32 years on from the release of the original, Ridley Scott is preparing to revisit the world of 'Blade Runner', with a sequel which will see Harrison Ford reprise his role of is-he or isn't-he-a-replicant Deckard. But now, the 76 year old director has announced that he won't be behind the camera for 'Blade Runner 2', but will serve as producer.

Speaking to Variety whilst on the promo rounds for his latest picture, 'Exodus: Gods and Kings', Scott has confirmed some more details on the story, written by the original 'Blade Runner' scribe Hampton Fancher.

Sonim has just unveiled the "world's most rugged LTE/Wi-Fi/Android smartphone" with its new XP7 Extreme, featuring a 4-inch 800x480 "glove touchscreen" and oh-so-much more. The company has taken to Indiegogo to raise $150,000 for this awesome device, with the campaign ending on January 7, 2015.

The 4-inch display may be low-res in this QHD world we live in, but it is a high-visible display which is viewable in direct sunlight, a powerful 103 dB speaker, the keys and screen can be used with heavy or wet gloves, it's rated at IP68, which means the XP7 Extreme can be fully submerged in water at up to 6.5 feet, for up to 30 minutes, as well as being rated at IP69, for resistance to high temperature pressure wash.

The Sonim XP7 Extreme is also drop and impact resistant, surviving drops up to 6.5 feet onto concrete, from any angle. It can be used in temperatures ranging from -4C to 131F, can survive in extreme pressures of up to one metric ton, is resistant to oils and chemicals, and is also puncture resistant. But don't worry, Sonim (even with all these technologies keeping it safe) still offer a 3-year comprehensive warranty, covering accidental damage.

Whilst the first teaser for 'Jurassic World' wasn't supposed to be released until Thursday, it seems Universal wanted to get out a little earlier to get some clear space before the launch of the 'Star Wars' teaser and have outed their first look at the 2015 blockbuster - and it's a doozy.

Showing the kinds of things I've wanted to see for years - a fully functional and operative park akin to a theme park, and something I didn't expect to see, I gotta say, 'Jurassic World' has now surpassed 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' as my most anticipated film of the 2015 blockbuster season.

'Jurassic World' hits 3D, 2D and IMAX screens worldwide in June 2015.

Hardware maker Intel wanted to rely on its desktop, laptop and server CPUs, and missed the mobile boat when the smartphone and tablet markets began to soar. The company has managed to get its CPUs in tablets, giving away millions of chips to manufacturers, and will continue to expand its offerings in 2015.

"All is not well," said Andy Bryant, Intel board chairman, when speaking at the Intel annual investor meeting. "We are aware we're losing logs of money trying to gain presence in the mobility space. I'm not proud of the money we're losing, but I'm not embarrassed by it. This is the price we pay for sitting on the sidelines for a number of years. We're fighting our way back into a market. We will improve this. We will not accept a business to lose billions of dollars. We are getting back in."

Despite dropping growth in the tablet market - as saturation continues to increase - the mobile market will remain a viable goal for hardware manufacturers. Even though Intel has greatly struggled trying to enter the space, profitability in smartphones, tablets, and other devices can be achieved.

The tablet market has seen massive deceleration this year, and while year-over-year growth still accounted for 7.2 percent, the figure is down from 52.5 percent in 2013, according to the IDC research group. There will be 235.7 million tablets shipped in 2014, and is a clear indicator consumers need full functionality of PCs and smartphones.

Android has seen 16 percent year-over-year tablet market growth, now amounting for 67.7 percent of the market - Apple iOS is the No. 2 spot, but struggled, losing 12.7 percent year-over-year. Microsoft Windows saw 67.3 percent year-over-year and now has 4.6 percent control of the tablet market.

"The tablet market continues to be impacted by a few major trends happening in relevant markets," said Ryan Reith, IDC Program Director. "In the early stages of the tablet market, device lifecycles were expected to resemble those of smartphones, with replacement occurring every 2-3 years. What has played out instead is that many tablet owners are holding onto their devices for more than 3 years and in some instances more than 4 years. We believe the two major drivers for longer than expected tablet lifecycles are legacy software support for older products, especially within iOS, and the increased use of smartphones for a variety of computing tasks."

AMD is reportedly stepping away from the tablet chip market as they enter into yet another restructuring period. AMD has struggled financially over the last several years, and the low-margin tablet market isn't likely to provide them much relief. Tablet sales are declining, and the market is awash in Apple and economically-priced Chinese tablets. The beleaguered AMD is changing their focus to the low-wattage CPU space and custom chips for their customers, such as the Microsoft XBOX and the Sony PlayStation 4.

These two custom projects are projected to provide AMD with billion in sales alone, and they indicate that other custom projects are in the works. AMD is not releasing a new tablet chip this year, instead staying with their Mullins chip for the entirety of next year. AMD does not provide chip roadmaps more than a year out, so it is hard to determine if they will ever offer a new line of their currently unsuccessful tablet processors. Intel has also recently took a drubbing in the tablet PC market, as outlined during their recent investor conference, and has shifted priorities as they move forward.

The tablet market is continuing to decline, in large part due to competing smartphones that offer incredible performance and ever-larger screen sizes.

Intel is planning to release diminutive thumb-sized computers next year. These Small PC's are fanless designs that are roughly the size of a USB thumb drive, and Intel actually demonstrated one of the devices at their recent investor conference. Intel didn't speak to the actual performance of the unit, but we do know that some Atom processors are small enough to fit into such devices.

The market for these small computers is actually in the tens of millions of devices per year, and there are already competing designs on the market featuring ARM processors and the Android operating system. By expanding x86 computing ability into this small form factor it opens up new potential use-cases. This class of tiny compute devices rarely have much storage, if any at all, onboard. Intel might be planning on integrating their new 3D NAND, which can pack up to 1TB of storage into a 2mm package, into the new devices. This would provide Intel a massive advantage over competing devices.

Intel did reveal they can be plugged into smart TV's and monitors and provide an instant computing solution. This may foreshadow Intel trying to penetrate into devices such as Amazon's Fire TV stick and Google Chromecast designs.

Two men were arrested for their role in pirating the Expendables 3 movie, with officials from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). The US release date for the movie was August 15, but copies of Expendables 3 were found online as early as July 25.

The two suspects, 36 and 33 years of age, reportedly uploaded the high-quality film after stealing it from a cloud-based storage system. Lionsgate Films said there was severe financial impact by the movie being related so early online, saying it cost millions of dollars in potential lost revenue.

"Today's operation shows you the significant impact intellectual property crime has on our creative industries, with millions of pounds being lost as a result of criminal actions," said Detective Chief Inspector Danny Medlycott, Head of PIPCU. "The public need to be aware that piracy is not a victimless crime. By downloading illegal music, film, TV and books, not only are you exposing your own computer to the risk of viruses and malware, but you are also putting hardworking people's livelihoods at risk as piracy threatens the security of thousands of jobs in the UK's creative industries."

PMC has announced that Lenovo has selected PMC storage solutions for external connectivity in their ThinkServer product line. Lenovo is offering the Lenovo 8885E by PMC for 12Gb/s SAS applications. The low-profile MD2 form factor 8885E is an HBA that provides eight SAS/SATA ports for connectivity. HBA's are becoming more popular in the datacenter as new architectures arise to leverage scale-out storage and advanced erasure coding. PMC Sierra has been very aggressive on the SAS front and recently captured the goal of providing the most SAS ports on a single card. This has led to a leading position in the market, and PMC has currently shipped more SAS ports than their competitors.

The increased density has the side effect of lower power consumption per port, which resonates well in power-constrained datacenters. PMC has measured 40% lower power consumption than their competitors with the same number of devices connected, which results in a tangible TCO reduction for their customers. As a rough guideline most datacenters spec each watt of power as an incremental cost increase of $2 dollars per year. When deploying thousands of SAS adaptors this can lead to a staggering amount of increased cost if there is a difference of a few watts per port.

12Gb/s SAS is gaining in popularity due to the bandwidth limitation of SATA SSDs. SATA is still stuck at 6Gb/s, and there are no plans to increase this in the future. SAS is cooking along at 12GB/s and provides more bandwidth for powerful solid state drives. High-Availability features also provide a more robust architecture, and until NVMe competitors can offer the same type of features SAS will continue to provide administrators tangible benefits. The Adaptec Series 8 adapters feature the PM8063 ROC, and offer great performance in a variety of workloads. We recently took the 8 Series for a test drive with 24 SATA SSDs and 8 12Gb/s SAS SSDs. Head over to our Adaptec by PMC ASR-8885 12Gb/s RAID Controller Review in the IT/Datacenter section for more in-depth coverage.

The quest for more storage has led to revolutionary breakthroughs in HDD technology. SSDs get the most attention in the storage world, but the incredible technology that goes into HDDs has created some of the most refined precision instruments in history. HDD density has increased 500 million fold since the initial designs were released in 1956. During the recent MMM (Magnetism and Magnetic Materials) Conference the ASTC (Advanced Storage Technology Consortium) laid out the continuing path of progress on the HDD front. Acronyms aside, the demand for more storage has resulted in billions of dollars in investments in new technology, and these new techniques are pushing us forward on the path to 100TB HDDs by 2025.

There are already 10TB HDDs on the menu for 2015, but they utilize SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology, which has some performance pitfalls. Helium drives have also come to the forefront in the quest for more density, and as demonstrated in our HGST Ultrastar He6 6TB Helium Enterprise HDD Review they deliver increased density, lower power consumption, and don't skimp on performance.

These radical new advancements are required because the pace of density increases have slowed as we reach the limits of current HDD recording technology (PMR). According to the ASTC, and several industry sources, HAMR should arrive in 2017. This will speed the annual density growth rate to 30%, which is a considerable increase from the current 15% annual increase. BPMR (Bit-Patterned Magnetic Recording) is the next step to realize incredible increases in density, and that is slated for release in the 2021 timeframe. Combining HAMR and BPMR seems to be a very promising approach that will deliver 10X the density of current HDDs, or 100 TB drives, by 2025.