Latest News - Page 2933

The next iPhone won't be released until 2014, but we knew that the rumors would begin sooner rather than later. The bigger change we can expect from the upcoming next-gen iPhone would be a larger screen, moving into the 4.8-inch space.

Peter Misek from Jefferies & Co. said yesterday in his research note that the iPhone 6 would feature a 4.8-inch display, the biggest iPhone yet. According to their estimates, roughly 50% of smartphones shipped now have larger than 4-inch screens, with the iPhone 6 wanting to hit those customers wanting a bigger screen.

It makes sense, because people are getting sick of the same old small screened iPhones and want something bigger. Unfortunately Apple don't offer anything bigger, so their only options would be to change brands, to something like Apple's biggest competitor: Samsung. Samsung have countless phones ranging from smaller 3-inch (or so) devices to massive 6.3-inch devices.

Silicon Motion has just announced the launch of a new cost-effective USB 3.0 controller for use in flash drives. The new SM3267 integrates an embedded crystal-based oscillator, power ICs as well as the control silicon all into a tiny package that lowers overall system cost. This new SM3267 also enables industry-leading data transfer rates with speeds up to 160MB/s read, a 50-percent improvement over most other single-channel controllers on the market today.

"We are very excited to introduce SM3267, our first crystal-less USB 3.0 solution with integrated power ICs," said Wallace Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion. "SM3267 offers superior performance with competitive cost when compared to other USB 3.0 controllers in the market, and we believe our solution will help accelerate the market in transitioning from legacy USB 2.0 flash drives to the latest generation USB 3.0 drives. This is another example of Silicon Motion leading the market in bringing new, advanced technology to the mainstream market. We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013."

Silicon Motion's SM3267 provides an ultra-high performance, cost-effective USB 3.0 controller with industry leading capabilities and technologies including:

We know that gamers are experiencing all sorts of issues with GTA Online, with Rockstar Games scrambling to fix yet another online game that is in shambles. The developer is trying to find the source of an issue that is seeing users' loss of characters, apartments, in-game cash, rank and more.

Rockstar wants to find the issue,and hopefully recover players' lost data. One of the problems is Rockstar Cloud Services, which the developer suggests gamers don't play GTA Online when Cloud Services are inaccessible. When Cloud Services are down, players can continue playing GTA Online, but with a temporary character, without the ability to save their progress.

Another issue Rockstar has noticed is that the "Retry" button is causing problems, where when a gamer is prompted to retry to enter a GTA Online match when the Cloud is down, some players will see all of their data wiped. Yikes. Rockstar has said that reverting back to GTA V's single-player campaign, and then back into GTA Online does the trick, but this hasn't worked for everyone.

There's always something exciting coming out, and this is something you should prepare for when learning about ROCKI. ROCKI is a small device that connects to any audio system you own. ROCKI is a little startup which is run by a team of "audio and tech enthusiasts" that want to create a music product we all want to own.

Once it's physically connected, you can control the ROCKI device with the ROCKI app from any compatible smartphone or tablet. From here, you can play music from your device, to the ROCKI and thus your sound system, wirelessly. ROCKI features 802.11 b/g/n access, so you can be a few rooms away enjoying your music.

The ROCKI app is capable of pulling all of the music from your device, home network through DLNA and UPnP, or even online streaming services. ROCKI will be adding even more features into the already feature-packed device, with global crowdfunding beginning very soon. We'll keep you posted on all things ROCKI as it happens. You can go and 'like' the ROCKI Facebook page right here!

Percona is set to launch its latest Percona Server tomorrow morning at 8AM. The new Percona Server 5.6 is based off of MySQL 5.6 and offers all of the improvements featured in MySQL 5.6. Making things even better, Percona Server 5.6 features many of the exciting new features found in the enterprise edition of MySQL 5.6, for free!

Percona has built Percona Server 5.6 off of the MySQL 5.6 community edition and has taken the liberty of creating its own solutions for scalability, availability, backup, and security features that are only found in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition which requires an expensive support contract with Oracle to access.

"Percona Server 5.6 is the best free MySQL variant for demanding applications. It includes many features, which are only available to MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition users. We also built upon the traditional strength of Percona Server to provide Percona Server 5.6 users with the best available performance for demanding workloads," said Vadim Tkachenko, Co-founder and CTO for Percona. "The powerful features and high performance of Percona Server 5.6 plus its full drop-in compatibility with MySQL 5.6 Community Edition are all important reasons why Percona Server has been downloaded over 700,000 times since its launch."

Over the past year or so, the buzz surrounding Beats Audio's music streaming service has risen and fallen several times. With the project seeming so volatile, many industry analyst speculated that it may never get off the ground, but today new life appears to have been injected into the service.

During a recent interview with The Next Web, Beats COO Luke Wood, said that the streaming service would launch "within the next few months." He went on to say that the service would be available on the web as well as Android, iOS and Windows 8, with support for the latter arriving later than the previous two.

It also appears that the service will be titled Beats Music, rather than the "Daisy" moniker we have heard tossed around so much over the last 18 months. Wood said that the company is focusing heavily on the playlist side of things, and that the service would differ greatly from traditional streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

We are just 11 days from the release of Microsoft's Windows 8.1, and boutique system builders are beginning to announce availability of the operating system on new PCs. Today Origin PC announced that it has now began offering Windows 8.1 on all new desktops and laptops and will begin shipping those systems on October 17th.

"One of my favorite things about Windows 8.1 is now having the ability to choose where you want to boot directly to, your desktop or directly to the start screen menu." said Kevin Wasielewski ORIGIN PC CEO and co-founder. "With Windows 8.1, it's an evolutionary step in the right direction and we're extremely excited to immediately begin offering it to all ORIGIN PC customers to have it ready to ship by launch day."

Origin PC says that all existing customers who run Windows 8 can upgrade to Windows 8.1 for free on launch day through the Windows App store. For those who wish to stick with the tried and true Windows 7, Origin PC says that it will still continue to offer Windows 7 for the time being. With the inclusion of a "start button" Windows 8.1 is slowly working its way back to its roots, but personally, I am sticking to Windows 7.

QNAP recently updated the QTS 4.0 Turbo NAS operating system for its business-class Turbo NAS products. QTS is the operating system that runs QNAP NAS devices. The software is Linux based, and has been designed to deliver high-performance applications and services that fulfill the clint's needs of file sharing, storage management, and backups. Solutions for virtual environments, multimedia, and surveillance are also built in.

"Our previous release of QTS 4.0 for home-class Turbo NAS models has been a great success with tremendous positive feedback from our users," said Tony Lu, product manager of QNAP. "Now we are pleased to bring forth the QTS 4.0 for QNAP's business-class Turbo NAS models that we believe will greatly benefit business applications of the Turbo NAS,"

The update brings forth advanced functions for SMB users, including 400TB scale-up solution, intelligent Storage Manager, flexible volume management with thin-provisioned volume supported, SSD cache, SMART data migration, VMware VAAI and Microsoft ODX support and more, and greatly enhancing the efficiency in storage management, expansion, data process, and management in virtualization environments.

QNAP recently launched five new business-class, SAS-enabled Turbo NAS models including three devices that support 2.5-inch high-density drives. The new TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP and TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP support SAS and SATA 6Gbps hard drives while the SS-EC2479U-SAS-RP, SS-EC1879U-SAS-RP and SS-EC1279U-SAS-RP feature support for 2.5-inch hard drives.

All five of the new models feature a quad-core Intel Xeon processor that is clocked in at 3.4GHz, and things are kept nice and smooth by 8GB of DDR3 ECC RAM. Each of the new Turbo NAS devices feature a 10GbE network connection, SSD caching, and enterprise level SAS hard drives.

"The new SAS-enabled Turbo NAS models support enterprise-level SAS hard drives that will greatly satisfy performance-demanding businesses," said David Tsao, product manager of QNAP. "The new models also support lower cost high-capacity SATA hard drives for large data archiving and high-speed, high stability SSDs for I/O-intensive operations. With the new SAS-enabled Turbo NAS, businesses can enjoy great flexibility in hard drive selection."

We can all talk about lithium ion-powered cars, thanks to Tesla Motors and other companies, but what about air-powered cars? Well, Indian car maker Tata has constructed a prototype vehicle that is powered by air, the Airpod.

Tata completed testing on two vehicles, both of which are powered by compressed air. The Airpor has a top speed of around 50mph (or 80km/h) and can travel a distance of around 125 miles (or 200km) before it needs to be 'recharged' or re-gassed. For what seems like forever, the idea of an air-powered car has been futile, but it looks like Tata could be ahead of the curve, for now.

The Airpod by Tata has pretty much zero emissions, and costs just a dollar or so per 100 miles to run - which is unbelievably efficient. The Airpod's tank holds around 175 liters of compressed air, that can be refilled at gas stations, or even at home. All you have to do is be at a compatible spot, activate the on-board electric motor and then it will suck in air from the outside.

The NASA website is currently down due to the US government shutdown dilemma, but The Pirate Party of Russia has stepped up, offering its dedicated servers to the US space agency to host its website.

NASA was meant to celebrate its 55th birthday last week, but couldn't because of the government shutdown stopping its operations. A total of 18,000 employees have been affected, with future missions now at risk. The Pirate Party said in a statement: "We would like to offer you bulletproof collocation or dedicated servers on our hosting platform till the end of the crisis."

The statement also said: "We stand for Internet privacy, and as the result you would not have to worry about programs such as PRISM and other illegal activities of secret services of different countries. Your traffic, your activity and the activity of your users will be in safety." Now, if you're like me and didn't hear about the Pirate Party of Russia until today, they were founded in 2009 and are quite active in Russia as a public movement.

Apple is in some need of many more millions of customers, and what better market to pouch them from than an emerging market like India. According to The Economic Times, Apple execs in India recently hosted execs from some of the top retailers in the country.

During this meeting, the Apple execs spoke of plans to open up store-in-store locations and 100 standalone stores in smaller Indian markets:

This would be a good move for the company, as it is losing millions of customers to Samsung, it could pick these missing customers up, and millions more in emerging markets.

One of the biggest downsides with Apple's iPad mini is its truly shocking 1024x768 resolution, in a world controlled by "Retina" displays unleashed by the company on its full-sized iPad and Retina-based Macs, the iPad mini is well and truly behind.

Now it looks like the company won't be releasing a refreshed, higher resolution iPad mini this year at all, according to Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White, who recently met with several electronics manufacturers and suppliers in both China and Taiwan. His sources backed up claims that Apple is having issues getting the refreshed iPad mini to the market.

The original iPad min faced supply issues thanks to manufacturing difficulties, with Apple facing deja vu over the refreshed iPad mini.

It looks like we have more of an idea of what to expect from Google and LG's upcoming Nexus 5 smartphone thanks to a leaked technical manual on the smartphone. The manual is a 281-page document, which is filled with troubleshooting materials, circuit schematics and pinouts, and much more.

It is pretty much identical to the LG G2 smartphone, with some changes. The back of the Nexus 5 is featured, where we can see the Nexus logo placed vertically, like the 2013 Nexus 7, which we absolutely loved by the way. The specs on the Nexus 5 are definitely something worth getting excited over, check them out:

This could all be a lie, but I think this is what we should expect from the Nexus 5. I'm hoping to see LG and Google push a price of $399-$449 on this new device, starting at 32GB of on-board storage. I'm hoping to see a 64GB model, which would be nice, too. This will be a day one purchase for me, that's for sure.

Just in time for AMD to announce its next-gen R7 and R9 series of GPUs, NVIDIA is using this time to drop its prices on its popular mid-range GPUs. This includes the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 1GB and 2GB models, as well as the GTX 660.

We now have pricing of the GTX 650 Ti BOOST 1GB and 2GB models for $129 and $149 respectively, while the GTX 660 is now priced at $179. The GTX 760 has a suggested etail price of $249, and the GTX 770 starts at $399. This is a great time to pick up a new GPU, with next-gen titles about to hit like Battlefield 4 and Watch Dogs. If you enjoy the GeForce side of things, prepare your wallets!

We reported earlier in the week that Valve had trademarked the Half-Life 3 name in the EU, but it turns out this was wrong. It has all been a fake, with the website for the EU trademark office now gone.

Valve Time is right on the ball with this, but I'm sure that there are many out there, myself included, who are disappointed with the news. Just as we were hearing about the Steam Box, SteamOS, Steam Machines and Steam Controllers, we were suckered into believing one of the, if not the most anticipated game was finally coming... but not anymore.

In the server market Supermicro is beginning to pick up market share with its new line of server and storage solutions supporting Intel's new Xeon Processor's E5-2600 v2 & 1600 v2 family of CPU's.

"Intel's Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 v2 families push performance and efficiency to new levels with greater density and feature integration thanks to Intel's 22nm Tri-gate transistor technology," said Shannon Poulin, vice president and general manager of Intel Datacenter Marketing Group. "Intel works closely with partners such as Supermicro to ensure their latest computing solutions offer increased performance with higher frequency and core counts, lower power consumption and more features such as security and PCI-E acceleration. With Supermicro's rapidly expanding product lines and worldwide presence, our combined technology innovations can get to market quickly and contribute to a greener, more secure computing environment."

"Once again, Supermicro leads the industry with the best and most innovative green computing solutions supporting Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors," said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. "Our architecture advancements in FatTwin, TwinPro² and SAS3 12Gb/s solutions deliver the highest computing performance and energy efficiency with maximized PCI-E, memory and storage I/O bandwidth for unrivaled performance per watt, per dollar, per square foot. Our new server, storage and workstation solutions, combined with full integration and support services worldwide, help organizations minimize TCO and maximize ROI as they scale their business."

Valve recently unveiled its grand plan for the long anticipated Steam Boxes. Now being called Steam Machines, Valve said that the new gaming consoles will be developed and sold by partners, but the company did mention that it would be making a Steam Box of its own, and 300 lucky Steam users would be getting one to beta test.

No other mention was made about the hardware that we might see packed inside Valve's Steam Box at the time of the initial release, but today we have found out what those beta boxes will contain. Valve says that the first Steam Machine will be a high-end device that features off-the-shelf PC hardware, and will be fully upgradeable like a normal gaming PC.

Valve's Steam Machine will be served up with several hardware configurations with GPUs spanning from NVIDIA's GTX Titan, GTX780, GTX760 and GTX660. CPUs will conside of Intel i7-4770, i5-4570, and some i3 processors. RAM allocation will be 16GB of unknown origin and storage will consist of a 1TB/8GB hybrid SSHD. A 450W 80Plus PSU will handle power delivery, and the entire thing will fit in a case just over 12-inches by 12-inches by 3 inches. No image was issued with the hardware details.

We are finally seeing PC games move into the 64-bit world after what has felt like forever, with Ubisoft's Watch Dogs requiring a 64-bit OS to function. The news comes from the studio unveiling the requirements of its upcoming super open-world game.

Watch Dogs will require a 64-bit OS, a DirectX 9.0c-capable GPU, and 20GB of spare HDD space. Recommended hardware includes a DX11-capable GPU with at least 1GB of VRAM, 4GB of system RAM, and a quad-core CPU. As for GPUs, it's suggested that you use an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 5770. If you want to run the 'recommended' level, you're going to require much more power.

Ubisoft recommends 2GB of VRAM, an 8-core processor and at least 8GB of system RAM. Watch Dogs is said to scale very well on multi-core processors, so if you're in the market for a new CPU, you might want to grab that 6- or 8-core processor. With the recommended level, the GPU requirements go up, but not too bad, up to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7850.

Some of our readers may be shocked to hear that the car they drove to work this morning may have a hard drive under the dash. With today's vehicles featuring more and more technology, we have to have somewhere to store all that data, and HGST has been leading the way for years now.

Earlier this week, HGST announced that it has began shipping the sixth generation of its automotive friendly HDDs. The new Endurastar J4K320 line of hard drives feature a single platter design that has been refined for the automotive infotainment and telematics market. With capacities up to 320GB, the new Endurastar drives are built to survive the rugged environment that automobiles not only reside in, but also create.

The hard drives have to be able to withstand extreme temperatures with very fast fluctuations between hot and cold, while at the same time retaining enough rigidity to handle the stray pothole or speed bump the vehicle may encounter. The Endurastar hard drives can handle altitudes up to 18,000 feet, and can operate in temperatures from -22F all the way up to 185F. Shock loads up to 300Gs will not phase the drive either.