Latest News - Page 3051

Survival horror third-person shooter, Dead Space 3, has had its released date finally unveiled at Gamescom in Germany. The game is looking at February 5, 2013 release in the US, followed by a European release three days later on February 8.

The February release window was previously teased at E3, but not we have a concrete couple of dates. If you're like me, you'll be hotly anticipating this title, as the previous two titles were some truly standout games. If you haven't played them, you should definitely hit them up.

Dead Space 3 pits its protagonist, Isaac Clarke, into new territory this time round. Instead of being stuck on scary spaceships, you'll be exploring frozen planet called Tau Volantis.

The late Steve Jobs' home was broken into recently, where thieves stole more than $60,000 worth of "computers and personal items" from the former CEO of Apple, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Jobs' house is on the 2100 block of Waverley Street in Palo Alto, and was broken into on July 17.

It was on August 2, however, that police arrested Kariem McFarlin, a 35-year-old man from Alameda. Fast forward to August 7, McFarlin was arraigned on one count of residential burglary and selling stolen property. McFarlin's bail has been set at a hefty $500,000, with the man potentially facing a sentence as long as seven years and eight months, this includes an extra year for "excessive taking of property" according to Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Tom Flattery.

Flattery hasn't yet said if the stolen property included some of Jobs' posthumous possessions or if it instead belonged to other members of his family. Police and DA's office have kept the mouth's sealed on details of the case, but Flattery does hint that McFarlin didn't know that the house he was breaking into belonged to Steve Jobs, the attorney says "the best we can tell is it was totally random".

Retina MacBook Pro owners might not be enjoying that high-res display as much as they could. This is because if apps don't support the native 2880x1800 resolution, the apps are displayed as a blurry, pixel-doubled app. But, there are plenty of Retina-made apps right now, but they're not easy to find.

Even with Apple's Mac App Store, the apps aren't easy to find, which is why RetinaMacApps.com has stepped in, bringing a list of Retina-compatible apps. The website looks quite simple, lacking any form of search function, as it just sports a drop-down menu on the left that lets you look through the most recent submissions, category or name.

If you don't want to check through the whole site, you can just hook yourself up to a weekly e-mail that will be sent out to you with a list of submitted apps from the week just gone. Retina-powered apps won't automatically appear in this listing, though, as developers will need to submit their apps manually, which means there'll only be a few apps out there that meet these requirements, but won't jump up onto the listing.

Adobe's run of Flash player on Android devices ends tomorrow, with the developer disabling new installs of the app on Android-based devices. The developer will now concentrate on HTML5 and other web-based technologies.

Adobe wanted to go head first into mobiles with Flash, but were met with some strong resistance from Apple. The late Steve Jobs wrote an open letter in April 2010, where he explained just why Flash wasn't allowed on the iOS-based devices. Jobs took a swing at Flash's reliability, security, impact on battery life and performance, as well as claiming that Flash was a proprietary web standard. He suggested that Adobe work on creating great HTML5 tools, which is now what they're doing.

But, Flash isn't just going to disappear. Adobe still have a huge market for Flash, with Google adding better Flash support to their popular Chrome browser. How much longer does Flash have to stay relevant? Well, this market is an ever-changing one, so its really an impossible question right now.

DigiTimes is reporting that hard drive makers are working on slimming the 2.5" HDD standard down to a 5mm thick version. The move appears to be to compete with solid state drives and to provide a product that can be used inside today's fashionable ultra-portables and Intel's Ultrabooks. The slimmed models would still feature a hybrid design to provide better performance than a traditional drive.

DigiTimes reports that most hard drive manufacturers are still in the planning stages of development for the new 5mm thick drives and there has not been one manufactured as of yet. The source says the two major issues with the shrinking is stabilization of the read and write actions and increased cost due to the shrinking.

The source also believes that early 2013 will see heavy hybrid hard drive competition as the drives continue to be adopted in Ultrabook settings as well as entry- to mid-level laptops. Furthermore, this competition should accelerate the speed at which a 5mm 2.5-inch drive standard is developed and adopted.

Turns out NVIDIA doesn't think to highly of Intel integrated graphics, who would have figured? They apparently feel that the HD4000 series is the same as HD3000 series in that they are both incapable of playing 40% of games. KitGuru turned to an expert to analyse the slide, and the expert happened to be from Intel.

The slide, seen above, contains quite of bit of information about the testing NVIDIA performed. "If nVidia claims that over 40% of the top games are unplayable on Intel HD4000, then that's simply not true", said Huddy. The idea is that Intel graphics are unable to play top 2011 games at the lowest settings and provide over 30 FPS.

Of course, Intel denies these claims. It's true, if you want the best of the best performance, you'll have to go to a dedicated solution from AMD or NVIDIA, but Intel's integrated solution is better in recent years and will allow playing to occur on laptops and value desktops. Intel, due to the number of CPUs it ships, is the largest GPU provider.

Microsoft's new Outlook.com looks to be a success. In the first 24 hours of it being live, Outlook.com saw 1 million users sign up for the newest webmail service on the block. Now, Microsoft is reporting that the service has seen 10 million users sign up and starting using Outlook.com since its launch just two weeks ago.

This stat was released alongside an announcement about the updated SkyDrive updates. The number could be slightly inflated by users grabbing vanity e-mails, but even still it is an impressive feat. In other news, SkyDrive has been revamped by Microsoft to feature a new, modern design and will soon be getting an Android app:

Microsoft has been quiet about pricing for the upcoming Surface tablets. Announced out of nowhere, Microsoft showed off an incredibly polished tablet and told us all about it. Everything we could want to know was laid out--except launch date and launch price. We now know the launch date, and reports are now surfacing regarding the launch price.

Of course, take this with the usual grain of salt--throw some over your shoulder just to be safe. Citing an inside source, Engadget is reporting that the launch price will be $199. This is reportedly from a session, which laid out all of the launch details, held at Microsoft's TechReady15 conference.

There's no way Microsoft is producing the tablets for that money, so they must be doing what console manufacturers have been doing for years: trying to make their money back off of the software and games sold for the device. At that price, it's in direct competition with the new Google Nexus 7 and is cheaper than the iPad (and rumored iPad mini).

The red camp fires back. AMD has just announced an updated version of the 7950 in the same vein as the 7970 GHz edition update. What this means is that the card is getting faster base clocks as well as a new feature that boosts the core clock when the TDP isn't fully loaded. With AMD and NVIDIA nearly matched on performance and AMD losing in power efficiency, they've decided to go for the best performance-per-dollar.

So, aside from throwing power consumption out the window, what else have they changed? Not much really. The new base clock is up to 850MHz from the original 800MHz. Boost clock speeds allow the clock speed to jump to 925MHz. The reason power usage will jump is they have increased the core voltage to support these speeds.

With the 7970, it wasn't too bad as they had top bin parts. With the 7950, they are dealing with either broken chips or chips that wouldn't hit clock speed requirements. Because of this, AMD is using 1.25v which is higher than the 7970GHzE's 1.218v. It will be interesting to see how this increase affects benchmark results.

The PlayStation 3 never had any issues play YouTube before, thanks to it's browser with Flash support, but the user experience from a browser is never quite as good as a dedicated app. Last year, YouTube released a similar app for the Xbox and this release is likely to bring that user experience to Sony's PlayStation 3.

Even cooler is the app supports using your smartphone as a remote control for the app. After following a simple pairing process (screenshot below), the device is the controller. The app also supports instant suggestions and will offer suggestions as users type. Additionally, it can pull your subscribed channels.

As YouTube puts the features:

Multi-lingual users will like this news, with Google announcing that they've introduced a new text input tool that lets you type in Russian, Chinese and Hindi within their Google Docs product.

Normally other languages require special characters which aren't available on US keyboard configurations, but here is what the Google Drive team had to say about it:

This is something that I've read with great interest, and to anyone who has seen the TV show "Person of Interest", you'll understand that these types of systems are not just fiction, but they can be used for wrong-doing, too.

Last week, WikiLeaks talked of, and released internal documents and e-mails by hackers regarding TrapWire. TrapWire is a privately-owned surveillance technology that is used by various private and public agencies. TrapWire seems to work by collecting surveillance data from 'participating' private and public sources, such as CCTV cameras.

The data is then poured into the system, where TrapWire can analyze the data, detecting changes in patterns such as noticing a certain vehicle is not on its usual morning commute to work, which can then be looked at as 'suspicious behavior'. The technology is owned by Abraxas, who were eventually acquired by Cubic. In 2005, Abraxas Corp. CEO Richard Hollis talked about TrapWire:

Sorry for the attention-grabbing headline, but it really is necessary because this is quite the bizarro world right now to read, and report on this. But, Apple are licensing some of their iOS design patents to Microsoft.

The news was unveiled during the ongoing patent slapping game between Apple and Samsung, with a Reuters reporter commenting that the information came from Boris Teksler, Apple's director of patent licensing and strategy, who went on to explain that the deal also features an "anticloning" agreement.

Ian Sherr, a reporter for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal has said that the design patents are covered under a cross-licensing agreement that the two heavyweight company's have set up.

We probably should admit we knew this was coming, and not just TweakTown, but most readers of our site. But, Electronic Arts, the world's second largest game maker, has announced their working with Microsoft to bring games to Windows Phone 8. Electronic Arts' COO, Peter Moore, told Bloomberg:

Game sales haven't been the best for the company this year, where they've been down 37% so far, but the game maker is looking to think out side the box, with that box being the retail box game market. EA wants to get more titles online, onto tablets, and phones. The company believes that Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 8 will be central to this new handset strategy.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have been out for quite some time now, but as with any new technology, the iron needs to be bought out to get out some of the niggly issues, some big, some small. One of these has been RAID 0 on SSDs with TRIM.

RWLabs has an editorial where they talk about the subject itself, and I can't really condense it into a news post as its a four-page piece. If you're interested in SSD RAID 0 with TRIM enabled, then I suggest you check out the piece here.

RWLabs reckon it won't be long before we see motherboard makers bake the necessary goods into their BIOS', so as long as you've got the hardware, TRIM on RAID 0 SSDs shouldn't be too far away!

Looking for a new device on the Sprint network? Maybe they can interest you in their upcoming Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE phone that they recently announced? How about if you know the price and release date? Well, the phone officially went on pre-order today for $199.99 and will be available August 19.

The new phone may seem a bit old fashioned with its QWERTY-keyboard and all, but Sprint assures users that there is a place in the market for such a phone. "At Sprint, we recognize there is a large group of our customers that love the ease of a physical QWERTY keyboard," said David Owens, vice president - Product Development, Sprint. "By bringing a device like Motorola PHOTON Q into our portfolio, we are able to give these customers the option of a physical keyboard plus international roaming capabilities to stay connected while traveling abroad."

The device runs a 1.5GHz dual-core processor which is supported by 1GB of RAM. The screen is a 4.3-inch ColorBoost™ display which runs at a rather low resolution of only 540 x 960. The phone also comes with NFC, LTE wireless connectivity, SD card support, and an 8MP camera. The whole device is powered by Android ICS 4.0.4.

Someone who managed to get their hands on an Xbox 720 'Durango' development machine took a big risk by throwing it on Ebay. Turns out that the big risk was seemingly worth it as the auction has now ended with the sales price being just a bit north of $20,000. But don't worry as "All proceeds go to charity. And by charity, I[he] mean my[his] new car."

Posted by user SuperDaE, this was the latest move in a series of leaks that were sure to be angering Microsoft. Prior to this auction, DaE had been leaking images of the tower. This tower is nowhere near what the final version of the product will look like. It is just the hardware so that game developers can start making games ahead of launch.

Since the appearance of the development kit isn't known by anyone except for those who have it, it's a bit difficult to say if this is the real deal. The case looks like a standard computer case and could easily house standard PC components. We will have to wait until the purchaser goes public with the details.

It looks like Samsung's T-Mobile-branded phone, now known officially as the Galaxy S Blaze Q is nearly here. The image below is thanks to TmoNews, and its showing off that it's a slider, and sports a full QWERTY keyboard.

The Galaxy A Blaze Q comes out on August 15, and Samsung had already stated they would be announcing a new Galaxy on this date. How does the Blaze Q spec against its other Galaxy brothers? Well, we're looking at a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.

Display-wise, it reportedly contains a 720p display, and a rear camera capable of taking 1080p video. It should arrive with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but it might come with an schedule for an upgrade to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Samsung's first dedicated gaming notebook has come and gone, and the refresh is just pulling up on the finishing line. Samsung's Series 7 Gamer notebook has been refreshed, with the company using their Samsung Tomorrow blog to tell the world.

The new build is called Series 7 Gamer Yellow 3D, and if the 'yellow' and '3D' weren't strong enough hints, we're looking at the GPU being upgraded, the screen is 3D-capable, and it comes in yellow. The GPU in question is AMD's Radeon HD 7870M, and the screen is a 14.3-inch SuperBright (400 nit) 3D LED display.

The refreshed Series 7 Gamer comes with an 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD for storage. Availability isn't known just yet, but those in Samsung's homeland can grab one of these bad boys for 2.99 million Won, which is around $2,643 US.

It looks as though the MegaUpload problems aren't stopping founder Kim Dotcom from getting right back into work, with the biggest hint that his new music program has not been delayed and will arrived later this year. The new hint comes from a tweet from the man himself, and is talking about Megabox.

I'm sure you've heard of it, but if you haven't, Megabox will be a music service that allows artists to sell music directly to its users. The last time Dotcom talked of Megabox was back in June, where he told Torrent Freak that: