Latest News - Page 2973

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.

This morning rumors of two new NVIDIA GeForce Titan GPU's have made their way to our ears. Website 3DCeter.org is reporting that NVIDIA is planning to launch two revisions of its flagship Titan GPU, the Titan LE and Titan II.

The new models will bring the Titan lineup to three different units that all share the same GK110 processor with the Titan LE being a slightly underclocked model, that uses marginal chips that didn't make the grade for full-fledged Titan performance. The LE will feature 2,495 CUDA cores across 208 texture mapping units, 5GB of GDDR5, and a peak power consumption rate of 190W, according to the leak.

The GTX Titan II is an upgraded model to the now famous GTX Titan and unlocks more of the GK110's power than the stock Titan. The Titan II name is said to change to Titan Ultra on launch and will feature 2,880 CUDA cores across 256 texture mapping units. Clock speed is boosted to 950MHz with RAM staying the same as the stock Titan at 6GB.

When Microsoft killed the start button with Windows 8, many long time users were appalled, and cried foul. This morning the Verge is reporting that we will see a reappearance of the start button in the Windows 8.1, but don't get too excited yet.

If you were hoping for a start menu along with the revived start button, you will be sadly disappointed, the new start button is essentially a reskinned copy of the charm that appears when you mouse over to the right hand side of the desktop. Clicking the new start button will open the live tile interface.

News of this addition comes shortly after the announcement that Windows 8.1 will include a "boot to desktop" mode that will let users log directly into the desktop interface and forgo ever having to look at live tiles again.

AMD's Radeon HD 8000 series is just around the corner, something I expect to be unveiled closer to Computex which happens in June, but for now, we have a tease of one of the GPUs in the HD 8000 series, the HD 8570.

The Radeon HD 8570 or "Oland Pro" is set to feature 384 stream processors (or GCN cores), 24 texture units and it should come with a clock speed of 720MHz. The memory side of things sees the HD 8570 with a 128-bit memory bus, where two versions will be available - the first, a 4.6GHz GDDR5 edition, and a 1.8GHz GDDR3 edition.

With these specs, we should expect the HD 8570 to be around 75% of the performance of the HD 7750. AMD are really aiming the HD 8570 at 720p gamers, which isn't a bad thing as that is what current-generation consoles run at. There were also some benchmarks run, with the performance of these tests below:

An Indian-based startup has created something quite incredible, the first true smartphone for the blind. The design had help from the Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad campus, and uses an invention that uses a screen that transforms into Braille characters as messages are received.

Sumit Dagar is behind the phone, and has said: "We have created the world's first Braille smartphone. This product is based on an innovative 'touch screen' which is capable of elevating and depressing the contents it receives to transform them into 'touchable' patterns".

Dagar has said that the response to the Braille smartphone has been immense so far, adding: "It comes out as a companion more than a phone to the user. We plan to do more advanced versions of the phone in the future".

There are more people gaming on Mac's thanks to the popularity of Apple's MacBook Pro's and their iMac's, with most thanks given to Intel who made their way into Apple machines across the world.

Logitech have just stepped up, announcing that their Logitech Gaming Software is now compatible with Mac OS for all of their keyboard and mouse products. This means that Mac-based gamers can now enjoy the same personalization and customization of their products that PC gamers have enjoyed for years now. You can download the latest version of the Logitech Gaming Software from the Logitech support page.

Logitech's list of compatible products include:

The Xbox 360 has enjoyed its position as the best-selling console in the United States for the 27th consecutive month in a row according to new data from NPD Group. Last month, there were 261,000 Xbox 360 units sold in the US, beating both the PS3 and Wii U.

Physical sales were down 10% year-over-year, with $992.5 million in March 2013 compared to $1.1 billion in the same month of 2012. Software sales didn't rise, but they didn't fall much either, dropping just 1% year-over-year. The biggest decline came from hardware sales, dropping 32% to $221.6 million. This should be solved with the upcoming next-generation consoles. Portable consoles are having problems, experiencing a "stronger decline" than traditional ones.

This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the Hubble Telescope taking flight in orbit around the earth. To celebrate the occasion it revisited one of my favorite monuments in the night sky; the Horse Head Nebula (IC 434).

Located within the Orion Nebula (M42), the Horsehead is a massive star forming region which is comprised of dust and gas. The Hubble first imaged the Horse Head about 20 years ago and the resulting visible light image can be seen above. The red or pinkish glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. The darkness of the Horsehead is caused mostly by thick dust, although the lower part of the Horsehead's neck casts a shadow to the left.

The new image of the great Horse Head can be seen above. It shows the region in infrared light, which is made up of longer wavelengths than visible light and can see through the dusty cloud that usually obscures the nebula's inner regions. The result is a rather amazing, and stunning looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas.

In anticipation of the upcoming movie Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams' production company, Bad Robot, has released some breathtaking HD images of the Enterprise's Bridge used in the 2009 blockbuster Star Trek.

The images (source #1) show off the beauty of the Enterprise Reboot designed by Scott Chambliss, and display a remarkable level of detail that many fans just chalked up to being CGI creations. Bad Robot has also released a Star Trek Into Darkness app that will let you scan these high resolution images to earn extra points that will help you move up within the Starfleet ranks.

Star Trek Into Darkness releases on May 17th and I for one will be first in line to see it. In case you missed them, Paramount has released several Into Darkness trailers, and I have listed three of them below.

If you were after some totally free VoiP calls between your friends on Facebook, then you may want to pay attention to Facebook Messenger. The latest app update include the ability of free VoiP-based calls between your Facebook friends.

In the beginning of last month, Canadian users were greeted with the VoiP call goodness, but now it has extended outside of Canadaland, and into the US and other countries. If you want to see if you have this feature, all you have to do is tap into a current chat, tap the 'i' button in the top right corner and if you're in one of the countries the new feature has rolled out into, you'll see a "Free Call" button at the bottom.

I've just tested it on my Nexus 4 here in Australia, and can confirm it's working for Australians.

While America still reels over the Boston Marathon bombings and the fertilizer plant explosion near Waco in Texas, the House of Representatives have passed the cybersecurity bill CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act).

CISPA was passed by a 288-127 vote, receiving support from 92 democrats. From here, it will move to the Senate, then to President Obama's desk. CISPA, if you're not already familiar, will allow private businesses to share customers' personal information with any government entity, giving the government, and entities like the NSA, some serious power.

The way laws like this get passed, is by people who throw their hands in the air claiming that not letting something like CISPA pass, is because there are threats to "US economic security". Because, you know, there aren't any other issues with the US' economy right now. Mike Rogers, co-author of CISPA and the intelligence committee chairman, argued that cyberattacks and espionage, mostly from China, where an umber of high profile attacks have originated from, are a number one threat to US economic security.

According to an analyst with the ISI Group, Apple have sold around 38 million iPhone's in the last quarter, representing an 8% increase over the same quarter of last year. Brian Marshall, an analyst with ISI Group, said he's sticking with his estimate of 38 million iPhone's for Q1 2013.

Other analysts, such as Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets and Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, have their bets on lower numbers, with 35 million and 35.5 million, respectively. These two analysts' estimates would have Apple seeing an increase of just 0% or 1% versus each quarter, Q1 2013 and Q1 2012. Most analysts are looking ahead, waiting for Apple's next move, which is rumored to be the iPhone 5S.

Personally, I don't think this can save them unless it is a big departure from what we know and love about the iPhone, and in particular, iOS. I hope we see a new premium iPhone (6) with iOS 7, with widgets and a much better UI, oh, and much cheaper than we have now. A 128GB offering would be nice too, maybe even 256GB. Apple could shake the market up again, and they need to considering Samsung are really pushing forward with so many devices being announced and released lately in all shapes and sizes catering to all markets, all over the world.

Estimated sales numbers for the Nexus 10 aren't very positive. In fact, the estimates place sales of the Nexus 10 below that of the Microsoft Surface, which is widely regarded as a flop product. So, just how bad is it? Estimates suggest that Google has only sold somewhere between 680,000 and one million Nexus 10's.

Neither Samsung or Google provided data regarding tablet sales, but some interesting extrapolations by Ben Evans resulted in those numbers. Since the Nexus 10 features a relatively uncommon screen resolution, Evans was able to use Google's development data for screen sizes. Only 0.1 percent of devices hitting the Play Store featured the resolution present on the Nexus 10.

An estimate of 680 million Android users at the end of March was used, though this could be slightly off base. Even still, sales numbers of the Nexus 10 aren't good, especially when compared to Apple's. Apple managed to sell 36.9 million iPads in the second half of 2012 and 10 million iPad minis in Q4 alone.

OpenSignal, the central repository for crowdsourced cellular reception maps, has finally released an app for iPhones. Up until now, OpenSignal has been relying on only Android users to collect data about signal strength, cellular towers, and speed data.

OpenSignal has used this collected Android data to extrapolate how signal would perform on iPhones. Now they will be able to rely on data collected via iPhones. To download the new app or learn more about it, head over to OpenSignal's webpage for the new iPhone app.

The app features some useful functions. If you're having reception issues, the app can point you in a direction that should help boost your signal. It can also locate free Wi-Fi if you need to borrow a faster connection. The app will also collect anonymous signal data to help build the map available at OpenSignal's website.

Not all that glitters is gold, and this morning Bitcoin investors who traded on the Bitfloor Bitcoin exchange are waking up to that hard to learn lesson. Bitfloor has announced that it has been forced to cease all operations due to reasons "outside of our control."

Bitfloor, while not as popular as Mt. Gox, was still a key player in the Bitcoin game. In the wake of last week's Bitcoin crash, the exchange has had its bank account closed and as a direct result, must end all trading. We are guessing that when the massive sell off was over, the bank deemed Bitfloor too much of a risk and opted to part ways in an act of self-preservation.

Roman, the founder of Bitfloor, had the following to say:

We've already got the Retina MacBook Pro from Apple, featuring a 2560x1600 display, and Google's Chromebook Pixel with its 2560x1700 display - but both of those machines are built for Windows. Toshiba have just unveiled a new Ultrabook, that comes with Windows 8 - the Kirabook.

Toshiba's Kirabook comes with a 13.3-inch 2560x1440 display, giving us slightly less pixels than Apple and Google's offerings. Kirabook starts from $1599, which gives you an Intel third-generation Core i5 processor, 256GB of SSD, 8GB of RAM and a backlit keyboard. The $1999 model provides touchscreen capabilities, and a bump in processor to the Core i7. Toshiba's Kirabook is 0.7 inches thick, and weighs 2.6 pounds.

We should see pre-orders open up on May 3, with shipping beginning on May 12.