Latest News - Page 3019

For those of you running the 'yakju' international GSM version of the Galaxy Nexus, you should be receiving the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean OTA (over the air) update right about now. If not, the factory Android 4.2 JB image is also available, if that's how you roll.

The only Galaxy Nexus receiving this update is the above-mentioned 'yakju' version, which is the version available in Hong Kong and the UK, the "takju" Galaxy Nexus owners had their updates last week, but at the moment the Verizon or Sprint bound updates are nowhere to be seen.

If you want to download the new update, check out this link courtesy of Android Central, they've also been kind enough to offer up a guide.

NVIDIA has just swooped in before the huge holiday rush with a new set of beta GeForce drivers in the form of the 310.61 beta. They're only a slight update on the last 310.54 before release, offering up improved support for PlanetSide 2 and Hitman: Absolution.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II gamers running on multi-GPU setups will also enjoy the new GeForce 310.61 beta drivers, as there's a new SLI profile included. 310.61 offers up all of the tweaks that were baked into the 310.54 drivers, including performance improvements such as 26% more performance for COD: Black Ops II, and 18% in Assassin's Creed III when compared to the 306.97 WHQL driver.

There's the usual blanket of performance improvements for other games such as Battlefield 3, MoH: Warfighter, Batman: Arkham City, Skyrim, StarCraft II and Dragon Age II. New or updated SLI profiles are also here, with Dirt: Showdown, Dota 2, Dou Zhan Shen, F1 2012, FIFA 13, Hawken, Hitman: Absolution, Natural Selection 2, Primal Carnage and Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad getting some lovin'.

It looks like Sony are really pushing their new 4K TV, the XBR-84X900 Ultra HDTV - which is set to not leave first adopters twiddling their thumbs without 4K content when they drop over $20k on a new 4K TV. Ray Hartjen from Sony jumped on the company's blog to address some consumers concerns over the new 4K resolution-specific features that will ship with the new TV.

The new TV will feature three chipsets that will help give the X-Reality PRO picture engine the extra juice it requires to upscale today's programming to close to 4K quality, this includes even your collection of current Blu-rays that you already own. It does get better, much much better - in that the new Sony XBR-84X900 Ultra HDTV will include the world's first 4K Ultra HDTV delivery solution.

The new TV will come pre-loaded with native 4K content, and won't be just some flyover demos of a forest, but would be full-length Hollywood productions, available only to those who purchased this specific TV. There's no exact details of what content to expect, or what 4K delivery solution will be deployed, so we'll have to wait a little while longer to find out. Sony's 84-inch Ultra HDTV sports a resolution of 3840x2160, and has been up for pre-order since September for the wallet-busting price of $25,000.

Some leaked roadmaps of Intel's next-gen Atom tablet chips have been made available, teasing the new chips that will be baked into tablets in early 2014. The new chips sport quad-core CPUs, and DirectX 11-capable GPUs. All of this is built on a 22nm process, named Valley View-T.

Bay Trail-T should arrive before hand, and will be given out to OEMs to bake into their tablets. We should see these new Bay Trail-T-based devices teased at CES 2014 (we're already talking about CES 2014!!) and the main competitors should be working with ARM Cortex-A15 architecture SoCs, or NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoCs. Intel's new Bay Trail-T, when compared to its predecessor, Clover Trail, is quite impressive. Built on a 22nm process, it pushes new lower power consumption numbers, as well as increased performance. Clover Trail finds itself on the 32nm process, and its competition, the ARM Cortex-A15 being built on the 28nm process.

Moving on to Valley View-T, where we'll see Intel drop the hyper-threading capabilities, but increase the core count from two to four. Moving from a dual-core design, to a proper quad-core design should see performance improvements of around 50-60%. Backed up by a new GPU based on the HD 4000 series, as well as new LP DDR3-1067 RAM, we should expect performance to increase, big time.

Building mammoth skyscrapers these days just doesn't take anywhere near as long as it used to, but 90 days? Sheesh - that's nothing. Sky City will sport 220 floors and reach a dizzying 2,749 feet (838m) and will be built in Changsha City, near the Xiangjiang river in just 90 days - yes, just three months.

So, to have Sky City completed in just 90 days, we're looking at an amazing five floors being built, per day! The building has been designed by some of the same engineers who had a hand in building the Burj Khalifa, as well as the company that built the 30-story hotel in just 15 days, which is still in perfect working condition. Foundation on the new building starts at the end of December, where they're just waiting on Chinese authorities to give the final nod to begin construction.

In order to get the construction done in the three-month period, prefabricated modular technology is used, and deployed by Broad Sustainable Building. This company has built 20 tall structures in China thus far, including the 30-story hotel. Ever since the hotel project was completed, they've been perfecting their prefabricated modular tech, which the company claims will turn their project into the world's tallest skyscraper in just three months. Senior Vice President of the Broad Group, Juliet Jiang, has said that they "will go on as planned with the completion of five storeys a day".

NPR ran a story this morning after talking with scientists at NASA. It seems as though the Curiosity rover has found something incredible on the surface of Mars while analyzing soil. The SAM instrument, which is a miniature chemistry lab, is capable of figuring out what a sample is made of.

Data from SAM is currently coming back to NASA and it "looks really interesting." Of course, the scientists don't want to jump the gun announcing something that later turns out to be false. They almost had this happen back when the rover detected methane. It turned out the methane had come from air Curiosity had brought from Florida.

John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the rover mission: "We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting. The science team is busily chewing away on it as it comes down." He adds: "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good."

Google's Android has suffered a rather embarrassing bug. In the latest version, 4.2, December is conspicuously missing from the date picker. This makes it rather hard--well, impossible--to enter birthdays, appointments, and really anything else that requires use of the date picker. The bug does not affect the calendar.

It's not clear how Google engineers could have made this oversight, but one thing is clear, they are working on fixing it, but have not given a specific time frame. Google made the following post on the Android Google+ feed, which describes the bug and says they will have it fixed "soon":

Thanksgiving is fast approaching which means many of us will be traveling to make our way back home to celebrate and be thankful for all we have this year and to all fall into a food coma when all is said and done. Overindulging during the holidays will ruin all of your hard work at the gym, which is why a scale is such an important item to have in your weight-loss arsenal. Sure - you can make a trip to your local drug store to pick up any scale that catches your eye, or you can take a gander at Wahoo Fitness' Balance Smartphone Scale as it has way more bells and whistles than any regular scale.

The Balance Smartphone Scale doesn't just weigh you, but it can be used to track your weight and BMI over time and send it to your iOS devices instantly to Wahoo's Wellness application or other fitness apps that support the scale. With support of up to 16 different users, there's no way anyone in your household won't be able to keep track of their fitness. The scale will also store up to 130 weight readings for when you can't sync the data to your iOS device.

The Balance Smartphone Scale will be available for the first week of December with pre-orders currently available at WahooFitness.com for $99.

One of the PS Vita's biggest updates has officially been rolled out and is now available for you to download at your leisure, but you may want to update it fast as the sooner you update to version 2.00, the sooner you'll be able to access PS Plus on your Vita.

As we reported last week, PS Plus is coming to the Vita and if you're a member, then you know exactly why all Vita owners are excited about this news. Unfortunately, Sony hasn't flipped the switch to allow for PS Plus to be accessible on the Vita right now, but have promised the feature will go live sometime later today when the PlayStation Store updates. For now, let's take a look at what you can expect in the Vita's 2.00 update.

Sony has improved the Vita's browser as the system's GPU now helps in rendering web pages and have changed to support HTML5 and Javascript. A "Tweet" button has also been included if you feel the need to tweet within the browser.

Rockstar Games has suggested that Grand Theft Auto V could be the first-ever Grand Theft Auto game to make it onto a Nintendo console, with co-founder Dan Houser saying that "everything else is up for consideration." He explains how they are a third-party publisher and have no alliance to any one console.

"Everything else is up for consideration. That's all I can give you," Houser told IGN, "The main thing is...we are a third-party publisher. We're not Nintendo, we're not Sony, we're not Microsoft. We love all of them in different ways. But we can do what we want whenever there's the appropriate business opportunity and chance to find a market. If that's on Apple we put something on Apple. Wherever it might be. I think that's the fun in what we do. We see ourselves as a content company that uses technology. We don't make it; we use it to make the most fun stuff."

The Wii U is already seeing more support from third-party gamers than previous consoles. It has launched with a good number of games from a variety of different publishers. The tablet controller definitely gives the Wii U a possibility to employ unique gameplay and Rockstar Games would have to make sure to make use of it if they bring GTA V to the console.

Most people have heard about Google's self-driving cars, but they probably dismiss it as a fantasy that anything could ever come to reality. However, the fact is that these cars are being tested on California and Nevada roads and have logged over 300,000 miles without incident, unless you count that one in the parking lot when a human was driving.

Now, Google is looking to make the vehicles even safer and has hired the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deputy director to help them in this quest. Ron Medford has an impressive resume and has worked in the government for more than 40 years, with his most recent job being deputy director of the NHTSA.

Google really wants to get these cars on the road and they will need to pass stringent safety testing if they are to be allowed. Bringing on Ron Medford is an important step to meet these requirements. Medford is both excited to be joining Google, he's also saddened by leaving the NHTSA, an agency that works to save lives:

LG filed a lawsuit against Samsung back in September alleging that Samsung's products infringed upon LG's patents concerning OLED technology, which was featured in televisions by both LG and Samsung back at CES 2012. The new TVs based upon this technology were due out this year, though neither company has released one as of yet.

The technology is used in Samsung devices such as the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Tab 7.7 and LG is looking to get those devices banned. When news of the lawsuit first broke, Samsung had no response, however, they have now responded to the lawsuit and are looking to get LG's patents disavowed.

Samsung is looking for the Seoul court to dismiss seven of LG's patents. Samsung argues that the OLED patents owned by LG don't feature the originality and innovation that a patent in South Korea requires. Both companies are at the forefront of OLED technology, so this is an obvious step to try to slow down the competition. Let's just hope it doesn't slow down those OLED TVs that were promised.

Microsoft is looking to capture the energy in the gas produced by sewage and harness that otherwise wasted energy for data centers. Microsoft has just gotten approval to test out a new modular data center that will be powered by a biogas fuel cell. The fuel cell will be situated at a sewage plant in Wyoming.

"A person is consuming data and that person's waste is going to power the data center," Microsoft data center researcher Sean Parker told Technology Review. "It's been a mind shift...when we smell that methane at a water treatment plant, we realize we're smelling energy."

Supposedly this isn't just some project designed to make Microsoft appear "green" to the public. They actually seem genuinely interested in being able to co-locate smaller data centers around sources of biogas. This means datacenters could find their way to your local sewage system, farm, or landfill.

If there are two things I enjoy than life itself, it's singing karaoke and never leaving my home. Thanks to a new collaboration between Microsoft and The Karaoke Channel, I won't have to as the company will release a Karaoke application for the Xbox 360 this holiday season.

Karaoke will allow users to rock out by the hour as they'll need to purchase blocks of time, which are said to be two, six and 24-hours of time, although I'm sure the 24-hour block of time won't need to be used all at once or you could end up with no voice for days after your marathon performance. Players will also be given the opportunity to select a number of free karaoke tracks to sing through.

Once you picked an amount of time, you'll be given access to Karaoke's complete song library of over 8,000 tracks to sing to that selections from Pop, Rock, Country, R&B/Hip-Hop and more. If it was a popular tune at one point in time, we're sure you'll be able to find it in the Karaoke app.

One of the biggest selling points for Black Ops 2 fans to pre-order their game, aside from playing the latest and great Call of Duty game, had to have been the return of one of the most popular multiplayer maps in Call of Duty: Black Ops, Nuketown 2025. The pre-order bonus had its own playlist where players could play Nuketown to their heart's content with other Nuketown fans, but it looks like the plug has been pulled on the map's dedicated playlist as it no longer is available to play through matchmaking.

Confirmation of the playlist's removal came from the Twitter account of Treyarch's game design director, David Vonderhaar.

Rumor has it that the next version of Apple's Mac OS X, 10.9 to be exact, will be called Lynx. The OS X line of operating systems have been named after big cats and Apple is running out of big cats to name the operating system versions after. The current version of Mac OS X is called Mountain Lion. Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion have already been used.

That leaves really only two choices, out of the trademarked big cats that Apple got way back in 2003. The two unused trademarked big cats are "Lynx" and "Cougar." Here's the kicker: a cougar is just another name for Mountain Lion, so Apple would likely not use that name. This leaves the final name as Lynx.

Furthermore, a report has surfaced that Apple's internal papers say they are working on finalizing the name and that it will be Lynx. Of course, this is the part that should be taken with a grain of sand as it relies on "reliable sources" and other decidedly flaky sources. But, it does have some logic behind it.

Steven Sinofsky is out. Steve Ballmer personally fired Sinofsky, who was head of Microsoft's Windows division. He was the principle proponent and driving force behind the decision to remove the start button from Windows 8. He detailed his reasoning of why users should be forced to drop it cold-turkey.

But now that he is out, could the Windows Start Menu make a come back? Some factors point to yes. Stardock, makers of Start8, has distributed tens of thousands of free trials of Start8, a program which brings back a Windows 7-style Start Menu. Kris Kwilas, Stardocks vice president of technology:

Apple's (AAPL) stock has jumped by over 6 percent today, bringing it's value up to $561.45 per share. This increase is in stark contrast to the past few weeks in which Apple stock had been in a near-continual state of decline and shed over 20 percent of its per-share value. The decline started shortly after the iPhone 5 announcement.

The value of the stock is still not close to the $700+ value it had reached two months ago, but it's better off than it had been. Stock prices have recovered due to strong sales of mobile devices in China, fresh rumors of a new iPhone 5 successor that is scheduled to be released in the summer of 2013, and Apple having the full catalog of AC/DC music on iTunes.

Several analysts still expect Apple stock to continue to increase, with most pegging the price around $760 in the next 12 months. One analyst, Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets, expects Apple to reach $1,111 a share in that same time period. He released a note saying the recent selling of Apple stock was "insanely insane."

Over Intel's long history of 45 years, they have had just five CEOs. Paul Otellini has led the company for eight years now, but he has been involved in with the company for nearly 40 years, a long time by any measure. He has announced plans to retire in May of 2013, which gives the board of directors 6 months to find a suitable replacement.

"I've been privileged to lead one of the world's greatest companies," Otellini said. "After almost four decades with the company and eight years as CEO, it's time to move on and transfer Intel's helm to a new generation of leadership."

There are many qualified candidates, both inside the company and outside. A new candidate would likely be someone with a focus on mobile as that seems to be where all of the market is heading. Otellini is seen as the driving force behind reinventing the PC market with Intel's current focus on Ultrabooks, but it's not quite a cell phone or tablet.

It's been nearly 36 hours since Nintendo's Wii U launched, which means users are bound to report issues as soon as they happen via social networks like Twitter and Facebook. One such complaint that is currently making the rounds is the extremely high possibility of Wii U owners bricking their console.

When new Wii U owners connect their console for the first time, they're going to be met with a rather large 5GB update, which enables the Wii U's online functionality, that can take nearly an hour to complete depending on your connection.

Users who have mistakingly interrupted the update process through a number of possibilities such as their power or Internet going down during the update, have been met with a "bricked" console, meaning it's completely unusable. As of now, it isn't known just how widespread this issue is as Nintendo has yet to comment on it, but seeing how users will need to have a constant stream of energy and Internet flowing into their Wii U could translate into a disaster this holiday season if a user decides to hook up their console during a storm.