Latest News - Page 2993

If you're still on the hunt for a Nexus 4 and can't get your hands on one, Google have your back with their Nexus Store Locator tool. This tool will will allow you to search local retailers for Nexus devices.

All you have to do is type in your address, and it'll find you a retailer that deals in Nexus devices. At the moment, the only Nexus 4 retailer in the US is T-Mobile, so right now if you're looking for a Nexus 4, then this tool is kind of like a T-Mobile store locator. If you're after a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10, then it branches out a little more.

The Nexus 4 should reach other retailers soon, where this tool will become more useful.

We're not hearing much about Aliens: Colonial Marines other than its abysmal reviews - but there are some out there voicing their opinions on Gearbox Software's latest flop.

I purchased the game after watching videos months ago, getting just a little excited that we might have another cool game to play - but after the first few minutes of playing it, I felt like I had been robbed of my $50. The demos shown off months ago were of much better quality in terms of graphics and physics within the game, with the final version feeling like it has gone back in development time.

The video above does a very good job of walking you through some of the different parts that have been changed - from the dynamic lighting to the explosions and pre-scripted scenes. I ran the game on my EyeFinity setup and it is so poor with its field of view it's unplayable.

If you've been wondering why your Nexus 4 charges really quickly, well, it could be because of something Qualcomm have very quietly introduced - Quick Charge 1.0. This technology is baked into some of their Snapdragon-based chipsets.

Quick Charge is a physical circuit built into the chipset that talks to the USB connector, so it's not some form of software addition. Qualcomm acquired the technology when they purchased Summit Microelectronics last June. Qualcomm claims that Quick Charge 1.0 allows your smartphone to charge up to 40% faster than a device without Quick Charge. There are already devices in the wild sporting the quick charging technology, including:

There are many devices running the technology, which you can take a look at the list of right here. Qualcomm aren't finished with Quick Charge just yet, as they've promised "exciting news on the newest advancement in fast charging technology" next week - which should hopefully arrive as Quick Charge 2.0.

We have some good news for you, NVIDIA are set to unleash their latest GPU, the GeForce GTX Titan on February 18. This is just days away, so if you had any cash saved from not buying Valentine's Day presents, you should look at getting one of these puppies.

Now, before you get too excited - this isn't the GTX 800 series, nor is it a refresh, nor is it the Maxwell-based GPUs we should expect later this year. According to TechPowerUp's database, this is what we should expect:

What should we expect performance-wise from the GeForce GTX Titan? Well, we should expect 2688 stream processors, 224 texture units, and 48 raster operating units. The Titan should slam its hammer down with 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 6GHz on a 384-bit bus. This is the GK110 chip, folks, featuring over 7 billion transistors laid down on a 521mm2 of space and will have clock speeds pumping at 875MHz.

Sony have said we'll see the future on February 20, but before that we're seeing leaks of a purported PlayStation 4 prototype controller. The photo comes courtesy of an unknown source who sent it in to Destructoid.

As you can see, it looks quite familiar to the current controllers, but the directional pad buttons are placed further apart - with what seems like a touchscreen slapped in between. If you can see that glowing part on top of the controller, this could be a Move-related part of the new controller.

There's also a small button to the left of the touchscreen, in the upper right hand corner of the d-pad. This could be the rumored share button, or something associated with the Move part on top of the controller, or the touchscreen. Just above the PlayStation button in the bottom center, looks to be a speaker and underneath the PlayStation button is an audio jack for some headphone connectivity.

Yesterday we reported on the very talented Jeri Ellsworth being let go from her position on Valve's Steam Box development team, and today it appears that even more layoffs have taken place.

While the extent of the layoffs is unknown at the moment, sources are reporting that Valve may have terminated the employment of as many as 25 people. In addition to Ellsworth, Jason Holtman was also let go. Jason was head of Steam's business network, and was the person publishers negotiated with before their games appeared on Steam.

With rumors and accusations mounting, Valve CEO Gabe Newell released the following statement:

With the success of Apple's iPad mini, and Google's Nexus 7, it is only a matter of time before Microsoft jumps into the small tablet market. During the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference on Wednesday, Microsoft CFO Peter Klein, said that the company is open to and willing to bring a wide range of new form factors to the mobile device market.

Not only is the company considering a small form factor Surface Pro, but they alluded to being able to produce devices as large as 27 inches. "We're set up for that," Klein said "The notion of flexibility and scalability of the operating system is intrinsic to our strategy."

Klein went on to say:

Next-gen consoles are nearly here, not including the Nintendo Wii U, and we're hearing that the next-gen Xbox might not be capable of playing used games. Just how much does this piss off gamers? Well, according to the GameStop CFO, a lot.

Rob Lloyd, CFO of GameSpot during his recent speech at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference said that 60% of customers said they would not buy the next-gen consoles if they meant they couldn't play used, or second hand games. Lloyd told those at the event that consumers like the ability to play pre-owned games, as well as having the portability and physicality in games.

Not having these abilities, such as buying a pre-owned game, would stop consumers - nearly 60% of them - from buying a next-gen console that isn't capable of playing used games. Lloyd noted that around 4% of GameStop's used game sales are for games that had been released in the last 60 days - this is a huge fact for used games.

It's a hard market for camera right now, and after both Canon and Nikon both had revisions to their forecasts, Olympus have also followed by cutting their full-year sales and profit forecast.

Olmypus have said that they expect sales to tip at around $7.8 billion, down from their first forecast of $8.09 billion. Profits will drop by 25%, too. When most people think Olympus, they think cameras, but Olympus aren't all just about cameras - they have pushed into the medical equipment and endoscope markets, too.

Last year saw Sony buy a $642 million stake in Olympus which was mainly for the medical imaging side of things. Over the past two years, Olympus' main goals have been to focus on their Pen and OM-D interchangeable lends (ILC) cameras, which has caused people to think the company were slowly dragging themselves out of the traditional SLR market.

The government of Iceland is talking about introducing an Internet filter which would stop Icelandic citizens from downloading or viewing pornography on the Internet. The talk of the filter has transpired through fears of the damages porn can do to children and women.

Iceland's Interior Minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, is currently drafting legislation to stop the access of online porn images and videos through many ways - computers, consoles and smart devices. He says:

3D printers are the new everything right now, where we've heard about moon bases being 3D-printed, buildings being 3D-printed and even stem cells - what next? Houses. Yes, houses.

A London-based design firm, Softkill, has just talked about their entry into the rat race that is 3D-printed houses, with a structure they claim would take just three weeks to build. From the picture above, it looks like a million spiders have crawled in and just spun a house out of their webs, but this is all part of what Softkill call their ProtoHouse, and will reach the prototype stage by the middle of the year.

During an interview with Dezeen, Softkill's Gilles Retsin didn't like the idea of their rival project by Universe Architecture, where he said:

We all know Google scrapes countless amounts of data from anyone who uses their services, which, let's face it, is everyone - but, it looks like it goes much deeper than that.

From what Sydney-based app developer Dan Nolan, has found, each time you purchase an app from the Google Play Store your personal details are sent to that developer. This includes your name, address and e-mail address. Nolan spoke with news.com.au, saying that he wasn't comfortable being the receiver of this information, and that there is no reason that a developer needs to have this - very powerful - information given to them without their consent.

Nolan took to his blog, saying:

Both LinkedIn employees and Apple are probably pretty happy with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner right now. The CEO has rewarded employees for a great 2012 by providing them each with their own iPad mini. This means that Weiner spent over $1.2 million on 3,500 iPad minis. Ouch. We hope he worked out a discount!

The good deed was first tweeted about by Darain Faraz: "We wanted to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of all of our employees in 2012. During today's biweekly All Hands meeting, we surprised our employees with iPad Minis as a small gesture of the company's gratitude for their contributions."

It's these small things that keep employees happy and working hard for a company. LinkedIn pulled in a record Q4 with earnings topping $303 million.

Tim Cook had some interesting things to say during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, where the Apple CEO touched on a number of topics, including some rumors of a next-gen iPhone including a larger screen.

Cook talked about the user experience, saying that the experience is more important than what cranks along inside of the phone. When talking about a larger screen size on the iPhone, Cook said:

President Obama is getting a bit of attention today thanks to his State of the Union speech, where he introduced a new executive order to address cybersecurity problems across the United States.

The now second term President said that the US and allied nations must take action to stop the constant attacks, as "we cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy." The new executive order continues on a voluntary initiative that started in May 2012, supervised by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

The already in-place measure has been criticized over its lack of definition and scope, as well as its failure to find what actually makes up a cyber attack that requires a response. The original proposal has a lack of civil rights protections, which is, of course, a huge problem. In a draft of the document released during the State of the Union speech, the White House notes that the new measure must include "strong privacy and civil liberties protections", where it addresses the criticisms of the program currently enacted by 12 companies, as well as the federal government.

Unigine Corp. have just released the latest revision to their GPU benchmark, Heaven Benchmark 4.0. Heaven 4.0 is perfect for stability testing on your system, mainly for your GPU.

Heaven 4.0 has full support for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0, works across multiple platforms - Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and includes countless settings for you to tinker with. Best of all, it has support for multi-monitor setups as well as different stereo 3D models. What's new in Heaven 4.0? Here's a list of what to expect:

You can download Heaven Benchmark 4.0 here.

Japan's mobile market is a new territory for Apple to conquer, but it looks like last year was good to them as the iPhone maker scooped up the top spot in Japan's mobile phone market for a twelve-month period for the first time ever.

Apple took 16% of Japan's mobile market - this includes smartphones and feature phones - in Q4 2012, giving them an overall 15% share of the year as a whole. This pushes Apple just ahead of Japan locals Sharp and Fujitsu who both held 14% share eacj, according to a new report from Counterpoint Research.

Apple have previously taken the top spot in Japan's mobile industry but it has always been short lived and usually happened at the beginning of new product launches, like the iPhone 4S' launch in 2011. Apple reaching the top is a big fact, with Sharp being knocked off their top spot after a six-year run as number one.

BlueStacks is at it again, this time updating their application to work with Microsoft's Surface Pro, as well as Windows 8, providing the ability to run Android apps on the tablet and OS, respectively.

The latest version of their app fully supports Windows 8, right down to the charms bar and rotation support, as well as being optimized for the Surface Pro. Best of all, BlueStacks' app is free, giving you the ability to run Android apps on Windows 8 devices, or if you were lucky enough to score one of Microsoft's Surface Pro tablets in the last couple of days.

You can download the BlueStacks app right here.

I've said it previously, but I think we're going to see LG really crank up their quality moving into 2013 and it looks like this is happening. Today we have the unveiling of the South Korean-based company's Optimus G Pro.

LG's Optimus G Pro features a 5.5-inch display, and a curved glass design available in both black and white which LG says produces a "2.5D effect". The aforementioned 5.5-inch display ushers in 1920x1080 pixels, a quad-core processor that we should expect to arrive as Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro.

We should expect a launch later this month, but LG haven't stated whether this would be locked to just South Korea or not. We should hear more later this month at Mobile World Congress.

On their rampage for world domination, Corsair have just acquired Scotland-based Simple Audio. Simple Audio have been around for five years and is mostly known in Europe for their networked set-top receivers.

These receivers are capable of sharing music from PCs, Macs, TVs, iPods and MP3 players, so we should expect Corsair to expand their audio lineup in the coming months and years. Corsair's acquisition will see Simple Audio's products jump across the pond, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Corsair haven't said anything about the amount of money they paid for Simple Audio, but the American computer component maker have said that they'd been checking out Simple Audio's dance moves for a while now - even since 2010 - and felt that now is the right time to acquire them.