NASA have just launched three Nexus One smartphones into orbit as part of a low-budget, experimental satellite program that uses off-the-shelf components.

The three Android-powered devices are now circling high above the Earth, encased in 4-inch metal cubes, at an altitude of around 150 miles and will burn up on re-entry within the next two weeks. NASA's mission of each PhoneSat is easy, they just have to take photos of the Earth and send back periodic radio messages.

The mission is to see if the smartphones are capable of supplying the "brains" of future satellites, which would make satellites much cheaper in the future. NASA launched the smartphones into orbit on Sunday when Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket lifted off from Virginia. Amateur radio operators had begun notifying NASA that they could pick up radio signals from the satellites within hours of the launch.

Coinciding with the launch of the Radeon HD 7990, AMD has released updated Catalyst drivers, bringing the count up to 13.4. These are the first WHQL-certified drivers released by the CPU and GPU manufacturer in three months. Our resident GPU Editor and author of the driver analyses pieces will hopefully have a piece up on them soon.

The drivers bring official support for the newly released HD 7790 and HD 7990. They fix or bring support for the following:

To download the newest drivers, you can head over to AMD's driver support site.

Despite claimed inventory shortages, US Cellular has announced that they will be getting the latest Samsung smartphone come April 30. The Samsung Galaxy S4, originally announced back in March, will be coming to US Cellular. The 16GB version will be available in either black or white for $199, provided you sign a two-year contract.

T-Mobile had high hopes to be the first to market with Samsung's highly anticipated Galaxy S4, but it appears that the company will most likely be the third company to offer retail sales of the device in the US market. Late Tuesday night the company issued a statement that said it has been forced to delay the Galaxy S4 launch due to unexpected inventory deliveries.

T-Mobile will now begin offering the Galaxy S4 for sale on Monday April 29th, a full two days after rivals Sprint and AT&T begin selling the device. While to some two days is no big deal, T-Mobile was hoping to cash in on the early adopters who wanted the latest and greatest, but wanted to forgo the annual contract that comes with a new phone.

In a statement T-Mobile said:

For so long, a pre-built gaming PC cost so much more than a DIY rig. The DIY rigs are always down to the components chosen, and the skill of the system builder, but now Digital Storm are going to take not only the headache out of building an awesome gaming PC, but the extra cost of it, too.

Enter the Vanquish line of PCs from Digital Storm, which reduces the gap between DIY and pre-built PCs to between $23 and $58. The Vanquish line of PCs is a "carefully optimized selection of brand name, high-performance components to deliver a fluid smooth game playing experience".

Digital Storm's Vanquish PCs are pre-built, pre-tested and ready to ship after an order has been played - completely reducing the usual delays of a built-to-order system. Digital Storm's Director of Product Development, Rajeev Kuruppu, says:

Today is the day for Apple news, isn't it? We've just seen the iPhone makers earnings report for Q2 2013, and had news to not expect a bigger iPhone anytime soon, but now we shouldn't expect any new products between now and Q4 2013.

This isn't a rumor or another site rustling around the dark for some traffic, but from CEO Tim Cook himself who hinted that new products would come out during the fourth fiscal quarter of the year, continuing throughout fiscal 2014. This means that we shouldn't see many products unveiled between now and Q4, or around the holidays this year.

Personally, I think Apple are behind the ball and will have to come out with something that truly deserves the title of 'magical' and 'revolutionary' this time around. Google, LG, Samsung, Sony, HTC and more all have great products out and many more to come between now and Q4.

AMD are back yet again with the monster of Radeon GPUs, the dual-GCN rocking Radeon HD 7990. The Radeon HD 7990 features a number-busting 8.6 billion (that's with a B) transistors, 4096 stream processors and a total of 8.2 TLOPS of compute power.

6GB of GDDR5 is baked onto the HD 7990, four miniDisplayPort connectors and a dual-link DVI connector back it up to provide five monitor support through AMD's EyeFinity technology. There's three fans on the front of the HD 7990 to keep those two GraphicsCore Next GPUs cool, which it does so without making too much noise at all - 37.8dBA compared to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 (NVIDIA's dual GPU) which cranks along at 47.5dBA (tests used with sound pressure at 50cm running Furmark).

AMD's ZeroCore power technology is at play, where it switches off the second GPU when not in use to save power (and heat). You can check out our own review on the Radeon HD 7990 right here.

For years, Apple and more specifically, the late Steve Jobs, defended the 3.5-inch display on the iPhone. It wasn't until Apple were getting kicked all over the market by consumers demanding a bigger display that Apple shifted gears and increased the display to 4 inches on the iPhone 5.

Apple aren't looking to make the iPhone screen bigger right now, with company CEO Tim Cook claiming that competitors have had to make sacrifices in multiple parts of the screen, such as resolution, white balance, color quality, screen longevity and portability in order to deliver consumers a larger screen. He continued:

Mobile device use has come under fire more and more in recent times, with numerous states outlawing talking on the phone without the use of a hands-free device. I've always contended that the action of holding a conversation is more dangerous than the act of holding the phone to your ear, but states apparently don't agree.

A new study finds that using a hands-free voice-to-text app is as distracting and dangerous as texting manually. The study showed that drivers who utilized hands-free texting apps didn't spend any less time looking at the screen. The study also found that drivers were just as distracted as users who manually input the text message.

This means that the act of composing the text message, not the act of physically inputting it, is what is the distracting part:

Today was a big day for Apple as they released their second quarter financial results. Apple's stock has been in a free fall as of late and this quarter's earnings needed to be good for Apple to stop their stock from falling any further. The official numbers are in and Apple pulled in a quarterly revenue of $43.6 billion, up from $39.2 billion for the second quarter of last year.

While revenue was up, profit was down. Apple pulled in a net profit of $9.5 billion, down from $11.6 billion from the same quarter last year. Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads. During the same period last year, Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones and just 11.8 million iPads. Mac sales continue to be flat, with Apple selling just shy of 4 million units during the quarter.

Apple's stock price increased by roughly 5 percent during the conference call. It will be interesting to see how the stock fairs tomorrow during normal trading.

There appears to be at least some demand for devices running the new Firefox OS. The first Firefox OS devices were released today and the company's website crashed and the devices quickly sold out. The devices, its worth noting, don't even feature the highest of specifications.

One thing that probably helped sales is the fact that they are unlocked and priced fairly reasonably. The cheap pricing comes as a direct result of low-power specifications. The devices are known as the Keon and Peak, which cost 91 euros and 149 euros respectively. The devices are made by a Spanish startup known as Geeksphone.

The Keon specifications are:

Yesterday I reported on a leak that showed off two new additions to NVIDIA's Titan line of video cards; the Titan LE and Titan II. This morning we are learning a little more about the Titan LE, as well as two other new video cards for 2013.

According to Bright Side of News, it appears that the Titan LE name will be tossed out in favor of the GTX 780 5GB, which follows the traditional NVIDIA naming scheme. The 780 is the consumer version of the Tesla K20C and sports 2496 CUDA cores and 5GB of GDDR5 memory.

We have also came across info on two other NVIDIA boards, the GTX 770 and GTX 760 Ti. The 770 is based off a GK104-425 die, which makes it nothing more than a higher clocked GTX 680. It is expected to perform 20-25% better than the GTX 670 and be on par with a GTX 680.

Gigabyte have pushed out a bunch of teaser images on their upcoming Haswell-capable Z87 G1-Killer motherboard. Gigabyte's G1 Killer series is the company's top-tier motherboard, which offers some high-end on-board solutions from companies like Creative and Bigfoot Networks.

What makes this tease very interesting is that the Z87 G1-Killer sports an internal liquid cooling solution, something that has been featured on ASUS' Maximus V Formula. Gigabyte's solution offers both air cooling through the heatsink and liquid cooling through an internally built water channel which transfers the coolant through all-copper made heatpipes. Gigabyte will be offering the board some serious Ultra Durable components, such as IR3550 PowIRstage, 2X Copper PCB, High Capacity Ferrite Core Chokes and more.

Gigabyte's Z87 G1-Killer includes 8 VRM phases on one side of the board, and if we're lucky, we could see 8 more VRMs on the other side of the board, providing a total of 16 VRMs. We should expect the Z87 G1-Killer to ship with Intel XMP profile support, pushing DDR3 right up to 3200MHz. This will be on top of the usual slew of crazy overclocking features that this motherboard is set to include.

If you were hoping for some motion control in the upcoming first-person shooter from DICE, then you're out of luck. Battlefield 4 will not be featuring any motion control gameplay. Patrick Bach, executive producer of Battlefield 4 told Edge:

Bach also said that DICE are "extremely open to innovation", but they do not like gimmicks, adding that they do not add value to the player. Bach isn't completely against motion control, where he is open to the technology if it actually adds to the gameplay. Hopefully we see Oculus Rift support, DICE, don't disappoint me, okay?

According to an anonymous Foxconn worker who spoke with China Business, Apple have returned something between five and eight million iPhone's back to Foxconn over quality control issues. The anonymous Foxconn worker said the issues are "due to the appearance of substandard or dysfunctional problems".

If the anonymous Foxconn workers claims are true, this would have cost Foxconn somewhere in the vicinity of $1.6 billion. This is also assuming that the returned iPhone's are thrown away, and aren't repaired or used to make another iPhone. There's no information on whether this applies to certain iPhone's, or how far these quality control issues go.

Then we have to ponder... do these quality control issues affect the new iPhone?

It's an interesting time for Windows-based systems, as there are mountains of Android- and iOS-based devices being sold every minute of every day, with no sign of slowing down.

DigiTimes' latest report is that major PC vendors are joining Intel in their push for Android-based convertible touch-based devices. Yes, Android-based devices are wanted from Intel, with it looking like they're slowly shifting away from Windows. Lenovo are the ones reportedly leading the pack, where they'll release an Android-based version of their Yoga, an 11-inch convertible tablet.

Acer, ASUS, HP and Toshiba are all preparing Android-based devices, which we should see more of heading into Computex and even more in Q3 2013. DigiTimes' sources have said that the "sweet spot" for Android notebook pricing is at around $500, which means we should see some pretty powerful devices similar to what we see from Apple and their iPad, and Samsung and others with their current Android-based slates.

LSI Corporation have something kinda big to talk about for the weekend, and that news is IBM are now offering versions of their High IOPS Modular Adapters based on LSI's Nytro WarpDrive technology. These models join a growing list of PCIe Flash cards that are designed to be used with IBM System x server series.

IBM's System x server series are used by large clients that require insane speed for Big Data analytics. LSI's Nytro WarpDrive products provide ultra-low-latency, high-performance storage for data-intensive applications, all while helping cloud and enterprise datacenters reduce their storage footprint, as well as those ever-increasing energy costs. The IBM High IOPS capacity options range from 300GB to 800GB of SLC and MLC Flash memory for IBM System x servers.

Amazon has updated the Kindle app store with a bunch of new apps, including a much-anticipated Xbox SmartGlass app. The SmartGlass app is a companion app for the Xbox 360 that allows users to control their Xbox and get second-screen information, including access to Xbox Music, messaging, and other features.

The app has been available since fall for iOS and Android, but has just been made available Amazon's redesigned Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. The app will scale natively to the resolutions provided by these Android tablets. If you have a Kindle Fire or Fire HD and an Xbox 360, you can download the SmartGlass app for free from the Amazon App Store.

The HTC One could be facing another delay, at least in the Netherlands. Nokia has been granted a preliminary injunction against HTC over the latter's use of high-amplitude mics in their latest flagship device. As you can see in the picture below, both the Lumia 720 and HTC One use the same dual-membrane components.

Nokia asserts that the supplier of the Lumia 720 part was supposed to be manufacturing the part exclusively for Nokia: "[the] microphone components [were] invented by and manufactured exclusively for Nokia."

This afternoon Mars One officially announced the opening of its search and application process for the first manned mission to the planet Mars. Mars One is looking for two men and two women from different nationalities to man a one-way trip to Mars in 2023.

The trip to Mars is not for the light hearted, or those who are not willing to give up everything they have known. "While it is possible that, within the lifetime of the early settlers on Mars, there will be opportunity to bring one or more back to Earth, it cannot be anticipated nor expected", reads part of the mission briefing on the Mars-One.com website.

While I fully support this endeavor, and am immensely excited about humans leaving the planet Earth and populating another world, I still feel that a colonization mission is nothing more than suicide and will remain so until we develop a form of terraforming that would render the Martian atmosphere more hospitable for human life. I think a more technology appropriate approach would be for an orbital mission where we send explorers on a mission to orbit the planet before returning home.