Latest News - Page 3033

It looks like I'm not the only one not impressed with the iPhone 5, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wishing that the new sixth-generation iPhone 5 wasn't just a taller, thinner, faster iPhone 4S. Wozniak says Apple were arrogant in their decision of keeping just a single 4-inch sized iPhone 5.

He notes that the Cupertino-based company should've created two sizes, a smaller iPhone, and a larger as well as wider iPhone. His chat with TechCentral gave quite a lot of insight, and opinion into the company he helped form:

Tesla have just received a huge grant from the California Energy Commission to the tune of $10 million, which will help the luxury electric car maker expand manufacturing capacity for their upcoming Model X SUV.

Tesla's terms of the agreement with Commission will match the $10 million grant, with $50 million if their own money and spend the entire lump sum to keep Model X production rates high when it reaches manufacturing in 2014. This plan involves the hiring of 700 more workers with the manufacturing starts.

If there are no problems between now and the production of the Model X SUV, Tesla will be much closer to their goal of producing a truly mainstream electric vehicle. The Model X SUV won't be that goal, but it is definitely getting closer. The new Model X SUV will hopefully fall into the same price range as the Model S, which ranges between $50,000 and $70,000. Tesla's VP of Finance, Mike Taylor, said:

In a world completely dominated by smart devices like smartphones and tablets, less and less people are buying traditional PCs. The "post-PC" era has been touted for quite sometime, but the market has been doing well, until now.

ISH iSuppli's numbers for annual PC sales have dropped for the first time in over ten years, since 2001. iSuppli's numbers aren't devastating, representing a drop of only 1.2% from this time last year, but it's the first decline since 2001. Last year saw a 2.2% growth, so a 1.2% drop is actually something to talk about.

Expectations of growth were pushed and relied on the economy recovering somewhat, Intel's huge push of Ultrabooks and more. Manufacturers shipped 348 million PCs so far, down from 352 million of 2011's numbers. iSuppli does ask some questions:

Well, this is interesting - the European Commission has approved the construction of three new huge research lasers, leaving the door open on a fourth that would, for a tiny instant, be several hundred times more powerful than the entirety of the power generated by the human race.

Yes, that is very, very powerful. The scientists hope to actually create virtual particules from absolutely nothing. The fourth laser when at peak power in Europe's Extreme Light Infrastructure project (ELI) would combine a total of ten beams into a single pulse at 200 petawatts. The entire Earth doesn't even generate that much power at any one moment, and if we're talking scale, it is more total power than the Earth receives from our star, the sun.

This is not the type of laser that stays on continuously, and will only use this mammoth amount of power for just 1.5 x 10^-14 second .This is the same time that "it takes for light to travel from one side of a human hair to the other, if you shave your hair down by 90%", reports Dvice.

By now you've surely heard of Psy's viral mega hit "Gangnam Style", and if you haven't I've embedded the clip below for your viewing pleasure. Well, since the clip hit YouTube on 7/15, it has reached [at the time of writing] 423 million views.

Normally I wouldn't report on this, but YouTube is a huge part of our daily lives, and this clip has gone viral in ways most people can't even image. Gangnam Style is everywhere and it's gotten to the point where it is even being played on the radio, some what of a record - a Korean song, on Australian radio stations (and around the world). It is either #1 or close to #1, or has been at #1 on most charts around the world and has turned Psy into a megastar.

There are only a few music videos that have garnered as much views as Gangnam Style are Justin Bieber's "Baby", which has an astounding 787 million views. But it took Bieber over a year to reach 400 million or so views, but just three months for Psy.

Twitter conducted a study after the first presidential debate and found some interesting statistics regarding Twitter users and a possible connection between seeing political tweets and donating. Even better is the fact that the trends don't vary significantly between political affiliation, meaning that both sides can take advantage of Twitter to further campaign contributions.

The study showed that the average Twitter user was 68 percent more likely to visit a campaign donation page than the general internet user at large. Even more incredible is the statistic that the average Twitter user exposed to political tweets is 97 percent more likely to visit a campaign donation page.

Furthermore, repetition works. Users who saw a tweet for three to seven days were more than 31 percent more likely to visit a donation page as opposed to someone who just saw a tweet for one or two days. Even repeating the tweet for more than eight days has a positive effect with a user being 130 percent more likely to visit.

The final downloadable content pack is available for the now nearly one-year-old Modern Warfare 3. With Black Ops 2 just around the corner, the publisher behind Modern Warfare 3 is looking to milk as much money as it possibly can before it has to wait another year to release a Call of Duty game.

The new DLC brings five all-new multiplayer maps for players to explore and learn how to play. Players will see a wide range of scenery, from the beach, to New Orleans, to off-shore sea-based battles. There's one thing that is almost a certainty about this DLC pack and that is that it will sell in droves, just like all of the Call of Duty games do.

It looks like Samsung is ready to launch their Galaxy S III Mini, which should sport a 4-inch screen and compete directly with the iPhone 5 on screen size. But Mobile Geeks are reporting on a leaked price, with the model number of GT-I8190 and GT-I8190N popping up some online retailers from Switzerland and Austria.

The Galaxy S III Mini is being priced by some Austrian stores at 390 to 540 francs, which when converted is around 323 Euros, or roughly US$399 or so. An expected availability date has been given with the earliest time to expect these mini S III's is October 16, or early-November most likely.

The new Galaxy S III Mini will be made available in the two colors its bigger brother launched in, Marble White and Blue Pebble. We should expect the 4-inch display to sport a resolution of 800x480 pixels, and a less-powerful rear-facing camera. We should expect just a dual-core version of the S III Mini, but that should be fine given that the device is more than powerful enough, even as a dual-core smartphone.

Logitech have until now, stayed out of the mechanical gaming keyboard world - we've seen a bunch of other manufacturers push out mechanical gaming keyboards with Logitech-like styling, but Logitech themselves have been MIA.

Logitech have just unveiled their G710+ Mechanical Gaming Keyboard, which the peripheral maker says combines high-speed non-clicking key switches with a dampening ring underneath eay keycap to reduce overall noise - somewhat of an annoyance with consumers and current mechanical keyboards. The G710+ uses keys with an actuation force of 45g and a distance of 4mm. The keyboard is lit up beautifully with white backlit LED keys, which are adjustable with one of four brightness levels, or if you're not a fan of LEDs, they can be disabled completely.

The brightness of the arrow and WASD keys can also be adjusted independently for better visibility under low-light conditions for those late-night gaming sessions. Logitech have also put the G710+ under some stress testing with professional gamers, partners, publishers and the everyday gamer. Logitech tout their their new mechanical keyboard can take at least 50 million keystrokes.

Dropbox have just made some changes to their mobile site which will help users check out their photos while on the move, following the same type of changes we saw with their Android, iOS apps and their desktop site.

Dropbox have moved toward a gallery-style image viewer, which is available to anyone with a mobile device. Windows Phone is included, which is great news as there's no official Dropbox application on Microsoft's mobile OS.

The changes that Dropbox have pushed out give users a more streamlined experience across all apps, desktop and mobile sites. Dropbox have said:

If you haven't noticed by now, Microsoft are going through a period of change. This is something I truly applaud the Redmond-based company of doing, as it really is required as the competition has changed, and is constantly changing at every turn.

We've now had Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer putting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, on a new letter to shareholders explaining that Microsoft now sees its own devies as crucial to the company as anything else. He adds that there's a "fundamental shift" in how the company's employees works and he says that investors should expect Microsoft to periodically make "specific devices for specific purposes", like Surface, or Xbox.

This new shift in strategy doesn't mean Microsoft are ditching Windows, it is actually looking like it's quite the opposite - they're listening to their customers, and shifting toward a new era of energy that looks to help all areas of Microsoft's business. This includes Windows, Office, tablets, gaming, phones and more. Microsoft are looking to deliver premium hardware experiences on all devices. Ballmer says "it truly is a new era at Microsoft. We see an unprecedented amount of opportunity for both this year and the long term...I couldn't be more excited and optimistic."

ASUS have used their Facebook page to tease that their upcoming Padfone 2 is coming on October 16. There's not much else they say about the phone, apart from "it's intuitive!" and that "it's coming on October 16".

We should expect the ASUS Padfone 2 to really make a big splash for ASUS, as they've been doing the tablet world a good deed with their Transformer range of slates. The Padfone 2 should hopefully rock a quad-core processor, and have its usual tablet accessory, which turns your smartphone into a tablet.

This is quite the design shift from other manufacturers who sell you a tablet or a smartphone, but ASUS let you slide your phone into a bigger device where it turns into a tablet. This is great as you'll then have the one device, with all of your pictures, movies, tunes and more.

LG's Nexus-branded phone continues to make waves on the Internet, where some new photos of the device have popped up. The black plate looks like Sprint's model of LG's Optimus G smartphone, with the front of the device looking like Samsung's Galaxy Nexus - so you'll hear no complaints from most people as it looks great so far.

It does sport a chrome-like bezel, with a speaker grille sitting at the top of the device. The home screen and buttons all look Nexus-like, which should be expected. But, now we have some specs:

So we're looking at a powerful device, sporting a quad-core processor clocking in at 1.5GHz, but also 2GB of RAM. 8GB of internal storage is included without an expandable microSD slot, which is a disappointment but these specs could change over time. Android 4.1 Jelly Bean fills out the software side of things, and the screen has a resolution of 1184x768, which should give us a DPI of around 320 and works out to an approximately 4.7-inch display, and finally, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera.

Everyone's favorite online radio, Pandora, had its CEO reveal some interesting numbers at the SF Musictech Summit in San Francisco. Among these tidbits of information is the bit about how some artists are making over $2 million dollars in revenue from Pandora. "You would be surprised how many artists are making over $100,000."

These payments to artists are hurting Pandora's bottom line. As it stands right now, Pandora has to pay much more in royalties than satellite providers and typical radio stations do. "We want the same standard being extended to web radio that currently is being applied to our competition," said Westergren.

Pandora pays over 55 percent of its entire revenue to Soundexchange, an agency that collects for licenses for performing musicians. This is something that normal radio stations don't have to do. Instead, they just pay money to composers. As Pandora has gained users, their losses have continued to mount. If musicians want Pandora to be able to stick around, they're going to need to lower their fees.

It's time for another update in the ongoing legal battle between Kim Dotcom, founder of MegaUpload, and the US Government. Kim Dotcom and his lawyers requested that the case against him and his company be dismissed upon the grounds that he does not have a United States-based address at which he could be served.

Of course, the courts didn't exactly let him off this easy. In fact, they went as far to say that the absence of a U.S. address under criminal law "does not require a result so extreme as dismissal" of an indictment. It looks like, for now, Kim Dotcom and his lawyers will have to continue fighting the charges brought by the US Government.

Those charges, for the uninitiated, include criminal copyright charges that claim Kim Dotcom encouraged users to upload pirated content to the service so that he could make money from the advertising and premium subscription fees. Megaupload argues that they fall within the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.

Data centers and archivers, TDK has your back. They have been working on increasing the storage density of traditional hard drives and managed to squish 1.5TB onto a single square inch of platter. This means a 3.5-inch disk's platter can hold 2TB of data. Multiply that by 5 platters and we will soon have 10TB drives.

The new technology relies on H/TAMR (Heat/ Thermal assisted magnetic recording) technology. This allows the bits to be flipped on the ultra dense platters. The technology has not yet been squished into a working hard drive, but rather the 2TB per platter was tested on a spin plate.

Drives based upon the new technology is due out commercially by the end of 2013, or early 2014. A working 10TB drive based upon this technology is set to be exhibited at the CEATEC show in Japan. This is the single largest jump forward for hard disk technology in a long time and will have large effects on notebook drives and data centers.

Fox news, you have surprised me - news has hit the web that the TV network behind huge hits like American Idol and 24 are working on a TV series made from popular first-person shooter title Battlefield: Bad Company.

Bad Company really focused on the single-player campaign, and for those who played the game you might remember that little smiley face pin on the grenade, too. This was the game's sense of humor and it is looking like this humor will turn the game into an action-comedy series.

From time to time, software giant Microsoft ask Google to remove links from their search engine for webpages that display or distribute copyrighted material. Most of these copyright holders use automated systems to identify and inform Google and other sites of infringements.

As with most things, these automated tools aren't perfect, and Microsoft's latest filings show this. Back in July of this year Microsoft were trying to stem the distribution of its leaked Windows 8 beta listed 65 "infringing" websites, reports Torrent Freak.

Over half of these sites had nothing to do with the beta release of their OS, with Microsoft's automated software accidentally reporting that CNN, Wikipedia, Buzzfeed, BBC, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, The Washington Post, Real Clear Politics, Rotten Tomatoes, AMC Theaters and various websites belonging to the United States government were infringing on Microsoft's copyrights - look at that list!

We were privy enough to get asked to join in on a conference call for AMD's Z-60 APU last week, with the company pulling the veils down on their new Accelerated Processing Unit today.

AMD's new Z-60 APU is built to be an ultra-low power consuming chip, with its heart lying in tablet and hybrid PCs. AMD's Z-60 APU is designed to maximize system responsiveness, where it is capable of quickly entering, and exiting low power states. To get these benefits, there's no special hardware required, just an optimized BIOS.

AMD's new Z-60 APU is capable of resuming from sleep within a few seconds, and can boot into Windows in the half-a-minute mark. Something that isn't quite amazing compared to today's Core i7 systems powered up with a nice SSD, but it is a tablet that is chewing less than 5W, remember.

If you were itching to use your phone to make some calls during a flight, you might want to take a look at Dubai-based Emirates, who have just started allowing passengers to use their phones to make calls on its A380 aircraft.

The service is compatible with normal phones in conjunction with OnAir, who is the company that provides Wi-Fi service for the airliner. There is a limitation, through Federal Aviation Administration rules, that the phones can't be used over the United States, where the service will cease working within 250 miles of US soil.

Emirates have been on the forefront of pushing technology in their aircraft for quite sometime, as they equipped their Airbus fleet with phones and fax machines all the way back in the 90s, and in 2006 the airline even offered in-seat e-mail and text messaging to all passengers. The first call with the new in-flight phone service was made on October 2, and was placed to China, said Emirates.