Latest News - Page 3053

While there has been no official announcement of a coming black Samsung Galaxy S III, a couple of pictures have popped up on the Samsung Olympics Facebook page which include a black Galaxy S III. This is likely to keep interest in the Galaxy S III so that it can better compete with the upcoming iPhone 5.

The first image, shown above, features both a black Galaxy S III and a white one. It's highly unlikely to be an optical illusion as another picture with a black Galaxy S III is also online (see below). At least one black Galaxy S III has to exist, and many more are possibly being manufactured as I type this.

The launch will probably occur sometime around the launch of the next iPhone, rumored to be September 12, in order to draw attention back from the rival's product. The question is, will this be enough to keep Samsung and the Galaxy S III on a hot streak? It's already managed to sell 10 million units in 2 months, but the iPhone will steal at least part of its thunder.

If you're looking into buying a tablet for your return to school, you might just think about holding off for a little bit. Engadget has heard from an anonymous tipster that Samsung will be releasing a student edition of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 that will be sliding onto Best Buy's shelves bundled with a keyboard and USB adapter.

The tablet itself will be the 8GB Wi-Fi only model that already retails for $249, so holding off for a few weeks will net you a free keyboard and USB adapter for free. The device is said to be coming to shelves near you on August 19, just in time for most people who would be buying it for college, and just a week into high school.

If you're still conducting research and weighing the pros and cons of the different devices, this is something you would want to consider. If you go with the Google Nexus 7, you'll have to purchase these extras separately, something likely to drive the price beyond the $249 selling point of the new student version of the Galaxy Tab 2.

Dell have just replaced their UltraSharp U2711 monitor with some seriously slick looking screens, with specs to match their looks. Dell's latest display is the UltraSharp U2713HM and is Dell's first monitor to sport the AH-IPS (Advanced High-Performance IPS) panel, which is meant to feature improved color and clarity over other IPS-based technologies.

Dell's UltraSharp U2713HM sports a resolution of 2560x1440, with the company claiming that the U2713HM offers a color gamut of more than 99% sRGB, maximum brightness of 350 cd/m2, grey-to-grey response time of 8ms, a 178/178-degree wide viewing angle, as well as an anti-glare coating.

The U2713HM has a plethora of connectivity, featuring four USB 3.0 ports, dual-link DVI, DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI and VGA. All of the connections are on the back of the display, keeping those nasty cables out of sight. Dell also mentions that their U2713HM is environmentally friendly, with the U2713HM's chassis made out of 25% post-consumer recycled plastics, as well as providing a 37% reduction in energy consumption when compared to its predecessor, the U2711.

It looks like The Hobbit, which is now a trilogy by the way, will only be shown in limited amounts of cinemas in 48 fps. Variety reports that according to a source familiar with Warner's release plans for the first Hobbit movie, is that the HFR version will only hit select locations, and maybe not even major cities.

Though, people who have had the pleasure of eyeballing the 48 fps version of the movie have said that it now looks much better than the test footage shown at CinemaCon back in April, which had not "undergone post-production polishing" and received a mixed reception from viewers. Warner's wants to protect the HFR format, where they'll be going into a limited release for the HFR version of the movie, hoping that they'll be able to test the marketplace and expand the HFR release for the second, and third Hobbit movies.

Right now, there are no HFR-ready theaters, with some requiring a simple software upgrade that will be ready next month. It also looks like HFR is the future, where myself, and many people in the industry seem to think its going to take off. Does someone want to find me a theater, and fly me over to the US to watch it at 48 fps? Drool.

The New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has taken the covers off of a new crime-fighting system developed by Microsoft. Bloomberg also revealed that New York City will take a cut of the profits if the system is sold to other administrators.

The new system will give police the ability to quickly gather and visualize massive amounts of data from multiple sources such as cameras, license plate readers, 911 calls, police databases, and more. Once it collates the data, it then displays the information in real-time, both visually and chronologically, giving investigations a central location to look into crimes as they happen, or as they're reported.

The new system has been dubbed "Domain Awareness System", and was developed by Microsoft engineers who worked with New York police officers. DAS for short, has the ability to host a features, such as being capable of spotting a suspicious looking vehicle, and being able to track its recent movements, or use cameras to track back and see who left a suspicious package. DAS sports live video feeds, massive databases of recent crime patterns and can accept input direct from the field in real-time from sources like 911 calls or police radios. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said "all the information is presented visually and geographically and in chronological context".

According to a piece on Reuters, Amazon is looking to scoop up a bunch of intellectual property (IP) experts to help them enter the patent acquisition and licensing game, after seeing the patent war between Apple, Google, and more.

Amazon have reportedly hired executive recruiting firm Argos Search in order to help Amazon hire an IP "Acquisition and Investment Leader" that can "identify and evaluate strategic IP acquisition and licensing opportunities" according to a job description that Reuters had fall into their hands. The person Amazon hires will work close with all of Amazon's technology team's and leaders on future product development, according to the document. Amazon said in their job posting:

We all know Research in Motion (RIM) is in trouble, and one of, if not their only safe haven, is their forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS. But now there's some new spark to rumors that the troubled company could be saved by Samsung.

This is all according to Jefferies analyst, Peter Misek, who believes that RIM's strategic review will end up with a decision to license the company's BlackBerry 10 OS, and that the company best suited to handle it, is Samsung. Misek wrote in a note to clients:

Ouya's journey on Kickstarter has come to an end, and what a journey it has been. The Kickstarter-funded, Android-powered home gaming console raised its required $950,000 goal in 24 hours, and since then has reached limits that the creator didn't even realise.

We've posted a few times about Ouya, as it is a great story of gamers all across the world coming in and pledging their money toward a device that isn't even available yet. There were multiple models to choose from, with some Kickstarter-exclusive models that are sure to get people bragging once they receive them. The $225 (or more) pledge was a Kickstarter-exclusive, where you received an Ouya console, with two controllers, each with your username ETCHED into it. Yes, how cool is that. I managed to get in on one of those, and I'm incredibly excited as there are only 2,500 of them making their way out to people.

Ouya received over $200,000 in the last couple of hours of funding, as well as over 1,000 more backers. Ouya finished its Kickstarter funding with $8,579,673, and 63,264 backers at the time of writing. This number is slowly increasing with the few remaining pledges.

Some Android developers have tinkered with the Jelly Bean-powered Nexus 7, where they've overclocked its NVIDIA Tegra 3-based processor to an astonishing 1.64GHz, where it promptly smashes all other smart devices on the market in benchmarks.

The Nexus 7 was rooted, with a kernel installed named Trinity Seven and as you can see from the above screenshot, it scores 7130 in Quadrant, with the closest devices the HTC One X with just over 4500, and the other ASUS-made Transformer Prime TF201 with a little over 4000. These are some truly remarkable results for such a cheap tablet.

But, how does an overclocked device like that keep battery life when its spitting out 1.64GHz on all four cores? Well, the Trinity Kernel Toolbox lets you control this, where you can overclock when you're gaming and want the best results, and underclock for everything else. That's not the only benefit, either, as standby usage has been improved, big time. Deep sleep mode offers huge results, where even after a 12 hour stint at being awake, there's still plenty of battery left on the Nexus 7, as the screenshot below shows.

This is something you don't see or hear everyday, but a few nights ago a Kentucky-based woman was forced to walk into an Apple Store with her kidnapper, who was forcing her to purchase goods on her credit cards. But an alert Apple Store employee came to her rescue, and she is now safe and the kidnapper is in prison.

Police have said that the woman met the man, who called himself "Greg", when he arranged a date with her. When they first met, "Greg" showed up to her house and forced her into his car at gunpoint. While holding a gun to her, he forced her to drive around to a handful of stores to purchase cellphones in her own name, with her own money.

"Greg" and his victim then drove to an Apple Store in Louisville, where they tried to buy some Apple products from one of the in-store Geniuses:

Despite the disparity in cost and convenience, DVD and Blu-ray rentals through mail and physical retailers still outnumbers streaming. Rentals through retail stores, kiosks, and Netflix's mail service made up more than 62 percent of all movie rentals in the first half of the year according to NPD Group.

In stark contrast to the figure above, subscription streaming, pay TV video on demand, and Internet VOD made up only 38 percent of movie rentals. Even though rentals are still the majority, the size of their majority has been shrinking. Rentals are down 17 percent from last year and stores continue to be replaced with kiosks.

45 percent of rentals came from kiosks, up 5 percent from last year. Netflix's push to streaming has also contributed to the decline in physical rentals. Netflix announced 530,000 new streaming customers while at the same time losing 850,000 of its DVD service. Part of what is keeping streaming down is the lack of extra features and availability of all movies. Often times a movie is only available as a physical copy.

Valve, the company behind Steam, is keeping itself busy. Gabe Newell has publicly bashed Windows 8 and is working towards making Linux into a viable alternative for gamers. Valve is working on porting the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux and has achieved some great results. Now, Steam will be expanding into software other than games.

Starting September 5, software will begin to show up in the Steam store. Options will include creativity and productivity software and a majority will feature Steamworks integration. "Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you."

Furthermore, Indie developers will be able to submit their software through Steam Greenlight. Steam has some competition in this market as Mac already has its own store and Windows 8 will be coming with a Windows store. "The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games," said Mark Richardson at Valve. "They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests."

Today, Google has been doing a lot of talking. They debuted their exclusive field trial of integrating Gmail emails with searches and they've been talking about the future of search. But, how can you look towards the future without knowing the present? You can't and that's why Google has provided us with some incredible numbers about the current state of search.

To make an average day, Google crawls an incredible 20 billion pages. However, to put that number in perspective, there are about 30 trillion URLs on the Internet. An average month is made up of serving 100 billion searches. Google's current Knowledge Graph is composed of 500 million items and that is just a baby step towards the future of search.

Google's vision of the future of search:

Apple.pro have posted scans from Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily showing off the new "iPhone 5" enclosures that have been available for the past couple of weeks, and even went as far as taking measurements of them.

The thickness of the next-gen iPhone enclosure measures in at 7.6mm, with the rest of the dimensions appear to be equivalent to the specifications that are making the rounds of sites across the world, and the same as the leaked specs by case manufacturers in June:

Zombie apocalypse game, Day Z, if you haven't heard about it, is a mod for ArmA II, and has been quite successful. It's talked about quite often, and started out as just as play around mod by Dean Hall. But, his mod for ArmA II has just passed one million players, after only being available in April of this year.

The mod hasn't even reached beta status yet, and has been announced its going to be featured in its own standalone game. The announcement of the game was made on the official Day Z Tumblr this morning, with Bohemia Interactive, who is the studio behind ArmA II handling development. Hall will serve as project lead. Hall has some words on the standalone release:

Samsung have been accused by activist group China Labor Watch of a bunch of infractions, with one of them being quite serious: employing workers as young as 14 years old at its supplier's factory in China. Samsung, in response to the allegations, issued a statement where the company said they've re-inspect the factory in question, but have claimed that it had previously passed all inspections. Samsung said:

China Labor Watch didn't just find underage employees, but the factory's management would reportedly abuse workers, and also failed to treat, or compensate those who experienced work-related injuries. It doesn't stop there, with more accusations that the factory forced excessive overtime, sometimes to as much as 11 hours per day with just a single meal break, in 'extremely dangerous conditions'. Also, those who reported product defect were fined severely, rather than rewarded.

So, Apple have cut YouTube out of iOS 6, and now they've added an extra row for icons. There just doesn't seem to be anything worth drooling over for the next-gen mobile OS from Apple. BGR reports from a 9to5Mac post that we could be looking at a fifth row of icons on iOS 6.

Using Apple's Xcode development application, BGR used a simple tweak to show what iOS 6 would look like when the resolution is bumped up to 640x1136, as shown above. 9to5Mac says that five rows of icons will fit on the screen instead of 4 on the current iPhone's, and that apps will scale accordingly to take advantage of the extra height.

So, if Apple are using more icons, are we going to see widgets like Android uses? Will we see portrait use on the home screen, like Android? It seems Apple are falling further and further behind in the mobile OS department. Don't get me wrong, I love me some iOS on my third-gen iPad, but for a smartphone, iOS feels just so claustrophobic. What do you think? Are Apple finding it hard to evolve iOS, but not copy Android?

Imagine a self-driving car, want to go on that long drive but don't want to sit behind the wheel and concentrate for 8 hours straight? Well, the future is self-driving cars, and search, mobile OS and cloud giant, Google, with their self-driving car project has been a success.

The self-driving car project has hit the milestone of 300,000 test miles without an accident. The cars have been spotted in Mountain View around the Google Plex, on highways, and more. Too bad I live in one of the smallest states of Australia, I'd laugh if I saw one of these on the road, but feel jealous all at the same time. Google have talked about the self-driving project, where they've said:

And so they should. After having the joy of a daisy-changed hack, Mat Honan has been keeping the tech world up-to-date on the going ons of the recent hack over at Apple, and what companies are doing to make sure that it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Apple have improved their services, issuing a 24-hour ban on calling Apple support to change your Apple ID password. Honan's hack involved some social engineering, meaning that a hacker actually made a voice call, setting up accounts pretending to be him. Wired reported on the ban, saying:

Windows 8 is bringing a lot of new changes to the Windows operating system. Beyond a completely new Start/desktop interface, Microsoft has fully integrated Windows and Xbox as shown by the new "Xbox Windows" branded games. These games will live separately from the Games for Windows Live service.

The games that fall under this banner will provide in-game achievements which award Gamerscore to players. This way you can boost your Gamerscore while killing time at work. As of right now, the games that fall under this title give up to 50 Gamerscore and are Microsoft productions: Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Majong.

Minesweeper provides the most chance to increase your Gamerscore with a possible 50 spread out over 4 achievements. You get 5 Gamerscore just for being blown up by your first mine. Solitaire provides up to 40 Gamerscore with 10 being awarded for just flipping over your first card. Majong has 25 Gamerscore with 5 being awarded for changing the game's theme.