (note that its not Facebook Messenger anymore) app features a much lighter color pallet and the chat screens are less like the messenger used in the Facebook App.

The new styling is intentional and is part of Facebook's master plan to infiltrate the every growing market of instant messaging apps. At the moment, the messaging ecosystem is dominated by WhatsApp and iMessenger, but it appears that Facebook is looking to hit them head on and the newly updated app proves that by adding in a host of new features. One of the most prevalent new features is that the Messenger app now has the capabilities of identifying users based on their phone numbers, something WhatsApp has been doing since the beginning.

Facebook is testing the new version of Messenger with select users on Android and iOS and will be rolling out the new update over the course of the next few weeks. Have you gotten the update yet? If so, post some images and your thoughts on our Facebook page as we would love to see and hear them!

Today, HGST announced that it has managed to ship more than 100 million Travelstar Z-series 7mm 2.5-inch hard drives this year and expects demand to rise to more than 140 million units by 2017. Seeing the demand for large storage capacities in ultra-thin mobile devices, HGST has launched a new 7mm 2.5-inch HDD with a capacity of 1TB.

The new Travelstar Z5K1000 drive is said to be the industry's fastest 7mm 5400 RPM HDD and features best-in-class shock robustness. The Z5K1000 is designed for use in ultra-thin laptops, ultrabooks, external storage and ultra-compact CE devices. Featuring 2 platters, the Travelstar Z5K1000 family features 1.6 watts (W) read/write power and 0.5W low-power idle, and delivers a nearly silent operation at 2.1 idle/2.2 seek bels.

"The 7.0 mm 2.5-inch mobile market continues to be a strategic space for HGST as evidenced by our record 100M shipments," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. "With the addition of our new 1TB Travelstar Z5K1000, HGST continues to offer the market's broadest 5,400 and 7,200 RPM 7.0 mm 2.5-inch hard drive portfolio to meet the needs of a diverse mobile computing and storage segment."

Today ASUSTOR announced that its line of NAS storage devices are now fully compatible with over 100 different Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) devices in the PowerWalker line from BlueWalker. ASUSTOR says that the integration of PowerWalker UPS' with its NAS systems allows SOHO and small business users greater flexibility and a larger variety of solutions when searching for a UPS.

"Due to both European big distribution channel strong request, PowerWalker UPS and ASUSTOR NAS cooperate together to offer end-user a reliable solution for their high value device & critical data" said Jörg Bous, Business Development Manager at BlueWalker GmbH. "After 6 months closely testing, we are happy to announce all the customers could have these solution available from now."

"In order to protect their critical electronic equipment against the damage that can potentially be caused by power outages and power surges, modern enterprises can choose to deploy uninterruptible power supply mechanisms," said Quote Lin, Director of Research and Development at ASUSTOR. "After passing our strict verification and testing process, we are happy to announce that PowerWalker UPS devices are now compatible with all ASUSTOR products. This provides our users with a wealth of options when choosing a UPS device to provide protection for their NAS."

It has been almost exactly two years since Battlefield 3 was released to the world, and today, EA and Dice have officially launched the next-generation of Battlefield. Battlefield 4 is built upon the revolutionary Frostbite 3 engine, and features an immersive single player mode, and a multiplayer mode that can only be described as "EPIC."

Since its announcement earlier this year, Battlefield 4 has managed to win more than 40 industry awards, and has received nothing but rave reviews in the past 24 hours. With revolutionary features such as "Levolution" where players are able to destroy key locations that change the layout of the entire map, Battlefield 4 is truly a look into the future of first-person shooters. An excerpt from the official press release can be found below.