News Archive

Intel may have missed its chance to power Apple's iPhone range, but Lenovo's not going to let the chipmaker skip over yet another flagship device. The company's K900 smartphone, which was initially shown at CES 2013, is finally on sale this week. It's actually one of the most powerful smartphones on the planet, equipped with a dual-core 2GHz...

Some would argue that the modern day cellular phone killed the watch. After all, who needs a wristwatch when you can just glance at the time on a display that never leaves your side? But on the other side of the equation, the phone revolution has seemingly jump-started fitness. While a certain segment of the population has been (and will always...

Cha-ching! That's the sound of approval, and also the sound of impending purchases of even more Apple products. The Pentagon this week cleared Apple devices for use on its highly secured networks -- a move that follows similar approvals given to BlackBerry 10 and the latest Android-based Samsung products. The Defense Department has now given...

In an effort to coax developers to begin taking Atom seriously as an Android platform, Intel has just released a complete suite of tools that should help ease them into things - especially since it can be used for ARM development as well. It's called Beacon Mountain, named after the highest peak outside of Beacon, New York, and it currently...

Welcome to the weekend edition of the best deals from across the web. Leading today's deals is a new, ultra-durable business laptop from Dell. Not only is it ultraportable and loaded with features, we found it with an impressive 34% discount. Gamers take note of the Thermaltake mechanical keyboard, designed just for your fragging sessions,...

Google’s new music subscription service, Google Play Music All Access, is live. You can head over to the Google Play store and sign up today for one of two plans--the unlimited “All Access” service or the free “Standard” option. Both versions offer you an online “locker” where you can store up to 20,000...

As we reported back in February, Mozilla had plans to introduce cookie-blocking by default in version 22 of its Firefox Web browser. Well, it seems that the company has realized that it might have been a bit hasty in wanting to implement the change so quickly, so now, it's decided to hold off as it needs more time to analyze the outcome of...

How the time flies. I remember a time when Bill Gates' fortunate was valued at a mere $40 billion. It seemed like no one could touch him, until a certain business magnate Carlos Slim came along and surpassed him in 2007. Since then, the fortunes of both men have continued to increase, and this week, Bloomberg's Billionaires Index has put Mr....

Today is outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s last day at the company, and although he’s left the company better off than when he found it, in an interview with The Atlantic he let slip one regret he had from his tenure--Intel could have made the chips for the iPhone. Apparently, Apple approached Intel about making chips for the...

It only makes sense that a high-speed train would provide wireless service that's also high-speed right? In that case, all aboard! Amtrak this week announced an upgrade to its AmtrakConnect cellular-based Wi-Fi service to take advantage of 4G technologies. Amtrak says the 4G upgrade is already in place on Acela Express and California-supported...

Dell has been in the news quite a bit of late as major investors like Michael Dell and Carl Icahn battle over the plan to take the company private. The contested plan company CEO Michael Dell proposed several months ago was a reaction to weakness in the PC market, and that weakness has manifested as a nasty drop in Dell's product sales. Dell...

All good things come to an end, and as of yesterday, Paul Otellini's fast and furious ride in the driver's seat as Intel's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) officially came to a halt. The 45-year-old face of Intel retired as chief, just as he announced he would back in November of last year, and handed the reins over to Brian M. Krzanich, the...

Apple's in a bit of pickle. The Cupertino company has to figure out how to regain its mojo in the mobile space by releasing a smartphone with fancy new features, but not go so far overboard that it ends up alienating its rabid fan base. If you recall, the initial reaction to the iPhone 5 was somewhat subdued, not because it wasn't a great...

During the Wii U's big unveil, Electronic Arts (EA) talked a big game about the console's graphics and how it can't wait to pump out titles for the platform. There was an air of excitement from the publisher, who at the time seemed to be dreaming big. Well, not quite two years later, what a pipe dream that turned out to be. Sure, EA tossed...

NVIDIA's like a little kid at grade school who just received a new toy and can't wait to bring it to class for show-and-tell. The only difference is that what NVIDIA's peddling is much cooler than a yo-yo or a Tonka truck, it's a portable game system stocked with Android Jelly Bean and outfitted with a Tegra 4 SoC (System-on-Chip). If you're...

Archos has made a bit of a living out of producing low-end, super affordable gadgets. Namely, audio players and tablets. While they hardly ever impress anyone from a benchmarking standpoint, it's tough to overlook the latest. It's the Archos 80 Xenon, the company's latest and greatest 3G tablet in the Elements range.  It's a 8-inch unit,...

Ah, the war on conventional television networks rages on. With Netflix scooping up exclusive, Internet-first programs on a regular basis now, Amazon is doing its best to keep pace. After all, it has to give users even more reason to spend $79 on an annual Prime membership, right? This week, Amazon's streaming video service (Prime Instant Video)...

Looking to get in a bit of Street Fighter action with your Xbox 360? Razer's got you covered. The accessory company has just launched the new Atrox Arcade Stick for Xbox 360. Razer's been beta testing thing quite a bit, and it's seemingly launching just days before Microsoft is set to reveal to next-generation of Xbox.  The device features...

Although there are still details such as specifications and pricing being kept under wraps, ASUS has announced its line of Intel Z87-based motherboards--many of which are sporting the new gold-and-black color scheme. There are a lot of them. The main group of consumer-level boards includes the Z87 Deluxe, Z87 A, Z87 Pro, Z87 Plus, and even...

Japan’s NEC has created a smartphone that actually uses liquid cooling, which is a development that is either awesome or stupid, and we’re not decided as to which it is yet. In any case, the NEC Medias X N-06E smartphone indeed has a water-filled heatpipe that pulls heat away from the device’s processor, apparently dispelling...

Topping our list of the hottest deals from across the web, is a slim ultrabook with a big 14" screen for a record low price of $549.99. This is a smoking-hot offer on Dell's popular Inspiron 14z ultrabook complete with SSD, so be sure to scroll down and snag this one before it disappears. You can also grab some HDMI cables for a super-low...

Grab your racing gloves and get ready for the newest installment of Sony's popular Gran Turismo series, the best-selling franchise across all PlayStation consoles. Sony announced that Gran Turismo 6 will skid into view this holiday season for the PlayStation 3, though curiously missing is an explicit confirmation that it will also be available...

Google, NASA, and the Universities Space Research Association have announced that they'll collaborate in purchasing the second $10 million dollar D-Wave Two quantum computing system on the market. The system will deploy to NASA's Ames Research Center, and should be online by the fall of this year, where it'll be put to work solving particular...

Acer tried warning Microsoft that it's not easy competing in the hardware space. Nevertheless, the Redmond outfit threw caution to the wind and introduced the world to its Surface RT and Pro devices, neither of which has shaken up the industry. We can speculate that the cost of entry -- $499 and up -- is a large reason why, and if that's the...

At first, we had to double check our calendars to ensure that it wasn't the dawn of April. Nope -- this one's the real deal. Lenovo's Horizon Table PC is already a pretty unique take on the tablet + oversized sit-down desktop, but it's about to get even more so. Lenovo today introduced three new table concepts that are meant to house the Horizon...

Game publishers have been looking for ways to get in on the second-hand game market, but none have found a way that sits well with gamers just yet. Electronic Arts is throwing in the towel on its latest attempt, Online Pass, which generally charged gamers a fee to activate a game’s multiplayer content when they bought the game used....

Apple on Thursday announced that over 50 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store to date. The way things are going now, Apple says it sees 800 apps downloaded per second, and over 2 billion per month. Talk about growth -- the App Store opened its virtual doors in July 2008 with just 500 apps; today there are more than 850,000...

Google isn't the least bit happy with Microsoft for creating a custom YouTube app for its Windows Phone platform that circumvents ads from playing. As a result, Redmond's been hit with a cease and desist letter that takes the company to task for depriving Google and third-party content creators of revenue that they would otherwise receive...

It’s no secret that Intel is readying processors based in its Haswell microarchitecture. The new chips are due to be released in the not too distant future and feature a number of noteworthy enhancements, including a much more powerful integrated graphics core. When Haswell arrives though, it will supplant current Ivy Bridge-based processors,...

Small victories are victories nonetheless, and if Microsoft is in a celebratory mood, it can pop the top on a bottle of champagne and toast having jumped ahead of BlackBerry in smartphone platform penetration. According to newly published data by International Data Corporation (IDC), Windows Phone wiggled its way onto 7 million smartphones...

There’s gold in them thar motherboards, or so the saying (sort of) goes. ASUS announced that its upcoming line of Intel Z87-based motherboards will sport a decidedly gold color scheme, from the heatsinks to the DIMM slots. The boards will also feature black PCBs and silver accents. For the record, we’re talking nearly the whole...

4K HDTVs are slowly but surely finding their way to production lines. While we've seen early price estimates ranging from outrageous to outrageously affordable (at least, comparatively), and Sony's newest sets land somewhere in the middle. The company has just gone official with pricing and release dates for the BRAVIA X9 4K HDTV range, with...

Lots and lots of news coming out of San Francisco this week, mostly from Google. And in case you're hungry for more, there's yet another tidbit that could make waves. Google today announced that in the coming months, Android will include native support for Bluetooth Smart Ready and Bluetooth Smart devices. Phones and tablets with a dual-mode...

Dell announced a pair of new entries into its workstation line, the small form factor Dell Precision T1700 and the Dell Precision R7610. The former is an SFF workstation and the latter is 2U rackmount number, and together they show off two ends of Dell’s workstation spectrum. There’s also a new T1700 mini tower available. The T1700...

Google introduced a lot of new features and gear today at I/O, but one other thing snuck in outside of that: an update to Gmail. E-Mail is obviously vital to Google's core services, and today it's revealing a few new features that'll make using Gmail even better. The two newcomers are quick button actions, as well as a few travel-related improvements....

If you're living in the UK, and have been holding out for a Microsoft Surface, the wait is almost over. After launching months ago in the U.S. and Canada, the Surface Pro will make the journey across the pond starting May 23rd. The Windows 8-based unit will ship for £719 in the 64GB configuration, and £799 for the 128 GB configuration....

After all the speculation and rumors, in less than a week from now Microsoft will officially unveil its next generation Xbox game console. The Xbox 720 (codenamed Durango), or whatever it ends up being called, will be introduced via a live stream on May 21, 2013 at 10 AM PDT (that's 1 PM for folks on the East coast) on Xbox Live, Xbox.com,...

Companies continue to toy with new ways of building mobile PCs by tweaking form factors and working with different hardware, and today’s announcement from HP is more of the same, as the company announced the HP Slatebook x2 and the HP Split x2. Both devices are essentially Windows 8 notebooks with removable screens that convert them...

We’ve been eagerly anticipating the Google I/O conference because of course Google saved up lots of goodies for its annual event, and the company did not disappoint. Google unloaded with a ton of updates and new products, so let’s dig in. Android First off, the Android platform is enjoying a number of new upgrades. Google announced...

Welcome back to our collection of today's hottest deals. Leading today's best offers is a super-low price on a Core i3 desktop complete with WiFi and on-site warranty, just $374.99 after coupon. Feed some speed to your PC without losing storage space with our deal on the Samsung 840 500GB SSD, marked down to $324.99. We also found a deal that...

The world needs another paid streaming music service like it needs, well, another paid streaming music service, but let's not be pessimistic about a possible newcomer in Google, as is rumored to be the case. We'll know more as Google I/O progresses, though for now, word on the web is that Google is throwing its trombone into the paid streaming...

Wikipedia's greatest strength is also it's inherent weakness. We're of course referring to the ability of anyone and nearly everyone being able to hop into an article and edit its contents, assuming it's not locked, creating a collective treasure trove of information that may not always be accurate. Wikipedia gets a bit of a bad rap by its...

Apple's fairly well mastered the art of planned obsolescence, whereby the company leaves out certain desirable features on new devices so that it can introduce them on a later model and entice users to upgrade (think the lack of a rear-facing camera on the original iPad), but to suggest the Cupertino outfit sells knowingly faulty products...

It's probably a bit premature to play Taps whenever the topic turns to Windows RT, but at the rate things are going, someone may want to type up an obituary just in case (Acer would be game). Windows RT is proving a tough sell, as evidenced by its lackluster market share and by deep price cuts, the latest of which comes from Dell. On the bright...

Unofficially speaking, Samsung's Galaxy S4 device boarded a rocket ship and blasted off to four million shipments in just five days, qualifying it as the South Korean handset maker's fastest-selling smartphone to date. Why unofficially? Well, news of the spectacular shipment numbers comes from The Chosun Ilbo, a daily news site in Korea, rather...

Western Digital has a new line of portable hard drives on the market, the My Passport Ultra, which adds to the family of My Passport devices and serves as a generational bump for the My Passport Edge. In fact, the Ultra looks exactly like the Edge (and comes in black, silver, red, or blue), but it comes in a greater variety of capacities--500GB,...

Remember Polaroid? Yeah, that Polaroid. The brand that helped define an entire era of photography has had some ups and downs over the years, with more "downs" in recent years. But now, the company is staging a comeback by producing items that are far more germane in today's society. The latest is the XS80, a mountable HD action camera designed...

When Roku introduced the Roku 3 range, it also brought a sleek new user interface. But to date, that UI has been reserved for use on the newest hardware only. For those still using an older Roku to stream media, there's a bit of good news on the UI front. Roku has started to roll out the new interface to prior units. You can pull it down manually...

AMD is announcing its Radeon HD 8970M today. We say "announcing" instead of launching because this chip is essentially a rebadged HD 7970. It wasn't initially clear if this would be the case -- the HD 7790, which the company launched back in March, is based on a new design has a few small feature changes that have led it to be unofficially...

Google CEO Larry Page is a rare man, having co-created Google with pal Sergey Brin and kept the company constantly evolving into one of the most important tech companies in history, but he also has a rare affliction: His vocal chords are partially paralyzed. In a Google+ post, Page described how after a bad cold some 14 years ago, his voice...