Apple v Samsung, Apple must show Aussie Carrier Contracts to Samsung

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Nov 10, 2011 3:28 AM CST

Apple are now required to provide Samsung with contracts to Australian mobile phone carriers Telstra, Optus and Vodafone as ruled by Judge Annabel Bennet. The ruling is in relation to an assertion in Samsung's patent lawsuit against Apple carriers are obliged by the terms of the contract to subsidize iPhone sales.

Samsung are still waiting for the source code for the iPhone 4S firmware, which will support its case that Apple are infringing on their patents for wireless transmissions. Apple has handed in over 220 pages of documents in relation to the source code but Samsung have said that the source code disclosure wasn't enough because a single file was missing.

Samsung's lawyer Cynthia Cochrane has said that "someone out there is attempting to obfuscate," and I would agree. One page missing from 220 could be the key to the entire argument, and this would give Apple time to think of something else to throw in Samsung's face.

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Ultrabooks to have 43% of the laptop market by 2015

Anthony Garreffa | Laptops | Nov 10, 2011 2:20 AM CST

Ultrabooks are set to account for 43-percent of worldwide notebook shipments by 2015, just four short years away, despite the devices have only just started hitting the market. An Ultrabook is designed as being a notebook that is very light and thin, at under 0.8-inches.

Feature-wise, they sport more tablet-orientated hardware such as instant-on activation, always connected wireless links, SSDs and batteries capable of delivering more than eight hours usage from a single charge. IHS iSuppli research has led to these results and predictions for 2015, where they said in a press release:

Ultrabooks will represent 43 percent of global notebook PC shipments in 2015, up from 2 percent in 2011 and 13 percent in 2012. Following their first year of shipments in 2011, Ultrabook penetration of the notebook market will increase rapidly, rising to 28 percent in 2013 and to 38 percent in 2014.

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Xbox.com will receive Metro UI before Xbox Live dashboard update arrives

Anthony Garreffa | Internet & Websites | Nov 10, 2011 1:31 AM CST

Microsoft are set to roll some changes into their Xbox.com site over the next few days in anticipation for the upcoming Xbox 360 dashboard update. "My Xbox" will be replaced by a forward-thinking "Social" area, which will feature Metro UI styling. This new Social section will also give Xbox.com users the ability to be the first to try the new Beacons feature, which lets you mark games you want to play with others, making it easier to find friends who want to play the same game.

Microsoft have baked in a bunch of other extras such as the ability to search the Zune video catalog and buy movies and TV shows directly from your browser. At the top of the replacement of 'My Xbox', which is now "Social", will be the ability to be taken directly to the Social page when visiting Xbox.com.

At the top of the Social page, there will be a group of tiles that you might find familiar, this is the new Metro UI. This is where Microsoft will have Xbox LIVE events, preview articles with all of the latest details on the hottest new items on the Marketplace, new video and game releases, Gamer Spotlight, and more. To the left of these are quick links which display how many friends are online, and how many messages you currently have.

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Infinity Ward recycle buildings from Modern Warfare 1 in Modern Warfare 3

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Nov 10, 2011 12:48 AM CST

My readers will know I'm a lover of FPS titles, and I used to be the biggest fanboy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I loved it. I must have played hundreds and hundreds of hours of multiplayer and just never got sick of it. Today, my good friend Sean posts a link to a YouTube video on my Facebook wall titled "Infinity Ward recycles buildings on MW3 straight from COD4."

I wasn't surprised by the title, but thought I'd take a look. I thought it would just be a building that some eagle-eyed gamer has noticed... but no, it's a massive building, from my favourite COD4 map: Pipeline. The entire building is copy/pasted directly into the single-player campaign of Modern Warfare 3.

How ridiculous can this be? Is it laziness? Is this how Activision pumps out yearly releases of COD? Surely with hundreds of millions in production budgets across multiple studios with one of the biggest game-related companies in the world, could hire some extra peons to code up a map in a 1 - 2 year development cycle. Take a look for yourself, I think it's a joke, personally. Not a funny-ha-ha joke, but a slap-in-your-face, joke.

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Adobe Flash for mobile is dead, that is all

Adobe has just killed Flash for mobiles, which is sure to hit Android-based users. But, from the flames, other companies will benefit such as iSwifter, who makes a product for the iPad that allows Flash-based games and video to remotely run on a proxy server and then be sent down to the mobile device.

Until now, iSwifter has focused their energies on the Apple iOS market, but it has had an Android-based app nearly ready for months now. iSwifter founder Rajat Gupta has said "our target market literally just doubled, we had actually predicted this day now for over a year."

Gupta has said that iSwifter's Android product should be in the market by December, initially for tablets such as Kindle Fire, Barnes & Nobile's Nook and more traditional tablets, such as Samsung's Galaxy Tab. He also said that his company has talked to Adobe for some time about the need to move to a solution more like iSwifter's. Gupta has said "they have a fundamentally flawed architecture for mobile, Steve Jobs pointed it out but they didn't listen."

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Telstra to sell iPad 2 at retail stores from next week

Telstra are set to join Vodafone in the direct retail sales of Apple's tablet, the iPad 2. Telstra will directly retail Apple's iPad 2 from November 15, with monthly plans beginning from just $49. The iPad 2 will be available through Telstra Business Centres, Telstra Shops, online or over the phone at 132 200.

Telstra will offer the Wi-Fi + 3G model of the iPad 2, in 16, 32 and 64GB sizes, on two-year contracts and pre-paid data plans. Starting with the 16GB iPad 2, it will cost $0 upfront on $49, $59, $69 and $99 plans. Monthly data caps are 1, 4, 8 and 15GB, respectively.

The 32GB variant of the iPad 2 will also cost $0 upfront, with monthly costs of $54, $64, $74 and $104 with data allowances the same as the 16GB model. Finally, the 64GB model will come with an upfront cost of $24 and monthly pricing of $57, $67, $77 and $107 per month. Data allowances remain unchanged once again.

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HTC Edge set to be the first quad-core smartphone, sports NVIDIA's Tegra 3 SoC

HTC Edge is set to be the world's first quad-core smartphone, powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 System-on-a-Chip (SoC). Edge is set to be a premium handset, incorporating the latest mobile technologies.

Edge will be a 4.7-inch smartphone that is just 10mm thick, and will sport a 1280x720 resolution. It will also contain 1GB of RAM, a backlit 8-megapixel rear-racing camera with a 28mm, f/2.2 lens. The biggest thing the Edge can brag about is that it sports an AP30 Tegra 3 CPU from NVIDIA which is set to pump out quad-core at 1.5GHz each.

Storage-wise, we should see it increased to 32GB and Bluetooth 4.0 is included, on top of this we have Beats Audio with the package. Edge is also rumored to include the rollout of the new or improved HTC content services, such as the HTC Listen music store, HTC Read bookstore and the HTC Play gaming hub, finally, the HTC Watch movie portal will reportedly begin to offer HD fare. Edge could also be one of the first to sport HTC's Sense 4.0.

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EA president mentions Battlefield 4

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Nov 9, 2011 8:12 PM CST

This is something that isn't surprising, but EA president Frank Gibeau has been talking about Battlefield 4. Twitter user Brandon Winfrey posted that during a keynote at the University of Southern California, where Gibeau reportedly said "There is going to be a Battlefield 4."

This is pretty obvious considering the success the Battlefield franchise has had, and just how amazing Battlefield 3 has been. When Gibeau was asked about the statement, a rep for EA told IGN the following:

Frank was speaking broadly about the Battlefield brand - a brand that EA is deeply passionate about and a fan community that EA is committed to.

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Intel's next-generation processor architecture, Haswell, gets leaked details

Anthony Garreffa | CPU, APU & Chipsets | Nov 9, 2011 7:08 PM CST

Ivy Bridge isn't even here yet, and we're seeing details on Intel's next-generation processor architecture, Haswell. Haswell will be a brand new architecture based on a 22nm fan process which will be matured by Sandy Bridge's successor, Ivy Bridge. This is Intel's "tick-tock" product development model, where we see a "tock" being a new x86 architecture, and a "tick" miniaturizes it to a newer silicon fabrication process.

If Intel's 22nm process all goes to plan, Haswell has an ETA of Q2 2013, with Ivy Bridge taking the lead from Q2 2012 until then. Haswell will feature an all-new socket, LGA1150, which means it will not be compatible with LGA1155 boards. The reason behind this is that Intel have implemented drastic changes in the pin map of the package.

There has been a major change with the component arrangement in the platform that is affecting Haswell's pin map, more specifically, it's Haswell's higher bandwidth chipset bus, rearranged PCIe pins (with FDI pins), rearranged power pins, and miscellaneous pins. It also throws away the separate power domain for the integrated graphics controller.

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US military weapons, "full of fake Chinese parts"

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Nov 9, 2011 5:43 AM CST

I wonder if you look under the latest Jet, Rocket Launcher or M16 if it would say "Made in China", because at the end of the day - a lot of the parts that go into the high-end military arms are built in China. A story has come about that the US Senate Armed Services Committee said its researchers had uncovered 1,800 cases in which the Pentagon had been sold electronics that may be counterfeit.

In total, the committee has said that they found more than a million fake parts that have made their way into warplanes such as the Boeing C-17 transport jet and the Lockheed Martin C-130J "Super Hercules." The problem with this is, it could be everywhere without the US military knowing, as they also found fake components in Boeing's CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter as well as the Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence system.

Senator Carl Levin has said:

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