Latest News - Page 4440

The geeks over at AnandTech have laid hands on the new OCZ Vertex Plus SSD and are offering up a preview of the storage device and its new Indilinx Martini controller. The new controller came after the next-gen 6Gbps Jet Stream controller from the firm was delayed until next year. The controller used in the OCZ SSD is called Barefoot and is a new hardware revision and Martini is the new firmware for this new hardware only.

The new controller sets aside more spare area for its garbage collection and bad block allocation than the older controllers. The older Barefoot controller would leave an SSD with 128GiB of NAND with 119.2GiB or storage and the new one leaves 115.2GiB. The target pricing for the SSD using the new controller will be $74.99 for 32GB, $114.99 for 64GB, and $194.99 for 128GB. That pricing is actually pretty good.

When it comes to the mobile industry the major players like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are at each other's throats in a fight for subscribers and dominance in the market. The three have managed to find common ground in the potential to make huge sums of money by revamping the way consumers pay for goods and services at the register. The joint venture is called Isis.

The goal of Isis will be to work with the Discover Financial Services payment network to allow consumers to pay for products using their mobile devices and NFC tech inside the handsets. The user would present the mobile device at checkout rather than cash or credit card to pay. Isis plans to roll its tech out to select markets in the next 18 months. The tech uses "strong" encryption and privacy protection according to Isis.

Google TV is cool and when it was first announced I was really looking forward to getting it on my set with the Logitech Revue box so I could watching Hulu and online shows from networks. After the device launched, all of the major networks and Hulu blocked users of Google TV from being able to access any of their online content making the Google TV service much less appealing. At launch, the only TVs to support Google TV were from Sony.

Sometime next year that will change. Samsung will be making an announcement in January that it will support Google TV. The specifics of their plans are unknown, but with January being CES time, we will most likely hear then what will happen with Samsung and Google TV. I would be surprised if there aren't some Samsung TVs supporting the service on hand at CES.

The holiday season is upon us for sure and shopping for gifts is at the top of to-do lists for tons of people all around the world. Odds are you have a gadget hound on your list that would love a new eReader like the Nook color. Barnes & Noble has announced that it is now starting to ship the Nook color eReader, which is the latest in the Nook line up. If you have already pre-ordered the device, and put in your order early, you may be one of the select groups that get the new reader first.

Barnes & Noble states that the Nook color will start arriving at the door of those that pre-ordered today and will continue to ship throughout the week to pre-order customers. The pre-orders are being filled for those that ordered online and those that ordered in stores as well. B&N says that a "very limited" number of the Nook color devices will land in Barnes & Noble stores, Walmart, and Books-A-Million stores this week as well.

We all knew it was a matter of time before the latest update to the Playstation 3 firmware fell to the hacking community. The modders at PSJailbreak claim to have a break for the latest 3.50 firmware for the PS3 and are also claiming it will be good for any future versions as well.

The jailbreak is USB drive based and allows unapproved software, games, and even Linux installs on your PS3. PSJailbreak is also opening a sister site that will allow firmware downgrades for the PS3 at PSDowngrade.com. We'll see if their claims of future firmware breaking are true, but for now modders have a fun new toy for their kit.

This is the working of Intel's "tick, tock" method - the Sandy Bridge being the "tock" and bringing a 32nm fabrication process. Arriving on the same train will be the 6-series core-logic chipsets. These new chipsets will be on a slew of updated LGA1155 socket motherboards.

Sandy Bridge's arrival is quite close - so motherboard makers are tent-poling to show their line ups. Today, we have the Asus 6-series motherboards to have a quick look through. As with other quite long articles, I'll post a quick speel and the pictures for you to tent-pole over yourself, there's a few surprises throughout!

Arguably one of the most popular apps on the iOS device - Facebook has been upgraded to 3.3.2, the upgrade brings access to account and privacy settings along with Facebook Help Center - the usual bug fixes are included, one of them included is the bug that prevented users from uploading photos to specific albums.

Facebook on the iOS is filling out quite nicely - now a good release for the iPad would be nice - Mark, can you hear me?

Microsoft are proud of their latest spawn - the Kinect.

Selling one million units worldwide in 10 days is a great achievement, well on it's way toward it's projected 5 million mark by the end of this year - Microsoft have actual sold numbers while comparing to Sony's Move 3 million worldwide were "shipped" not "sold".

And with this news all graphics card partners and companies have entered in two key strokes on their keyboards, colon and capital O.

Futuremark announced today that 3DMark 11, the upcoming DirectX 11 benchmark, will be bundled with MSI's line of GTX 580 series NVIDIA graphics cards at launch and upcoming enthusiast level graphics cards for select, model, stock and country. The bundle will be available while stocks last in specially-designed collector's edition packaging inspired by the Deep Sea scene in 3DMark 11. MSI is the official launch and bundle partner for 3DMark 11. https://www.3dmark.com

"We are proud to partner with MSI on this unique promotion," said Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Inc. "Together MSI's high performance graphics cards and 3DMark 11, the industry standard for DirectX 11 performance measurement, make a great package for discerning PC users."

When it comes to gaming mice gamers tend to fall into two general categories. You have your low sensitivity gamers who like to be able to make big hand movements when they are controlling their character. You also have high-sensitivity gamers that like mice that move a long way on screen with tiny hand movements. What mouse you choose will depend on what type of gamer you are. If you are the low-sensitivity type of gamer, Tt eSports has a new optical mouse for you.

The mouse is called the Azurues and has some interesting features built-in. It has adjustable sensitivity with a switch from 400 dpi to 1600 dpi. Considering that the high-end laser gaming mice have sensitivity upwards of 5000dpi, this mouse is certainly for the low sensitivity gamers out there. Tt eSports is aiming this mouse at FPS gamers, but it will work for any type of game.