News Archive

If you've been holding your breath for confirmation of a Facebook Phone, go ahead and exhale, lest you turn blue in the face. The cold, hard truth (for social networking junkies) is that no such device is imminent. Furthermore, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't even seem interested in entertaining the idea in the near future, if ever. "We're not going...

Fitch, the debt rating agency, evidently wasn't pleased with what it heard during AMD's last conference call. The agency has cut AMD's debt rating from a B to a CCC-. That's the last step above default, and it echoes the agency's skepticism over whether or not AMD can continue as a going concern. The agency writes: The ratings reflect Fitch's...

Extract from this what you will, but not only do iPhone users typically pay a higher subsidy than many Android users, but their monthly cell phone bill is higher, too. The majority of iPhone owners spend more than $100 on their monthly carrier bills, while one out of every ten is on the hook for over $200 each month. According to data compiled...

This week the USPTO gave Apple another tool in its endless battle against copycats: a trademark for the layout of its Apple Store. That’s right, the store that made fools of early critics and became one of Apple’s many success stories now has a trademark to protect such design elements as the “oblong table with stools located...

Boy, the hits just keep on coming for social game maker Zynga. In the last few months alone, the company has been sued by Electronic Arts, fumbled in its efforts to transition to mobile, broke up with Facebook, killed off 11 of its games, and has been bleeding talent like crazy. All of that is in addition to a weak financial performance. Now,...

After struggling as of late in the market, AMD is mounting an offensive against very stiff competition, and part of that effort is the next generation of the company’s APUs. Codenamed “Richland”, we knew that these chips will be built on Piledriver CPU cores just as the last generation Trinity APUs are, and that Richland...

Linux users have long had the right to be concerned about UEFI's "SecureBoot" feature, and this is a perfect justification for it. It seems that on select Samsung notebook models, merely booting into Linux via UEFI can brick it. We're not just talking about something that an OS re-install could fix, either - it literally seems to corrupt the...

During the BlackBerry 10 launch event today, CEO Thorsten Heins announced plans to change the company's name from Research In Motion to BlackBerry. The company has also changed its tagline to "One brand. One promise." The company's stock ticker will change to BBRY to reflect the new name. "We have reinvented the company, and we want to represent...

250GB Samsung 840 Series Solid State Drive (MZ-7TD250BW) for $150 with free shipping (normally $180). Controller: Samsung MDX Controller Sustained Sequential Read: 540 MB/s Sustained Sequential Write: 250 MB/s 4KB Random Read: Up to 96,000 IOPS 4KB Random Write: Up to 62,000 IOPS MTBF: 1,500,000 hours Corsair Professional Series HX650 650W...

Have you ever found yourself caught in a Captcha loop? It's where you do your best to decipher strings of text that sometimes look like a bunch of hieroglyphics, only to get it wrong over and over again until finally, you punch in the correct characters and are granted to access to a site you're now too frustrated to visit. Even more annoying...

Google wants YouTube to be more than the World’s Largest Cat Video Collection, and it has a surefire plan to bring in higher quality video: money. Word on the street is that 2013 will see YouTube launch a subscription model that will give serious video producers an avenue for bringing in paying customers on YouTube. It might not be too...

Consumers who are planning to purchase a Surface Pro tablet when it debuts on February 8, 2013, are advised to think long and hard about the amount of internal storage they need. As it turns out, Surface Pro tablets are data hogs, leaving users with far less storage to play with than advertised due to the space required to install Windows...

Research In Motion (RIM) has been trying to drum up some buzz for its BlackBerry 10 platform by expanding its BlackBerry World app store catalog with lots of new music, movies, and TV shows. It now feels much more fleshed out with prices that are in line with the industry average. Individual songs in BlackBerry World sell for between $0.99...

Nintendo now expects to sell fewer Wii U consoles than it initially anticipated, the Japanese video game maker said Wednesday as it slashed its sales outlook for its newest gaming device. The company said it sold 3.06 million Wii U consoles to date, and only expects sales to reach 4 million through March, down from a previous forecast of 5.5...

The music business is a drastically different one now than it was even a decade ago. Slowly but surely, many entities tied to the record and music industry are shifting to take the new realities into account, and this week, Billboard announced that it would do likewise. The new Billboard.com finally gets with the Internet age, acknowledging...

Wondering how Amazon seems to consistently offer excellent pricing on products? Because it barely makes any profit per item sold. In the company's latest quarterly earnings report, we're told that Amazon raked in an astounding $21.27 billion dollars in the past three months alone. No, there's no typographical error there. But on the net profit...

These days, it's getting easier and easier to sniff out surprises from Apple ahead of time. Despite Tim Cook's promise to "double down on secrecy," the company's insane growth has made it nigh impossible to prevent as many leaks as it did just years ago. But here's something that Apple can control: when the FCC discloses what Apple has ushered...

In the earlier days of the Web, our browsers were simple. If one crashed, it was likely due more to poor programming than whatever content you were viewing. The opposite can be said today, where many websites have the potential to crash any number of plugins you've got equipped - especially true for the weightiest ones, such as Flash,...

Google's coveted Nexus 4 (see our review) is punching its passport and making repeat appearances in at least three locations today, including the U.S., Canada, and Germany. The Nexus 4 has been a slippery little sucker to get your hands on, and who knows how much inventory is available in each of those three locales. For now, however, it's...

There's just something about a delicious looking meal that compels people to whip out their smartphone, snap a picture, and upload it to a social network, like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Your friends and family can instantly see what you're about to devour before you've taken the first bite. Such is the connected world we live in, though...

Pinterest, the social bookmarking site everybody loves but many guys will only use through their wife/sister/girlfriend’s account (come on fellas, own it already), is getting a bit of a revamp. According to a blog post, Pinterest is changing up the interface somewhat in addition to unspecified “behind the scenes” changes...

HGST, the company formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, became a Western Digital company some time ago. And now, that entity is introducing the industry's highest capacity 10K RPM HDD. It's an enterprise-class drive, with the Ultrastar C10K1200 providing a capacity extension to HGST’s Ultrastar C10K900 product line....

Fire up your Google Maps app and you'll now find that there's more detailed information for North Korea, a territory that up until now was left mostly blank. A community of citizen cartographers collaborated using Google Map Maker to fill in many of the blanks, including road names and points of interest. "We know this map is not perfect —...

Apple on Tuesday confirmed that it's rolling out a new flagship iPad SKU with double the amount of storage. Beginning Tuesday, February 5 -- well in time for Valentine's Day... -- you'll be able to purchase a 128GB fourth generation iPad in either black or white, and with or without cellular connectivity. "With more than 120 million iPads...

You're not supposed to know this yet, but Hewlett-Packard is planning to launch a Chromebook model under its Pavilion brand. We wouldn't have known it either, had it not been for a short-lived document that inadvertently went live on HP's website. HP has since pulled it offline, but in the age of the Internet, once you put something out there,...

My, how time flies. It seems like just yesterday we were taking the wraps off of our shiny new copy of Office 2010, and now it appears that Office 2013 will grace us with its presence shortly. According to the official teasers on Twitter, Microsoft is planning announce Office 2013 from Bryant Park, New York later today with the (large, orange)...

Streaming music is a happening thing these days. While the record stores of yesteryear aren't apt to ever return in full force, the streaming generation is most certainly ushering in a new way of listening to music. Rdio is one name that's making big waves along with iTunes and Spotify, and soon, it'll be delighting users in ever more parts...

Portable? Expansive? On sale now? Toshiba's got all of these qualifications in more, all tucked neatly within the latest 2TB Canvio Basics and Special Edition portable HDDs. The company has just expanded its mobile hard drive range, revealing a 2TB Canvio Basics 3.0 portable hard drive and a 2TB Canvio Special Edition portable hard drive....

Remember all the “we don’t need another social network” griping when Google+ hit the scene in June of 2011? Fast forward to today and Google+ has 343 million users, making it second only to Facebook for social network size superiority, according to GlobalWebIndex. Social networks in millions of active users. Image credit:...

Apple released iOS 6.1 today, bringing LTE support for more carriers to iPhones and iPads. The update also provides some bug fixes and adds functionality for Siri, giving you the ability to make purchases by voice command on Fandango. Another change means you can download individual songs from iCloud with your iTunes Match subscription. And...

Nobody’s going to be pulling enemy star fighters into a mothership Star Trek-style anytime soon, but researchers at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) and the Institute of Scientific Instruments (ISI, Czech Republic) have developed a tractor beam--or at least an experimental version of the concept. Basically, they figured out how...

Sprint and Kyocera announced the new Kyocera Torque ultra-rugged smartphone. This smartphone is Sprint's first ultra-rugged smartphone to offer 4G LTE connectivity. The Torque runs on Android and is designed to withstand dust, drops, vibration, solar radiation, humidity, blowing rain, low pressure, salt fog, and extreme temperatures. The phone...

Sprint is continuing to roll out its Network Vision plan which includes 4G LTE service as well as improved 3G service in many areas throughout the country. Today, Sprint announced that it has added Austin and Bryan-College Station, Texas to the list of cities that have access to 4G LTE service. Sprint also launched 4G LTE service in Boston;...

What separates a premium headset from a blue light special? It's a combination of things, from well designed drivers to comfy ear cups that kiss the sides of your head with a gentle yet firm caress (we're being melodramatic...a little). And then there's the overall feature-set and premium extras like a noise-canceling microphone and 5.1 or...

Despite the fact that the company offers truly competitive products, NVIDIA has had a rough time penetrating the mobile market like it wants to - or perhaps needs to. Finding a Tegra-based smartphone requires a fair bit of patience, if you can find one at all for your particular market or carrier. Things are a lot smoother on the tablet side...

If you’ve ever daydreamed about being a Pinkerton thug (er, detective, we meant detective) at the beginning of the 1900’s, you already know that your chance is nigh. Bioshock’s forthcoming Infinite is set to launch in March, and it will have you gallivanting around the flying city of Columbus as Pinkerton’s Booker DeWitt....

Lest anyone question Intel's commitment to its Ultrabook platform, the Santa Clara chip maker today announced an enthusiast-grade mSATA solid state drive (SSD) with a 6Gbps interface. The new Intel SSD 525 Series measures just 3.7mm x 50.8mm x 29.85mm and weighs a mere 10 grams, but is super quick on the draw with random read performance of...

We're not sure Apple's product release strategy is all that sound these days, but for what it's worth, the Cupertino company is reportedly getting ready to release yet another iPad SKU. The newest iteration will be part of the fourth generation iPad family, meaning it's another incremental upgrade rather than a completely new model. Un-named...

Attention Facebook users, you might be eligible to receive a crisp $10 bill (or, more likely, a check worth $10) as part of a class action settlement. Try not to spend it all in one place. The entire settlement is actually worth $20 million, though your cut and everyone else who participates will receive a Hamilton, or nothing at all. "If...

Were you aware that game consoles are banned in China? Due to fears that these devices could harm the physical and mental development of children, seven Chinese ministries decided to ban the manufacture, sale, and import of game consoles a little over a decade ago. Now authorities in Beijing are starting to rethink things. Citing an anonymous...

Android and iOS aren't exactly best buds in the mobile world, though collectively the two platforms dominate the smartphone market in a big way. According to the latest data compiled by Strategy Analytics, Google's green machine and Apple's proprietary platform accounted for a record 92 percent of all smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter...

For as much time and attention as we devote to the specifications and the nuts and bolts of technology, we have to admit that we’re suckers for a fine-looking piece of hardware. Samsung’s limited edition Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 is a real looker. For a limited time, the tablet will be available in Garnet Red in addition to the usual white...

We aren't moving in a direction where the world at large streams less: we're moving towards a world where streaming is the norm. While data caps and pricing tiers have flourished just as data use has started to skyrocket, streaming video remains a dodgy issue. It's obviously vital content, but it also requires massive amounts of data to transmit....

These days, it's tough to find a major consumer electronics company that doesn't have its hand in the music world. From Apple to Samsung to Microsoft, music is now a pretty common card to play. Nokia's no different. The company already had the Nokia Music platform, but now, it's pulling a Google by tossing a "+" sign onto the end of it and...

BitTorrent remains alive and well while many of its P2P competitors have bit the dust in recent years, but the company is not sitting around simply hoping it can avoid the same fate; instead, BitTorrent is evolving, working hard on new products and technologies including Live Streaming, sharing large files directly to Facebook friends, and...

It goes without saying that where durability, stability and endurance are concerned, few organizations care quite as much about the products they deploy than the military. The term "Military-Grade" exists for a reason, after all. Rugged laptops are common there - they need to withstand dirt and an occasional bump - but what about servers?...

Remember eMachines? The company was founded in 1998, the same year Saving Private Ryan and A Bug's Life hit the big screen. For those of you who weren't in the PC scene back then, eMachines built low-cost computers that became popular because of their price tags, but were generally disregarded by power users. Gateway purchased the company...

In advance of its BlackBerry 10 launch, Research in Motion has made some much-needed changes to how its store handles pricing. It's still not ideal, but those using British £ or Euro € currency stand to see fairer prices. Currently, the lowest price someone in the UK can see is £1; after the change, that will become £0.75....

U.S. PlayStation owners have access to a new online content store today: the Sony Entertainment Network App Store. The Web-based store has been available in Europe since late last year, but just launched in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. The store has movies, TV shows, games, and other digital treats for their PlayStation 3/Vita/Portable...

It's hard to believe 20 years have passed since the first Jurassic Park film debuted in movie theaters. Even more remarkable is how well the special effects in the Stephen Spielberg-directed flick have held up over time. To celebrate the franchise's 20th anniversary, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is releasing the first three films individually...

Let there be no lingering doubt: Samsung has an 8" tablet in the pipeline. While the original Galaxy Tab filled the 7" void, and the Note 10.1 has done likewise for the largest 10" form factor, there's always a market for the in-between. In an effort to address each and every possible preference, Samsung is evidently readying a Galaxy Note...

Libraries may feel like an item of a past era, and books themselves are already starting to feel a little antiquated. It's an Internet-driven world, and e-books are slowly but surely taking the place of many hardcovers. The education world has caught on in the past few years, and many students already have the option of getting their new books...

Say what you will about the inefficiencies of government, but FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has evidently been busy of late. While things like "Internet expansion" generally get shoved aside in place of things like "debt ceilings," Genachowski has been doing a fine job of keeping some of our interests in the limelight. We're obviously in...

The smartphone market is hot and is continuously growing, and it’s no surprise that the IDC’s latest numbers have Samsung pegged as the number one smartphone maker in the world, followed by Apple. However, the new number three maker is a bit of a surprise--it’s Huawei. This is a first for Huawei, which has previously been...

The do-it-yourself Raspberry Pi boasts some pretty modest specs, but it's been proven time and time again that it's no slouch where gaming's concerned. In November, it was announced that Minecraft is being ported to the platform (it's still not here as of the time of this post), and not long after, the Raspberry Pi App Store was rolled-out...

We reported on Valve's roll-out of the original Half-Life for Linux and Mac yesterday, but it doesn't look like the fun was meant to stop there. Today, Valve followed-up with a release of the original Counter-Strike, or "1.6" as it's commonly known. That puts the total number of games based on the GoldSrc engine available for Linux...

Apple has terminated its contract with a third-party labor supplier in China after an audit discovered it had "intentionally" hired dozens of underage workers. The audit uncovered 74 cases of underage labor at the one facility, and 106 active cases overall, the remaining ones resulting from an inability to detect forged documents. "11 facilities...

For one day only (today), Best Buy is selling a brand new Apple MacBook Air (model MD223LL/A) for $800 shipped, plus any applicable sales tax. That's a $200 price break, and just so this point is clear, it's not a refurbished item. Deals like this on Apple products on relatively few and far between, so if you've been eying this model for whatever...

EA’s Origin is meant to be a one-stop shop for gaming: so long as you have a Windows PC, you can shop for games and play them via the Origin platform. (Think Steam.) Origin overcame early skepticism (and a coupon debacle in which it inadvertently gave away free games) and is now expanding to the Mac platform. Only a few thousand U.S....

In the world of Internet use, we can't really ever get enough speed. Thus, we're thrilled to see two leading networking companies sharing resources in order to produce yet another "world's first" in the art of transmission. Huawei and Vodafone this week announced the successful trial of 2 Tbit/s optical fiber transmission technologies on Vodafone's...

While ruggedized, waterproof smartphones have been largely contained to enterprise and field use scenarios, things are beginning to shift. More and more, average consumers are demanding high-quality, powerful mobile devices that can also take something of a beating. Sony and Motorola have dabbled in this new universe before, and companies...

The list of nations living in a mostly disconnected state continues to shrink, and that's a good thing. Cuba most certainly has access to the Internet, but it definitely isn't topping the list of countries that offer the highest speeds at the lowest prices. But now, an undersea cable of the fiber optic variety has been laid and connected --...

On Wednesday, GitHub expanded and improved its search feature to make it easier to locate code stashed on the site by live-indexing newly uploaded code. In theory, it sounds like a nice improvement on the site’s ability to deliver results to those looking for certain code or developers, but it appears that the new tool uncovers much...

Valve’s breakout Half-Life series has become the video game equivalent of movie classics like Star Wars: the game just never stops being cool. Lately, Half-Life has been getting attention for the Source engine remake (Black Mesa), which gave the 1998 game a massive graphics makeover. Today, Valve quietly released the old-school Half-Life...

The luck o’ the Irish is going strong, apparently, as Intel is planning to build a plant in Ireland for the purpose of manufacturing 14nm chips which will reportedly create 800 permanent tech jobs and 3,500 construction jobs. According to Silicon Republic, the project should take two years to complete at a total cost of $4 billion. The...

Want or need to run Android 4.0 apps on your PC? Chinese start-up SocketeQ has got you covered with its just-released "WindowsAndroid" - perhaps not the most creative name out there, but it's fitting. Given what it's capable of, WindowsAndroid directly competes with BlueStacks, however it goes a step further. What you'll be running is in effect...

When NVIDIA released a limited beta of its GeForce Experience software last month, 40,000 gamers wasted no time in jumping on top of it. Not long after its release, NVIDIA pulled access to the download, in order to let testing and bug-fixing commence. Now, just a month later, NVIDIA has issued a slew of bug fixes and updates, and has officially...

We're starting to wonder if Acer's allergic to high-end smartphones. Ahead of Mobile World Congress (MWC) next month, Acer decided it was time to splash the media with its Liquid E1 Android handset, a decidedly mid-range phone that would have seemed mighty impressive a year or two ago, but is rather ordinary today. The device has a 4.5-inch...

AT&T on Friday said that it has agreed to acquired wireless spectrum in the 700MHz B band from Verizon Wireless for $1.9 billion in cash and Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum licenses in several markets, including Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles and Fresno, California, and Portland, Oregon. A total of 39 lower 700MHz B band licenses...

It’s way too early to see if Vine is going to mean long-term success for Twitter, but it’s certainly getting off to an auspicious start. The video service, which lets users embed 6-second videos in their tweets, has already broken into the top 15 apps in the iTunes App Store. On top of that, Vine may have already made enemies with...

Samsung had its best quarter ever, posting a quarterly profit 7.04 trillion won ($6.6 billion), up an eye-popping 76 percent from 4.01 trillion won a year prior. Revenues for the quarter came to 56.06 trillion won ($52.06 billion) on a consolidated basis, up 7 percent sequentially. The company's Mobile Communications division performed exceptionally...

A market research firm forecasts media tablet shipments around the world will reach 145 million units in 2013. New players, a wider range of lower cost tablets to choose from, and increased interest from business sectors will help media tablets to "continue to take the market by storm," ABI Research says. "The rate of innovation is slowing...

Chinese computer maker Lenovo is reportedly taking a long, hard look at acquiring Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian handset and mobile software company. Lenovo, which is jockeying for position with Hewlett-Packard (HP) as the world's largest PC supplier, has already spoken with RIM about its interest in acquiring the company. The two sides,...

It's strange how things kind of come full circle in the technology realm, even amongst rivals. Though one could argue that Linksys, which was purchased by Cisco, has a pretty good tussle going with Belkin, it's Belkin who is handing over cash to Cisco in order to get something it's been longing for. Belkin this week announced that it has entered...

You know you've made it once companies start coming out of the woodwork using your operating system. Case in point? Google's Android, which has now slipped onto yet another Android late that you probably wouldn't have heard of otherwise. RAmos is a Chinese outfit that has actually been around for quite some time making mobile products, and...

If you think 140-character tweets are restrictive, try a six-second video. After picking up Vine late last year, Twitter decided the time was ripe to launch Vine as an app that complements Twitter’s text-based messages with short, looping videos. “Posts on Vine are about abbreviation – the shortened form of something larger,”...

It's coming: the day when a tablet is more than just an accessory to go along with your PC, but practically a workhorse in its own right. Windows RT and Windows 8 on tablets has already shown as much, but even Android is showing signs of maturity in the "Post-PC era" (which is a fallacy of course). Recently, Samsung pushed out Android 4.1.2...

When the iPhone 5 finally hit the masses, it was missing one major feature: NFC. While most every other major flagship smartphone has NFC and support for contact payments, bump sharing and the like, Apple's iPhone is strangely missing out. But rumors are beginning to swirl that the next-generation iPhone may finally join the herd, and evidence...

New video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA are almost always reviewed on hardware that’s less than 12 months old. That's not an arbitrary decision -- it helps reviewers make certain that GPU performance isn't held back by older CPUs and can be particularly important when evaluating the impact of new interfaces or bus designs. The downside...

As more and more low-cost ultrabooks enter the market, the shipments of solid state drives could more than double in 2013. An IHS iSuppli Storage Space Market Brief suggests shipments of SSDs could rise to 83 million units this year, which is more than double the number of shipments in 2012. By 2016, iSuppli expects shipments will continue...

Google filed an application with the FCC to build an experimental wireless network at its headquarters in Mountain View. Google has asked for many of the details of this network to be kept confidential, but a few details have been made public. Google's application with the FCC reveals the company's plans to place about 50 base stations on...

If you have a penchant for x86-based embedded system development, AMD and GizmoSphere have a new tiny board for you to play with. The Gizmo is a 4 x 4-inch development board designed for use in applications as diverse as set-top boxes, industrial control systems, and casino gaming, and it features an AMD G-T40E processor (dual core, 1GHz)...

As everyone knows, Netflix is a juggernaut in the TV and movie streaming and DVD rental market, but the company is actually doing even better than expected. After bracing investors for a loss from October-December, Netflix ended up pulling in a net income of $8 million for the quarter with a revenue of $945 million. Further, the company expects...

So long, THQ, and thanks for the pie. The North American game developer and publisher responsible for Saints Row, the Red Faction Series, Company of Heroes, and other titles auctioned off its assets to competitors for around $72 million. "We were hoping that the entire company would remain intact, but we expect to hear good news from each...

Amazon on Thursday announced the acquisition of Ivona Software, a text-to-speech firm out of Poland. Ivona Software's voice recognition technologies are already utilized by Amazon's line of Kindle Fire tablets, and the company also provides text-to-speech products and services for thousands of developers, businesses, and customers around the...

Nokia's strategy to buddy up with Microsoft and essentially go all-in with the Windows Phone platform is paying off. The Finnish handset maker turned a modest profit in the fourth quarter of 2012, coming out ahead on the balance sheet by 202 million euros ($269 million). That's not much, but it's just the sort of thing Nokia needed to keep...

Kudos to Imangi Studios for showing the Android platform nearly equal love as iOS. Whereas Android users had to wait nearly 8 months before the company's original Temple Run title was ported over from iOS, Temple Run 2, now available in Google Play, took only a week to make the leap, having launched first to iOS on January 17. Temple Run 2...

When you're on a roll, there's really one two places to go: ahead, or slipping back. Apple did a bit of both with its latest earnings report. While the company proudly proclaimed that Q1 2013 was one for the record books, Wall Street wasn't entirely thrilled. That said, Apple's Q1 2013 did have one fewer week than Q1 2012, so it's tough to...

With Box.net, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud already securing a huge chunk of the consumer cloud storage market place, Microsoft's SkyDrive sometimes feels like the guy in the back of the room. Of course, adding multi-platform capabilities to it could help it better rival things like Drive and Dropbox, but the company's clearly aiming to...

There have been a number of spec leaks around the PS4 and Xbox 720 in the last few days, including updated information on what the latest dev kits from Sony contain. We'll cover these first, courtesy of Kotaku and then offer our own analysis, HotHardware style. According to Kotaku, the latest dev kits for Sony's PS4 contain: 8GB of video RAM...

Nintendo’s latest gaming console, the Wii U, is a bit of a risk for the legendary company. The console promises the moon, and although we found plenty of things to like about the Wii U in our review, the device came up a little short. Sales have been somewhat up and down, too. There was a nice spike around Black Friday when Nintendo...

Ah, downed Internet access. It’s a time to grab a cup of coffee, dust off that book you’ve been meaning to read…or go to a neighbor’s house and use their Internet connection to read about the problems with yours. And if you live in the southern U.S. and have AT&T’s U-verse package, you’re probably doing...

Great ape keepers at the Smithsonian's National Zoo found themselves inspired by an "Apps for Apes" program that's been implemented in a dozen zoos around the world, and so they decided to try it out with their six orangutans. Each orangutan is able to interact with an iPad tablet, though only if they show interest. It's not required that...

Samsung on Wednesday sent out emails announcing that its ATIV Odyssey handset will be available to purchase in the U.S. starting tomorrow. You'll be able to pick one up from Verizon on the web or in stores for $50 (after a $50 mail-in-rebate) with a two-year service agreement. A quick refresher on the specs. The ATIV Odyssey sports a 4-inch...

Content delivery company Akamai has just issued its Q3 2012 "State of the Internet" report, and with it comes some promising signs that "high broadband" Internet connections are on the up. The report doesn't mention what caused the growth, but between Q2 and Q3 of last year, the number of people equipped with a 10Mbit/s+ connection rose 8.8%...

Eastman Kodak and JK Imaging have signed a multi-year agreement whereby JK Imaging will license the Kodak brand name for select consumer products. These products include digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and portable projectors. JK Imaging plans to launch the first products using the Kodak brand in the second quarter of 2013. One of the...

2TB Western Digital Red Internal Hard Drive (WD20EFRX) for $100 with free shipping (normally $125 - use coupon code EMCYTZT2830). Interface: SATA 6.0Gb/s Cache: 64MB Form Factor: 3.5" 120GB SanDisk Extreme Solid State Drive (SDSSDX-120G-G25) for $80 with free shipping (normally $110- use this form). Controller: SandForce Max Sequential Read:...

Prince Harry of Wales is a pretty good shooter, both in real-life and when playing video games. In fact, he credits his time playing games on an Xbox and PlayStation with making him a better shooter, and maybe even a better pilot. The 28-year-old spoke candidly about his tour of duty, flying Apache helicopters, and even killing. When asked...

For as amazing as it is that 3D printing technology can produce small plastic items such as toys and parts for medical appliances, a Dutch architect envisions an entire house printed in 3D. Janjaap Ruijssenaars is that visionary, and together with a 3D printing expert named Enrico Dini, he believes he can do it. Ruijssenaars apparently already...

It looks like Nokia is working on a Windows Phone that will include the vaunted PureView camera, which is powering Nokia’s comeback attempt. The Verge, which broke the news, expects the upcoming phone to be a Lumia with an aluminum body. The codename for the new phone is EOS. The Nokia 808 PureView is got a lot of props for its camera,...

Don't worry folks, the White House hasn't lost its marbles (well, not based on this, anyway) by encouraging citizens across the nation to start hacking. The U.S. government doesn't want you to break into banking systems, and after Matthew Broderick almost started World War III in the 1980s, we're pretty sure it doesn't want you messing around...

Apple can stick to its guns all it wants by refusing to release a lower-cost iPhone model, but at some point, the Cupertino company has to face the reality that the iPhone isn't the trend-setting device it once was. Remember when the iPhone was a status symbol and the coolest handset on the block? Now it's merely a symbol of someone who's...

If the limited Surface RT wasn't up to snuff for you, hang tight -- Microsoft's Surface Pro will be on sale soon. The software giant today announced that the Surface Windows 8 Pro tablet will be available for purchase on Feb. 9, 2013, in the United States and Canada at all Microsoft retail stores, microsoftstore.com, Staples and Best Buy in...

These days, you aren't getting much attention in the streaming TV universe if you aren't named Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, or Apple. But Crackle, billed as a "multi-platform entertainment network," is hoping to get a bit of that limelight with a new announcement. In a bid to get onto more devices and in front of more faces, Crackle today announced...

We have received news directly from Intel that the company will stop developing new desktop motherboards once the launch of its next-gen Haswell architecture is completed, sometime later this year. This move does not impact Intel’s desktop chipset plans and Intel will support and warranty all of the current products it sells, through...

AMD's fourth quarter results for 2012 are in, and they're as bad as everyone has been expecting. The only good news is that since everyone has been expecting it, the company's stock shouldn't take too hard a hammering. Total revenue for the year was $5.42B, down 17.5% year-on-year. Gross margins fell from 45% to 23% thanks to a much higher...

Bloomberg last week revealed Dell's desire to go private, and this week, we learn that Microsoft is one of the companies looking to make that happen. It's unclear exactly how much money Microsoft would have to invest in order to seal the deal, but it's said to be between $1 and $3 billion - almost a modest figure given Dell's total current...

Today we're reviewing a series of mid-tower cases at a variety of affordable price points. These four cases are all marketed towards enthusiasts and ship with what were once considered upscale options, including external water cooling mounts, multiple 120mm fans, screwless installation, removable case vents, and board cutouts for easy third-party...

It’s time to throw on your best hauberk and head to Tamriel. That’s right, The Elder Scrolls Online is taking names for a public Beta. Gamers who have been debating whether the online fantasy game will live up to the hype will finally have the chance to find out for themselves. What sets The Elder Scrolls Online apart from related...

There was a bit of Alltel left over after the Verizon Wireless acquisition back in 2009, and now AT&T is gobbling up the rest. AT&T announced that it will purchase Alltel and its licenses, network assets, retail outlets, and subscribers (such as they are, at 585,000 people) for $780 million. Alltel operates in Georgia, Idaho, Illinois,...

Have you found yourself feeling sad, depressed, or even unusually angry lately? Maybe you need to stop checking Facebook for awhile. A joint study conducted by two German universities found that Facebook envy is a real thing, and perhaps as many as one out of three people actually feel worse and less satisfied with their lives after visiting...

Most of us can’t remember the last time we were inside a Blockbuster video store, which is why the chain went belly up nearly two years ago, and why Dish Network is planning to close 300 Blockbuster locations in the coming weeks, which will bring the total number of deceased locations to 800. Dish bought up the dregs of Blockbuster hoping...

You’ll soon be able to buy in-game content with your Amazon account, thanks to a new Amazon service. Amazon is wooing game developers with a service for making in-app purchases on games for Mac, PC, and browser-based games. Game developers get the benefit of Amazon’s stable purchasing infrastructure, while gamers (who already have...

Verizon on Tuesday released its financial report for the fourth quarter of 2012, noting that its wireless business saw an 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in service revenues, along with 2.2 million retail net additions. The company also said that its 4G LTE service is now available to more than 273 million people in 476 markets across...

Steve Ballmer, the outspoken and oft times animated CEO of Microsoft, might not always be the easiest boss to work for. It all depends on who you ask, and if you sit down for a spell with Joachim Kempin, who worked at Microsoft from 1983 to 2002 in a high-level position, he'll paint Ballmer as a bully who forces out employees who dare challenge...

Mozilla's upcoming phone OS, Firefox OS, has seemingly matured a lot these past six months, and with today's announcement of developer phones soon to be available, its final release can't be too far off. Developed by Geeksphone, the "Keon" and "Peak" models are designed to allow developers to dive head-first into getting their apps ready for...

The business world isn't all that different from the world of sports. In either case, if your team isn't performing at a high enough level, you go out and hire better talent. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) just did that, adding a pair of experienced chip engineers, one of which previously worked for Qualcomm and the other for Apple. Citing "sources...

While Samsung has decided not to ship the ATIV Tab in the United States (nor any Windows RT tablet), there's evidently sufficient demand in other markets for Microsoft's ARM-friendly OS. A new edition of the ATIV Smart PC has popped up this week, with a sleek, shiny white shell that most definitely stands apart from the other grey/charcoal/black...

The year's largest mobile phone show hasn't even kicked off, with Mobile World Congress still a solid month away. But that's not stopping LG from ushering in an entirely new smartphone, and it's a powerful one at that. The Optimus G Pro picks up where the non-Pro edition left off, and it'll make its start on Japan's NTT DoCoMo before heading...

Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s pet project is Google Glass, which is a pair of spectacles that function as a wearable computer. He’s been spotted wearing them at multiple events, but NYC resident Noah Zerkin happened to sit across from him on the subway train. Zerkin had a chat with Brin (whom he described as both “the powerful...

Forbes contributor Adam Hartung dropped a bomb on the business world this morning when he forecast the complete collapse of Microsoft's business and the company's sudden exit from the entertainment market. Hartung draws on Surface's mediocre sales and the PC market's woes to claim that "Microsoft makes nothing from its xBox/Kinect entertainment...

Perhaps it’s not quite the same level of importance as President Nixon’s famous visit to China, but Eric Schmidt’s journey to North Korea this month alongside New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson certainly evokes the image of the West reaching east to a nation that has been closed off from most parts of the world for a long...

One thing Samsung doesn't lack is a funny bone. Ask Apple, which has been repeatedly bopped on the head with it through a series of advertisements, both on TV and out in the wild. Want a second opinion? Talk to Research In Motion (RIM), Samsung's latest target in a new ad poking fun at people who refuse to give up their BlackBerry devices....

On many occasions Thorsten Heins, CEO of Research In Motion, has said he is willing to consider several different options for the company moving forward. It's no secret that RIM wants to license its upcoming BlackBerry 10 software. Another option Heins has considered is much bigger, and it involves selling off the production of BlackBerry...

Hot on the heels (in the worst possible way) of THQ filing for bankruptcy last month comes Atari's US-based headquarters doing the same. It's the company's goal to break free from its France-based overlord Atari, SA and then get bought out to reform as a private company and subsequently continue business under a new name. Atari, Inc....

Right on the heels of the Firefox 18 update, which patched a disconcerting 21 security flaws, a new Firefox update has been released. The new patch focuses on resolving glitches and makes Firefox 18 stable. Version 18.0.1 should update automatically, but if it doesn’t, snag it here.   Some known issues remain after the 18.0.1...

Hey U.S. gamers, would you like a side of PayPal with your PlayStation Network (PSN)? You can have it, now that Sony is extending the same courtesy to PSN subscribers living in North America as was already available to those who reside in Europe. It's more of an end-around process to use PayPal, as the option to add funds to your Wallet using...

There are some basic rules to follow when selecting a password. For example, while we're sure your significant other is a fine person, using their name as your password is a terrible idea. Same goes for your son's birthday. The object is to select a series of characters and symbols that's nigh impossible to guess, but it doesn't stop there....

What's in a name? Depends on who you ask, of course. RIM has been hard at work for months now, with BlackBerry 10 looming large for a 1/30 debut. In preparation for that, the company has shifted the naming slightly on the outlet where you snag BlackBerry apps. BlackBerry App World has become the shorter, cleaner "BlackBerry World," and RIM...

Physicist Stephen Hawking is revered as one of the most brilliant scientific minds this world as ever seen, and Intel's not taking that for granted. Despite having a degenerative motor neuron disease for the past 50 or so years, he has used technology in order to help him communicate and connect. In recent years, however, his condition has...

If we might be allowed to exaggerate for a moment, Apple finds itself in dire straits these days. Here are the facts: Apple's stock is only worth $500 per share, the company's slice of the smartphone pie in the U.S. is just 18.5 percent, and the iPhone has lost its luster compared to sexier Android phones and the emergence of intriguing Windows...

While it's no doubt tough to make inroads in the tablet market these days, you won't catch Sony resting on its laurels. As the company strives to make something of a comeback in the mobile and computing sectors, it's going to lean heavily on the new Xperia Tablet Z to make some positive impressions. The new 10.1" slate launched today, and...

Just how important has Linux become? Very. Just weeks after hearing that Steam would be launching for the world's favorite open-source desktop OS, AMD has just announced new Catalyst drivers made specifically for -- you guessed it -- Linux. The Catalyst 13.1 Proprietary Linux Graphics were just let loose into the wild, and it provides budding...

Almost exactly a year ago, feds shut down cloud storage site MegaUpload over alleged widespread digital piracy and instantly turned site owner Kim Dotcom into a controversial figure. The case raised a number of questions concerning digital piracy, file ownership, and even the wisdom of using cloud storage at all. Today, Kim Dotcom has officially...

We're only a few weeks into the New Year and there's already an exciting gaming project in Kickstarter. It's Vendetta Online, an existing twich-based, sci-fi themed MMORPG that's available on a number of platforms. In fact, two years ago it was the first PC 3D MMO to make the leap to mobile and is now available for Android, in addition to...

Acer might have been on to something when it warned Microsoft that competing in the hardware space is no easy task. Undeterred, Microsoft entered the battlefield with its Surface RT tablet, an ARM-based slate running a gimped version of Windows 8 that doesn't support legacy applications. It's an okay tablet for content consumption and poking...

Facebook may not be gunning directly at Google's Web search with the new Graph Search, but it's still a unique and fascinating new search paradigm -- particularly now that the company has over one billion individuals to pull data from. Graph Search promises to bring users closer to "friends" -- many of which have thousands of connections that...

It's not often that a console company sticks with a controller design for three straight generations, but sure enough, the PlayStation controller that ships with the PS3 is largely the same as the original that shipped with the first PlayStation so many years ago. There's a saying that folks shouldn't worry with fixing things that aren't broken,...

Just the mere mention of the word "Skyrim" is enough to get most avid gamers worked into a frenzy. Mention a next-gen Skyrim combined with proposed release dates, and you may need to call in security to keep the peace. Starting next month, both PC and PlayStation 3 gamers will be treating to Dragonborn, the latest Skyrim add-on. The PC edition...

Most of us have dozens of passwords to remember, including for multiple email accounts, Google, Facebook, online banking and credit card accounts, services like Dropbox and Evernote, and on and on, and it’s simply a pain. It can be difficult to create a strong password that you’ll actually remember, and it’s not smart to...

One of the oldest written songs in history is the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal. It's inscribed on a clay tablet and dates back to 1400 BC. Unfortunately, you can't build a radio station around the 3,400-year-old song on Pandora, but there are plenty of alternatives. In fact, music lovers listened to over 1 million different songs by over 100,000...

There was a massive public uproar on the Internet a month ago when Instagram tried changing its Terms of Service (ToS) agreement so that it could sell your pictures for profit. Following the backlash, Instagram tried to say it was a big misunderstanding over standard legalese, and then vowed to change the wording to appease the masses. It...

You know those cute little white cubes that ship with pretty much every iPod touch, iPhone and iPad? Those are charging blocks, with a simply USB slot in there that's used for charging just about any portable device on the planet. And for years now, something similar has been shipping with -- you guessed it -- pretty much every portable device...

When Oracle released its Java Update 11 earlier this week, it patched several zero-day exploits that security researchers had previously identified. Nevertheless, a number of firms still recommended uninstalling Java due to a number of remaining bugs. It's taken less than a week for new flaws to surface -- and these are issues that hadn't...

Did you make a New Year's Resolution to update you Windows 7 rig to Windows 8? Better start making good on it, or else that upgrade's going to cost you more in the long run. A new post from Microsoft this week notes that Windows 8 is seeing "good momentum," but it also reminds people that a relatively affordable Win8 update will soon cost...

Folks have long since argued about what government aspects are too wasteful, and which ones don't actually have a positive impact. But as technology fans, it's hard to knock this idea: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has called for at least one gigabit community in all 50 states by 2015. It's a new challenge that should provide a solid background...

Corsair tends to be somewhat measured in their approach to certain markets and only enters them with products that are clearly differentiated from the competition. That’s true for their cases, peripherals, power supplies, and many other product lines. Corsair, however, has been relatively adventurous in regard to Solid State Drives....

Perhaps a sign that 3D printing technology is edging ever further into the mainstream is that a company like Nokia is using it in a PR stunt. In this case, pun intended, Nokia is releasing 3D templates, case specifications, and handy best practices so that people can print their own Nokia Lumia 820 cases. The phone’s shell can actually...

It's been a long time since we've last been able to play a proper new release of a SimCity game, with SimCity 4 having been released a staggering 10 years ago. If you happen to feel lenient and place SimCity Societies in the running, then it's still been a full six years since we've been able to indulge in our city-building addictions...

In what's sure to bring tears to tens of people, Halo 2's PC multiplayer servers are permanently going dark next month. 343 Industries made the decision to pull the plug when it noticed that usage was consistently peaking at around just 20 player or less. "We’re sad to report that the service end-date for Halo 2 PC multiplayer will be...

Now that the Consumer Electronics Show is over and done with, it's time to start looking forward to Mobile World Congress (MWC), the mobile industry's largest exhibition. It will be there that Samsung unveils its Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet. Two of them, actually -- one with Wi-Fi only and the other with both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. SamMobile,...

Apple's Siri voice assistant software for iOS devices is an evolving persona, one that creates the illusion of having a real-life secretary at your beck and call. She's able to find restaurants, set reminders, jot down notes, and plenty more, and occasionally gets sassy. It's all very charming, though there remains plenty of room for improvement....

Samsung has a treat for Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 2 owners heading into the weekend. It's Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), now available for both devices as an over-the-air (OTA) update or as a manual download/install through the mobile device maker's free Kies software. No matter how you install it, the long-awaited Jelly Bean update is a...

Apple perfected a vertical market when it developed the iPhone, iOS, and the App Store, effectively walling off the garden, as it were. In fact, the only real loophole for evading the standards and practices of the App Store was the Safari Web browser, which of course flung open the doors to the Internet with a single tap. Amazon has now taken...

While it's pretty hard to get a leg-up in a music industry that's already saturated by mega-corporations, Rhapsody has done a fine job of keeping up. And now, there's a deal out there that'll surely have MetroPCS fans thinking twice before spending another dollar on iTunes or Spotify. The two have partnered to introduce a new mobile music...

Kanex's mySpot sure looks a lot like Asus' newest product -- or, should say that the other way around? Whatever the case, it appears that the travel-friendly router is sure getting smaller, with Asus' new WL-330NUL USB pocket router being the latest on the block. It's a tiny, tiny device, with an Ethernet jack on one end and a flip-out USB...

Over the course of the past few years, you might have noticed that component vendors have been working hard to shed some old technology that's been keeping us from progress. We've seen EFI replace the typical BIOS, for example, and GPT become more prevalent to allow us to use hard drives greater than 2.2TB in size. Next up? "Silicon...

The Consumer Electronics Show is over, but the product announcements keep rolling in. Among them is Corsair's introduction of a pair of big and burly Hydro Series liquid CPU coolers, the dual-fan H110 and single-fan H90, both with spacious radiators. "Many PC enthusiasts choose liquid cooling for its extreme cooling efficiency and quiet operation,"...

Earlier this month, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) began testing the ability to call from one iPhone to another using the company's Messenger for iPhone app in Canada. Now, Facebook is rolling this feature out to the United States. Using the Messenger for iPhone app, you should now be able to make a call to another Messenger for iPhone user. According...

Maingear announced that it will add Lucid Virtu MVP Mobile software to its Nomad line of gaming notebooks to increase performance, to the tune of up to 30%. Virtu MVP is designed to provide GPU virtualization to dynamically and intelligently assign graphical workloads to the best available resource, offer virtual V-Sync, and remove redundant...

Genius announced the new Gila professional gaming mouse to its GX Gaming Series. This professional 12-button MMO/RTS gaming mouse can be customized to fit your needs. You can make on-the-fly dpi changes from 200 to 8200, easily switching among five different previously assigned dpi levels directly from the mouse. Gila features a 1ms response...

Lenovo added to its education portfolio with the release of the ThinkPad X131e, a Chromebook designed to withstand the substantial abuse doled out by kids in grades K-12.  The laptop includes a rubberized bumper around the top cover, reinforced corners for the inevitable drops, and strengthened hinges and brackets that are built to be...

John Sculley, an American businessman who once served as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Apple, has some advice for his former employer. The way Sculley sees it, Apple needs to "dramatically rethink" things and forge ahead with a low-cost iPhone model for emerging markets. "Apple needs to adapt to a very different world," Sculley told Bloomberg...

For years, brick-and-mortar retailers have been crowing about the unfair advantage Amazon has in the retail space in territories where it doesn't have to collect sales tax, and now that the playing field is starting to level, their sales are going up. Best Buy, for example, noted that holiday online sales increased in three states where Amazon...

Stop us if you've heard this one before: AT&T is looking to merge with a telecom...what's that, you have heard this one? Well this time it's different. AT&T isn't looking to make another run at T-Mobile, the U.S. subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and presumably the wireless carrier learned its lesson about offering massive breakup fees...

Boy, it must be nice to live like a 1 percenter (speaking about the wealthy, not the outlaw motorcycle club), but even the filthy rich practice prudence every once in awhile. And when it comes to LG Electronics' ginormous 84-inch Ultra HD 4K television, I can share with you 22,000 reasons why not to buy it. Yes, the TV that's wider than a...

What if you're an up-and-coming mobile carrier, needing to make yourself evident to those who are blitzed with ads from the dominant players? If you're Ting, you create a $100,000 "ETF Payout" fund, and you encourage people to join your network while promising to use some of that fund to pay for their early termination fee. This story is more...

Is there anything worse than scampering through airport security, getting to your gate, firing up your laptop to send one last important e-mail before an intercontinental flight... and finding that the airport Wi-Fi will run you $10 per hour? Well, sure, but we could probably count those things on one hand. To combat that feeling, JiWire has...

If any of you reading this are free this Saturday and will be near NVIDIA’s Santa Clara headquarters, they are hosting the Grand Finals of the Call of Duty: Black Ops II | Rivalries at the NVIDIA campus and would like you to attend and enjoy the festivities. The full scoop and registration link are posted below: Join us for what will...

Nearly two years ago, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project. The initiative was intended to rethink all aspects of data server design, including cooling, racks, and server configuration. The coalition has gathered steam and support from a number of companies; AMD announced its own Open 3.0 Platform at today's OCP Summit. AMD's hardware...

Two great tastes that go great together are Jelly Bean (Android 4.1.x) and Samsung's Galaxy S III, and it just so happens that Jelly Bean is exactly what's on AT&T's over-the-air (OTA) menu. So go ahead Galaxy III owners and feast your phones on the OTA update, which is reportedly being rolled out today! Some of you may already have Jelly...

At long last, AT&T is loosening its grip on Apple's FaceTime video conferencing technology over cellular connections. If you recall, FaceTime was limited to Wi-Fi when it was first debuted, and then in September 2012, AT&T said it would gradually roll out support on cellular to sort of test the waters. Now it's ready to open the floodgates....

Amid a precarious PC market and rumors that Dell is looking to revert back to becoming a privately-held company as opposed to a publicly-traded one (which it is currently), the company somewhat quietly announced “Project Ophelia”, a potentially game-changing device that is essentially a computer/cloud client on a stick. The little...

Java is a mess; Oracle’s software has become a popular target of cybercriminals, and news about Java exploits is becoming more and more common, even as the solutions Oracle provides offer little comfort. Wait, it gets worse: According to Kaspersky Labs and security company Seculert, the terrifying and massive Red October botnet espionage...

Verizon's Risk Team has published a blog post on a mind-boggling security adventure (it's the only term that really fits) detailing just how poorly some IT workers -- including those working for "critical infrastructure" companies -- understand the meaning of the term. The saga began when a US-based company contacted the VRT, asking for their...

If all goes as planned, Texas could be the home to the nation's first all digital library by the end of this summer. San Antonio's Bexar County will be the home of this book-less public library. The project, referred to as BiblioTech, was announced recently by the Bexar County Commissioners Court. Plans for the 4,989 square-foot BiblioTech...

Google's Doodles have become quite a hit over the years, adding interest and creativity to the search giant's otherwise simple homepage.  Over the years, Google's team of doodlers has created over 1,500 doodles for Google's homepages around the world. Each year, Google invites K-12 students around the United States to draw a doodle for...

The all-in-one PC form factor is a brilliant, if not obvious, evolution of the desktop computer. AIO systems offer the maximum amount of screen real estate while drastically minimizing the total footprint of the computer by packing all the components inside the monitor (or in the case of this particular AIO, the base of the stand). Even better,...

Recovering Temple Run addicts who finally managed to stop playing the endless action game developed by Imangi Studios are going to feel like Michael Corleone did in Godfather III when he said, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." That is, unless you can resist Temple Run 2, which is already available in New Zealand and slated...

George Lucas may have sold his Star Wars franchise to Disney a little too soon, missing out on an opportunity to release yet another re-mastered special edition with authentic looking hyperspace travel. That's right folks, we've all been misled by Hollywood (shocking, but true!); traveling through galaxies at warp speed in real-life would...

PC gamers are sometimes treated like second-class citizens (to put it delicately) compared to our console brethren, and if you're worried BioShock Infinite will be another one of those titles, Irrational Games wants to put your fears to rest. The developer posted an article detailing what PC gamers can expect from the upcoming title, as well...

One of the grooviest gadgets to break cover at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week was Sony's Xperia Z smartphone. Armed with a tantalizing collection of components and features, and waterproof up to three feet, the Xperia Z is definitely on our radar. Might Sony also be readying an Xperia Z tablet? Twitter account @Xperia_info...

Sometimes, the world's best jobs are the hardest seats to fill. You'd have to imagine that heading up Apple's retail sectors -- one of the most successful in the world at the brick-and-mortar game -- would be something of a fun and exciting challenge. But after losing the head a few months ago due to choice, Apple has now lost another top...

Fusion-io's ioDrive line has become an icon in its own right, proving that all-flash storage solutions -- while pricey -- do fit in our world. Now, the company is taking yet another swipe at the market (citing a target of "webscale" customers) with the introduction of ioScale. This unit was previously exclusive to Fusion-io customers outfitting...

In-flight Wi-Fi is a nice amenity when crossing the skies of the continental United States, but it's pretty much radio silence if heading overseas. No longer. United has just become the first U.S.-based international carrier to offer customers the ability to stay connected while traveling on long-haul overseas routes. Of course, it's not a...

Everyone enjoys a love story, right? And if you're a television fan, this is one love story you'll probably have an easy time blushing about. The Walt Disney Company and AT&T have just locked down a pretty substantial new agreement regarding distribution of content through the carrier's U-verse platform. It's a multi-year deal, which will...

It may come as no surprise to you that Facebook hosts a lot of data, generated by and harvested from its billion users. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg said today that there are 240 billion photos and one trillion connections in Facebook’s social graph. Thus, it makes sense for Facebook to launch its own search tool, called Graph Search. Zuck...

Apple's share price is lingering around the $488 mark, down more than 30 percent from its 52-week high of $705.07 just prior to the iPhone 5 launch. Shares of Apple stock dropped to as low as $483.80 earlier this morning, and is on pace to the close the day below $500 per share, which would be the first time that's happened since February...

After several setbacks and delays, the folks at Fedora have just released their newest Linux distro, Fedora 18, otherwise known by its code-name "Spherical Cow." One of the big new features in Fedora 18 is that it now supports UEFI Secure Boot by using bootloaders that have been signed with Microsoft certificates. In short, you should have...

A Belgian consumer rights organization has announced it will take Apple to court over the company's failure to satisfactorily disclose EU-mandated warranty terms. According to European Union law, consumers are entitled to a two year warranty, free of charge. Apple, meanwhile, charges for an Apple Care warranty after the first year and steers...

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon to learn of music stores closing shop nowadays, but when a major retailer with stores across the UK, Ireland and Canada goes into administration - the situation almost seems dire. HMV isn't just some regular music store - its seeds were planted in the late 1890s alongside the disc gramophone. In 1907, the company...

3TB Western Digital Red Internal Hard Drive (WD30EFRX) for $140 with free shipping (normally $170 - use coupon code EMCNJJE28). Interface: SATA 6.0Gb/s Cache: 64MB Form Factor: 3.5" 256GB Samsung 840 Pro Series Solid State Drive (MZ-7PD256BW) for $215 with free shipping (normally $240 - use coupon code EMCNJJE22). Controller: Samsung MDX Controller...

CES is chock full of enough new products and technologies to make even the most cynical techie salivate, but as always, there are a handful of items that tend to rise to the top and stand out for being the best products of their kind or for true innovation.  We thought we'd run down a short list of the stand-out products of this year's...

Like many memory makers, Mushkin is heavily focused on solid state drives (SSDs) these days, having previously launched its enterprise-friendly ProSpec SSD family at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week. Without skipping a beat, Mushkin today announced the U.S. availability of its capacious 480GB Atlas mSATA SSD. It's...

What if you could take an online course from a third-party site (not necessarily a university), and get college credit for it? Wouldn't that be ideal? In today's take on "Living In The Future," we're seeing a Silicon Valley start-up partner with San Jose State University in order to make those kinds of dreams come true. Udacity is in the business...

China isn't just the most populated country in the world, it also boasts the most Internet users. That's not surprising since it's only logical for those two traits to go hand-in-hand, but the numbers are staggering nonetheless. For example, China's online population grew 10 percent last year, adding 51 million additional users. That brings...

After looking at the sales figures for Surface RT, Microsoft may find itself haunted by the words of Acer chairman and CEO JT Wang. Back in August, Wang stated in an interview with The Financial Times that Microsoft should "think twice" about launching a tablet of its own, saying that hardware is "not something you are good at." In our own...

Like a siren song, In Win’s H-Frame and D-Frame open air cases called to us from across the show floor at CES. In Win’s booth was tucked away in a corner, which was a rather demure setting for the company’s sizzling cases. Specifically, the H-Frame and D-Frame cases pulled us in for a closer look. The H-Frame was a CES darling,...

The friendly skies are becoming the connected skies. While getting up in an airplane used to be one of the few remaining places in America where it was pretty much impossible to reach someone, the introduction of in-flight Wi-Fi has drastically changed that. Many airlines have Gogo installed near fleet-wide, with the likes of Virgin America...

RadioShack is one of those companies that you have to wonder about. Does it have what it takes to compete in the modern-day landscape of online shopping and major electronic store domination? Do people still need it in the same way they used to? In a strange retail move, RadioShack announced this week the end of its relationship with Target,...

If you're still hanging on to your original Wii, or you managed to pick up a Wii Mini on a recent trip to Canada, you may be in luck. If you're an avid viewer of content from Amazon's Instant Video library, you'll be delighted to know that original Wii owners can now stream those movies, documentaries and TV shows. When Nintendo released the...

The way Gartner sees it, we're all going to be living in single-PC homes in the not-too-distant future. Mom, pop, little Billy and his sister Janet won't have their own PCs anymore, and will instead share a single primary PC in the household for heavy lifting, and use a tablet for content consumption chores, like surfing the web and playing...

Researchers with Kaspersky Labs have released information on a new botnet they've discovered that dwarfs any previous cyber-espionage efforts as far as its size, scope, and complexity. The new network, dubbed Red October, has sunk its hooks into systems worldwide. The degree of penetration varies from state to state -- in the United States,...

For as much attention Google Glass has received, due in part to appearing on the face of Google co-founder Sergey Brin at high-profile events such as a New York fashion show, Vuzix Corporation’s M100 Smart Glasses may quietly be beating Google to market. Indeed, Vuzix expects its M100 Smart Glasses to ship in the second half of this...

Why did Robot Chicken cross the road? To get to Netflix, of course. The stop-motion animated comedy series will be met by other Adult Swim shows, including Aqua Teen Hunger Force (longest running original series on Adult Swim), Sony Pictures Television's The Boondocks, and Childrens Hospital, as part of a multi-year licensing deal with Turner...

RIM is getting ready to launch its BlackBerry 10 operating system in about two weeks. In an effort to try to boost the new platform's app store, RIM held two Port-A-Thon events last week. One of the events was focused on BlackBerry while the other focused on Android developers. RIM's vice president of develop relations, Alec Saunders, tweeted...

Tablets are extremely popular right now, but many users still need a more powerful machine to do serious work. For people who don't want two devices but desire the touch screen controls and convenience of a tablet, as well as the productivity capabilities of a notebook in a single machine, a convertible ultrabook may be a good fit. We're starting...

Are you the sort of drinker who simply doesn't know when to stop? Sometimes, even the best of us can fall into the trap. When you're having a good time, the hours just fly by, and so do the drinks - only to catch up to you as soon as the fun stops and it's time for bed. You close your eyes, the room is spinning, and you swear that you're never...

If you build a fiber-optic network, the startups will come. That’s what Google has found, after building a high-speed pipe to Kansas City. Google Fiber, which is a trial project, is wooing Kansas City tech companies with gigabit Internet connection speeds.   Google is bringing gigabit Internet connectivity to startups in Kansas...

Software vulnerabilities are common, but it’s not every day that the Computer Readiness Team (CERT) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security steps in and starts warning the public. Not surprisingly, Oracle jumped on the security hole and released an update (Java Update 7u11) that resolves the problem. If you’re running...

In Field of Dreams, farmer Ray Kinsella heard a voice that said, "If you build it, he will come." The Raspberry Pi Foundation must have heard a similar whisper about building a low-cost PC, and like Kinsella, the company was wise to listen, having likely sold a million Raspberry Pi boards to date. "The folks at element 14/Premier Farnell announced...

We live in an increasingly connected world. Each and every day, loads of people are accessing the Internet for the first time, and that wild sensation of having near-infinite knowledge at your fingertips is one that will probably never be matched by anything else in our lifetime. These days, a lot of people are touching the Internet for the...

Last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was arguably the most important one in Microsoft's history. Think about the circumstances: tablets and smartphones are getting the attention that desktops and notebooks once had, PC sales growth is down, and Windows 8 is an operating system for a new era, one in which Microsoft very...

Where once millions of buyers only had eyes for Apple's sexy iPhone devices, sassy smartphones from Samsung and other Android players have gotten pretty good at wooing previously loyal iOS fans. As a result, demand is down for the iPhone 5, as evidenced by Apple reportedly cutting orders for various components due to weak demand. An article...

One of the buzzwords to come out of CES last week wasn't really a world at all: it's 4K. But the term you'll be hearing more often is "Ultra HD." Samsung actually showcased an 85" Ultra HD monster at the show, and to those who generally complain that CES is full of concepts that never ship -- have a look at this. The company's 85S9 has already...

Bragging is typically frowned upon, but hey -- when you're in a global war with a company that's never shy about flaunting impressive numbers, you might as well let the arrow fly. These arrows are flying from South Korea, as Samsung has just announced that a whopping 100 million Galaxy S smartphones have been sold to date, worldwide. Think...

How low can you go? ASUS has announced the MeMO Pad, a 7-inch (1024x600) multi-touch tablet sporting a 1GHz VIA WM8950 CPU with a Mali 400 GPU and running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. And it costs just $149. An iPad killer it’s not, but ASUS has plenty of other tablets designed to compete toe-to-toe with the king of tablets. Instead, the...

There's just no escaping the cloud. Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google, and a host of other major players in the enterprise and CE spaces have already dived headfirst into cloud hosting, and it looks as if HP isn't going to simply rely on third-party companies for its own. The company has just created a new business unit, called Converged Cloud,...

So, here's the reality of the matter: Apple shunned NFC when it introduced the iPhone 5 last year without the hardware necessary for it to engage in tap-and-go payments. But there's always a workaround where there's a will, right? Right! U.S. Bank has just launched its new "Go Mobile" iPhone app for customers in Salt Lake City and Portland,...

Most times, dealing with airlines means dealing with lackluster technology. In fact, it's rare that you see a "legacy" airline do anything innovative at all outside of inventing new fees to charge. But Delta's new iPhone + iPad app is surging ahead, and is making a strong case for being the best airline app in the App Store. The company just...

Consider this a PSA: Oracle is going to patch that hole in Java, the one that security pros discovered last week. Cybercriminals were using a zero-day exploit in Oracle’s Java to deliver malware payloads, steal identities, and take over computers to force them to commit nefarious acts. According to Reuters, Oracle said that “A...

It's believed that Apple CEO Tim Cook has made at least two trips to China since taking over as head of the company. And why not, considering that China is Apple's second-largest market. Furthermore, Cook said he "strongly" believes China will become Apple's No. 1 customer, so there's good reason why he's exerting so much effort building and...

Research In Motion (RIM) is in control of its own fate. If BlackBerry 10 flops, and by extension, the company's next-generation mobile plans, the Canadian company will only have itself to blame, and not any of the major wireless carriers. That's because BlackBerry 10 reportedly has the backing of all four major wireless carriers in the U.S.,...

Great news for Android users: starting today, you can install Chrome Beta channel for phones and tablets on Android 4.0+ from Google Play. This release includes some of the biggest developer updates to Chrome for Android since its launch last year, bringing many features available on other Chrome versions to Android as well. Like...

Attention prospective students: the staggering tuition at Drexel might just be worth it. The university recently introduced a 24-hour, self-service vending machine located in the W. W. Hagerty Library that will dispense MacBooks for use by students, faculty and staff. Drexel is the third university on the East Coast to introduce the kiosk,...

CES is a blast in part because we get to see and touch exciting technology and amazing prototypes and grill companies in person about the latest rumors pertaining to their products. Yet for as exciting as all of that may be, it’s also a time for companies to simply look us in the eye and proudly show off their latest wares, whether they’re...

If you've been following Apple's recent quarterly earnings, this news won't come as a shock. But to most, it definitely will. The nation most commonly associated with Apple knockoffs may soon become the nation that's contributing the most to Apple's bottom line. It's a wild shift from even ten years back, when Apple's sales in China weren't...

As it turns out, the U.S. is a democracy. And while many may feel that their voices are rarely heard, the age of the Internet has given an even stronger echo to those with access to a keyboard and mouse. The White House has deemed that any online petition aimed at the U.S. government will be recognized and responded to, so long as over 25,000...

Well... I'm sure this isn't what the designers behind IBM's Watson supercomputer had in mind when it came to human interaction. As it turns out, Watson, as smart as it is, cannot tell the difference between English words that are appropriate, and then not-so-appropriate. You might immediately realize when a word is derogatory - even...

In the Web browser world, WebKit is a force to be reckoned with. It began life as a couple of KDE libraries (KHTML and KJS), but was then forked and further developed by a bevvy of companies including Apple, Nokia, Google and RIM. While KHTML's initial focus was to support the popular Linux Web browser Konquerer, the fork, which then became...

Attention DIY yourself system builders and upgraders, if you're thinking about adding more RAM to your system, you may not want to sit on the fence too much longer. According to DRAMeXchange, DRAM contract prices continue to rise, increasing by 2 percent on average in the first half of December, and still going up. The research firm says that...

The last thing Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) needs right now is to have to deal with continued supplier issues as the year reboots. It's been a tumultuous year for the Sunnyvale chip designer, and to ensure things on the supply side run smoothly, AMD has reportedly tapped Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to build its upcoming...

When it comes to PVRs, there's hardly a more recognizable name than Hauppauge. The company is back this year with yet another new product, the HD PVR 2 video recorder. In fact, there's two new models -- one is geared toward home media enthusiasts, while the other is designed for advanced gamers. The new model for home media users is called...

While the mainstream seems to be signaling that the iPad is the clear favorite in the tablet race, Android is making a slow and deliberate push into that market share. With the introduction of the low-cost, high-powered, well-built Nexus 7, Android tabs have become more than an obsession for the technically savvy. Now, players like Lenovo...

Modularity seems to be a minor theme of late, and NZXT is tapping into that crowd-pleasing potential with the release of the NZXT Phantom 630, the successor to the Phantom 410 and Phantom 820. The ability to alter the configuration of drive bays has long been an occasional and welcome feature on any chassis, but it’s a primary feature...

Nintendo took a lot of risks with the Wii U. It bet on the second-screen controller becoming a major draw, that the console's relatively limited hardware wouldn't be an issue, and that it could spark the same kind of meteoric sales volume a second time around. It's the first time Nintendo has ever tried to launch such a comprehensive device,...

We speak often of the “patent wars”, but underpinning those battles is something else: the “patent race”, as it were, which is how quickly and comprehensively companies can patent their technologies and designs. Without copious patents in hand, the Apples, Microsofts, Samsungs, and Googles of the world couldn’t...

In an effort to make CDs more attractive, Amazon is adding a new service known as AutoRip. If you purchase an AutoRip CD through Amazon, the retailer will now give you a free MP3 version of that same album. The MP3 version will be delivered to your Amazon Cloud Player library so you can access it from your computer, Kindle Fire, Android phone,...

We’re hearing a lot of talk about mobile at CES, but we’re also seeing some great PC hardware, as well. Antec had some interesting products to show us on both fronts. The first product to catch our eye was the Antec GX700. Marketing Coordinator Justin Chou tells us Antec went out of its way to build an inexpensive, but high-quality chassis...

Over the years, SanDisk has become best known as a supplier of flash memory cards and accessories. But the SanDisk folks we talked to at CES today say they'd really like to squeeze SSDs onto that list as well. In fact, SSDs were all they wanted to talk about at the show. And in terms of its specifications, their new consumer SSD, the...

Give it some time and when Grand Theft Auto V is released this Spring, underage gamers who somehow manage to get their hands on the title will be stuffing people in trunks in real life, right? You know that's nonsense, and I know that's nonsense, but there's a general consensus among parents that violent video games are leading to real-world...

Over the last few years, Rosewill has significantly expanded their product offerings. The company used to offer only a few PC-related accessories and cases, but now have everything from high-end power supplies to dedicated RAID enclosures in their product stack, with just about anything else you could imagine in-between. While gallivanting...

Your HotHardware Public Service Announcement (PSA) of the day is that there's a new version of Google's Chrome browser available to download, Chrome 24. The latest build is heavy on security updates and short on feature enhancements, though it does add support for MathML (with a shout out to WebKit volunteer Dave Barton). Also included is...

Here we go again. We're not even halfway through the first month of the New Year, and already we're being warned to disable Java. Not as a general practice, mind you (though that's not a bad idea), but because of yet another zero-day exploit spotted in the wild "There appears to be multiple ad networks redirecting to Blackhole sites, amplifying...

The video game industry industry declined 22 percent in December, dropping from $4.1 billion in retail sales in 2011 to $3.21 billion in 2012, according to the latest data published by the NPD Group. Software sales were hit the hardest, dropping 27 percent because of fewer releases. "A major culprit in the decline in retail sales in 2012 was...

It's getting really difficult not to flat-out fall in love Lenovo. The PC maker doesn't sit around and whine about Microsoft stepping into the hardware space (we're looking at you, Acer), nor does it panic when computer sales start to slow down. The company simply continues to put out solid products (ThinkPad X1 Carbon, anyone?), gain market...

Trying to predict what Apple will do next is a little like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. If you get lucky, you're spot with your prediction, and the odds go up exponentially if you receive some guidance. So, when rumors surfaced from seemingly reliable sources that Apple was building a low cost iPhone model to compete with Android, there...

Lian-Li has a wide selection of computer chassis available supporting virtually every size of motherboard imaginable, but the company is about to release many more. We swung by Lian-Li’s booth at CES to see what’s coming down the pike, and we ended up ogling a whole fleet of all-metal, intriguing cases. All of the cases we saw...

It's a new year, which means you may very well be in the market for a new LCD. If you're a gamer, and you're in the market, BenQ's new RL2455HM may be worth a look. Launched at CES 2013, this LCD slots into the company's growing line of gaming monitors. It features a 1ms grey-to-grey response time, 2-watt stereo speakers, dual HDMI ports,...

As of now, we're still waiting for Microsoft to come clean with Windows RT sales figures. And while waiting takes time, Samsung's giving us a clue: things probably aren't so great. Mike Abary, the head of Samsung's PC and tablet business in the States, has confirmed to CNET that no Samsung-made Windows RT products will be released on American...

Nicholas Negroponte’s quest to provide low cost computing to kids worldwide with the One Laptop Per Child project has had its share of bumps and bruises along the way, but this week the group announced two new, long-awaited updates in the XO-4 laptop and XO Learning Tablet. We knew OLPC had some things to announce at CES, but we first...

We had a chance to swing by Roccat’s suite today to see their latest and greatest products including the company’s first mechanical keyboard, a Beta version of Power Grid, and a couple of mouse pads. First, we got to see the Ryos mechanical keyboard series. The Ryos MK keyboard features Cherry switches, 2MB of memory, and a 32-bit...

While visiting LG's booth, we had a chance to see the company's latest OLED TVs. LG plans to ship its 55-inch OLED TV in March in the US. As you would expect from an OLED TV, it's absolutely gorgeous and pencil-thin. LG was also showing off its new 55-inch curved OLED TV known as the EA9800. The company wouldn't give us any information on...

So, you went out and purchased yourself an Apple iPhone 5, is that it? Great, so have millions of others. If you want to stand out from the crowd with a truly unique and geeky looking iPhone 5, one way you can do that is by dropping an additional $40 on a translucent iPhone 5 Mod Kit. It might very well be the best (or worst) phone accessory...

We began our time at Samsung's booth taking a closer look at the Galaxy Camera. As you'll recall, the Galaxy Camera runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and features 4G connectivity so you can upload and share photos immediately. The back of the camera features a very nice 4.8-inch HD touchscreen.   Samsung's Galaxy Camera lets you take pics...

27" Dell UltraSharp U2713HM IPS LED Monitor w/ USB 3.0 Hub for $650 with free shipping (normally $799). Resolution: 2560x1440 Response Time: 8ms Contrast Ratio: 2,000,000:1 Inputs: D-Sub, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort Corsair CX430 430W Power Supply for $20 with free shipping (normally $40- use this form). Energy Efficient: 80 Plus Bronze Certified...

An alleged Apple smartphone thief bit off more than he could chew when the owner of the stolen device tracked his whereabouts using the Find My iPhone app. The owner of the iPhone in question, Kenneth Schmidgall, tracked the suspect to a beach where he caught up with the person who was in possession of his smartphone as he rode his bike, blissfully...

Micron on Thursday introduced its new M500 solid state drive (SSD) with terabyte-class capacity, an ultra-slim design, and increased response times compared to previous SSD products, all at an "affordable price point." The M500 SSD will be sold to consumers, businesses, and system builders under the Crucial brand, and to OEM customers under...

OCZ used the Consumer Electronics Show to unveil their latest high-end solid state drive, the Vector PCI Express. As its name suggests, the Vector PCI Express leverages the same in-house developed Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller technology used in OCZ’s excellent Vector SATA III SSD (reviewed here), but the new drive attaches to a system...

We've covered a number of high-profile Kickstarter projects on HotHardware in 2012, and there's good reason for that. The online crowd funding site had a busy year, one in which more than 18,000 projects were successfully funded. Over 2.2 million people contributed hard earned dollars to various projects, pledging a combined $319.78 million....

Nokia can ill-afford any missteps as it attempts to rebuild its brand into a major smartphone player, so it's a little concerning on a number of levels that it was caught intercepting Internet traffic on its phones and redirecting the data through its own server farm. Is Nokia engaging in so-called man-in-the-middle attacks against its own...

Although Xi3 made CES headlines for other things this week, the company has some tasty wares to show off in the form of its unique modular computers, and we got a firsthand look. There are just a handful of models in the lineup thus far, but despite their small size, these machines pack a wallop. The X7A is the highest end unit in the group...

Rumors are boiling over regarding the potential for a low-end iPhone before the end of the year, but one has to wonder: does Apple really need a low-end iPhone? Already, Apple is penetrating new markets by getting the iPhone 4 onto prepaid carriers like Cricket, and now, Walmart + Straight Talk have announced that the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5...

T-Mobile USA is making a serious charge, and it's doing so by doing something novel: just being different. Of the four major carriers in the U.S., T-Mobile is the only one ushering in new plans that buck the trend of carrier subsidies and major limits on usage. This week, the operator decided to expand its unlimited nationwide 4G data to no-annual-contract...

Although Canonical is still hunting for OEM partners to develop handsets for Ubuntu on smartphones, the OS is alive and well, running smooth and pretty on prototype handsets at CES 2013. The Canonical folks were kind enough to give us a demo, which you can see below: Note in particular the lack of any hardware button on this device; that’s...

Apple might be looking to reclaim a bit of lost smartphone market share by introducing a lower end (and less expensive) iPhone model to compete with the zillion different Android phones in the wild. Word on the web is that such a device could launch sometime this year. Citing "people briefed on the matter," The Wall Street Journal says the...

Gigabyte gave us a tour of its new laptops, tablets, and everything in-between this week in Las Vegas. As with all of the big names at CES, Gigabyte is serious about getting touch screens on most devices running Windows 8 (with the exception of some of its heavy-duty gamer laptops - and even those will likely have touch down the...

We spent some time with representatives from Intel at the Consumer Electronics show and saw a couple of interesting demos in action. In addition to announcing that 7W Ivy Bridge-based processors are coming down the pipeline, Intel was touting the low power characteristics and efficiency of its current Clover Trail Atom processors, which...

We took a close-up gander at some of MSI's new laptops this week at CES and two caught our eye. The MSI GT70 Dragon Edition is turning heads (and snagged a CES Innovations award) for its bright-red chassis, which sports dragon engravings. The $2699 system has a 17.3-inch, 1920x1080 screen and boasts an Intel Core i7-3630QM processor. Other...

It's easy to see why T-Mobile USA appointed John Legere as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of its business unit back in September of last year. He's a charismatic dude, and if T-Mobile didn't snag him, Comedy Central might have. That's the impression you get after listening to him lambast AT&T and other wireless competitors. Legere didn't...

For years, notebook PCs have been the go-to device for mobile computing, but is this the dawn of a new era? Tablets are everywhere these days, they're dropping in price, and according to NPD DisplaySearch, they're going to fly off store shelves faster than notebooks in 2013. NPD DisplaySearch forecasts that tablet shipments will reach 240...

Plenty of folks thought that Razer was blowing smoke when it announced that it was developing a high end gaming tablet, dubbed Project Fiona, at last year’s CES. A year later, lo and behold, the company has a whole booth full of them at CES 2013. And the device is gorgeous. After garnering loads of input from actual PC gamers, Razer...

While at MSI’s suite today, we had the chance to get some hands on time with the company’s latest ultrabook convertible, the Slider S20. Announced late last week, this ultrabook is set to be available later this month with a price tag of $1,199.99.  Key specifications and features include Windows 8 along with an Intel Core...

Tough tablets? Panasonic's got a couple of new ones to introduce at CES 2013. The Toughpad line of enterprise-grade tablets is gaining new models this week: the Toughpad FZ-G1 (a 10" tablet running Windows 8 Pro) and the Toughpad JT-B1 (a 7" Android-powered unit). Both of them follow the original 10" Android-powered Toughpad FZ-A1 which became...

Not surprisingly, the upcoming Super Bowl is apt to be one of the most watched events in the world this year. And for CBS, there's a huge challenge ahead in distributing that event to as many people as possible, using some of the more unconventional viewing options. The next Super Bowl will be the first to feature a live halftime stream, and...

Earlier, we came across a hot item about Valve and their rumored Steam Box gaming console. Word came out that modular PC maker Xi3 was Valve’s hardware partner on the project and was showing off the result, a beautifully designed computer called the Piston. However, when we eagerly scooted over to Valve’s booth here at CES 2013...

NVIDIA made some serious noise and surprised just about everyone in attendance a couple of days before the official opening of this year's Consumer Electronics Show, with the company’s official unveiling of its next-gen Tegra 4 SoC and a portable gaming device, code-named "Project SHIELD." We posted details regarding Tegra 4 and SHIELD...

With all the hustle and bustle of CES surrounding us, let's take a moment for a feel-good story. The Chelsea district in New York is comprised of both rich and poor; the rich can undoubtedly afford Internet, while the poor may not. It's easy for a lot of us to take Internet for granted, but just imagine not having it. Some of us go insane...

Just when you thought that tablet resolutions couldn't get any more ridiculous, here comes Panasonic with the unveiling of a 4K resolution model. Yes, 4K. But that's not all that makes this tablet unique: it comes in at a staggering 20-inches in size. Clearly, this isn't meant to be something you toss into your backpack and use while on the...

A humorous thing about CES is that every year, there's always a couple of buzzwords that you can't ignore. "3D" has been a big one in recent years, as has been "cloud", "ultrabooks", "superphones' and so on. This year, a major buzzword is one that really caught fire throughout 2012: "4K". We're of course talking about display resolutions here,...

For the past several months, the Internet has been flush with rumors about a so-called Steam Box that has the potential to revolutionize PC gaming. Such things have an unfortunate way of disappearing into a place called VaporwareVille (the only "Ville" not owned by Zynga), but lest you fear the same fate awaits the Steam Box, check out what...

Wondering what you can expect from Hulu in 2013? The streaming video service answered that question today by releasing a handful of trailers for new original and exclusive programming, including its first animated original series called The Awesomes. Co-created by Saturday Night Live's head writer Seth Meyers and SNL alum Michael Shoemaker,...

It has been a rough few years for AMD. The company has found itself increasingly behind the eight ball and outmaneuvered, thanks to strong competition from Intel and less-than-stellar performance with recent releases of their A series integrated APUs. At a press event yesterday at CES 2013,  the Sunnyvale-based company focused on demonstrating...

Remember Mushkin? The company isn't in the headlines as much as it used to be when it was cranking out enthusiast grade memory at a breakneck pace, but it hasn't faded off into obscurity either. Mushkin's on hand at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and among the products it brought with it is a new line of enterprise-class...

Target has a message for Amazon and other popular online retailers: "You better check yourself before you wreck yourself." We're more than paraphrasing (Target didn't actually say that), but an updated price match policy makes it clear that the brick and mortar retailer is tired of being shoved around by online competitors. Effective immediately,...

AT&T on Tuesday announced that it sold more than 10 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2012, which isn't just a lot of smartphones, it's actually a personal record. Ma Bell's previous high was 9.4 million smartphone sales, which it achieved a year prior in the fourth quarter of 2011. "We had another incredible quarter of smartphone...

With CES getting underway, Lenovo treated us to some one-on-one time with one of its more unsual products: The Horizon Table PC. The 27-inch tablet is not only big enough to be used as a table, it is one. As we discussed earlier,device fits into (and becomes the centerpiece of) a special, high-tech table that runs Windows 8.   In...

Let's say you're out playing golf and you shank the shot so badly, you end up near a pond. You walk over, whip out your smartphone to snap a pic for Facebook, and then...oops! That slippery sucker jumps right out of your hand and dives into the drink. You then fish out your phone, but it's dripping water and appears dead. What a day! That's...

If there's one company worth watching out for at any CES, it's Corsair. More often than not, the company unveils a slew of products that catch our attention for all the right reasons, and sometimes even cause us to want to rebuild our PCs using its latest collection of kit. Another stature from Corsair is the unveiling of something we weren't...

Looking for something small and useful out of CES? How about this? Kanex has just introduced the meDrive, a file server for iOS products that can be used to expand storage and provide a secure local cloud. It essentially turns USB storage into a network drive, which can then be accessed from an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch or Mac + PC. iOS file...

Now that Windows 8 it out in full force, we're seeing a new raft of LCDs that are shipping as "Windows 8 certified." Sure enough, as touch becomes more important in the world of gestures, ViewSonic has introduced the TD2340, TD2740 and TD3240 scratch resistant, 10-point Windows 8 certified displays. The TD 40 family features Professional Grade...

We had a chance to stop by Lenovo’s suite today at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, to check out some of the latest and greatest offerings from the company. First up is the new Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2. This tablet runs on Windows 8 Pro and features a 10.1-inch multi-touch HD display. Lenovo claims this is the lightest Windows 8 tablet on the...

A few months ago, we detailed Intel's low-power plans with Haswell and how the company was planning to push mainstream x86 processors into much lower TDPs than it had previously discussed. Santa Clara still intends to deliver Haswell parts at 10W or below, but it's accelerated the delivery of sub-10W parts even further. Today, it officially...

One of the most active companies at CES in the announcements department is Intel, and it wasted no time in getting things kicked-off today. It's obvious that the company would love a much larger piece of the mobile pie, but to date, it's had a difficult time penetrating the North American market. However, it's been doing fairly well in other...

In addition to the major system and graphics card announcements ASUS made at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, the company was showing off a number of other interesting products as well. We just spent some time with representatives from ASUS at a suite in the Trump Hotel and got to check out some new monitors, motherboards,...

CyberPowerPC has gone all out with its announcements at CES, unveiling not only a new notebook and small form-factor PC, but one of the beefiest and most robust water-cooling kits we've seen in a while. Let's take it from the top. It seems that lately, "console-sized" is all the rage, and that's exactly how CyberPowerPC is describing its brand-new...

Ever since AMD debuted the HD 7000 series, there's been rumors that a high-end HD 7990 dual-GPU version of the card would appear and take on Nvidia's GTX 690. Thus far, the company has avoided launching such a card in the consumer space (the S10000, which we covered last November, packs two 7970 cores on a single PCB but is aimed at data centers...

OCZ is planning to showcase several storage products this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and among them is a pre-production version of its new flagship Vector SSD Series for PCI Express (PCIe) interfaces. Armed with an Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller and the above mentioned PCIe interface, the latest Vector SSDs will...

Ford and Rhapsody are teaming up to deliver the latter's streaming Internet music service to more than 1 million Ford and Lincoln vehicles. An official announcement will be made later today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, but in the meantime, some details have already trickled out. According to Bloomberg, Rhapsody's service...

You better believe Asus intends to make a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, like a rhino jumping off the high-dive. It starts off with a canonball unveiling of the "Asus Qube with Google TV" (just "Qube" from here on out), a square shaped device intended to add Google TV to your high definition television. The Qube...

Windows 8 opens up a whole new world of possibilities in computing, and one of the recurring themes we've seen thus far is that of the convertible laptop. There are plenty to be seen at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including two from Lenovo. The first is the ThinkPad Helix with a "groundbreaking 'rip and flip' design"...

While all the eyes in the tech industry are focused on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, Apple still found a way to make headlines, though not by releasing new hardware. Instead, Apple chose today, the day before CES officially kicks off, to announce that its App Store has notched more than a mind boggling 40 billion...

Audience has just announced their latest smartphone/mobile audio processor, the earSmart eS515. The earSmart eS515 combines the company’s advanced voice processing technology, which is already employed in many popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II, with a high-performance, low-power audio codec for...

Zotac is starting off its CES 2013 by announcing a pair of new ZBOX mini-PCs, with the 3rd-generation ZBOX (ID42) leading the way and packing revamped specs. “After many years of research and development, ZOTAC is able to integrate desktop components and discrete graphics into our award-winning ZBOX mini-PC for greater flexibility and...

This evening, NVIDIA made some bold moves at their CES 2013 press conference and announced a couple of potentially game-changing products. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang spent a little more than 90 minutes talking to a captive audience at the press conference, which was held at the posh Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. He used the first couple of segments to...

When clouds and cars combine, what do you get? Something like this, probably. Delphi has announced this week a new cloud-based automotive connective service for consumers. It was officially unwrapped at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show, allowing drivers to mimic their key fob functions to control their car, track, locate, access,...

Look out, Thunderbolt! Apple and Intel's high-speed interconnect just got some new competition, but if you aren't looking closely, you may think it's actually old technology. USB 3.0 is planning to get a major update, and in fact, it'll end up doubling the transfer rates of an already quick technology. The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today announced...

NVIDIA is kicking off their CES 2013 onslaught a little early this evening with major announcements promised at an exclusive press event at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas at 8PM PST.  Buzz with folks in the know says that NVIDIA could officially take the wraps off Tegra 4, their next generation low power integrated System-On-a-Chip, based...

CES doesn’t officially start until January 8, but many of the pre-show festivities have begun. We just spent some time at the CES Unveiled event taking place at the Mandalay Bay resort and have some cool stuff show you. Amidst the myriad of funky gadgets, mobile accessories, and random doo-dads, there were a few PC-centric items...

Storage -- it's a wild and wonderful thing. But can small businesses and enterprises every truly have enough? LaCie doesn't think so, and has today unveiled the 5big NAS Pro as well as a 20TB Thunderbolt RAID drive. The latter is a massive, five-bay RAID solution, offering up to 20TB of storage and speeds up to 785MB/sec. It manages that by...

Is there an award for the world's most beautiful hard drive? Because if so, LaCie and famed designer Philippe Starck may have just created it. The pair debuted the Blade Runner today, an external hard drive that combines an anthropomorphic metal interior with an angular cage-like shell. In fact, only 9,999 of these will be produced, and each...

If you want the full touch experience of Windows 8 without investing in a brand new PC, Lenovo's ThinkVision LT1423p Touch Mobile Monitor might be the solution you're looking for. The LT1423p is a 13.3-inch display with a 10-point multi-touch Gorilla Glass screen featuring an anti-reflection and anti-fingerprint surface. It's designed primarily...

The desktop isn't dead by any stretch of the imagination, and if you don't believe, just ask Lenovo. Among Lenovo's upcoming desktop PCs (yes, that's plural) is the IdeaCentre Erazer X700, a high performance system for "extreme gamers" that begs to be overclocked. Like everything else Lenovo announced this weekend, the Erazer X700 pimps Microsoft's...

Among the many items Lenovo has chosen to announce just days before the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is a new lineup of consumer and business Windows 8 touch-optimized notebooks. According to Lenovo, "people love touch," and the OEM is putting its money where its mouth is by aggressively integrating touch capabilities into...

Microsoft likes to point out that Windows 8 represents a re-imagining of the Windows platform, and going along with that theme, Redmond's OEM partners are stepping outside the bounds of what constitutes a typical PC. A good example of this is Lenovo's IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC, or the world's first interpersonal PC, as Lenovo describes it....

The doors of the Las Vegas Convention Center may still be largely sealed, but the news from CES 2013 is already starting to flow. Samsung is one of the major players showing up in Las Vegas to debut new products, and a new digital audio line-up will be a huge part of that. The company's 2013 AV products feature a number of wireless connectivity...

Big news out of the Lenovo camp this morning. As the company prepares for CES, the public should start preparing for a very different Lenovo starting in April. Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing sent out an e-mail to employees over the weekend that made clear that Lenovo would be dividing its business into two units: Lenovo and Think. It's probably...

We haven't heard of too many busy professionals of late that have too much time, and no way to adequately watch all of the great television that's coming out these days. But, if you're looking for a way to soak in even more entertainment, DISH has today introduced the DISH Explorer app for iPad. It's described as a second-screen app for the...

While Smart TVs have improved over the years, one issue in particular has bothered us: there's no uniformity. Every single TV has their own user interface, and every single software back-end is written on a different platform. And how can you get developers to band together and help make an ecosystem better, if every single TV maker is courting...

Fujifilm has been producing retro-like rangefinder cameras for the past few years now, and if you appreciate style, you'll be hard-pressed to find a device that shines quite like the X series. At this year's CES, two new ones are being revealed: the X20 and the X100s. Starting with the latter, that one is the follow-up to the X100, and it...

Is wireless charging the future? Turns out, every CES for the past few years has become home to a host of wireless charging products, but the stuff really hasn't ever taken off in the mainstream world. Naturally, the company's showing up with wireless in mind are hoping to change the perspective at this year's CES. Fulton Innovation has just...

Given that Vizio was already cutting thin the razor-sharp margins in the TV universe, it wasn't all that much of a shock when it introduced a PC lineup last year. But given that PCs are giving way to tablets in a major way, now the company has decided to go small. At CES 2013, Vizio is introducing its first Windows 8 tablet, and 11.6" unit...

It appears that quite a few folks received non-iPad tablets for holiday gifts this year. According to statistics from Chitika Insights, which tracks Web usage by device, traffic on iPads dipped sharply this December, losing ground to almost all of its main competition. To say that the iPad is still the most-used tablet for Web browsing is...

Attention GeForce GPU owners, NVIDIA this weekend quietly rolled out new WHQL-certified graphics drivers (version 310.90) for your videocard, and there are plenty of reasons why you should grab them. The most important reason to install the updated software is due to a security update for the NVIDIA Display Driver service (nvvsvs.exe). NVIDIA...

Sprint's network is used by a wide variety of MVNOs across America, but perhaps there's something to be said about keeping the Sprint branding. Reportedly, the carrier will launch its own Sprint-branded prepaid service starting on 1/25, which will bring a familiar list of services: unlimited text, talk, and data on both featurephones and smartphones....

We always see a lot of great new gaming gear at CES, and the fun is already starting for next week’s show. Rosewill is teasing some new gamer-friendly devices in its lineup today.   Rosewill is building on its line of mechanical keyboards with a new board that features a dual LED backlight. The Helios RK-9200 uses red and green...

Sometimes the smallest additions to an app can offer the biggest gains. Case in point: Facebook, which has just received the ability to send and receive voice messages through its Android and iOS app. This is perfect for those times when you either don't feel like typing out a decently-written message on a small phone, or when you need to...

Here’s a name that’ll bring back memories (particularly memories of waving photos ‘til your hands hurt): Polaroid. The company is fighting its way back into the market with the just-announced Polaroid Fotobar, which is a retail location that lets you print the photos stored on your phone. It sounds as though Polaroid is following...

If you use Twitter, you’ve likely been adding content to the U.S. Library of Congress. For better or for worse, the Library of Congress has been archiving public tweets for years. In fact, it has public tweets going all the way back to Twitter’s start for a total of more than 170 billion. The deal is ongoing, so keep that in mind...

If you've been following the news, then you know Congress managed to avoid driving us over the so-called "fiscal cliff," at least for now. Great, job well done and all that jazz. But for many Americans, money is still tight, and we're all paying over three bucks a gallon at the pump. Perhaps now is not the time to jump out of your seat and...

It's a sad thing when you step into a GameStop or Babbages (formerly Software Etc.) and see just a single rack dedicated to PC games, but hey, we don't have it so bad. Valve has picked up the torch with its Steam platform, and it seems there's always a major sale going on. The most recent was the Steam Holiday Sale, which saw big discounts...

Although Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs were once captured in an iconic photo congenially sipping coffee together in Silicon Valley, Jobs famously took serious umbrage that Google dared to invade the smartphone market with its Android OS. The Android and iOS platforms have been duking it out ever since....

If there's one area of consumer technology that is actually poised to take off in terms of real, unseen innovation, it's probably the automobile. Historically, cars have been slow to keep up with the rapid pace of changing technology. On the safety front, most cars are well equipped in terms of technology. But the infotainment front? Not so...

It's tough in the mobile market. Really tough. And not just tough for start-ups trying to rival Apple and Samsung, but tough for industry mainstays like HTC. After a few years of wild growth and immense popularity, something turned for HTC. Sales grew weak, and despite the company pushing out absolutely phenomenal hardware, the market wasn't...

Fancy a disco? Got a need to utilize Bluetooth a bit more? Then, listen up. SuperTooth has just introduced a set of $199 Disco Twin speakers, alongside an $89 HD Voice apparatus at CES 2013. The former is a pair of portable, rechargeable speakers featuring true right / left stereo, each unit equipped with 16 watts RMS audio power, double speakers...

Being a company like Microsoft isn't easy. You've got a lot of customers to please, and a lot of shareholders expecting lots of value. But things get somewhat easier when you get checks in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and DISA have announced that they are expanding access to Microsoft solutions by entering...

There are smartphones, and then there are beautiful smartphones. HTC's newest entrant into the mid-range U.S. market is certainly the latter. The company's One SV just made its official debut for Cricket Wireless, and it's easily one of the most gorgeous prepaid phones on the market today. This is a gently tweaked version of the One VX, offering...

Did you really think we could go any longer without a fresh Apple rumor piquing people’s interest? The latest scuttlebutt on the next rumored Apple device is that the Cupertino company could be working on an iPhone Mini to compete with its main rival, Samsung, in more specific market segments. Samsung is the current king of smartphone...

Remember when mobile hotspots were clunky little black boxes that just had one or two LED notification lights? Those days are gone. These days, hotspots are just as whiz-bang as any other modern gadget, and AT&T is about to pick up perhaps the most innovative one to date. The company announced today that it will carry Sierra Wireless'...

There was once a time when mechanical keyboards were the exception, not the rule. But as more gamers have started to clamor over them, and more mainstream typists enjoy the feel, it seems as if quite a few more companies are reaching out into the mechanical waters. ROCCAT is debuting its first-ever mechanical keyboard this week, dubbed Ryos....

Of all the companies that we were certain would be producing tablets at CES 2013, RCA was most certainly not in that group. Nevertheless, that's one of the companies that is indeed introducing a tablet in Las Vegas this year, with the Mobile TV Tablet (Model DDA850R) breaking into the market. It's actually a pretty unique twist on the conventional...

One of the biggest things that has set Android apart from iOS all these years is its openness - and that alone is a major reason that many who seek out free (as in libre) software have appreciated it. In fact, this could be one of the biggest reasons Android got off the ground so quickly, as I vividly remember around the time all of the excitement...

Amazon continues to flesh out its Prime Instant Video service, which allows Prime members to watch streaming movies and TV shows for free. The online retailer signed a content licensing agreement with A+E Networks to add prior seasons of popular TV shows from A&E, bio, HISTORY, and Lifetime, Amazon announced today. "In a year we have more...

In terms of mobile market share, Samsung and Google continue to be the most potent combination, taking the top spots in handset and smartphone platform market share, respectively. According to numbers released by comScore, over the time period of August-November 2012, Samsung increased its market share of handsets from 25.7% to 26.9%. Apple...

Replacing a cracked smartphone screen is a time-consuming, miserable process that involves way too many microscopic screws. Corning, which makes the glass found in many smartphones and tablets, announced Gorilla Glass 3, the latest version of its tough glass composition.   Gorilla Glass 3 is going to be tougher than version 2, of...

Online shoppers in the U.S. spent $42.3 billion during the holiday shopping season in 2012, representing a 14 percent increase compared to one year prior, according to data compiled by comScore. Several individual shopping days saw massive growth, including Free Shipping Day (December 17), which jumped 76 percent compared to 2011, Christmas...

Nokia is reportedly prepping a successor to its flagship Lumia 920 device. Codenamed "Catwalk," the new smartphone will feature a chassis constructed from aluminum rather than the polycarbonate body found on previous Lumia devices. As a result, the Catwalk will be much lighter and thinner than existing Lumia smartphones. Not a lot of specifics...

It's been more than six months since Google first introduced Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and it's taken that long to break the 10 percent barrier in Android market share. According to the Android Developers Dashboard, Jelly Bean is now installed on 10.2 percent of all Android devices that have accessed Google Play within the past two weeks. That's...

Sony may have already lost the next generation console wars before stepping foot on the battlefield. That is, if it's granted a patent for a technology that would effectively eliminate the ability to play used games on the PlayStation 4, a move that would prove mighty unpopular among gamers and second-hand game shops if Sony actually implemented...

The good news? There's a new BlackBerry in town. The bad news? It's not one of those fancy BlackBerry 10 handsets. Despite the fact that RIM's new operating system (and associated hardware) is scheduled to be launched on 1/30, T-Mobile is taking the opportunity to introduce the BlackBerry Curve 9315 right now, and to no one's surprise, the...

With our powers combined... wait, how does that phrase go? At any rate, it sure seems appropriate here, given that the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance are announcing plans to unify. WiGig has been floundering around for a while now, but paired up with the far more known Wi-Fi Alliance, it could very easily gain a ton of steam...

CES 2013 is gearing up to be a huge, huge show in terms of quantity of products announced. So much so, in fact, that a number of companies have resorted to talking about their new stash ahead of schedule in order to grab a little more limelight. Velocity Micro is one of the early birds, announcing its entire CES gala just a few days early....

New leaked slides from Intel have shed additional light on how the company's 2014 platforms will challenge ARM products in the netbook/nettop space. At present, the company's efforts in the segment are anchored by Cedar Trail, the 32nm dual-core platform that launched a year ago. To date, all of Intel's platform updates for Atom have focused...

Forget touch input, with everything it offers and how it can change the way people interact with their computers; ASUS is looking to leap ahead of touch input by bundling motion control technology from Leap Motion with some high end laptops and all-in-one desktops yet this year. Leap Motion claims that its technology can track movements of...

You’ve probably never heard of id8 Group R2 Studios, but apparently the home automation and entertainment startup--a project of Blake Krikorian, founder of Slingbox maker Sling Media--was a highly sought after commodity, attracting the attention of industry giants including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. According to the Wall Street Journal,...

Gamers who have been around the block a time or two may remember a vaunted product by Belkin -- something called the Nostromo SpeedPad n52. Now, it looks as if peripheral maker Razer is pumping out something similar years later, called the Orbweaver. It's a highly unique product designed for hardcore gamers, offering mechanical keys not in...

Will 2013 be the year of the open-source mobile OS? Not too long ago, U.S. smartphone users had a wealth of options, between WebOS, iOS, Android, Symbian, Bada -- you name it. Now, however, that list has shrunk considerably, but it may be ramping back up soon. Just a day after the Ubuntu OS was announced for mobile, Samsung has come forward...

When Google made its attractive Nexus 4 smartphone available for sale back in November, it sold out in about half an hour in the Google Play Store. Clearly, LG (the actual manufacturer of the device) and Google grossly underestimated the demand for the Nexus 4, but there’s been no way to tell how many units were available in the first...

Did you end up with a new Xbox 360 from Santa? Lucky you! And now, Razer has a controller than may honestly be superior to the first-party edition that Microsoft shipped with the system. The company has just announced the new Sabertooth Xbox 360 controller, which offers up 6 additional buttons, an OLED screen, and a hugely comfortable grip....

Here's an interesting tale: Google's executive chairman is about to go on a trip. But it's not just "any" trip, and it's hardly a vacation. He's about to travel to the Hermit Kingdom -- a place that's all but impossible to venture to unless you're a highly regarded political figure, or a member of a limited tour group where the guide never...

Welcome to the new year, same as the last year. If you thought the war between Google and Microsoft (and Apple, and Amazon) was going to quiet down now that we've turned a proverbial page, think again. Dave Heiner, Microsoft's VP and Deputy General Counsel, has just posted a fairly pointed blog post surrounding its quest to resolve "search...

If you're in the market for a new smartphone in the post-holiday season, you'll have a few Windows Phone 8 smartphone options to consider, including the new Nokia Lumia 810 which is exclusive to T-Mobile and the Lumia 820 which is exclusive to AT&T. These new Windows Phone smartphones come with all of the Windows Phone 8 features you'd...

One of the essential features of any smartphone is the built-in camera, and the quality of photos a device outputs plays a role in our evaluation of these devices. For many, a quality camera is no longer a luxury, but a necessity in an increasingly social landscape, so is it any surprise that smartphone and tablet shipments have turned us...

MSI announced a new ultrabook convertible known as the Slider S20. This new ultrabook runs on Windows 8 and features an Intel Core i5 processor. As you may expect from its name, the Slider S20 utilizes a slide-out keyboard that enables it to convert from an ultrabook to a tablet. Other key specifications of the Slider S20 include a 16:9 1920x1080...

Samsung added two new models to its Series 7 PCs. The Series 7 Chronos has been enhanced to offer professional performance in a thin and light form factor. The Series 7 Ultra is a new ultrabook that features plenty of computing power and graphics as well as touch capabilities. The new Series 7 Chronos features RAMaccelerator software that...

Here's a curious thing. If you direct your browser over to the Major Nelson blog, which covers Xbox Live related topics, you'll find a countdown timer to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 158 days and some odd hours from now. Above the timer is a three word statement: "And it's on..." Yes folks, it's on indeed. Perhaps one of the worst...

The rift between Apple and Samsung continues to widen with reports that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will take over A6X chip production, at least on a trial basis. Samsung had been producing the A6X parts found in fourth generation iPad devices, but with ongoing legal disputes over patents, Apple is eager to sever ties...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has a new Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and his name is Devinder Kumar, the Sunnyvale chip designer announced this week. The 57-year-old executive will report directly to AMD President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Rory Read. "Devinder has been with AMD for more than 28 years and...

Display makers have been working to march consumers into the OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) Promised Land for several years now, and it looks like LG Electronics is finally ready to kick things off. The Korean electronics company has begun accepting pre-orders for its "eagerly-awaited" 55-inch OLED TV set (55EM9700), albeit only in South...

Well, it was really only a matter of time. When you look back at gaming a decade ago, handheld gaming followed the same logic as console gaming -- you had closed platforms and only a smattering of players. If it didn't ship for Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony (or Sega, before that), it wasn't shipping. But look at gaming today. Perhaps the biggest...

Ubuntu is absolutely the most well-known flavor of Linux over on the desktop side, but it's far from owning a huge swath of the market share. But can Canonical make inroads in the mobile market? The image shown here may look like your average Galaxy Nexus, but look a little closer at the screen: that's not Android. That's Ubuntu. The fabled...

500GB Samsung 840 Series Solid State Drive (MZ-7TD500BW) for $314 with free shipping (normally $350). Controller: Samsung Sustained Sequential Read: 540 MB/s Sustained Sequential Write: 330 MB/s 4KB Random Read: Up to 98,000 IOPS 4KB Random Write: Up to 70,000 IOPS MTBF: 1,500,000 hours XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB DDR5 Video Card + Sleeping Dogs,...

The antivirus market is enormous, responsible for billions in revenue each year. That being the case, it'd be easy to believe that current offerings are quite good, but not so claims a report (PDF) by security company iMPERVA. This report states a couple of alarming facts, including one that shows that less than 5% of newly-crafted viruses...

In what seems like it could be a script for an action movie, masked men robbed an Apple Retail Store in Paris, France, on New Year's Eve, making off with a reported £780,000 (almost US$1.3 million) in goods. Police were nearby when the whole thing went down. Armed with handguns, the thieves broke in through the store's back entrance...

About six years ago, Nintendo completely changed the way the world viewed console gaming. The Wii remote (affectionately dubbed Wiimote by most) was a brand new paradigm in gaming control, and it ushered in a wave of motion-based gaming that forced Sony to follow suit with the Move, and Microsoft to do likewise with Kinect... Pundits seemed...

Think Ubuntu could make a great tablet OS? So does Canonical, and it sure looks like Canonical is jumping into the tablet OS market today. Ubuntu's website features a giant clock that is counting down to 1PM EST today, with a hint that can only mean touch-friendly Ubuntu tablets are in the future. Actually, it's not too surprising to...

Slowly but surely, it looks as if Asus is taking the wraps off of its CES 2013 product launch plans. Shortly after teasing the Zenbook Touch U500VZ, the Clover Trail-based Asus VivoTab has emerged with a proper product portal on the company's website. It's a Windows 8-based rig, complete with a 1.8GHz Intel Atom Z2760 CPU, 11.6" display, a...

CES 2013 is upon us. Gadget lovers and technology hounds everywhere will soon have plenty of reasons to be excited for the new year, as loads of companies will be taking the wraps off of new tech in the days ahead. MSI is getting a jump on the crowds, however, by introducing a new mobile workstation prior to the show officially opening its...

Intel's grand plan to dominate the living room and turn the cable TV world upside down with its own Internet-based TV service has already hit a snag. The Santa Clara chip maker originally wanted to launch its service before the end of 2012, and with that time frame having now passed, it's looking like mid-2013, or even later. According to...

If you've never heard of Snapchat, ask your kids about it, especially if they're teenagers. It's billed as a real-time picture chatting application, and that's exactly what it is, making it an ideal tool for so-called "sexting." Using Snapchat, you can send photos or videos to recipients with a timer attached, so after a few seconds (or however...

Apple may be looking to improve upon the stylus as we know it today. The Cupertino company filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) for what it calls an "Active Stylus," which can be used on capacitive touch sensor panels like those found on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. "Conventional styluses...

Don't tell Microsoft, but the top selling notebook on Amazon isn't running Windows 8, or any flavor of Windows for that matter. It's not running Mac OS X, either. Interestingly enough, the biggest seller in the notebook category on the world's largest online retail site is a Chromebook. Samsung's Chromebook, to be exact. It's Samsung's newest...

With the tears of joy barely dry on the cheeks of holiday recipients of the iPhone 5, there’s a report that Apple is already testing the next generation of its iconic smartphone along with a new version of the iOS operating system. According to The Next Web’s sources, developers have found app usage logs indicating that Apple is...

Although it’s disturbing that there needed to be laws preventing employers and institutions of higher learning from demanding Facebook usernames and passwords from job applicants and employees, apparently the practice (or at least the threat of the practice) became widespread enough that six state legislatures passed laws to that effect....

As CES 2013 creeps ever closer, it looks as if yet another item has leaked out ahead of what we can only presume will be an official debut next week in Las Vegas. Asus has established a product website for a new 15" Zenbook Touch U500VZ. This marks the first instance that we've heard of this machine, but judging by the name, it seems sure...

As 2013 rings in, we all get a chance to look back, reflect and take inventory on where were are. Here at HotHardware, it also gives us a chance to think about our wish list for the year ahead, and how we hope our favorite gadgets and platforms evolve. Evolution is a natural part of growth in consumer electronics, and with companies like Microsoft,...

Although it may not receive a lot of fanfare, presents, or even a birthday cake, the Internet as we know it is celebrating its 30th birthday today. On January 1, 1983, the US Department of Defense fully switched its Arpanet network to the Internet protocol suite (IPS) communications system. Although people may not have realized it at the time,...

Google Glass is one of those innovations where you know right away that you're staring at the future. Google has been a company that has constantly pushed the envelope in a variety of things, and recently, some of those "things" have been far-flung ideas that would never earn an ounce of funding at more focused, strapped outfits. But since...

Don't worry if you're suffering from a hangover today, so are many others, and apparently your iPhone might have one as well. Not a real one, mind you, though reports have surfaced that some iOS 6 users have been bitten by a bug preventing Apple's scheduled "Do Not Disturb" feature from automatically disabling on New Year's Day. The Do Not...

The social games juggernaut known as Zynga announced it has pulled the plug on 11 of the 13 games it plans on shutting down as part of a cost cutting effort. Far and away the most popular of those titles is PetVille, a cute little game that had 1 million active monthly users in December 2012. "Thank you for supporting PetVille and for being...

For the second time in about a week, Netflix is experiencing an outage. On Christmas Eve, many users lost streaming capabilities and didn’t get it back until well into Christmas morning. Netflix pointed the finger at Amazon Web Services, and indeed it appears that an Amazon facility in Virginia was to blame. This time around, Netflix...

Today marks the first day of a brand new year, which means the web is littered with "best" and "worst" lists of 2012. Count Spotify among them. The streaming music service put together a rather extensive collection of the most popular bands, tracks, and genres of the past year, broken down by country. In the U.S., Rihanna ranked as the most...

Samsung was on to something when it decided to bridge the gap between a smartphone and tablet. Hence the Galaxy Note was born, which has since passed the torch to the Galaxy Note II. Samsung's second generation phablet (phone + tablet = phablet) is selling pretty well, achieving a million sales in South Korea since launching in September,...

It doesn't appear there will be any delaying Research In Motion's plans to launch at least one BlackBerry 10 device at the end of the month, as scheduled. In addition to the numerous leaked photos of RIM's upcoming products, a new BlackBerry device is now listed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC listing identifies the...

Netbooks may be fading, but ultralight laptops still have quite a bit of life left in them. As the new year begins, Velocity Micro is refreshing its line of NoteMagix laptops. The 14" Ultrabooks are seeing revisions, with the U430, U450, and U470 also getting internal boosts to bring 'em more in line with what rivals are offering in the here...

It's a brand new year, and Samsung is kicking things off with a bang. The company has just taken the wraps off of two new touch screen monitors, aimed at professionals and mainstream consumers alike. The Series 7 SC770 Touch Monitor is a desktop affair that's aimed at those upgrading to Windows 8, and looking to take advantage of the gesture-based...