Latest News - Page 3078

Customers of Comcast's Xfinity Voice will be getting some new features which could help customers save money. The new feature is called "Voice 2go" and will allow users to make calls over WiFi using their home phone number. The new service will also allow users to text from the number while on WiFi.

"We continue to enhance our Xfinity Voice service by adding new features consumers have come to expect from smartphones and mobile technology," said Cathy Avgiris, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data and Communications Services. "These new tools enable customers to stay connected to their home phone service and take it with them virtually wherever they go."

Using the newly redesigned Xfinity Connect Mobile app, customers can make and receive calls and texts messages for free while using WiFi. The service will also work over a mobile phone's 3G or 4G data connection and not use any minutes. These text messages can also be sent internationally to over 40 countries, including Canada, Brazil, China and, soon, Mexico.

Voice control is gaining momentum everywhere thanks to Apple's Siri: Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S III is going to feature a Siri alternative. Google has voice search. Now, Nuance, the people behind the Dragon software, is showcasing a new technology to allow for natural language processing. Nuance technology is already seen in Ford's Sync and My Ford Touch.

The current Nuance system recognizes about 10,000 voice commands, but can't cope with anything outside of that pre-programmed library. The new technology being showcased is called Dragon Drive and will use Nuance's cloud-based servers to allow natural language processing, similar to how Apple's Siri works.

The technology is moving forward slowly and starting with an SMS service. The SMS service will allow users to send and receive text messages. As more people get used to the technology and the technology advances, Nuance will bring the technology to services like navigation, traffic updates and music playback.

Vodaphone is singing praises about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III. We had previously reported about the Galaxy S III surpassing 9 million pre-orders, but it now has reached the point where it is the most pre-ordered Android device that has been offered by Vodaphone. It hasn't quite reached the same popularity of an Apple device, but Samsung is getting closer.

A spokesperson told TechRadar: "We've been really encouraged by our customers' response to the Samsung Galaxy S III. With over a week to go until launch, it's already the most pre-ordered Android device we've brought into our smartphone line-up to date and our limited time offer of 2GB of mobile data and 100 free music tracks is being snapped up."

The Carphone Warehouse has stated something similar: "Pre-order demand for the new Galaxy SIII has surpassed expectations since the handset was first unveiled two weeks ago. The first 24 hours alone saw thousands placing their pre-order at Carphone Warehouse".

In order to further user's gaming experiences, Alienware will be the first to feature Qualcomm Atheros' new Killer Wireless-N 1202 chipset. The new wireless chip "is designed to provide improved performance and advanced control by automatically classifying and prioritizing gaming, video and audio network data to provide a superior, uninterrupted online entertainment experience."

"Alienware continues to be the leader in performance laptops and we appreciate that its customers are used to getting the best gaming experience possible," said Mike Cubbage, director of business development, networking business unit, Qualcomm Atheros. "The Killer Wireless-N 1202 will continue the tradition of delivering a superior gaming and real-time communication experience for Alienware laptop users by providing the best in online application performance, intelligence and control to ensure that critical online applications get the bandwidth and priority they need, when they need it."

"Gamers everywhere depend on Alienware to deliver superior experiences that help them achieve that 'epic win'," said Frank Azor, general manager at Alienware. "Integrating the Killer Wireless N-1202 technology-another first from Alienware-allows gamers to experience exceptional online gaming."

Since this is an enthusiast site, I imagine a majority of the readers are running multiple monitor setups. If you are, I'm sure you're aware of some of the difficulties associated with such a setup on previous versions of Windows. Well, Windows 8 isn't just receiving a touch screen UI upgrade; it's also receiving tweaks for multiple monitor setups.

There are several different tweaks that Microsoft is making in the upcoming Windows 8. One of the more minor tweaks is that you will now be able to put different backgrounds onto different monitors as seen in the picture above. Additionally, it will be possible to span a single panoramic picture across multiple monitors.

Microsoft has also improved the slideshow function to take advantage of multiple monitors. This is an especially important feature for users who have monitors in different orientations. Some pictures are more suited for a portrait or landscape monitor, so Microsoft has added a piece of logic code to show images on monitors to which they are better suited.

Motorola has had a good run as its own company. They literally invented the mobile phone. But, as of late, they haven't been doing so well and Google has been courting them for some time. The deal has finally closed over seas in China, which is the last place that was holding back approval of the acquisition. Google has acquired MMI for $40.00 per share in cash which totals near $12.5 billion.

The CEO of Motorola Mobility has stepped down and Google has replaced them with one of their own. Dennis Woodside, formerly President of the Americas region for Google, will step up and become Motorola's next CEO. Google will continue to run Motorola as a separate company as well as keeping Android an open operating system.

Larry Page, CEO of Google, said:

It's clear that people can't wait to get their hands on the latest Samsung Galaxy device, but they were at least supposed to have to wait until the international launch on May 29. Apparently one store in Dubai didn't want to make people wait, or maybe they just didn't get the embargo memo. Either way, the Samsung Galaxy S III has been put up for sale for $667 in Dubai.

An advertisement, seen above, for the upcoming smartphone was seen in the window at a mall by a Reddit user. Of course, he figured they meant for pre-order, but he decided to inquire anyway. Withing a few minutes of talking with a shop worker, it was revealed that the white Samsung Galaxy S III was in stock and waiting for customers.

It's not clear why the shop decided to start selling the phone before the May 29 date provided by Samsung as the launch, but I don't think anyone who has purchased a phone is going to be returning it to the store so that they can meet the date. I imagine quite a few people are happy about the slip-up as they are the first to have the Samsung Galaxy S III.

Earlier on today we were invited down to the VIA headquarters where we met up with marketing director Richard Brown who introduced us to its new APC computer system.

The APC computer is a $49 Android system based on the brand new Neo-ITX form factor which measures in at roughly half the size of standard Mini-ITX based motherboards. It features an 800MHz ARM SOC (VIA WonderMedia ARM 11 SoC) with 512MB of DDR3 memory and 2GB of onboard flash memory for storage. A modified version of Google Android 2.3 uses up most of that 2GB of flash storage, but there are external storage options. On the back I/O is a microSD slot and of course you could hook in an external USB 2.0 drive. VIA spent a lot of time customizing Android to enable keyboard and mouse support which natively it does not support. The system also comes with the modified apps such as a YouTube player, Angry Birds, a file manager, web browser and more.

However, the VIA APC is not designed to be about local storage. It is designed to stream your content from the cloud and does so at an amazing price and within a very tiny footprint. The APC will fit in normal Mini-ITX cases with room to spare for something like a 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch hard drive. On the I/O panel you get VGA output, HDMI output (up to 720p playback with hardware acceleration), four USB 2.0 ports, gigabit LAN and audio out and microphone in.

Anonymous have dumped 1.7GB of data belonging to the US Department of Justice, and on the flip side, the DoJ have downplayed the sensitivity of the data siphoned from their website. Anonymous says that the information they have includes "internal e-mails", and "the entire database dump" from the website.

Anonymous' leak was announced alongside a torrent with the 1.7GB of data inside, as well as a statement:

Microsoft have announced that they've released version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows runtime and SDK. They've also announced that Kinect for Windows hardware is now available in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

As of next month, Kinect for Windows hardware will arrive in 15 more countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. Once this is done, Microsoft will have Kinect for Windows available in 31 countries around the world. The company have also added more capabilities to Kinect that help developers build amazing applications:

On top of this, they've improved the skeletal tracking capabilities:

Online video creator, Machinima has had a great funding round, where they received $35 million in funding. This was led by Google, which also included existing investors found in Redpoint Ventures, and MK Capital. If you remember, Google's YouTube were after some original programming, and have been investing heavily to do so.

At the moment, Machinima's network is the largest single page view generator for YouTube, where it enjoyed more than 1.6 billion video views in the month of April. So we can see why Google ponied up for the online video creator.

YouTube is also an invaluable partner of Machinima, as YouTube is the company's primary distribution and monetization platform. Machinima plans to spend the money on investing in content and global sales, as well as international expansion and distribution. This latest move from Google shows just how important online video will be in the future, while it's not a huge investment, Machinima by itself brings in some serious viewers.

Here we are, folks. The beginning of next-gen gaming, hopefully. Epic have taken the curtains down from the first screenshots of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4, and boy do they look freakin' insane. Epic have also spoke of their "responsibility" to make sure next-gen consoles from both Microsoft and Sony can support the kind of eye candy that UE4 can push out.

Epic ran the Unreal Engine 4 demo on a PC, cough, with a single NVIDIA Kepler-based GEFORCE GTX 680. Epic design director Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski has said:

NVELO has gained several design wins in 2012 with their Dataplex SSD Caching software. So far Corsair, Crucial and OCZ have paired Dataplex with all of their SSD products used to cache Hot Data on mechanical HDDs.

The software works as advertised, but all is not perfect in SSD Caching Land. Dataplex has a nasty DRM feature that will shut the software down if you change two components in your system. Many of us had to go through these hassles years ago with some video games. It was annoying then and it is just as annoying now.

Over the last month reviewers started to receive their OCZ Synapse Cache, Corsair Accelerator and Crucial Adrenaline products. Easily the number one complaint in many of these reviews had to do with the limits placed on the user by NVELO's Dataplex software.

Foxconn are close to getting their cheque book out and writing a fat one for Apple to the tune of $210 million for a new production line that would be used by Apple, exclusively. The new investment would pave the way for the project to start in October in Hua'an City, part of the Jiangsu province in China, reports the China Daily.

The new plant will be of a decent size, measuring 40,000 square meters, and should hire 35,800 new employees. This is great for the local economy. The annual output of the new plant is set to be between $949 million and $1.1 billion, with the import and export value sitting at around $55.8 million.

35,800 new employees might sound good, but the Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park that is dedicated to making iPhones employs 120,000 people, while the Shenzhen-based plant employs an insane 200,000 people.

Yahoo have been having a hard time lately, with increased competition from Google and others, and have just announced today that they have reached a deal to sell part of their stake in China's biggest internet company, Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.

The deal will have Alibaba buying back half of Yahoo's 40-percent stake in the group for a nice $7.1 billion. Alibaba will wave $6.3 billion in cash in front of Yahoo, as well as $800 million in Alibaba preferred stock. Alibaba are also required to buy back a quarter of the remaining shares at the price of a future IPO, or alternatively, allow Yahoo to sell them in the expected public offering in the near future.

This deal now pits Alibaba Group's worth at around $35 billion. Alibaba CEO Jack Ma said in a statement to Bloomberg:

DICE's Frostbite 2 is still to this day one of the best game engines on the market, but it looks like the developer is ready to amp things up a bit. DICE posted a tweet earlier today where they've teased that they will have Frostbite-powered games in 2013 that will only work on a 64-bit operating system.

DICE rendering architect Johan Andersson is the man behind the tweet, and has recommended that Windows 8 would be a great upgrade when it arrives if they're still running a 32-bit version of Windows. This is only for those who have a 64-bit CPU, some people rock a 32-bit OS with a 64-bit CPU, which of course you'd need both a 64-bit OS and CPU to run the 64-bit-only Frostbite games.

At the moment, it's hard to know which upcoming game could use the 64-bit-only Frostbite engine. Could it be Battlefield 4? Mirror's Edge 2? Battlefield: Bad Company 3? It could be any of those games. Right now, the only 2013 Frostbite title confirmed is Command & Conquer: Generals 2.

Spotify says "G'day" to Australia. In other words, Spotify is now available for use in Australia. This should make a good number of Australians happy, including our very own Anthony Garreffa. Spotify is launching three versions including Spotify Free, Spotify Unlimited, and Spotify Premium.

"Spotify is a game changer," says Kate Vale, Spotify's Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. "This is a revolutionary new music service that's free, simple, and provides lightning-fast access to one of the world's biggest music libraries. We hope Australian music fans will love Spotify as much as they do across Europe and the US."

Spotify Free is, as the name suggests free, and is ad supported. Spotify Unlimited costs $6.99 a month and gives users ad free access to Spotify a user's PC. Spotify Premium is $11.99 a month and provides the same features as the two prior and also allows users to listen to Spotify on the go on a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device.

It appears that TSMC and NVIDIA disagree whether or not NVIDIA's new Kepler architecture has a fatal flaw or not. On one had, we are hearing reports from TSMC that the new Kepler video card "chips may be suffering from serious performance degradation over long periods of heavy load" and could be the cause of a future recall by NVIDIA.

On the other hand, NVIDIA is saying all is fine. Bryan Del Rizzo, spokesman for NVIDIA stated, "There is no truth to this." NVIDIA denies that there will be any sort of recall over this report from TSMC. NVIDIA has, however, not provided any further details other than the previous statement denying that there is an issue.

EVGA has already had to recall all of their GTX 670 SC cards due to a hardware issue, so the idea of a recall could be correct. Is this the hardware fault that has caused the recall? Additionally, this could be the reason that the 670/680/690 are not in stock anywhere, even after TSMC promised NVIDIA a majority of its manufacturing resources.

The upcoming Nintendo WiiU will feature an innovative tablet controller as the primary input for the gaming console. A picture has surfaced of a new revision of the controller and shows some tweaks from previous versions. The picture is courtesy of a QA tester at gaming firm Traveller's Tales who Tweeted the picture.

The picture and Twitter account have since been removed, and I imagine the Tweeter has received quite the reprimand from his boss(es). What the picture shows is that the overall device form remains the same as previously seen. However, now the device features full analog sticks similar to a PS3 or Xbox controller as opposed to the flattened circle present on the 3DS. The new picture is above with the older released picture below.

Additionally, the start and select buttons have been relocated to the right-hand side and a new button appears to have shown up next to the power button. Another button appears to be present under the D-pad. They are unlabeled and there use is not apparent at this time. The picture also shows that the tablet has the WiiU logo on it, which should confirm Nintento's name along with the logo. The device is expected to be featured at E3 where we will get the full scoop.

Microsoft has announced a victory in the MinuteSort test. They claim to have tripled the amount of data sorted by the previous record holder, a Yahoo team. MinuteSort is a test to see how much data can be sorted in just a mere 60 seconds. As more data moves into the cloud, this ability to sort data quickly becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

According to Microsoft's post on TechNet, "In raw numbers, the team's system sorted 1401 gigabytes in just 60 seconds - using 1033 disks across 250 machines." This hardware compared to what Yahoo ran is roughly "one-sixth of the hardware resources" and managed to sort around 3 times as much data. You can see that the Microsoft solution is much more efficient.

Additionally, it's interesting to note that Microsoft Research didn't use Hadoop as one might expect. Instead, the researchers at Microsoft created a new system called "Flat Datacenter Storage." The "flat" portion is the important part of the system. Microsoft explains: