Latest News - Page 3754

MWC 2011 - Nicole Scott is back on the show floor today at MWC 2011 in Barcelona for us and she found herself at the Intel booth checking out one of Intel's big announcements at the show which is MeeGo for Tablets or the Tablet User Experience (UX) as Intel are calling it.

Refresher on MeeGo? It was an idea first started by Nokia (the Maemo project) and Intel (the Moblin project) who joined together to create MeeGo, an open source Linux operating system for mobile devices. Nokia has since removed itself from the project, but according to everyone at MWC 2011, MeeGo is still going full steam ahead at this stage of the game.

MeeGo for Tablets is really quite simple as the name suggests - MeeGo designed intentionally for tablet computers. It relies on panels which can be loaded with various different widgets and apps to bring a full viewing experience to people on larger mobile devices such as of course tablets. Nicole saw the new tablet user interface on a Pegatron 11.6-inch tablet running an Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a 32GB SSD.

The Intel AppUp store is not ready for the new tablet OS at this stage, but it should be coming soon. Intel will of course want to get that on there ASAP to increase the richness of apps for it. MeeGo for tablets is expected to be released to the general public for download before MWC 2011 ends, which is February 17.

Rumor has it AMD is for sale, with the rumors circling around AMD's stock rose by roughly 5-percent on Monday. Wedbush Securities analyst Patrick Wang said "there is no management team there" and he is right. CEO Dirk Meyer was forced out last month, COO Bob Rivet and strategy chief Marty Seyer last week.

That's quite the loss for AMD all at once which leaves AMD with a large buyout target on it's back. Adding to the rumor-mill is Dell are interested in AMD. Dell could do with the acquisition as it would distance itself from the cold, corporate world that is Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and other rival system-builders.

A new video has just been posted to YouTube which shows off the upcoming GIGABYTE X58A-OC, a motherboard dedicated solely to overclocking. It has many unnecessary features stripped from the board creating a platform that is ideal for ultra high clock speeds.

HiCookie, resident extreme overclocker at GIGABYTE, posted the above video which showcases his upcoming X58A-OC. Teamed up with Intel's latest 990X Extreme Edition processor and LN2 he managed to go past 7GHz all without using a keyboard or mouse. Demonstrated was the OC Touch feature which utilizes buttons on the motherboard to increase the bus speed of processor.

Suffice to say, if you are an overclocker trying to hit extreme speeds, the X58A-OC is looking like the motherboard for you.

NVIDIA is really pushing their Tegra line and for a good reason - it quite simply kicks arse. NVIDIA's currently sampling a quad-core Tegra chip that is going by an internal name of Kal-El (otherwise known as The Son of Krypton, aka, Superman).

Kal-El will most likely turn into NVIDIA's Tegra 3 once it hits the market, but is capable of quite a bit of muscle. It was shown off by NVIDIA running a 2560 x 1440 stream that was being decoded on a developmental device, scaled down to the slate's native resolution of 1366 x 768 and also displayed on a 30-inch display pushing 2560 x 1600 - the workload was being handled in real time, all by Kal-El.

In amongst the leak of Crysis 2 and the inevitable tears of rage Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli would've had this week, he has stepped out into the spotlight that is the internet to release a statement.

He assures everyone that PC gaming is still very important and will always be important to Crytek (that must be why the Xbox 360 had an exclusive multiplayer demo) and that they are still focused on delivering a great gaming experience to our true and honest fans. He says that he hopes everyone enjoys Crysis 2 as they think it's their best PC game yet.

MWC 2011 - Today HTC announced its first tablet at MWC called "Flyer". It is a 7-inch tablet with a 1024 x 600 display running Android and maybe most notably with HTC Sense for Tablets. Many will know HTC Sense on HTC's range of mobile phones, a kind of overlay on the OS which includes a range of easy to use widgets and such. HTC Sense for Tablets is much of the same thing, but has been optimized for the larger screen.

Next up is HTC Scribe Technology which implemented a "scribble" feature which allows the user to jot down notes or mark certain sections in books or even on Facebook and other applications that they want to remember or to easily show to a friend. Using the included multi-function pen, you can select different pen thicknesses and colors and just start writing in many different areas. If you want to make changes, you can adjust the pen setting and use it as an eraser.

From the looks of things, you use the pen to tap in a certain area of the screen and it quickly snaps a screenshot and launches the "Scribble" application. Basically, it seems like you are editing a saved screenshot image in a very simple graphics editor. Then if you like you can share the Scribble image using a range of different methods.

MWC 2011 - The next product stop for Miss Scooter after checking out the 10.1-inch tablet from Samsung was the latest smartphone to be introduced by Samsung, the Galaxy S II (GT-I9100).

This is yet another Google Android device based on Gingerbread 2.3. Different from the first Galaxy S is the new and slightly larger 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus screen which has a better contrast ratio and .3-inch more of screen to enjoy. Other hardware specs to change is the inclusion of a dual-core 1GHz processor which is said to provide the key advantage of offering mobile download speeds of up to 21MBit/s compared to 7.2MBit/s on the original Galaxy.

On the back of the device is a very impressive 8 megapixel camera with a flash which provides video recording at 1080p as well as playback at 1080p. In the video above we get a demo of the Readers app where you can download over 2000 newspapers from around the world. You get full page views of each page and then you simply tap on a headline to read each story in its own view.

Nicole quizzed the Samsung rep on when it might be going on sale, but lips were sealed and we do not know when it will be going on sale. Looks pretty darn impressive, though!

Qualcomm are riding the wave of smartphone and tablets by announcing a new quad core chip at the World Congress event, capable of running at 2.5GHz and is designed for next-gen tablets. The new chip will go head to head with NVIDIA's Tegra 3 system on a chip.

The new chip, APQ8064 has the same design as the APQ8060 but has ramped the speed up to 2.5GHz and doubles the processing cores to four. It is based on a 28nm design and is featured in a new family of upcoming Snapdragon chips based on the "Krait" codename. APQ8064 also includes a new quad core Adrenos 320 graphics processor with up to 15 times more performance than the current Adreno GPU that it will replace.

Valve's digital distribution platform, Steam, has been rumored to control between 50 and 70-percent of the entire downloadable PC games market. The digital distribution market on PC is said to be worth $4 billion USD.

Newell talked to Forbes as part of a company profile and said that Valve was "tremendously profitable", but would not give specific figures. Valve is a private company after all and does not release financial reports publicly either. Newell did say that Valve's 200 percent year-on-year growth and relatively small headcount of just 250 employees made the company more profitable than Google or Apple.

Cevat Yerli is surely through two or three bottles of some very expensive scotch. Crysis 2 has been leaked in some very poor form, Direct X9-only, 64-bit only, audio does not work through USB.

But the good things is it runs at roughly 60fps on a GTX570 at hardcore graphics settings, so minimum requirements should be much better this time. This is to the benefit of consoles, but might work against us PC-gamers for ultimate eye candy if a single GTX570 can give 60fps.