Latest News - Page 3037

Users who live in rural parts of the United States will soon be able to get on the internet quite a bit quicker. DISH, one of the large US satellite TV providers, has launched a new internet service under the dishNET brand. Incredibly, the new service provides internet speeds of about double the average residential connection.

"Many unserved and underserved markets are years away from a telco or cable broadband build out, but dishNET is available today," said Brian McIntyre, vice president of Broadband at DISH. "These services will have powerful, positive impacts for kids, educators, businesses, farmers and families -- no matter how far out of town they may choose to live."

As of October 1, users will be able to obtain a 5Mbps down/1Mbps up data connection for $39.99 a month with two year contract. That price does not include equipment fees. Unfortunately, there is a 10GB data cap on that line. Stepping up to $49.99/month yields a 10/1Mbps connection with a 20GB data cap.

Intel has announced today the details regarding their new Atom processor, the Z2760, which is "built for Windows 8 tablets." The new device remains under the Atom market name as it is a lower power part, designed to sip power in thin and cool devices, such as the upcoming Windows 8 devices.

It comes with the following key features and capabilities:

We'll have to wait and see just how well the new device performs. The feature that strikes me as the most important/interesting/curious is the "Intel Burst Technology." This sounds like it is TurboBoost under a different name, though I have a feeling it may do something different than TurboBoost.

People looking to get a Windows 8 x86 tablet at launch will now be able to start researching just which one they would like to buy. Intel and its partners have unveiled a wide array of tablet designs and experiences with the only common factor running through all of them being Windows 8 and an Intel Atom Z2760.

"This is just the beginning of Intel's effort in the tablet market, and our goal is to deliver products that fit the spectrum of evolving needs of both consumers and business users without compromising on compatibility, experience or battery life," said Erik Reid, general manager, Application Processor Platforms for Intel's Mobile and Communications Group. "When people or corporations buy a device with Intel Inside, they're getting the best of Windows 8 features with a computing experience that just works."

New tablets being shown off today come from the likes of Dell, Acer, ASUS, Fukitsu, HP (seen above), Lenovo, Samsung, and ZTE. The designs vary from business models to consumer models, but Intel is saying they can go as thin as 8.5mm (nearly as thin as the iPhone 5!) and as light as 1.5 pounds.

Computer, Android. Android, Computer. Now that you two have met, maybe we can move on to bigger and better things, such as allowing Android's games to play on the computer. Well, that's exactly what AMD has done with the help of BlueStacks. The two have worked together to produce AMD AppZone Player, which will enable hundreds of thousands of Android apps to be used on AMD PCs.

The new app is a really cool program that uses BlueStack's "award-winning LayerCake Technology" to bridge Android and x86 application ecosystems. I'm pretty confident that the AppZone Player features an Android emulator, though I can't be 100 percent confident. If you want to check it out, the apps, and player, are available on AMD's AppZone website.

Rosen Sharma, CEO of BlueStacks said "As the engine behind the AMD AppZone Player, we are providing a potent combination of award-winning software optimized for AMD's industry-leading hardware. Consumers can now enjoy their favourite mobile apps on the larger, more immersive screen of their PC"

LG's 'phablet', the Optimus Vu II has just had its specs officially unveiled by the South Korean company, where we've found out it will be sporting a new CPU, some more RAM and some extra goodies. The phone sports a 5-inch 4:3 display but ramps up some of the specs, while meeting some previously rumored specs.

Optimus Vu II sports a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, more specifically the Qualcomm MSM8960, 2GB of RAM versus its predecessor's 1GB of RAM, and a battery that is slightly bigger than the previous Vu, at 2,150mAh. Optimus Vu II will only ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but will include an integrated IR blaster, QRemote software, and VoLTE capabilities.

LG are also throwing in a Rubberdium Pen 2.0 stylus, which sports a thinner, more precise nub (why do I feel dirty saying that?). LG have also put on offer an optional "One Key" accessory, which actually sounds pretty damn cool - it is a waterproof fob that is destined for your key ring, and can be pressed at anytime if you can't find your phone. Your Optimus Vu II will then let off loud beeps until you find it. One Key will also flash blue or red if there are any messages or if the smartphone has finished charging.

It was only last month that Google's self-driving cars hit 300,000 test miles without an accident, and now we're looking at California getting the self-driving cars hitting their roads. California governor, Jerry Brown, signed a new law that will see the cars hit Californian roads.

The new law signed in will see trials of the self-driving cars on California's roadways, with one condition - there has to be a licensed human in the driver's seat to take over in the case of an emergency. Brown said at the signing ceremony at Google's Mountain View-based HQ - "today we are looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality".

Google did some modifications to a Toyota Prius, which sports video cameras, radar sensors, a laser rangefinder and detailed maps - using all of this data to drive itself. Google's self-driving vehicles also sport a failsafe mechanism that allows the driver to take control by grabbing the steering wheel or pressing the brakes.

Normally a DigiTimes report is preceded with the words "RumorTT", but this seems more serious, and more real than most of DigiTimes' reports as it makes a lot of sense. Intel is preparing the launch of their next-generation Haswell-based processors for sometime in 2013, and they'll baked into tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, and servers - nearly every segment of the market.

But, Haswell is designed by Intel to integrate functions such as power phase control - something overclockers use, into the CPU itself. This is of course worrying motherboard makers, as the overclocking market is a big thing right now, and a lot of players have boards designed purely for overclocking in mind. We're talking of nearly all big players - Gigabyte, ASUS, MSI, ASRock. This won't spell the end of their businesses, but it will most likely see a change in direction of how we see them sell their boards, and what features will set them apart from the others.

Intel won't push these changes into Haswell straight away, but will instead bake more chipset functions into the CPU over time. Right now, we're seeing motherboard players changing gears and pushing USB-based features, Thunderbolt, BIOS firmware features, and more in order to not feel stale, or similar to similarly priced motherboards from competitors.

Check this out! Call of Duty and the studio behind Black Ops 2 has released the official Zombies reveal trailer:

I'm going to go out on a limb and take a stab at the structure of the game. Not only does this Zombies mode look really cool, it appears that players will move from map to map, or location to location via an old bus. During the trip they appear to have to fight off the zombies. I have a feeling players will be required to beat each stage on their way through the game mode.

If it works out to be something like above, it will be a change from the seemingly endless waves on a single map that Black Ops featured. That's one of the few things I didn't like about Black Ops' Zombies, you had to stay on the same map for so long. If they do this stage method, I think it could be really cool.

There are a lot of good things to like about the iPhone 5 and a lot of bad things to dislike about the iPhone 5. One of the things that most of us can settle on is the fact that the iPhone 5's A6 processor is quite a beautiful thing. This chip is a custom layout by Apple of an ARM instruction set.

Since Apple spent the time to layout the chip by hand, they can gear the chip for performance, battery life, or both. Many people have attributed the "2x" performance claim, and seemingly supportive benchmarks, to this hand layout process. It seems now that the iPhone 5's A6 processor is either clocked higher than previously thought, or contains a turbo mode of sorts that ramps it up to 1.3GHz.

As you can see in the video above, the new version of Geekbench identifies the processor as being clocked at the higher 1.3GHz. The older version of Geekbench identified the A6 as a 1GHz part. Dynamic clocking makes sense as it would allow the processor to be more powerful when needed and clock down to save battery when not.

Readers interested in the upcoming WiiU gaming platform will be excited to hear that there will be some 23 games ready for launch day, which happens to be November 18 in the United States. During the announcement, Nintendo played somewhat coy with the hard details about the launch plans, only giving us a date and price.

Otherwise, they said that 51 games would be coming out during the launch window, a window which extended all the way until March 2013. Thankfully, things have been cleared up a bit and readers will be happy to hear that 23 games are available on launch day. Three of those games are Nintendo-published titles, and the 20 others will be from major publishers.

Players can look forward to New Super Mario Bros. U, NintendoLand, and Sing Party from Nintendo. Activision is will be providing Skylanders Giants, Wipeout 3, Transformers Prime, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Ubisoft is coming out with Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013, ESPN Sports Connection, Just Dance 4, Rabbids Land, Assassin's Creed III, and ZombiU, a game that proved popular at E3.

For all of you who picked up the iPhone 5 on launch day last Friday, try taking a picture where the light source is just outside the frame and take a look at the resulting image. See that purple haze? Well, you're not alone. Members have taken to the AnandTech forums complaining about the issue and have corroborated each other's stories.

The current thought regarding the issue is that it is caused due to the use of sapphire for the lens. Sapphire is a hard material that comes in a variety of colors and the purple halo could be a result of the light refracting through a slightly purple lens. Sapphire is used for its toughness as it is difficult to scratch.

One user on the AnandTech forums stated that Apple support told him that this is a widespread issue. However, since people only seem to be complaining about it on AnandTech, it's not exactly clear just how widespread this issue is. Apple support also reportedly said that they are researching the problem. Another person reported that when they called Apple support, the representative said there have been a lot of calls about the problem.

Even though EA hasn't been doing so well financially lately, they've managed to scrape some cash together to acquire the online gaming studio ESN. ESN is the developers of the Planet web-based games framework. ESN announced the acquisition on their blog and declined to disclose the purchase price.

The two companies had worked together previously, most notably on Battlefield's Battlelog.

Facebook has gone ahead and updated Instagram to be compatible with the larger screen on the iPhone 5 and to make the app more compatible with iOS6. The new update brings with it several changes, most notably the removal of live filters for the iPhone 5. Older iPhones, such as the 4S seem to have retained the feature.

Along with no more live filters for the iPhone 5, Instagram has a new registration page that allows users to pull in their information from Facebook--go figure. However, the option to log-in with Facebook is curiously absent from the app. One would think that this would be a feature that Facebook would want to implement.

Moving back to the live filters, it appears that they will soon be removed from older devices. Their absence has been acknowledged on Instagram's "known issues" page and the acknowledgement seems to indicate that they will be removed from the older phones soon:

Apple made the decision to jump ship to its own Maps creation over a year before the contract between the two companies was set to expire, according to The Verge, who cites two independent sources familiar with the matter. The decision came sometime before Apple's WWDC event last June and sent Google off to the races to develop an iOS Google Maps App.

The sources say that the app is incomplete and not set to be released for several more months, but there is one coming. Apple appears to have decided to go with their own Maps app mainly because they felt that the older Google Maps in iOS were falling behind Android, namely the fact they lacked turn-by-turn directions.

Google's CEO has been quoted as saying, "what were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It's their call." He added that Google has "not done anything yet" in regards to an iOS Maps app. Besides, any app would still have to be approved by Apple. Google Maps VP Brian McClendon has stated that he's committed to offering Google Maps on all platforms, a sign that an iOS app should be forthcoming.

What a few days it has been!

We changed from our older servers over to a new host with a single high-powered dual Xeon server with all the trimmings such as RAID 10 Intel SSDs, 48GB of RAM and more. We thought it would be a fairly simple process to move all of our files and databases over to the new server and get online in a few hours. The new server is running a different server control panel with some other different configurations that we weren't familiar with. It really did a good job of confusing us all, but finally we are back online. Things are not 100% perfect yet, but we're close. Apache redirects... grrrrr!

We are working as fast as we can to bring the site back to 100% working order, it won't be long now. The good news is that we are now on a very powerful server that is going to be able to hold up when we get hit with a lot of traffic, and it will also be a great server for us to grow into as we continue to grow. It's been an expensive and stressful event, but we've learnt a lot.

Right now, Dropbox and Google+ apps sport the ability to automatically upload your photos to their respective cloud-based storage spaces after you've snapped your latest picture, with Facebook looking like they're playing around with the same feature.

Facebook are soon to rollout the feature to a few select users that will let them take pictures, and get uploaded automatically to a private photo album on their account. The social networking site has said that the feature will roll out to a very select few, which is how Facebook operates when testing out new features.

I'm a huge Facebook user, and I like the idea of this happening - but it does chew through your mobile data if you're not connected to WiFi. I'd love to see some features built-in where you can choose options of times when it can upload the photos. I'd love to be able to select a time like "upload between 1AM-6AM", when I'm sleeping. This way, my phone is next to me when I'm in bed, secondly it's connected to my home WiFi and not using my mobile data, thirdly it doesn't impact the speed of my Internet use on the device if its thrashing itself uploading pictures to Facebook.

I used to be a huge fan of Pure Pwnage back in the day, when I used to for a little while, be a 'pro-gamer'. I watched every episode, bought the shirts, the hoodies, and talked about it amongst friends. Browsing through Reddit just now, I've noticed that the team behind Pure Pwnage are wanting to make a movie, and are asking for pledges for funding.

Pure Pwnage has enjoyed huge success, where they landed their own TV show, and was nominated for Best Comedy Series, Best Writing in a Comedy Series and Best Directing in a Comedy Series, but was not renewed. The web series ran from 2004-2008 until the TV show, but until now, the land of Pure Pwnage has been pretty dry. The team behind Pure Pwnage are looking for at least $75,000 to get the project off their ground, but have said that this is "less than half the budget we need to accomplish what we have in mind, but it's a great start".

In the last few years, the competitive gaming landscape has evolved, immensely. We now have Starcraft 2, League of Legends, DotA 2, and many live streaming services like Twitch.tv and own3d.tv. The team hope to visit Korea, where I'm guessing they would get in with some of the world's biggest professional gamers - which would be seriously awesome, to see Jeremy interact with these pro gamers.

Dell are unveiling more of their products as the release of Windows 8 draws closer, with a new business-orientated model. Dell have given it the name 'Latitude 10', and the company have baked in a fair amount of enterprise features, such as a user-swappable battery, a dock for improved productivity, and Dell Data Protection Encryption (DDPE) for security.

Dell's Latitude 10 sports a, you guessed it, 10.1-inch screen, bakes in Intel's Clover Trail SoC, 2GB of RAM, up to 128GB of flash-based storage, and a 30WHr battery. Unfortunately, Dell have opted for a 1366x768 resolution on the Latitude 10 which is disappointing, but they did include a Gorilla Glass-protected IPS panel. Latitude 10 boasts support for 10-point multitouch as well as an optional Wacom stylus.

Filling out the specs, we have an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, 720p webcam for those voice calls and selfies, a full-sized USB port, microUSB port for charging, miniHDMI port, headphone/mic jack, a proprietary docking port, microSIM slot and a card reader. Dell's docking abilities give the Latitude 10 four extra USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, HDMI output as well as audio output. All of this is in a slate that measures 0.4 inches thick, and weighs in at around 1.5 pounds with the stock 30WHr battery. Dell are offering an optional 60WHr battery.

Apple sure knows how to turn a profit. A preliminary virtual teardown by IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service tries to take a stab at what the individual parts cost and how that all adds up. This preliminary teardown found that the estimated cost for materials that go into the iPhone 5 16GB is $199.

Apple sells that same iPhone 5 16GB, which costs $207 after adding manufacturing costs, for $649. Of course, this bill of materials doesn't include any software costs or research and development costs. Moving up the ladder, the 32GB iPhone runs $217 and the 64GB costs Apple $238. The only difference between these models is the NAND memory.

"With the base model carrying a $199.00 BOM, the iPhone 5's components are expected to be slightly more expensive compared to the iPhone 4S model," said Andrew Rassweiler, senior principal analyst, teardown services, for IHS. "The low-end iPhone 4S with the same memory density as the base-model iPhone 5 carried a BOM of $188.00, according to a preliminary estimate issued by IHS in October 2011. While the price of some components, such as NAND flash, has fallen during the past year, the iPhone 5's overall BOM has increased mainly because its display and wireless subsystems are more expensive compared to the iPhone 4S."

I'm sure everyone remembers where they were on that fateful day when Apple was awarded $1 billion for Samsung infringing on their patents. Well, in a case like that, the plaintiff can request that the judge triple the damages awarded and, according to an unnamed source cited by The Korea Times, it looks like Apple is planning to do just that.

As if the $1 billion wasn't enough, Apple could very well be planning on going for $3 billion. The Korea Times believes that this is "when the world sees the American technology giant turn into a patent monster." And it's very likely. As of late, Apple has been increasingly litigious and it shows no signs of stopping.

However, there are signs that the judgement could be overturned during an appeal by Samsung. For starters, the jury foreman has been doing too much speaking to the media proudly proclaiming, "We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist ...We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."