News Archive

At $129.99, the Cyborg M.M.O. 7 Gaming Mouse might be the most expensive rodent you ever buy. It's also one of the most flexible. Now available on pre-order from Mad Catz, the Cyborg M.M.O. 7 is a funktastic looking mouse for gamers with an adjustable weight system, ergonomic finger resting places, multiple buttons, and a high DPI sensor....

For a relatively small fee, Marge Simpson and/or Mr. Burns will happily tell you where to make your next turn, or order you around the neighborhood depending on which character you choose. They're the newest voice downloads to land on the TomTom navigation app for iPhone, iPad, and personal navigation devices (PNDs), the company announced...

Abbot confused the tar out of Costello when he tried to explain Who's on first, and while the ambiguity surrounding the 'Super Wi-Fi' moniker isn't on the same level of stupid hilarity, the Wi-Fi Alliance nonetheless feels consumers will end up equally confused. Super Wi-Fi, after all, isn't Wi-Fi at all, it's unlicensed spectrum known as...

One of the risks when you store your data in the cloud is that you’re trusting a third party with your precious files. Of course, you’re gambling with your data no matter where it’s stored; even if you have your own mini-server locked away in the basement, there are worst-case scenarios associated with fire or water damage,...

On the one hand, it’s tempting to say, “We get it already, MSI, your military-class components help facilitate fantastic overclocking”, but on the other hand, it’s really fun to see just how far pro overclockers can push the envelope with MSI motherboards and Intel Sandy Bridge-E chips. According to a release from MSI,...

Samsung took the wraps off of another new smartphone in the Galaxy S line. The new Galaxy S Advance appears to be a mid-range handset that features specs that fall between the original Galaxy S and the more recent Galaxy S II. Some of the key features of the Galaxy S Advance include a dual core 1GHz processor, HSPA 14.4 Mbps connectivity,...

Sprint users who have been anxious to get their hands on Ice Cream Sandwich and LTE connectivity may not have to wait much longer. Google's official Galaxy Nexus website now offers a registration section for anyone on Sprint's network who wants to know when this hot smartphone is officially available for sale. Although no release date has...

Samsung's Galaxy Note -- largely seen as the largest smartphone on the market today -- is coming to AT&T. After launching globally a while back, AT&T has decided that Samsung's large screen and S Pen technology are too much to resist here in the U.S. It's a 4G LTE device as well, arriving on February 19th in carbon blue and ceramic...

New cameras? Sony's got 'em. The company just launched a new assortment of compact Cyber-Shot point-and-shoot cameras this evening. Three new models include the DSC-TX200V model from the ultra-thin Cyber-shot T series and the DSC-WX70 and DSC-WX50 models from the stylish, traditionally designed W series, each featuring a high-resolution "Exmor...

Studios and publishers are fighting back hard against the used game market, with the upcoming title Kingdoms of Amular, the latest to declare it'll use a content lock. In this case, KoA ups the ante by locking out part of the game that's normally available in single-player mode. Game reviewers found the following inside their copies. The text...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has released a ruling that invalidates the third of three patents Rambus used to intimidate Nvidia into settling with it early last year. The decision is a further blow to Rambus' ambitions; the company has sued a wide range of companies, including HP, Broadcom, MediaTek, and STMicroelectronics...

Back in 2009, President Obama appointed the country’s first federal Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, in an effort by the administration to push the government past old technology and into the 21st century. Chopra is now stepping down from his post, and the move was announced (appropriately) in a blog post on the official White...

If you're looking for a well equipped laptop sporting AMD's new generation current generation 40nm graphics technology, Lenovo may have exactly what you've been pining for. Lenovo quietly slipped out its IdeaPad Y470p, a 14-inch notebook with an Intel Core i7 2670QM processor (2.2GHz, 6MB cache), 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory, and AMD Radeon HD...

Samsung's rolling in the dough after posting a profit of 5.3 trillion won in 2011, or $4.73 in U.S. currency, representative of a staggering 79 percent year-on-year growth rate. Smartphone sales have been for key for Samsung, and despite ongoing litigation with Apple over patent infringement claims, Samsung's shipped more mobile phones in...

It didn't take Microsoft long to realize that they had more than they bargained for with Kinect. While originally intended only for use with the Xbox 360, the motion sensing device soon found a home with PC hackers. After first rejecting the notion, Microsoft soon changed their tune and began to embrace the hackerspace. Earlier this month...

And just like that, he's out. The former head of Palm is leaving HP, and with webOS all but buried, it's no real surprise. HP's acquisition of Palm proved disastrous, and after Jon Rubinstein was shifted into a product innovation role after the first major blow to webOS, we sort of figured he wouldn't hang around too much longer. He was once...

Embedded computing manufacturer Habey USA announced the BIS-6630, a small, fanless embedded computer with an Intel Atom N2800 (1.83 GHz) or D2700 (2.13 GHz) at its core. The D2700 version also has a PowerVR SGX545 GPU (640MHz) which purports to offer 60% improvement in graphics performance over previous Atoms. Features of the 12W, 7.5x7.5x2.5-inch...

Mobile malware hasn't been a huge problem up to this point. It certainly exists, but wielding a smartphone and downloading apps from an official market place isn't like running Windows, where multiple new threats emerge every day. Perhaps things are beginning to change. Security firm Symantec discovered over a dozen malicious apps in the Android...

Google has a message for developers: Say Goodbye to the Menu Button, which is the title of an Android Developers blog post pleading with devs to rethink their reliance on the Menu button. A better option, according to Google, is to direct users towards the ActionBar introduced in Honeycomb, and it's never been more important than with the...

Talk about tough luck for folks living on the East Coast. Razer late last night sent us an email announcing its highly anticipated Razer Blade gaming laptop is in stock and going on sale at 9PM PST, or midnight for EST gamers. We clicked the link this morning and discovered whatever stock Razer made available had been devoured. The email read:...

There's nothing quite like an SSD to really hammer home the "high performance" feeling in a new notebook. Apple's been cramming SSDs into MacBook Air machines for some time now, but Other World Computing believes in pushing the envelope. The company's Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G 480GB SSD offers up to 3x faster performance and 8x more storage...

Wouldn't it be nice if that free data that Verizon includes with Samsung's Chromebooks were something that other carriers would utilize? Maybe it's a trend that's taking off. Sony's PlayStation Vita is nearly ready to launch in America, and as you may have heard, there's a 3G version on tap. There's under 30 days left for it to launch, and...

Move over, 7-inch color e-readers, there’s a new guy in town--if you live in Japan, anyway. Toshiba announced a full color 7-inch (1024x600) dedicated e-reader called the BookPlace DB50, which will launch in Japan on February 10th. Word on the street is that it may make its way to U.S. shores at some point, too. Specifications include...

A couple of recent articles in The New York Times painted a less than rosy picture of Apple and its role in allegedly urging its suppliers in China to take shortcuts despite concerns to worker safety. It's a hot topic considering the multiple reports of poor working conditions at Foxconn, a top supplier of Apple's iDevices along with many...

Hey look, North Carolinians, it's a bird... It's a plane ... no, it's the Super WI-Fi! Or, if you want get all technical about it, it's actually the world's first commercial TV White Space (TVWS) network, but Super Wi-Fi, as it's commonly referred to, sounds so much better, even though -- again, technically -- it's not really Wi-Fi since it...

It took a little over a month after the debut of the ATI Radeon HD 7970, but AVADirect now offers 7970 graphics cards from multiple manufacturers. The latest and greatest in graphics from AMD, the 7970 will offer a nice bump in performance for AVADirect systems. Although cards from more manufacturers will be added by and by, AVADirect customers...

A new MAP (minimum advertised price) list from Verizon has been tipped online and it reveals a number of discounted Droid devices, including the upcoming Droid 4. Motorola's darling, which was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, was originally announced at $249 with a two-year service agreement, but it...

According to leaked reports on the web, a new tablet could be coming to Sprint early next month that features a $100 price tag. The information suggests the ZTE Optik tablet, which is powered by Android, will be available for this budget-friendly price provided you're willing to sign a two-year agreement and purchase a compatible rate plan....

Last year, Google launched the Google Music service which lets you upload as many as 20,000 songs. You can also purchase songs through the service. The songs purchased through the service could then be downloaded to a PC. As for the songs you uploaded on your own, well, they were stuck in the cloud—until now. Thanks to a new update to...

Remember Real Player? Evidently that's still around, and Intel -- of all companies -- is interested. RealNetworks just announced that it has signed an agreement to sell a significant number of its patents and its next generation video codec software to Intel Corporation for a purchase price of $120 million. Under terms of the sale, RealNetworks...

An Ultrabook? A netbook? Something in-between. Maybe this one's just a standard notebook, and that's perfectly okay. Lenovo's ThinkPad X130e is now shipping to consumers, a few weeks after being adopted by select schools. The machine packs an 11.6" display, 4GB of memory, and your choice of an AMD Fusion API or Intel's Core i CPU. It's also...

Last year, the trio of developers at NimbleBit released their iOS game, Tiny Tower. The game puts players in charge of a building and the diminutive residents, dubbed "bitizens" who reside there. The game was a smash hit on both iOS and Android, was downloaded more than nine million times, and earned Apple's Game of the Year 2011. Enter Zynga....

Earlier this month, Symantec essentially shrugged after hacker group Lords of Dharmaraja swiped source code to some Symantec products from Indian military servers and threatened to release it. Now, it appears to have been a lot of false bravado on Symantec’s part. Symantec has publicly acknowledged the breach(es), the extent of the damage,...

If you've paid attention to quarterly earnings reports from the major computer OEMs, you've likely noticed that the hard drive shortage this fall had an impact, but not a disastrous one. Companies like Intel reported that manufacturer inventories were substantially affected as company's held off on restocking to see what prices would do, but...

Here's a feel-good story to help justify all those hours you spent wandering through Azeroth and leveling up in World of Warcraft when you should have been working, spending time with family, or, if you're really addicted, showering. Because of you and millions of other WoW gamers, Blizzard needed to upgrade its server hardware to keep the...

Western Digital today announced it will demonstrate the ultra-fast data transfer rates of its upcoming My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system at the Macworld/iWorld show. The Thunderbolt-equipped My Book gives the storage system access to up to 10Gbps of theoretical throughput on each of two channels in both directions. According...

Steam has changed the way many people play games by delivering hundreds of titles through the cloud. Today, Valve (maker of Steam) announced a closed beta of a Steam app for iOS and Android. If the above gets your heart pounding with the possibility that you’ll soon be able to play Steam games on your mobile device, this part of the...

Don't underestimate the power of finely tuned firmware. Underscoring this point is the release of new enhanced IOPS firmware (v1.13) for OCZ's Octane SATA 3.0 Series solid state drives (SSDs). With the new firmware applied, OCZ promises significant improvements to write performance, over double in some capacities. For all Octane SATA 6Gb/s...

Google recently launched a new project known as Google Public Alerts. With this project, you'll be able to see relevant weather, public safety, and earthquake alerts directly from Google Maps. Since the information will be from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey,...

A leaked roadmap for AT&T suggests the carrier is planning to launch the Nokia Lumina 900 on March 18 for a bargain price of $99.99 with a two-year contract. Considering this phone is expected to be one of the high-end Windows Phone devices of the year, the budget-friendly price is a little surprising. Still, if this proves to be true,...

Options, folks. That’s what NZXT is shooting for with its new full-tower Switch 810 case, which can be configured in a number of different ways to optimize airflow or sound reduction and is equally friendly for air- or water-cooling setups. Available in black or white, the NZXT Switch 810 takes a while to get to know intimately. NZXT...

Chrome is doing great. Android is doing great. Google is doing great. But what about Chrome OS? And what about Chromebooks? These machines were set to revolutionize the notebook industry, and we've heard radio silence on them ever since Google I/O 2011. But it sounds like Google's working overtime behind the curtains in order to get these...

These are strange, strange days that we're living in. HP buys Palm, then basically kills it when they murdered webOS. But then, due to consumer outcries (or just guilt?), webOS is brought back into the fold, but not in a shipping product. No, HP is actually going to invest time and resources to open source webOS. Yes, really. The company this...

Yesterday afternoon, Alma Whitten, Google's Director of Privacy, posted a blog entry stating that the company is preparing a major overhaul and simplification of its various privacy policies. According to the entry, Google is planning to condense the current crop of 70 separate policies into a single, easy-to-read agreement. In and of itself,...

If you’re looking to cut your IT budget and simplify your operations, Amazon is as usual more than happy to oblige. The company announced the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Storage Gateway, a (beta) service that connects on-premises software applications to cloud storage. The service will also mirror your on-premises storage to Amazon’s...

Apple's next generation iPhone device is reportedly gearing up for production, or at least that's what an employee at Foxconn revealed to 9to5Mac.Foxconn is where most of Apple's products are made, including its iPhone line and the upcoming iPhone 5, as it's currently being called. The tipster said there are a handful of iPhone prototypes...

AMD announced its fourth quarter and 2011 results yesterday. The figures aren't bad in and of themselves, but the company's overall position headed into 2012 is decidedly uncertain. Yearly revenue was flat at $6.57B, with total net income for fiscal 2011 at $495M, up four percent from 2010. "AMD shipped more than 30 million APUs in 2011, resulting...

Google's Chrome browser didn't become the second or third most used browser on the planet by accident (whether it ranks No. 2 or No. 3 depends on whose market share numbers you trust). Among other things, stability is a key ingredient, and you can score some serious loot by uncovering bugs and letting Google know about them. Arthur Gerkis,...

Video sharing site Vimeo, in a bubbly and whimsical blog post, outlined a slew of new changes to the site, many of which it says were inspired by user requests. The video page received a facelift, and now it features a wider video player, a cleaner interface, and a reorganization of various shortcuts and tools. Browsing is improved, as is...

AT&T and Sprint have had their fair share of battles lately, especially with Sprint's strong opposition to the now defunct proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. In the latest battle between the two wireless carriers, AT&T is attacking Sprint for divesting some of its infrastructure and relying on roaming agreements for voice...

According to a leaked product lineup, it would appear that RIM is slimming down its product line up in order to focus resources on its next-generation BlackBerry devices that are expected in the second half of this year. Even so, we could still see two BlackBerry Curve smartphones as well as a slightly tweaked new PlayBook tablet in the next...

If there were any lingering doubts about Apple CEO Tim Cook being capable of keeping the momentum going that Steve Jobs initiated before his untimely death, go ahead and toss them out the window. Apple last night announced quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, both record numbers for the Cupertino...

Clearwire's had a rough, wild ride so far, but things may be turning around for the fledgling wireless company. This week, the 4G broadband company reported selected preliminary financial and operating results for fourth quarter 2011. Record quarterly revenues of approximately $362 million are estimated for fourth quarter 2011, representing...

Is Powerline networking making a comeback? Possibly! After years of remaining relatively off the radar, Powerline tech has been popping up way more often of late. This week, Cisco announced a suite of Linksys HomePlug AV Powerline solutions that allow consumers to use their home network by using their existing home electrical wiring. The HomePlug...

Long before "Google" became both a noun and a verb, put Mountain View on the (proverbial) map, and became one of the wealthiest and most powerful companies on the planet, there were two young fellows named Larry and Sergey that met at Stanford University in 1995. The in-between parts are the subject of the entertaining and informative interactive...

Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced "speedy") protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that's already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation...

Pantech's new dual-core smartphone and its waterproof tablet are now available through AT&T. The wireless carrier is offering a bundled deal with both the smartphone and the tablet for just $250 with a contract. Of course, you'll need the appropriate data plans for both devices. Both of these devices feature 4G LTE connectivity and run...

If you don’t have it already, surely you’ve seen some of your friends’ Facebook profiles converted to the new Timeline format: a large, (probably low-res) wide picture with a little profile pic inset on the lower left, a bit of personal info below that, and a two-column stream of stuff about them and their personal histories,...

You may have played Super Mario Bros. on a 65-inch television before, and you might have even collected coins on an HDTV much larger. But have you ever chucked fireballs at Bowser using a 12-foot wide Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller? Sure it's insanity, but it's also possible on the world's largest game controller, a massive...

Boxee added Live TV to its services. With this addition, Boxee claims the Boxee Box is the only mainstream set top box to combine over the air broadcast TV with Internet content. With the addition of Live TV, you'll get the ability to edit and rename channels, see social channel listings (including seeing what your friends are watching), the...

Texas Instruments, maker of the popular OMAP processor line and those pricey calculators high school math teachers insist their students bring to class, announced fourth quarter revenue of $3.42 billion, net income of $298 billion, and earnings per share of 25 cents, all of which exceeded the company's expectations. "Revenue in the fourth...

Haven't found the Droid you've been looking for? Maybe the Droid RAZR Maxx is the one you've been waiting on, and if that's the case, your wait is almost over. Verizon Wireless today announced that the Droid RAZR Maxx will be available to purchase on January 26, 2012 for $300 with a new two-year service agreement. The RAZR Maxx is a slender...

The latest member of Antec’s gaming chassis family is the Three Hundred Two, a case that features eight expansion slots, eleven drive bays (3 x 5.25-inch, 6 x 3.5-inch, and 2 dedicated 2.5-inch), 170mm of clearance for the CPU cooler, and 318mm for up to three graphics cards. The Three Hundred Two supports ATX, microATX, and Mini-ITX...

The original A-Series APU line-up didn’t feature any enthusiast-targeted products, but AMD quickly reacted to the A-Series’ mostly favorable reception with a new flagship, dubbed the A8-3870K Black Edition, which we’ll be showing you here today. In its default configuration, the A8-3870K is a slight upgrade from the A8-3850,...

We tell ya, iOS gets all the great apps. Epson has just announced the iProjection app, which wirelessly projects from the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. It's the first projection app for wirelessly displaying documents and photos to Epson projectors, allowing mobile professionals and educators the freedom to present content wirelessly with ease....

Sony may be most likely to be associated with their VAIO notebooks and slimmer-than-slim HDTVs, but the company's camera modules are pretty stellar. The NEX line of mirrorless cameras are giving everyone else in that market a run for their money, and now the company is unveiling a next-gen back-illuminated CMOS image sensor that's more capable...

For all the ballyhooing over Apple's restrictive license for its iBooks 2 initiative, users seemed eager to flock to Cupertino's virtual book store and download in droves. To wit, All Things D is reporting that more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from Apple's iBooks Store within just the first three days of availability, a staggering...

It's been awhile since we covered the announcements coming out of the Building Windows 8 blog and there have been a number of interesting new articles published. We've got three of the biggest discussed below: New Network Management: Windows 7 made connecting to a WiFi network easy, but managing a 3G connection can be more troublesome. As...

It may have taken forever and a day, but owners of iPhone 4S smartphones and iPad 2 tablet PCs running the latest stable build of iOS (5.0.1) can finally jailbreak their Apple gear. Don't take it for granted. The Chronic Dev Team, which unveiled the iOS jailbreak code on Green Poison, said hacking the A5 isn't exactly a walk in the park. "The...

The U.S. Supreme Court put to rest any discussion of whether or not law enforcement needs to get a warrant to stick a GPS tracking device on your car. The answer is a unanimous “yep”. All nine court justices agreed that placing a GPS tracking device on someone’s vehicle without a warrant constitutes an unlawful search, per...

Do you want to know why Google forked over a whopping $1.65 billion in stock to acquire YouTube a little over five years ago? It's because the sultan of search recognized back then that YouTube had the potential to be more than just a hub for crappy quality home videos. Either Google was right, or YouTube viewers simply don't care about quality....

After the arrest in New Zealand of MegaUploads founder Kim Dotcom and shutdown of the site over allegations of digital piracy, any and all sites that facilitate file sharing should take notice. At least one, FileSonic.com, is taking steps to distance itself from that kind of negative attention from law enforcement. It announced, via a simple...

CES 2012 started the next netbook revolution, with Intel's newest Atom CPUs at the helm. Today, HP is (re)joining the crowd, with the newest Mini machine launching. The HP Mini 1104 is the latest Mini for business in education. It's priced at $399, weighs 2.78 pounds and has a 10.1" display. There's also a 93% full-size keyboard, a battery...

Sony announced new CPU options for its S Series of laptops. The 13-inch and 15-inch S Series models now offer the newest generation of Intel Core processors with Core i7 options. The S Series features Hybrid Graphics (AMD Radeon HD 6470M or AMD Radeon HD 6630M), optical drives (including Blu-ray Disc options), backlit keyboards, options for...

The TouchSmart 520-1070 is a fairly remarkable AIO equipped with high-end hardware and a robust selection of software, all of which comes wrapped in a 23-inch touchscreen display with a speaker bar blasting out Beats Audio. Any fears that HP's recent preoccupation with righting its ship would result in a degraded product line go right out...

CES 2012 may be over, but Mobile World Congress is just around the corner. We're already expecting a number of big announcements in the smartphone space, with most of them surrounding the idea of quad-core handsets. Rumor has it that HTC and Samsung have some quad-core smartphones up their sleeves, and now, new information suggests LG may...

Speaking of reshuffling! RIM's not the only company making some changes today, as Hitachi's flat-panel TV business is also looking to try on a new dress. The company nnounced that, with the goal of building a business management structure more closely linked to market, Hitachi Consumer Business Group features flat-screen TV business from FY...

RIM's co-CEOs just stepped down. The two men that founded the company that made BlackBerry a raging success have finally caved to mounting pressure to innovate and keep up with Android, iOS and the rest of the growing mobile landscape. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie are stepping down, with existing COO Thorsten Heins to take over as the...

The CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. We spent some time earlier this fall discussing the new TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) with company CTO Russell Fish, but while the idea is...

The battle between HP and Oracle over the future of the Itanium processor has gotten large enough to pull Intel into the courtroom, but the CPU manufacturer successfully appealed to a judge to allow it to keep certain documents confidential rather than turning them over to Oracle. For those of you just tuning in, the entire spat kicked off...

If you’re a DIY electronics geek, Adafruit should be one of your favorite playgrounds. The open source hardware maker’s site offers a plethora of kits, parts, plans, and other electronic miscellany, and it recently announced FLORA, a wearable electronics platform. FLORA is a tiny board that measures just 1.75 inches in diameter,...

It appears Asus left a little something extra for the business crowd post-Consumer Electronics Show (CES). There's a product page for the B23E "Pro Notebook for Business Pros" (we'll just call it an Ultrabook) on Asus' website, and it's a pretty slick looking device. The chassis is made of magnesium-aluminum alloy and features brushed motif,...

What a difference a couple of weeks make. About this time two weeks ago, U.K. games retailer GamePlay was listing Diablo III's release date as February 3, 2012, and there was at least one Best Buy brick and mortar location with a Diablo III advert announcing availability on February 1, 2012, plenty of time to get your hack and slash on before...

Ever heard of Touchtv? Now you have. LG Electronics and Touchtv announced a global partnership that'll bring Touchtv technology to LG Smart TVs. Touchtv will be available to tens of millions of viewers on their LG Smart TVs. With Touchtv, LG Smart TVs offer viewers innovative capabilities such as watching the biggest trending events at any...

HTC and... IBM? Yep. Two seemingly unrelated companies are coming together, with a recent TechWeekEurope report noting that IBM and HTC have "struck up a partnership that could make the Taiwanese phone maker a major enterprise player." In the enterprise, RIM has traditionally had a strong grip on smartphone buyers, with the iPhone making a...

Netflix was a darling, but it's hard to keep up appearances in the ever-changing world of technology. Quikster didn't help matters, nor did Netflix's decision to seriously raise rates for those wanting DVD rentals in addition to streaming. And for 2012, the company has a plan to change things up a bit in an effort to turn the ship around....

Zoho, a provider of online business, productivity, and collaboration applications, experienced a brief power outage Friday, taking its products and services offline for several hours. According to Zoho’s blog, the outage began at 8:25am PST, and even when power was restored by 9:15am, the company had a lot of work to do to get its service...

Even though it's illegal to print your own money, the end result of what Intel's doing isn't all that much different. We're not suggesting the Santa Clara chip maker is running afoul of the law in any way, but when you report full-year revenue of $54 billion, as Intel just did, the results are the same -- money to burn. It was a record year...

Your PC (and maybe you) likely has a connection with DVI or VGA, a pair of interfaces that have seemingly been around since cavemen first discovered the computer. It hasn't actually been that long, however both are about to enter legacy status as a number of computer vendors and display makers start shunning DVI and VGA over the the next few...

Notion Ink is a name you don't hear too much of anymore, partly because its first generation Adam tablet has been overshadowed by the current crop of powerul Android slates. The other reason is because the company wasn't ready to announce its Adam II tablet... until now. Texas Instruments has partnered up with Notion Ink to provide the Adam...

Hitting the slopes soon? Taking your goggles? We'll bet they aren't as great as these. Zeal Optics has announced their new iON Goggles with HD video and phone capabilities. These ski goggles actually have an HD camera embedded in them in order to capture videos and photos while standing still or on the move. iON by Zeal Optics was born out...

Every so often, a technology comes across that's just too good to ignore, even if it doesn't directly impact handheld gizmos at the moment. BASF and Philips have combined to create one of those; it's an OLED lighting solution for use as a transparent car roof. They're calling this a breakthrough in the industry, and we believe it. The OLEDs...

During CES 2012, the SD Association put forth a release that specified a new Wireless LAN SD standard that would effectively allow any company producing Secure Digital cards to embed Wi-Fi into their cards. At first blush, it sounds great. Unless you're Eye-Fi. The deal is pretty simple: Eye-Fi has been selling Wi-Fi SD cards for years now,...

Polycom is working to spread its RealPresence video collaboration platform far and wide, and it now has Lenovo as a compatriot. Lenovo will soon be offering Polycom’s RealPresence HD Video and HD Voice on some of its laptops and tablets. Polycom’s RealPresence products deliver HD video and voice collaboration tools to the enterprise....

It seems that there are a lot of people who aren't taking Microsoft very seriously when it comes to competing in the smartphone marketplace. However, various well-known analyst firms, including IDC, Gartner, and iSuppli, believe Windows Phone could actually overtake iOS and become the second most popular smartphone platform by 2015. The head...

The Chinese New Year falls on Monday, January 23, 2012, and to get a head start, Spire today introduced its new BlackDragon line of power supplies. The new PSUs comply with the ATX Version 2.3 specification and boast an advanced circuit design with "Japanese grade A components," Spire says. Spire's a bit vague on the specifics, but digging...

Motherboard makers have long gone after the enthusiast crowd by implementing overclocking friendly features into their products, and these days companies get just as excited about benchmarking and OCing world records as end users do. Take MSI, for example, which is happy as can be that its X79A-GD65 (8D) was part of an overclocked system that...

Months after unveiling its TWC TV app for iPad and weeks hence from bringing a non-streaming version of it (“My TWC”) to Android smartphones and tablets, Time Warner Cable announced that TWC TV is now available on the iPhone, as well. iPhone users who also have broadband Internet in the home can use the app to stream live TV to...

Here's a nice treat for AMD Radeon HD 7970 videocard owners as you get ready to end the work day and head into weekend. The Santa Clara chip maker just released its 8.921.2 RC11 AMD Radeon HD 7900 driver so all you early adopters can squeeze a little bit of extra performance out of your graphics card. Performance highlights include up to a...

Acer's Aspire A0722 is now available through AT&T. This 11.6-inch netbook targets enterprise and consumer users by offering a portable and thin design with key usability features such as a full-size keyboard and multiple ports. The Aspire A0722 can connect to AT&T's HSPA+ network. The A0722 offers three USB ports, a VGA out connector,...

When we first received the new NVIDIA Tegra 3-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime for testing, we had solid communication from both Asus and NVIDIA that this tablet was one of Google's test vehicles for their upcoming Android 4.0 operating system, also referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich. Besides the fact that the folks at Google have a bit...

FuelBand? Well, we've heard of stranger names for products, and perhaps Nike's attempting to catch a few odd stares here. The athletic company just announced a new wristband that tracks and measures everyday movement to motivate and inspire people to be more active. Activities can now be measured through a new metric called NikeFuel: the more...

More memory, more problems? Can't say that NAND is causing issues for Samsung the way intellectual property lawsuits are, but either way, the company's pushing out a new highly efficient embedded multi-chip memory for the marketplace to pore over. Just this week the company started producing embedded multi-chip package (eMCP) memory for use...

Microsoft is doing a bit of celebrating right now, if we had to guess. The company just wrapped up another quarter, and the profits are rolling in. They today announced quarterly revenue of $20.89 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, a 5% increase from the prior year period. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share...

Intel announced its Q4 and end-of-year results with $54B in revenue and $17.5 billion in operating income, both records for the CPU giant. Q4 income was $13.9B, driven by a 17% rise in sales from the PC Client Group. Revenue growth was positive across all sectors save for Atom; sales of the diminutive processor fell 57% year on year, to $167...

Apple announced its new foray into education today with a presentation that included details on iBooks 2 (and the digital textbooks available therein), iBooks Author (an app for the creation of digital textbooks), and the latest on iTunes U. iBooks 2 Apple wants to reinvent textbooks, and it’s starting with iBooks 2. Via the free iBooks...

You could almost hear the collective groans from gamers who discovered that Sony's PlayStation Network is offline today. Could it be that Sony is once again the victim of a hacker attack, one in which the real victims are online players who just want to get their gaming groove on? And worse yet, does this mean everyone's accounts have been...

Who needs a wad of cash in their wallet dragging them down? If that's how you feel, you'll be thrilled with AT&T's new data plans for smartphone and tablet customers. The plans, which launch this Sunday, January 22, 2012, are designed to "give customers more data and value," but that additional data and value comes at the cost of higher...

The creative hardware designers at Shogun Bros. aren't afraid to get a little funky, which would explain their Chameleon X-1 Wireless Gamepad Mouse, a dual-purpose input devices that functions as both a gamepad and a mouse, just like its name implies. The company's new Ballista MK-1 Gaming Mouse doesn't share the same split personality, but...

Kingston Digital added another member to the SSDNow family with the SSDNow V+200, a drive designed with speed in mind--fast startup, data access, and copying of files. Equipped with SATA 6Gbps, a SandForce SF-2281 processor, and sequential read/write speeds up to 535MBps/480MBps, the SSDNow V+200 is geared for businesses and consumers alike....

The Spectrum by LG is now available from Verizon Wireless. This smartphone features a 4.5-inch True HD display as well as a Qualcomm 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 4G LTE connectivity, an 8MP rear-facing camera, 1.3MP front-facing camera, and support for Dolby Digital Plus. With Dolby Digital Plus, you'll have the ability to stream up to 7.1...

In this latest episode of HotHardware's Two and Half Geeks, Marco, Iyaz and Dave discuss highlights from CES 2012 in Las Vegas, including OCZ's new blistering fast PCI Express and SATA SSD technologies, Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga, Intel Medfield Smartphones, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T, Samsung's Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD, and AMD's...

AOC expanded its monitor lineup with the addition of a new 23-inch flicker-free 3D monitor known as the e2352Phz. This monitor uses FPR 3D technology to help eliminate eyestrain, headaches, and dizziness that some people experience with other 3D display technologies. The e2352Phz offers a HDMI 1.4a input and supports a resolution of 1920 x...

The e-reader game may have its leaders, but the war is far from over. Chegg has just come out of the woodwork in order to launch their new eTextbook Reader, providing students with a cloud-based service to access their eTextbooks on any connected device. Optimized for computers and iPads, Chegg's eTextbook Reader utilizes HTML5 to deliver...

It's the story that just won't end. Just when you thought LightSquared may have given up the game, nope -- here's another punch to the mid-section. LightSquared has just issues a scathing new release that points fingers at testing equipment and again assures the public that their network wouldn't screw with any GPS triangulation. LightSquared...

Ouch. Kodak's had some troubles of late, but now that the end may be near, they're trying everything they can to stay afloat. Samsung is the latest company to get nailed by passing debris, as Eastman Kodak announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., alleging infringement of certain patents related to Kodak...

Intel today unveiled a pilot program that provides warranty protection to overclockers in the event they get a little bit overzealous with pushing the pedal to the metal. For a fee, Intel will provide a one-time replacement of certain processors that were damaged by overclocking and/or over-volting. It's completely optional and in addition...

LG introduced its first LTE-enabled tablet, the Optimus Pad LTE, with an initial launch limited to Korea. (Presumably, the rest of the world will get its hands on the device soon, too.) The Optimus Pad LTE has a dual-core/dual-channel 1.5GHz Qualcomm chip and runs Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). Other features include expandability of up to 32GB...

The video chatting and collaboration aspects of unified communications (UC) are a big deal in the enterprise as companies routinely work with far-flung companies and employ remote workers in droves; for that matter, large companies rely on it as employees working in separate buildings or on different floors need to collaborate. Logitech is...

Yet another Android device is unwrapping Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). This time it's rolling out to Motorola Xoom tablet owners, and not just a select few who opted in to the Motorola Feedback Network. Now that Motorola has had a week to see how its tablet handles the upgraded OS, it's giving the OTA update its stamp of approval so anyone...

If you've always wanted to spend a small fortune on a professional camera designed specifically for digital cinematography, today just happens to be your lucky day. Canon's new EOS C300 Cinema is available for pre-order for a cool $15,999 with free shipping, so technically this is a sub-$16,000 camera, in case that helps you pitch it to your...

Don't worry Android smartphone fans, now that your platform of choice is on top (in terms of market share), it's probably going to stay there for awhile. The latest data from market research firm Nielsen bear this out, pegging 46.3 percent of all smartphone owners choosing Android in the fourth quarter of 2011. At the same time, it was the...

Think Alienware, and you likely think big—full-sized towers, liquid cooling solutions, and multi-GPU configurations. The company's latest X51 system, however, is aimed at gamers who want a system they can slip into a nook, while still allowing for some upgrades post-purchase. "The Alienware X51 allows us to bring the exciting nature...

Genius announced a new battery-free wireless mouse that can be recharged in just three minutes. The new DX-ECO BlueEye Mouse will work on nearly any surface including dusted glass and marble. This plug and play mouse also features an ergonomic design and adjustable dpi (800/1600 dpi). The DX-ECO BlueEye Mouse comes with a 2.4GHz USB Pico receiver...

If you want to get your hands on the DROID RAZR but aren't sure you want to spend $300, Verizon Wireless has a new option for you. The wireless carrier is now offering the DROID RAZR, minus the previously included 16GB microSD card, for $100 less than the initial price offering. With this promotion, you'll get the same DROID RAZR smartphone...

As is always the case, CES 2012 was a complete blur of big product announcements, bleeding-edge technology and a mass of humanity clamoring to see it all. Our coverage of the event and the various product announcements came so fast and furious that, unless you were checking the page every few minutes (not a bad idea actually), you probably...

Like flash memory? Like good looks? pureSilicon has plenty of both, as evidenced by their introductions this evening. They're launching launched a new line of enterprise-focused storage devices, including the Kage K1 USB Flash Drive — an “impossibly thin” (4.5 mm) USB 3.0-based SSD drive. It leverages the technology pioneered...

LCDs are brilliant, sure, but what about a transparent one? Yep, Samsung has one. Today, they announced that they'll be expanding the transparent display market with production of a 46-inch transparent LCD panel, beginning this month. Younghwan Park, senior vice president of LCD marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics, said, “Transparent...

Flash drives have been around for ages and ages, but the newer USB 3.0 ones are still taking shape. Sony's joining the group with a new Micro Vault MACH, which is the first SuperSpeed USB drive from the company. It's available in 8GB/16GB/32GB/64GB sizes, and supports transfer speeds up to 120MB/sec (read) and 90MB/sec (write). It's encased...

In early November, Amazon launched the Kindle Lending Library program. It allows Amazon Prime subscribers and Kindle owners to "borrow" one book a month, return it, and check out another. There's no cost to the reader, though Amazon actually purchases a copy of each book at their own expense in order to satisfy contractual obligations to authors....

Earlier this week, we told you about OnlineEducation.net's predictions for the growth of digital textbooks. It appears Apple agrees there is a big future in digital textbook sales. According to various reports, Apple is planning to reveal a new product at a press conference this Thursday that will change the way students use textbooks. The...

For all the computing power and innovation built into today’s devices, connectivity is always a bottleneck. Even as streaming, video chats and meetings, and mobile connectivity becomes a normal part of computing life, the limitations of network speeds are constantly there, reminding us how far the technology and associated rollouts still...

If there's one fact that's emerged after Steve Jobs' death this fall, it's that the man hated Android. Really hated. As in, declared thermonuclear war on it and dedicated himself (and Apple's bank account) to wiping it from existence. In light of Steve's Khan-like level of loathing for Google's operating system, it's a wee bit surprising to...

Apple has made available its "Apple Supplier Responsibility 2012 Progress Report" in which the Cupertino company claims it conducted a total of 229 audits, up 80 percent over 2010. More than 100 of those were performed at factories that Apple has never audited before. Facilities that were re-examined "consistently showed fewer violations,"...

Remember the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit from a few years back? Microsoft appeared to have learned its lesson and enjoyed a much smoother roll out with Windows 7, and looking ahead, the Redmond software giant has already determined what will be required on the hardware side to run Windows 8. Microsoft actually released its "Windows 8 Hardware...

If the challenge is to go big or go home, don't wait up for Ideum to pull into its driveway. Ideum specializes in designing and creating interactive computer-based exhibits, multi-touch installations, rich Internet applications, and social networking sites for museum and Web visitors, and their latest creations is the MT65 Presenter, a 65-inch...

NZXT is into options; its new Source 810 chassis (available in black or white) is designed to offer gamers a bevy of different ways of easily configuring their preferred cooling setup, from liquid cooling to a slew of fans to a more quiet setup with the vents closed. The case offers support for 280mm radiators (the top 5.25-inch plates comes...

Shuttle's become famous for their barebones PC options, and the company's newest box is as tiny as ever. The XH61 is a 3-litre PC for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, measuring just 7cm high. The Intel H61 Express chipset selected for this new product supports second-generation Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors for the LGA1155 socket with...

If you've been reading here for any length of time, you'll know that we're big fans of mechanical keyboards. And now, one of the famous ones is making the move to Mac. Das Keyboard today introduced a new version of its award-winning Model S keyboard designed to appeal to a fan base also known for its extreme loyalty - the Mac crowd. The company's...

The Transformer Prime saga is just getting strange. After being one of the most highly anticipated Android tablets to date, Asus saw numerous troubles with Wi-Fi and GPS complains aplenty. The company has since removed the mention of GPS from the Prime's specification list, but that's not quieting the masses. To add fuel to a raging fire,...

The Internet's opposition to the Congressional bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) has reached a fever pitch, even as the bill's primary backers have first retreated from its most damning provisions, then fled altogether. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, announced today that the site would go dark to protest the bill. "Student warning! Do...

The cost of textbooks has driven every college student crazy. They’re pricey, new editions flow from the textbook pipeline with great frequency, and schlepping a backpack full of them across campus every day is exhausting. Printing textbooks (or anything, for that matter) is expensive, so it makes lots of sense for digital textbooks...

First, the good news: the Zappos server that holds its customers sensitive financial information (such as credit card numbers) was not hacked this weekend. The bad news, however, is that hackers made off with just about every other type of customer information they could want, including names; email, billing, and shipping addresses; phone...

We don't want to go so far as to call the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the Rocky Balboa of technology conventions, but let's face it, there's a bit of uncertainty in regards to its longevity. In the past few years, CES didn't seem to bustle to the same extent it once did, and the gut punch this year came when Microsoft announced...

It's been a long time since Amazon simply sold books, and these days you can get everything from diapers in bulk to videogames for all platforms through the online shopping site. And lest anyone think game sales are merely an afterthought for Amazon, it's become quite the booming business, both for physical and digital downloads. So what were...

It takes money to make money, and it takes it a whole bunch of cash to make semiconductors. Case in point: Samsung is reportedly holding a massive debt sale in which it will sell about $1 billion in bonds to fund its chip plant operations in the U.S. It's the first major overseas debt sale for Samsung in over 10 years, Reuters reports. Among...

In a recent announcement, Amazon said the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Free Usage Tier will now include Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances running Microsoft Windows Server. If your business is eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier, you'll be able to run Windows Server in Amazon's cloud for up to 750 hours per month at no charge. Amazon...

We still can't get over the irony: Although Microsoft now owns Skype, the video calling service is still not available on Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. Microsoft has promised Skype will be available someday to Windows Phone users, but that's still a pretty vague timeframe. It would appear the Windows Phone Skype app may be nearing its...

A few weeks back, we took a look at the Core i7-3960X, Intel’s first desktop processor to feature the company’s Sandy Bridge-E microarchitecture. If you're unfamiliar with the chip, Sandy Bridge-E is the ‘tock’ in Intel’s tick-tock release schedule cadence that bridges the gap between first-gen Sandy Bridge-based...

Ouch. We knew the movie studios didn't like Netflix very much, but this is just brutal. In the viewpoint of the movie studios, they want people to go out and buy new DVD and Blu-ray releases. A rental provides only a fraction of the profit that an outright purchase would, but with $1 Redbox rentals and unlimited Netflix streaming for just...

Verizon's "DROID" branding has worked out well for them. And the DROID RAZR Maxx is the latest in a long line of potent devices that rely on Google's Android operating system. The RAZR Maxx, up until this point, was barely official. But now, there's an entire product portfolio page on Motorola's website, including a snippet that mentions a...

There's something pretty interesting happening in the world of online programming: original content. While Hulu and Netflix were used to simply acting as an online pipe to funnel other programming through, recently they have both decided to start investing in making their own content. In other words, creating programming that can only be seen...

"Smart" is still in, and while 3D took a back seat to a lot of other things at CES 2012, intelligence is still at the front of most companies' minds. Samsung is tapping into a technology developed by Flixster and Rovi, where consumers will be able to import their existing Blu-ray and DVD collections from participating studios into the UltraViolet...

It's been a few years since Microsoft really shot itself in the foot by making itself look really unfriendly, and someone at the company must've been missing the pain. A careful read of the company's "Windows 8 Hardware Certification Requirements" document has revealed draconian policies that require vendors to block the installation of other...

Small is in, and there's little questioning that. And the latest "small" gizmo is coming to us courtesy of HSTi. The company's Moboplay Pocket Media Player is said to be the world's smallest, measuring just 60mm x 64mm, which is smaller than a credit card. Even being that compact, it's capable of playing back 1080p material via HDMI, and there's...

For a company that makes its bones off of making its own products seem outdated every six months or so, Apple seems committed to recycling used electronics. Apple expanded its recycling program in the UK, France, and Germany; now, the company has (or at least participates in) such programs all over the world, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil,...

Mobile payments are quite clearly riding the wave into the future, and with Google Wallet taking charge on just a few phones, there's plenty of opportunity for others to come in and steal some of that pie. Visa has recently begun the certification of smartphones for use as Visa Mobile Payment Devices. In particularly, NFC-enabled smartphones...

Perhaps Arfa Karim is a name you're not familiar with. A Pakistani student and programming prodigy, Arfa Karim became the world's youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in 2004 when she was just 9 years old, a title she held onto until 2008. Now, at the age of 16 years old, this talented young Pakistani who had the brightest of futures...

Nokia's Lumia 710 smartphone landed at T-Mobile last week and is available for purchase for a mere $50 with a two-year service agreement (and after a $50 mail-in-rebate). It's a middle-of-the-road Windows Phone device that's fairly decent for the money, but if you're holding out for Nokia's upcoming Lumia 900 smartphone, you don't have too...

Leave it to the creative cooks working in the kitchen at XDA Developers' forums to come up with a way to serve Android 4.0 'Ice Cream Sandwich' (ICS) on Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet device. A locked bootloader made things more challenging than they had to be, but as with similar recipes, installing ICS on the Nook Tablet is simply a matter...

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is a big step for the platform, and Google is clearly interested in maintaining some level of uniformity across the ICS-based products created by developers. In a blog post, the Android User Experience Team announced a new site called Android Design, which is chock full of practical advice and guides for anyone...

Goose and Maverick aren't the only ones with a need, a need for speed (that's a Top Gun reference for you young guns out there, not a shout out to EA's Need for Speed series). Apparently AMD isn't content to simply own the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the planet, but it's also flirting with the idea of launching an overclocked version...

Crucial, the Micron-owned maker of memory and storage products, made good on its promise to fix a strange issue plaguing some M4 solid state drive owners. Earlier this month, Crucial said it was hard at work on new firmware that would address an issue causing some M4 SSDs to stall out Windows and kick out a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) with...

GoPro? Nah, it's GoBandit. The company has launched what they're calling the world's first "action cam with integration Wi-Fi" at CES 2012 this week, and while we've seen Wi-Fi make its way into a lot of new stuff recently, this one definitely takes the cake. The first action cam in the world to integrate wireless connectivity, gobandit LIVE...

WOWee ONE, a company well-versed in ultra-portable speakers, and MicroVision, an outfit responsible for a number of ultra-miniature laser display technologies, are joining forces at CES. They're unveiling their collaboration to bring enhanced mobile visual and audio experiences to smartphone and tablet users in more than 120 countries, and...

CES has the keyboards, too. Matias has just released three new units for your iPhone and Mac / PC, and yes, we mean both. The idea here is to create a product that works with a computer and iPhone. "With the press of a button, the keyboard connects to your iPhone. You can type a quick text or Twitter message, and then press again to instantly...

Mark Zuckerberg has every reason to smile; according to analyst Gregory Lyons of iCrossing, Facebook will reach 1 billion users in a matter of months. Facebook has already cruised past 800 million users worldwide, a mark it just hit about 10 seconds ago, and membership continues to increase as users in nations such as India and Brazil join...

More Classmate PCs based on Intel’s Learning Series are coming down the pipe; CTL showed off two new models at CES, as did Lenovo, and both companies are offering traditional clamshell laptop and convertible form factors. CTL’s 2go Classmate PC E12 laptop and 2go Convertible Classmate PC NL3 have 10.1-inch screens and feature a...

Perhaps Dish Network should just pull the plug on Blockbuster completely, but instead it looks like the once popular DVD rental store is destined to die a slow death. The satellite service provider indicated it would be closing more Blockbuster locations in the coming months than originally planned, and those that remain will turn into quasi-Dish...

If you've ever hacked or considered hacking your Android device, you're probably familiar with CyanogenMod. Although there are plenty of custom Android ROMs out there, CyanogenMod is one of the most well-known.  In fact, CyanogenMod just passed 1 million active users. CyanogenMod was created by Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik. Given...

Hulu Plus reached a new milestone at the end of 2011 with 1.5 million paying subscribers. This is pretty impressive when you consider this milestone was reached a little more than a year after the service's official launch. On the company's blog, Jason Kilar, the CEO of Hulu, noted that the number of Hulu Plus subscribers is continuing to...

Samsung isn't among the world's top five PC vendors, not according to IDC or Gartner, both of which lump the manufacturer in the "Others" category behind Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, and Asus. That's just the way it is, though it hasn't stopped Samsung for setting some pretty ambitious goals for itself. One of those goals is to become...

Our coverage of the latest technology on display as CES continues today, with some goodies from Zotac. In addition to offering some hot graphics cars, Zotac has also been innovating in the small form factor and mini-ITX motherboard markets, especially over the last couple of years. As such, it should come as no surprise that Zotac had a number...

The long anticipated launch of Apple's iPhone 4S device in mainland China was cut short after the crowd turned violent. About a thousand people lined up for hours to buy the new iPhone model, some of which waited all night long in freezing weather conditions to be among the first in Apple's Sanlitun store in Beijing. Trouble began when the...

Well, well -- Microsoft seems to be making more money these days from Android than their own mobile OS. As it turns out, Microsoft has good reason to demand royalties from Android, and so any major company selling Android devices is ripe to be plucked for cash. This week, Microsoft and LG hammered out a patent agreement that covers Android...

Plextor's made a few announcements during the CES stretch, and here's another. The company has just revealed a snazzy new PlexEasy DVD/CD burner, which aims to provide PC-free backups. It's a stand-alone optical storage solution, consisting of a compact 8X DVD/CD Writer with a built-in SD/MMC card reader and a USB connector. It has the ability...

If you're lucky enough to live in an area that gets FiOS, you may be interested in picking up some Samsung gear. Verizon and Samsung announced this week that Samsung will be the first consumer electronics manufacturer to commercially introduce the Verizon FiOS TV App to its line of Smart TVs and Smart Blu-ray Players in 2012. The app will...

Our friends at CyberPowerPC were showing off some seriously decked-out gaming rigs this year at CES 2012.  We've always had good experiences with their products here in the lab and the systems on display at CES showcased very impressive build quality, immaculate wire-routing along with impeccable pipe-work for their water...

Weak consumer demand and a limited impact from the Thailand floods in the last part of the year drove PC sales down significantly in the US, while the global market saw a smaller 1.4 percent decline. The impact of the HDD shortage is expected to bite partly in Q1; while the floods hit in Q4, most manufacturers had sufficient inventory levels...

During a presentation today, Target confirmed plans to have "special displays" of Apple products in 25 of its retail stores. Although few details are available regarding the partnership, we would expect the deal to be similar to the deal between Apple and Best Buy in which the big-box electronics store sells Apple products from dedicated mini...

This will make Apple cult members swoon, and on-the-go musicians will at least find it worth checking out: iConnectivity is debuting its new iConnectMUSE, a portable digital audio mini-mixer designed specifically for iOS devices. The iConnectMUSE features six stereo inputs and outputs, two USB ports for other devices, a pair of 1.4-inch in/out...

Just in case you were looking a buzzkill after the chaotic euphoria wrought by CES, here it is: According to the Guardian, dozens of Foxconn workers in the city of Wuhan protested the company’s plan to close the Xbox 360 production line they worked on by threatening to jump from one of the six-story factory buildings. Indeed, a large...

As PC users first and foremost, we can't help but sometimes feel as though we're the red-headed stepchildren of technology (with all due respect to red-headed stepchildren). We're sometimes ignored completely by exclusives that skip the PC platform, and that's why it's so rad to find out Amazon's porting its "Send to Kindle" over to the PC....

It's a new year and already the first Patch Tuesday of Microsoft's monthly Windows update schedule has come and gone. If you ignored the update notification sitting your system tray, take a moment to let Windows Update do its thing, and as a reward for kicking procrastination to the curb, Microsoft will get rid of a BEAST that resides on your...

Well, well, well, it looks as though a Verizon employee "dropped" a carrier document containing the company's latest MAP (minimum advertised price) list for several make and model smartphones, including Motorola's upcoming Droid 4. Lucky for you, the MAP list was picked up and posted online -- strange how that always seems to happen. In any...

Rockchip isn't a name like Qualcomm or Intel, but their in a lot of the lesser-known products that hit lower price points. The Chinese company is here at CES 2012 to reveal the new RK2918 chip for Google's Android 4.0 Operating System, and announce the pending arrival of their eHome Cloud Solution as well. The chip will be featured in a number...

Although MSI isn’t revealing too many details on its new X79 and Z77 motherboards, the engineering samples were out and ready to ogle. As you can see from the photos, we got to look at a trio of the new boards. The Z77A-GD80 and Z77A-GD65 are kind of a pair, with the GD80s typically delivering some more features at a slightly higher...

HDTVs? Yeah, CES 2012 has plenty of those to go around. Panasonic just introduced their 2012 line of Smart Viera Plasma sets, which center on five new points: Networking, Easy Operation, Picture Quality, Eco and Design elements. There's 17" new models, which range in size from 42" to 65". Also new for 2012 is a cloud-based architecture to...

We already told you about some of Gigabyte’s next-gen motherboard technology, but as expected, the company has lots more in the offing, including a bevy of mobile gear and new 28nm Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards. And of course, we have loads of pictures for you. Starting with the upcoming Z77 motherboards, we’ve already seen images...

Wireless HD. A tablet. Together. That's what Amimon and Lenovo have done together here at CES 2012, with Amimon integrating WHDI technology into Lenovo's IdeaPad. The goal? To "enable wireless transmission of content to any TV." There's supposedly "zero" delay (probably a few milliseconds in reality), and it'll evidently work in theory on...

Corsair is launching a brace of mid-tower cases to round out the Obsidian and Carbide series respectively. The new cases are priced at $89.99 for the lower-end 300R and $159 for the more expensive Obsidian lineup. "In the past, enthusiast PC builders had to make the choice between optimal noise reduction and superior cooling capabilities,"...

Corsair announced a new line of SSD products at CES this week, aimed at users who want the performance benefit of these devices without leaping through the hoops of a fresh OS install or shucking out for a high capacity solid state drive. The company claims that using an Accelerator Series cache drive and the Nvelo-developed software that...

Remember when Plextor ruled the optical drive market with premium ODDs that typically performed better than the competition? That was long before the price of CD/DVD burners fell to around the cost of a case of water, and these days Plextor appears fully focused on solid state drives (SSDs). Announced at CES 2012 is Plextor's new M3 Pro Series,...

Using its new Phase Change cooling system (set to be available yet this quarter) and its professional overclockers, ORIGIN PC now offers the GENESIS system with a ridiculous 5.7GHz overclock. The Phase Change Technology can allegedly chill the CPU out as low as -40 degrees C. The above is a pretty cool (pun intended) bit of news, but ORIGIN...

Microsoft made a surprise announcement a couple of weeks ago when it informed the tech world that the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would be the last one in which the Redmond software giant gives a keynote or rents floor space. The company is pulling out after this year, at least as far as major presence goes, a decision it made...

The folks at Turtle Beach know a thing or three about ear candy and so it's no surprise that the gurus of gaming audio used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to unveil a couple of new headsets, the Ear Force XP300 and Ear Force XP400. Both are fully wireless operating on dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, and are optimized for...

Just about every company represented at CES has a theme or two it’s focusing on at the show, and for Seagate, this year the spotlight is on mobile storage technologies, hybrid storage, and of course, speed. Seagate is showing off its update to the GoFlex Satellite drive, a battery-powered, mobile storage solution that streams media to...

4K? That's the buzz here at CES 2012, where a load of television makers were introduction (or at least showcasing) 4KTVs. JVC was on hand to display the "world's first handheld 4K camcorder," which is definitely fairly small given the video capabilities. It can capture, record and play video images at four times the resolution of HDTV. It's...

DRM? Yeah, it's still a thing. Today at CES, Rovi announced Rovi Digital Copy Solution, a DRM solution that'll enable onsumers to access their physical DVD and Blu-ray Disc movie collections via the cloud. Rovi Digital Copy Solution integrates into consumer electronics devices and PC applications, allowing them to recognize a movie on physical...

T-Mobile's on the move again, tonight expanding their 4G portfolio with the Galaxy S Blaze 4G. Moreover, they've confirmed the 1/11 retail availability date of the 4G-capable Nokia Lumia 710. The Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G will be the third smartphone to take advantage of 4G HSPA+ 42 technology running on America's Largest 4G Network. Featuring...

We’re still fighting our way through the insanity that is the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, but wanted to take a break to share some more juicy news with you all. We just got out of a meeting with the folks at AMD in which they showed us some current and future APU offerings, new I/O technology, and provided a bit of info...

Today, we got a chance to see the new ViewSonic EXOdesk. This new interactive touch screen tabletop uses an HTML5-powered interface created by EXOPC. As you can see from the video below, the EXOdesk supports gesture-based control of applications and multi-touch input. The demo we saw featured a 32-inch screen and was powered by an external...

After years of work and a few false starts, Intel is finally ready to take the plunge into the smartphone market. At the CES keynote tonight, the CPU giant is officially launching Medfield, the 32nm smartphone SoC it's built to take it into the next generation of smartphones (and a few tablets). The chip---now officially named the Atom Z2460--is...

Dell just announced the thin and powerful new XPS 13 ultrabook. This razor thin ultrabook measures less than a quarter of an inch thick at its thinnest point and weighs as little as 2.99 pounds. The XPS 13 will feature a 13-inch display in a 12-inch form factor. For durability, the XPS 13 features a bonded edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass display....

We’re making our way around the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show and have some interesting tid-bits to share with you all from our tours of the Intel and SuperMicro booths in the Central and South Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center.             Not surprisingly, much of Intel’s...

Razer took the wraps off of “Fiona”, a PC gaming tablet concept design, at CES this week. Though just a concept design, Fiona portends exciting things in the portable gaming world--specifically, the idea that portable gaming can be as immersive and natively awesome as desktop PC gaming. Razer is packing in an Intel Core i7 processor...

We recently got a chance to see the all new Samsung Galaxy Note which will be coming to AT&T’s network. This new device represents a bit of a crossover between the tablet and a smartphone with its 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display that supports a resolution of 1280x800s. One of the unique features of the Samsung Galaxy Note is its...

Named for a mean-sounding deity, iBUYPOWER’s Erebus GT is the latest rig in the Erebus series and features a reduced size and reduced price without sacrificing features. Cooling is a major focus of the Erebus GT, with a top fill port, a reservoir that is accessible via the front panel, three radiators, and 13mm tubing capable of pumping...

If you’re wondering what treats are in store for the next round of Gigabyte motherboards, look no further. The company unveiled a host of new motherboard technologies that will debut on its 7-series motherboards. Gigabyte now boasts of a 3D Power engine that affords users digital control over and monitoring of power to all the main areas...

Prior to the start of this year's CES 2012 show, a number of OEMs were showcasing their latest products at various hotel venues throughout the bustling city of Las Vegas, Nevada.  Of course OCZ Technology was first on our list of suites to visit, in an effort to satiate our need for blinding storage speed -- and as usual, Team OCZ did...

In a lavish suite at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Asus set up a number of existing and upcoming products for eager members of the technology press to ogle and get some hands-on time. In the suite, we had a chance to checkout a handful of upcoming X79 motherboards, nettops, netbooks, notebooks, and even a few tablets and a smartphone. One...

Fancy yourself too cool for regular RAM that any ordinary Joe can get their hands on? Then what you're looking for is a kit made out of Northern White Rhinoceros hide or some other critically endangered species. Of course if you find one, it'll cost a king's ransom and you'll be letting the world know your moral compass is severely busted...

Corsair today announced on the second day of CES a couple of additions to its PC case lineup, including the builder-friendly Obsidian Series 550D ultra-quiet premium case, and the compact Carbide Series 300R gaming chassis, both of which sport an all-black interior and exterior theme. So other than size, what sets these enclosures apart? The...

Razer always seems to have something up its sleeve every time the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas rolls around, and this year one of the things wiggling around at Razer is a new rodent designed for RPG and Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) fans. It's the Naga Hex Gaming Mouse and it sports six large thumb buttons to bind...

Google TV's getting a second chance; will it count? Sony has taken to CES 2012 to unveil two new home devices powered by the Google TV platform. Sony was one of the industry's first to launch the Google TV products in 2010, and is now taking another step into the future of the home entertainment convergence. The NSZ-GS7 Network Media Player...

What if the memory card you used each day, only got bigger? Growing memory would be a technology to end all technologies, but until then, we'll just have to settle for buying more of the stuff. SanDisk has introduced the world's fastest 128GB SDXC card at CES 2012, which is capable of capturing up to ten hours of Full HD 3D video. It features...

With both LG and Samsung introducing huge OLED TVs at CES 2012 this year, Sony just couldn't be left out. The company today announced that it has developed the next-generation self-emitting display, "Crystal LED Display," and presented a Full HD, 55-inch prototype model. Yep, that's another 55-inch television, but there's no OLED to be found...

In addition to a number of new laptops, smartphones, and a TV, Lenovo announced the IdeaPad Yoga Ultrabook today. This new multi-mode notebook meets the specifications for an ultrabook and also has a 360-degree flip-and-fold design. As you can see from this demo video below, this ultrabook also meets the 10-finger touch requirement. What’s...

Prior to the start of the CES 2012 show in Las Vegas this week, major players in the storage industry kicked off their mini conference, in an effort to get the buzz going early in consumer and enterprise storage. Of course Micron and Crucial were there in force to show us their latest SSD technologies, starting with their big, bad P320h PCI...

We weren’t sure what to expect from NVIDIA’s press event at CES, but the big news turned out to be that ASUS is shipping the world’s first Ice Cream Sandwich tablet--starting today--an ASUS Transformer Prime, which boasts the NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage and hosted an impressive demonstration...

The next generation of ZOTAC’s ZBOX mini-PC platform is here in the form of three new models--the ZBOX ID81, ID80 and AD04. New enhancements include an external WiFi antenna and integrated Bluetooth 3.0 for connectivity as well as a Media Remote designed to work with the likes of Windows Media Center. The barebones systems require just...

Asus is pumping out a fair number of product announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and one of them relates to an upgraded version of its Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. The new tablet -- model TF700T -- will sport the same body style and slip into the same docking station as the original Prime (TF201), but will come...

Acer's been in the Ultrabook game since the day it started (which wasn't very long ago) and rolled out the first model back in September. Apparently pleased with the reception and feeling encouraged about the form factor's future, Acer bounces into the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with new Ultrabook models in tow. One of them is the new...

Marvell is doing some magnificent things in the storage space lately. Hot on the heels of co-developing the "Kilimanjaro" native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform with OCZ (demonstrated via OCZ's new Z-Drive R5, which we covered the announcement here), Marvell on Monday unveiled its 88SE9230 6Gbps SATA controller powered by HyperDuo embedded...

What if you had a mini, power-efficient computer that smiled at your when it was functioning properly, and frowned when something needed a tweak? It'd sure be better than your current troubleshooting setup, we're certain. Marvell announced today at CES their new "Classroom 3.0" technology, featuring an ARMADA-powered SMILE Plug and a partnership...

Thunderbolt clearly is the port to beat at this year's CES, and LaCie is announcing their latest peripherals at the show. There's the new 2big Thunderbolt Series and the eSATA Hub Thunderbolt series, the latter of which allows users to connect external eSATA drives to their Macs. With speeds up to three times faster than FireWire 800, the...

TV-to-iPad streaming isn't as far-fetched as it once was. Many pay-TV providers have hopped on this bandwagon in a bid to keep customers from cutting the cord, and now even DISH Network is following suit. The company announced today it has enhanced its DISH Remote Access app for the iPad to allow DISH customers to watch thousands of on-demand...

MAINGEAR’s line of gaming desktops are getting a boost in the form of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 and 7970 graphics cards. The SHIFT and F131 series will get the new cards straightaway, and the VYBE line will see it “in the near future”, according to MAINGEAR. We’ve already waxed long about the pros and cons of the 28nm...

CES is rolling in full force right now, and Lenovo's keeping the party started. What's on tap? Let's take a look. For one, there's the IdeaTab S2 10-inch, hailed as one of the lightest 10" tablets available today. There's also the S2 smartphone, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and Android 2.3. Finally, there's the K91 Smart...

More CES? More Lenovo? Yes to both. The company has just launched new laptops in the IdeaPad U Series, Y Series, S Series and Z Series, not to mention new guys in the IdeaCentre desktop range and the K Series desktop line. Oh, and the IdeaCentre B Series all-in-one line. Got all that? The IdeaPad U310 (13.3") and U410 are getting SSDs, Intel...

As expected, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, with partner Marvell, unveiled the XO-3 tablet for CES 2012. The 8-inch tablet features a 1024x768 PixelQi display; 512MB of memory; the Marvell Armada PXA618 SoC; a memory card slot; and USB and audio ports. The operating system will be either be Android or OLPC’s homegrown Linux-based...

I'm fully aware of the oxymoron in the title, because after all, how can a single stream be concurrent? It can't, and that's exactly my point. Netflix got itself in a bit of hot water a few months ago when subscribers reported the streaming service was tightening the reigns on the number of concurrent streams, enforcing a strict limit laid...

Diablo fans were equally disappointed and miffed when Blizzard announced back in September 2011 that it was delaying the release of the franchise's third major installment, Diablo III, into "early 2012." Blizzard was apologetic about the delay, though said in a statement that despite hoping to launch the game in 2011, the publisher "never...

You've probably never driven your car off a cliff or walked aimlessly into a 30-foot hole in the middle of a construction site, but perhaps your travels have taken you "through an unsafe neighborhood" or "in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures." One of Microsoft's latest patents -- No. 8,090,532 -- aims to make such incidents...

Well, that's one way to make an impact. LG has been teasing the world with loads of wild new displays in the days prior to CES 2012, and now that the doors are cracked open, it's this beauty shining through. It's the new Cinema Screen design, and it'll be featured in the new Cinema 3D Smart TVs for 2012. Amazingly, it reduces the bezel to...

When it comes to wild storage performance, few do it better than Fusion-io. The company has cranked on some insane NAND-based storage solutions in the past, but none as crazy as this. At a recent demo, they managed to break one billion (with a B!) IOPS. Yeah, that's many, many more times what even your average PCIe-based solid state drive...

If you walk into any Walmart and head over to the HDTV section, one of the brands that will jump out at you is Vizio, which has built a reputation for building and selling comparatively affordable TV sets. In a way, Vizio is to TVs what Rosewill is to PC parts -- value oriented. Perhaps bored with focusing almost entirely on HDTVs (Vizio also...

The ambitious folks at Vuzix announced plans to develop what they consider the Holy Grail of the wearable display industry, otherwise known as "Smart Glasses." It's all a fancy pants way of describing a pair of see-through HD glasses in a designer sunglasses form factor, but with Web capabilities baked in. "Now after years of internal developments...

Samsung is a company best known for its Android smartphones, high definition television sets, and storage devices, but audio products? Apparently Samsung dabbles in audio gear as well, and to prove it, the company sent us a note announcing its new family of "Your Sound" wired headsets. Samsung EHS-60 "Serious Sound" The new line consists of...

A USB-powered monitor? Yeah, we've seen that. But by and large, these things have been 10" or smaller, mostly meant for travelers who just wanted a quick and dirty way to bust out a second monitor once they arrived at their temporary desk. But AOC has another thing in mind with their 22" USB monitor. The e2251Fwu maintains the same functionality...

More LTE! Celebrate! If you're an AT&T customer waiting to catch up with Sprint and Verizon in the speed department, you just might have a reason to party. The carrier just announced 11 more markets for their 4G LTE rollout, making it available now in 26 total areas including NYC Metro, San Francisco, Los Angeles. This addition makes AT&T...

The high-end camera market is seriously heating up. Just months after Canon's EOS-1D X hit the scene, Nikon's response is now official. It's the D4, and while you may say it's a follow-up to the D3S, it's more like an evolutionary step. There's a new FX-format CMOS sensor (16.2MP), the same ISO range as on the D3S (100 to 12,800 natively),...

TRENDnet is already announcing its next-gen networking products, even though you won’t get to play with them until late this year (unless you’re at CES in a few days). The company’s 1300 Mbps Dual Band Wireless AC Router (TEW-811D), and 1300 Mbps Dual Band Wireless AC Media Bridge (TEW-800MB) utilize the new 802.11ac standard,...

The idea of using an SSD as a caching tool--placing more frequently-used files on the SSD and leaving the rest on a slower storage drive--is a great one, but many users have found that setting up the SSD cache can be tricky. Crucial’s new Adrenaline Solid State Cache Solution offers a slightly more elegant way of configuring such a setup;...

In a post on pastebin (which has been removed, though it is cached here), a hacker group called the Lords of Dharmaraja claimed that it hacked an Indian Military Intelligence server and snagged source codes from a dozen different companies, most notably (apparently) the source code to Symantec’s Norton Antivirus. The group posted a file...

The “Kilimanjaro” native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, co-developed by OCZ Technology and Marvell, underpins a new PCIe-based storage solution called the Z-Drive R5, an upgrade to OCZ's Z-Drive R4. Kilimanjaro is designed to enable improved scalable performance and redundancy as well as lowered costs for data centers...

You shouldn't take the latest iPad rumors with a grain of salt, you should take them with seven seas full of salt, and then some. The idea that Apple will release an iPad 3 and a supercharged iPad 4 both in the same year is beyond ludicrous -- either that, or this editor will eat a giant sized crow in nine months -- yet that's what news and...

Users over on Crucial's support forum have been complaining about a strange error that manifests on certain M4 solid state drives (SSDs) after precisely 5,200 hours of use. It appears to only affect the 64GB models, with affected drives kicking Windows systems into a BSoD with an error code that reads 0x00000f4. Crucial acknowledged the error...

Is your DSLR camera suddenly strutting around with a goofy grin on its LCD face? If so, it must have heard about Sony's new high-speed XQD memory cards that support the recently adopted XQD specification for high-speed, high performance digital image capture. Of course, in order to take advantage of the new cards, your DSLR has to support...

Research In Motion has reportedly trimmed its list of future BlackBerry 10 devices down to just a single handset, The upcoming device, BlackBerry London. Up until now, RIM was working on the BlackBerry Colt, which was supposed to be the first BlackBerry OS 10 device. Betting everything on just one handset is a risky move--the company is putting...

There's an old saying that goes something like "the best things in life are free."  Then there's another, more cynical proverb that says, "there's no such thing as a free lunch."  While I'm not here to choose sides or recite old proverbs, I'd offer that, in reality, both views are often very true and have merit. Which brings us to...

In the first half of this year, Sprint users in Dallas, Atlanta, Houston and San Antonio will be the first to be able to enjoy Sprint's new 4G LTE network. The move from Sprint's current 4G network technology, WiMAX, to the faster (and seemingly more popular) LTE standard is part of Sprint's overall network strategy known as Network Vision....

Satellite Internet has been a godsend for rural residents for years, but one complaint never dies down: horrible upload rates. ViaSat has been plugging away at improving that for some time now, and a new deal will reportedly bring "affordable" 12Mbps service to market within a couple of weeks. To residents using existing satellite services,...

Headsets at CES? Oh, yes. Turtle Beach, who largely remains unchallenged in the market, is choosing CES to launch a couple of new products. There's the Ear Force X42 Wireless Dolby® Surround Sound Xbox 360 Headset, Ear Force X32 Wireless Stereo Xbox 360 Headset, and replacements for the very popular Ear Force X31 and Ear Force X41 models,...

This just might be one of the wildest new devices to land in 2012. In a world of evolutionary things, the BryteWerks line of high-def digital projectors is truly unique. They're aiming to create a new market, and they seem well on their way. The BryteWerks Model One line of Intel Core CPU-based digital projectors merge state-of-the-industry...

100 cores in a processor? Evidently that's a thing. ZiiLABS, a media processor and platforms company that's also a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative Technology), has just unveiled a 100-core ZMS-40 StemCell Media processor optimized for Android. You read that correctly. The ZMS-40 combines 96 of ZiiLABS' StemCell media processing cores with...

And now, a message from the "Seriously, don't do this" department. Four Taiwanese engineers working for various Intel OEMs were arrested this week by China's Criminal Investigation Bureau for selling so-called "Engineering Samples" (ES) chips on Ebay and pocketing the proceeds. The police recovered 178 CPUs with an estimated worth of $82,590;...

Speed kills--unless you’re a busy professional photographer or videographer, in which case the opposite is true (regarding your equipment). For those folks, Lexar has introduced the industry’s first 1000x CompactFlash memory card, which is capable of sustained read/write speeds of 150MBps and video capture streams up to 20MBps--that’s...

Its products defined nearly a century of photography, cinema, and home video, but the venerable Kodak company is on the verge of bankruptcy. While the company is reportedly preparing to file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which permits restructuring, the firm is caught in a merciless slide. Once so synonymous with film that its products coined the...

Lost in the shuffle of Ultrabooks, tablet PCs, and everything else that dominated the headlines in 2011 is the all-in-one (AIO) PC market. We've seen several new AIO models emerge over the past 12 months or so, and who knows, maybe in another year or two these things will replace traditional desktop towers in the mainstream market. That would...

It's out with the old and in with the new over at Intel. According to reports, the Santa Clara chip maker is letting its hardware partners know of a revised schedule to halt production and/or stop the supply of more than 25 existing desktop processor models so that it can focus on and make room for its upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge launch. Speaking...

Listen closely, do you hear anything? Any fanfare, ballyhooing, or trumpets? Neither do we, and that's because AMD opted for none of those things when releasing its Radeon HD 7670 graphics card in complete silence. There is, however, a product page on AMD's website that lists this as an OEM-only videocard. Let's take a peek at the specs. The...

Western Digital unveiled the My Book Live Duo, a new personal cloud storage system that promises shared storage and remote file access along with your choice of either double-safe backup using a mirrored RAID configuration or increased capacity using a striped RAID configuration. WD's My Book Live Duo connects to your home network to create...

It’s been a while since our last case roundup--a long while, actually--so it’s high time we did another. We take a look at a slew of (mostly) mid tower cases on the following pages, including the Antec Eleven Hundred, the Corsair Carbide 400R and 500R, the NZXT Source 220, and Thermaltake Chaser MK-I, each designed for a slightly...

Android fragmentation issues around Ice Cream Sandwich continue to surface as more handset manufacturers issue decisions regarding their recent flagship products. Today, Samsung announced that despite user outcry, ICS wouldn't be coming to either the Samsung Galaxy S or the original Galaxy Tab. Both devices use a Samsung Exynos 3110 CPU, a...

NEC added another monitor it its next generation MultiSync EA Series, the 24-inch EA243WM. This new monitor features LED backlighting, HD resolution (1920 x 1200), touch-sensitive controls on the bezel, and an input panel that includes HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI-D and VGA connections. The EA243WM also comes with a ControlSync feature that lets...

Acer announced the new Iconia Tab A200 tablet. As the latest addition to Acer's tablet lineup, the Iconia Tab A200 features a 10.1-inch display (1280 x 800) as well as an attractive price of $329.99. The tablet will ship with Android 3.2 aka Honeycomb and Acer will offer a free upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) in mid-February. The...

As CES draws a day closer, Logitech has let fly with news about a couple of new peripherals it will be showing off in Vegas, one a webcam and the other a mouse. The Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 has some impressive features, but its primary claim to fame is its capability to conduct video calls in 1080p. The 1080p HD only works with Skype--Skype...

And with this, the CES 2012 madness begins. While news related to the show has been trickling in, the real faucet has now been flipped "on." Lenovo is getting things started with a pair of new notebooks that couldn't stand to be much thinner. First up is the ThinkPad X1 Hybrid. Measuring less than 0.6-inches and weighing less than four pounds,...

Looking to get edgy? So is Lenovo. The company is kicking off CES 2012 with three new Edge notebooks: the S430, E Series and B Series. All of these are aimed at small / medium-sized businesses, with the S430 measuring just 0.8-inches, and the Edge E430, E435, E530 and E535 laptops including technologies like Lenovo Solution Center while simultaneously...

Much is made of “developing markets” in nations like India, where the population dwarfs that of the U.S. and tech companies work to develop products that average consumers can afford. Sometimes, those developing nations take matters into their own hands. The long-awaited, Indian-homegrown tablet that alleged to cost just $35 and...

Our friend Terry Makedon from AMD (You may know him as CatalystMaker on Twitter), conducted a poll on his personal blog asking gamers to vote on PC Game of the Year candidates. If you tracked our similar poll, which was posted a couple of months earlier, you may have an idea as to which game was most popular, but Terry’s got some interesting...

Since 2003, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has played host to both a dizzying array of gadgetry and more serious presentations from major computer manufacturers. The fusion occured after Comdex, which had been the major yearly computing show for decades, faltered and was folded into CES. CES remains a major draw each year, but some of...

Hitachi is planning to display a pair of new hard drives at CES, the 1TB Travelstar 5K1000 and the 4TB Deskstar 7K4000. Both will be in the company’s G-Technology family, which is a line of products designed exclusively for Apple products. The 2.5-inch Travelstar 5K1000 features a 6Gbps SATA interface and will be wrapped in a G-DRIVE...

Microsoft is planning to take action against a UK corporation it claims sold some 94,000 pirated copies of Windows, but the company, British retailer Comet, isn't going down without a fight. Earlier today, Redmond released a statement alleging widespread fraud: "As detailed in the complaint filed today, Comet produced and sold thousands of...

LG's giving its Optimus smartphone a second act. Simply enough, it's called the Optimus 2, the details of which are now available on LG's website, along with a photo gallery. What you'll find if you surf on over is a mostly entry-level smartphone device, at least by today's standards, with what could be an unmolested version of Google's Android...

We're only four days into the New Year and already Advanced Micro Devices would probably like to take a mulligan. According to reports, Quanta Computer Inc. is angry at AMD and it's ATI division for allegedly selling defective mobile chips unsuitable for the toasty confines of a notebook. Quanta used the supposedly bad parts in notebooks made...

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is just now getting around to publishing data for chip sales in the month of November 2011, and on the surface they're not particularly flattering. According to SIA, worldwide chip sales two months ago totaled $25.1 billion, which is nothing to scoff at, but it does represent a 2.4 percent downward...

MSI claims to have the world's fastest gaming laptop in its arsenal in the form of the GT783. This laptop features Intel's second generation Core i7 quad core processor as well as Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M graphics. To back up the world's fastest gaming laptop claim, MSI says the GT783 achieved 16,000 points on the 3D Mark Vantage high resolution...

HP is expanding its lineup of consumer PCs and commercial displays with the introduction of the HP Omni27 PC, HP Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix PC, HP Compaq L2311c notebook docking monitor, and the HP LV1911 and LV2011 LED backlit LCD monitors. The new Omni27 PC is the company's first 27-inch all-in-one PC while the Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix PC is...

Lookie here, more CES news! WowWee doesn't make too many introductions, but who can resist the chance to unveil something on the world's tech stage? The company has just released their latest "toy," which is actually more of a gizmo than some impulse buy. AppGear is the name, standing for a line of collectible toys that interact with free...

AT&T's still feeling the epic pinch from having to pay out billions as part of a "break-up fee" related to the dissolving of the T-Mobile USA deal, but here's a little good news: TiVo's willing to play nice... and take even more of their money. TiVo just announced the settlement of patent litigation with AT&T, meaning that the two...

It's a trickle right now, but it'll be a flood soon enough. Samsung has just introduced the first of their CES slate of products, with home entertainment getting the first push. The company just introduced a new line of audio dock systems that look ultra stylish, with one in particular being the first in the world to incorporate Samsung's...

Google released a statement today apologizing for the actions of a Chrome advertising campaign it commissioned and kicked off just a few days ago. As an apology, the company has deprecated Chrome's page ranking; searching for "browser" doesn't return a direct link to Google Chrome until several pages worth of results. This brouhaha kicked...

When you think of “compact” or “small form factor”, it’s all too easy to make the leap to “weak” or “underpowered”, but AVADirect’s two new small systems are anything but. The company announced a compact gaming system and a workstation, and both systems pack a wallop. The Compact...

For the love of all that is holy on the Internet, it's time to stick in a fork in Internet Explorer 6 and consider it done, says Microsoft (and we wholeheartedly agree, by the way), in a matter of words. That's not a direct quote from the Redmond software giant, but heck, the company did go and create an "Internet Explorer 6 Countdown" page...

Speaking of MSI, the company announced its X79 chipset-based MSI Big Bang-XPower II. Billed as a flagship motherboard, the Big Bang-XPower II features 8 DIMM slots that support a total of 128GB of system memory, 4-way SLI/CrossFire X (with PCI-E Gen 3 support), and a 22-phase PWM design. There are plenty of features for overclockers, including...

We've discussed the fragmentation of Android and the shoddy update services of the various carriers before, but the Droid 3's situation is raising these issues again. According to pre-CES reports, Verizon is poised to end-of-life (EOL) the Droid 3 along with its entire current lineup of MiFi hotspots. The BlackBerry Curve 3G and Palm Pre 2...

This isn't just a new year for Cooler Master, 2012 just happens to represent the company's 20th year of service. What better way to celebrate the occasion than to release a new chassis? Honestly, we can think of several, but none of them productive (and some aren't even legal), so kudos to Cooler Master for staying out of trouble and kicking...

Would you miss Best Buy if the electronics chain suddenly shut its doors for good the way Circuit City did awhile back? The knee-jerk reaction by many tech enthusiasts is to answer "Hell no!" followed by a Best Buy horror story or three, but such incidents aside, would you really be happier if Best Buy no longer existed? Regardless of your...

RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook hasn't exactly sold as well as the company would have liked. Now, it appears the company may be taking notes from HP: RIM has discounted the PlayBook by as much as $400. Until February 4, RIM is offering the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB PlayBooks for $299. Given the fact that all three models are available for the same price,...

Toshiba's Portégé R835-P330 is one of just a handful Ultrabooks currently available and is part of a new breed of laptops intended to blend ultra-portability with performance. Thin, lightweight, and well equipped, the Ultrabook form factor is the direction the Windows laptop market is headed, but first manufacturers have to get...

MSI introduced its latest gaming laptop in the form of the new generation GT685. This laptop is the first in the company's lineup to feature the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M discrete graphics card which offers 384 more CUDAs than the previous generation card as well as 2GB GDDR5 of display memory. You'll also find an Intel second generation Core...

Oh, Apple. We're not even three full days into the new year, and already the company's looking to make a statement. In a bid to keep their status alive in 2012, the company is reportedly planning a New York City-based event in late January, just weeks after CES ends and a few weeks before Mobile World Congress begins. Unfortunately, for the...

Apple's Siri has clearly convinced a lot of people to upgrade, or buy into the iPhone universe altogether. Apple's had no issues selling the iPhone 4S, and while there are a few slightly similar solutions for Android, Windows Phone 7 has largely been left out. But a revised version of Ask Zippy may get WP7 into that conversation. It's clearly...

It's no surprise that a ton of PC makers have some things up their sleeves. After all, CES 2012 begins next week. But it looks like HP is getting a jump on the others, with the Spectre being teased ahead of the show's official start. Ultrabooks got their start late last year, but it's pretty clear that CES 2012 will be the real launch pad...

The one-two combo of Intel’s X79 chipset and six-core Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU is a potent one--especially, it seems, for overclockers. MSI reports that overclockers all over the world are juicing their Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition chips to 5GHz on X79-based MSI motherboards using air cooling alone. MSI singled out one source,...

If the “Eee” line of ASUS products evokes an “Eee!” of delight from you, then ASUS has some treats for you at CES this year. Photos of the upcoming ASUS Eee PC Flare netbook and some specifications and details on the 7-inch ASUS Eee Memo Pad have leaked on NotebookItalia a few days ahead of the big show. The site grabbed...

Digital pirates in search of free reading material are turning to illicit download sites where they can obtain copyrighted eBooks free of charge. The obvious allure for eBook pirates is just like anything else -- free treasure -- but in addition to not having to fork over pieces of eight, pirates are attracted to getting their hands on copies...

Samsung announced the DV300F Wi-Fi compatible compact camera. This camera is the latest in Samsung's DualView line, meaning it has two LCD displays—a 1.5-inch display on the front for self portraits and another LCD on the back of the camera. What sets the DV300F apart from previous models is the addition of Wi-Fi so you'll be able to...

While Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox duke it out on the desktop, the browser wars are a little more lopsided in the mobile space, with Apple's iOS platform leading the charge. Apple closed the year out with a majority market share of more than 52 percent belonging to iOS, which is down slightly from the 54.07 percent share it claimed...

It was always assumed that Mozilla's Firefox browser would one day overtake Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the global browser market, ending IE's reign that began when the Redmond software giant buried Netscape Navigator years ago. But as it turns out, Google Chrome might have a better shot of overtaking IE, and at the rate things are going,...

When AMD announced its first tablet APU earlier this year, codenamed Desna, it was obvious that the chip was more a proof-of-concept than an actual shipping part. Factors outside AMD's control, such as the limitations of Windows 7 when running on a tablet, have kept consumer interest in x86 tablets to a minimum. Nevertheless, MSI's AMD-powered...

We have evaluated a handful of Patriot’s SSDs recently, all of which proved to be solid (no pun intended) offerings in their respective categories. The high-end Patriot Wildfire SSD hung right alongside the best of the SandForce-based drives with synchronous NAND we’ve tested and the lower-priced Pyro was also competitive with...

About a month ago, Acer revealed a new Iconia Tab A200 tablet running on Ice Cream Sandwich that features a NVIDIA Tegra 2 Dual Core 1 GHz processor. At the time of the announcement, Acer indicated the tablet would ship sometime in January which makes us think we should see the tablet at CES next week. Now, we're also hearing rumors of a new...

Whoa, wait a second -- text messaging is on the decline? Well, not entirely, but it's certainly not shooting through the roof from a global perspective any longer. Once thought to be the number one killer of voice minutes, texting seems to be on the decline in a few locales around the world. According to M.G.I. Research, there was a "significant...

The Apple TV may be just a hobby for Apple, and sure enough, it's a major hobby for hackers as well. Over the new year, those very hackers were able to get iOS apps to run in full-screen mode on the Apple TV. Steven Troughton-Smith is no stranger to this realm; he's best known for getting Siri to work on devices other than the iPhone 4S. And...

Well, you can't blame LG for getting a jump on the CES festivities. Once the news starts rolling early next week, it'll be a complete blur from top to bottom. LG's looking to avoid that, and aside from the 84" Ultra-Definition HDTV they announced a few days ago, the company is now detailing a 55" OLED TV. The company's calling this the world's...

On the first day of a new year, many of us reflect on the recent past and hope we do better in the future. Jony Ive, renown Apple designer, probably doesn’t have any angst about his achievements in 2011; he was named a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). Although Steve Jobs garners the lion’s share of the credit for much...

Sony's New Year's resolution must have been to sell a more affordable tablet, as evidenced by the Tablet S receiving a much needed price cut. The 9.4-inch tablet now sells for $400 on Sony's website for the 16GB model, and $500 for the 32GB version, down from $500 and $600 respectively (though both were recently selling for $50 off MSRP)....

Acer's Aspire One D270 netbook will be one of the first to hit the ground running around Intel's Cedar Trail platform, and if the number of impatient vendors who have started listing the netbook ahead of its official release are any indication, we can surmise the D270 will land very soon. Notebook Italia spotted a whole bunch of European vendors...

2012 is bound to bring all sorts of new excitement in the mobile space, but it's worth taking a look at how the cards are stacked right now in order to see how things will or won't change in the 12 months ahead. ComScore's last numbers of 2011 found some rather unsurprising results, with Android on the upswing, RIM on the downward slope and...

Good news for heavy Dropbox users that seem to always find themselves sorting the same type of files over and over again: the company has just launched Dropbox Automator, which does what it says. It'll automatically do whatever you want with a certain kind of file. In other words, the system is capable of triggering a series of actions based...

What's the first song you listened to in 2012? Was on a Sirius XM radio? If not, there's a company that'd prefer to change that. Sirius XM Radio has just introduced the SiriusXM Lynx Portable Radio, the first SiriusXM 2.0 radio that offers new features and receives an expanded channel lineup via satellite and Internet. Lynx is the most advanced...