News Archive

Parties just aren't what they used to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the digital world, celebrations are often much broader, with friends from all over the world chiming in to wish someone well on their special day. As social networks and the like aim to bring in additional revenue, sites like Facebook are also encouraging...

There's slim, and then there's Toshiba's Canvio Slim II. The company's second-generation drive follows up on a successful launch last year, with this one offering up as much as 1TB of internal storage space and measuring just 12.5mm thick. It's easily one of the thinnest and smallest on the market in terms of external HDDs, and it relies on...

For the last 20 years, NVIDIA has developed and used its own graphics IP in-house. While the company engaged in several prominent cross-licensing deals with companies like Intel, those deals never resulted in an Intel-branded graphics card or an equivalent product from another company. Today, that changes -- NVIDIA has announced that henceforth,...

Thanks for joining us in today's roundup of the best deals from across the web. Leading our deal list round-up is the ultra-reliable Western Digital Red 1 Terabyte internal hard drive, marked down to just $74.99. We also found a rare discount on some premium Bose headphones, taking 11% off the list price, giving you the lowest price around....

Now that the NSA has apparently assented to allow companies from which it culled personal user data to post some numbers about how many requests were made, more companies are disclosing that information. Facebook and Microsoft posted some numbers this weekend, and now Yahoo! has some as well. According to a post written by Yahoo! CEO Marissa...

And “voicemail” evolved. Microsoft announced on its Skype blog that the video chat service now offers a Skype Video Messaging feature that allows you to leave a video voicemail when one of your contacts is away. Skype Video Messaging is free, and you can leave a message by tapping or clicking the Video Message button and recording...

Got a Kindle? Got a kid? Amazon has you in mind, as the company announced updates to its Kindle FreeTime Unlimited content service that delivers as much kid-friendly content as they can consume. The service originally rolled out in December of last year, and since then Amazon says it has added over a thousand titles to its lineup of books,...

Upon first glance of the LG Optimus G Pro, it's easy to draw comparisons to Samsung's Galaxy Note II. The two phones are strikingly similar. Both feature massive 5.5-inch displays along with rounded edges and a physical Home button below the screen. When placed side-by-side, the two phones appear to be nearly identical in size. However, upon...

For as amazing as our mobile devices are, their battery life is a joke. Most of us can’t make it through a whole day (or in cases, more than a few hours) without having to plug in. Solar charger company Goal Zero, in collaboration with AT&T and Brooklyn-based design studio Pensa, are developing solar charging stations designed to...

Huawei is proud as a peacock over its new Ascend P6 smartphone, an Android handset the company claims is the thinnest in the world. It measures a scant 6.18mm (0.24 inches) thick and has a 4.7-inch display, the same size screen found on the HTC One, which is 3mm (0.1 inches) thicker. Pretty impressive. Analysts who have seen the device have...

In this episode of "Microsoft Knows Best," Outlook.com is phasing out support for multiple email addresses. Going back to the Hotmail days, linked accounts were introduced in 2006, and Microsoft fully acknowledges there are several legitimate reasons for using multiple email addresses, such as not wanting to hand out your primary email identity...

Easily one of the more anticipated product launches is the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that had a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. Oculus VR managed to raise over $2.4 million on Kickstarter, well north or the company's comparatively modest $250,000 goal, and the money is still flowing in. Announced today, Oculus VR just...

When you're getting spanked the competition, one thing you can do is to pretend they don't exist and focus solely on yourself. So it goes with LG Electronics, the South Korean handset maker that would like nothing more than to swipe some smartphone share out of Samsung's pocket. While LG is losing to Samsung, the firm still found reason to...

Bolstered by the recent mad dash by consumers and manufacturers alike towards mobile computing, truly ARM has become too large to ignore. ARM has benefited the most from mobile device sales, proving that it's a capable architecture and a worthy competitor to x86 silicon, so it shouldn't come as a shock that NVIDIA equipped its CUDA 5.5 Release...

Wondering what AMD's plans are in terms of server strategy? Don't bother looking up leaks; the chip-maker is laying it all out in front of you. In what has to be one of the most unusual moves in recent memory, AMD is bucking the trend of all-out secrecy by disclosing today its server roadmap. Why? It's mostly aimed at shareholders and pundits...

Just what Sprint needs: another lawsuit to spend gobs of money on as it bleeds customers. But sure enough, the carrier -- which is struggling mightily on the coverage aspect as well as the LTE rollout front -- has just filed suit against DISH Network and Clearwire, citing the illegality of the DISH offer to buy up Clearwire. It has become...

Guess what's coming to your local Walmart? Google Chromebooks. In what may soon prove to be the Chromebook's biggest push yet, Google and Acer have convinced a store that is notoriously difficult to snag shelf space on to give them just that. The new Acer C710-2856, is now available at 2,800 Walmart stores for the low price of only $199. The...

Since the introduction of Intel's "Tick / Tock" model in 2007, the company has successfully released a major new architecture one year, and then a die shrink the next. Well, according to leaked documents, 2014 looks to be the first year where Intel skips a beat, as Broadwell, Haswell's original successor, has been replaced with "Haswell Refresh"....

When Google launched its Nexus 10, and it happened to be produced by Samsung, not ASUS, it seemed up in the air whether or not ASUS was going to be out of the picture from that point forward. Well, thanks to a new FCC filing, we can see that ASUS remains safe and sound - it just appears that it's going to be specifically focusing on the Nexus...

Welcome back to a new week of deals and we are kicking things off with a massive sale from HP. Just about everything is discounted, from accessories to laptops to desktops you don't want to miss this offer. One of our favorites from this sale is the gorgeous HP ENVY 27 inch monitor, a premium display packed with tech and upgraded Beats speakers....

Intel announced a set of new enterprise products today aimed at furthering its strengths in the TOP500 supercomputing market. As of today, the Chinese Tiahne-2 supercomputer (aka Milky Way 2) is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet at roughly ~54PFLOPs. That's double the speed of the old leader, the AMD/Nvidia powered Titan at Oak Ridge...

Good news, Jay-Z fans. The hip-hop artist and part owner of the NBA's Brooklyn Nets is back with a new album titled "Magna Carta Holy Grail." It's due to release on July 4, 2014, and it will feature various artists such as Drake, Nas, and Justin Timberlake, all of whom have been working on the album. As a special treat to certain Galaxy owners,...

Verizon Wireless is reportedly looking to expand its wireless service north of the border into Canada. Should VZW go through with it, Canadian mobile phone subscribers would then have access to four major wireless carriers to choose from, as Big Red would be competing against Telus Corp, BCE Inc's Bell Unit, and Rogers Communications. According...

Chin up kids, it's time to wipe away those tears for the loss of Spongebob, Dora the Explorer, and all the rest of Viacom's entities that skipped ship over to Amazon's Prime Instant Video service. There's still plenty of kid-friendly content on Netflix, especially now that the big daddy of streaming media inked a multi-year deal with DreamWorks,...

Sorry to break it to social networking curmudgeons, but the Oxford English Dictionary now officially recognizes "tweet" as a noun and verb in the social networking sense. Such is the power and influence of social networking services like Twitter that not only did OED expand its entry for the word tweet, but it broke its own rules to add the...

It's getting to be a little tough keeping up with all of Samsung's Galaxy devices, even those among the same family. To wit, there's there's the Galaxy S4 (Samsung's flagship smartphone), Galaxy S4 mini (a phone for budget shoppers), Galaxy S4 Active (a rugged smartphone), and Galaxy S4 zoom (hybrid camera/smartphone) -- phew! Soon you'll...

Something's brewing at Facebook, and as we reported last week, the social networking service is planning a launch event for June 20, 2013. Early speculation suggested the big reveal would be a news reader, which would fill a ginormous void left by the shuttering of Google Reader. However, sources say Facebook has something else up its sleeve....

After some pressure by UK Prime Minister David Cameron (pictured) and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), Google has stepped up its efforts to block images of child pornography on the Internet. According to The Telegraph, Google engineers are developing technology and a database that will be enable search engines and other web companies to...

Rural broadband is becoming a serious issue, and it's not just the government taking notice. Private for-profit companies are as well, with Dish Network and nTelos being the latest two. Following last month's announcement of their intent to co-develop a fixed wireless broadband service, Dish and nTelos have now deployed broadband service in...

Wireless power isn't really a reality even in the consumer world, but already we're seeing wireless options crop up for the precious few who own electric vehicles. Bosch is amongst the first, announcing the first commercially available wireless electric vehicle charging system in U.S. The company has teamed with Evatran Group to offer the...

After initially seeding the Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD to notebook manufacturers earlier this year, Samsung announced that the drives are now in mass production and will show up in products on store shelves later this year. The XP941 family of PCIe SSDs consists of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities and offers sequential reads of 1400MBps over...

Starting in late September, Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley will be collaborating on high-tech solutions to the problems both cities face. The mayors of New York and San Francisco announced that they will be holding two Digital Cities summits (one in each city) to develop new ways of handing old threats, such as flooding and power outages....

For the majority of Americans, when a fabulously wealthy person buys a private island, the eye-rolling is so severe that is causes widespread migraines. Thus, one’s knee jerk reaction to hearing via the Wall Street Journal that Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison just dropped $300 million to acquire 98% ownership of Hawaii’s Lanai...

At last week's E3, Microsoft COO Peter Moore claimed that Xbox One games being shown-off at the show were running on real development kits - however, thanks to a Windows PC crash, that was later found to be untrue. Yes, "Windows PC". When handed an Xbox One gamepad to play some game, the last thing you're likely to wonder is if you're...

Plants vs. Zombies is a cute, 2D tower defense game. Scratch that, it was a cute, 2D tower defense game; now, with Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, the game has evolved into a 3D shooter, and from the trailer video and screenshots, it looks like a lot of fun to play. PopCap developed the game on the Frostbite 3 engine and created completely...

Apple is getting even more serious about gaming. While games on iOS devices have been part and parcel of Apple’s mobile strategy since day one, the company is taking the next step forward--it’s actively facilitating the development of game controllers for iOS games by third-party companies. AppleInsider snagged some slides from...

AT&T announced that its GoPhone plans will now offer 4G LTE capabilities, which is a welcome and tasty performance upgrade for those who have opted for the pay-as-you-go phone service. Subscribers can bring their own handset to use with the plan or buy one of AT&T’s fourteen GoPhone devices, which range from the $14.99 Alcatel...

T-Mobile + MetroPCS. That's a thing now, remember? And it seems that the former is well ahead of schedule when it comes to integrating networks with the latter. A release shot out this week from T-Mobile makes clear that just six weeks after the combination was locked down, it's already working to migrate MetroPCS customers onto T-Mobile's...

Facebook is officially in the big leagues in terms of events. In fact, we're pretty sure the social networking company has held more events in 2013 than even Amazon. Who would've thought that just a year or so ago? As Facebook morphs into more than just a community of friends, the company is taking ever larger risks. Just look at Facebook...

Still on the hunt for a PlayStation 4 pre-order that's not already "sold out?" Amazon has you covered. As these things typically go, the spoils go to those who pull the trigger early on, and it seems that many retailers and e-tailers have already had their initial allotments snapped up by early pre-orders. But now, here come the bundles. Most...

When the original iPad Mini was unveiled, the entire tech industry understood one thing: there would eventually be another edition with a Retina display. Given that Apple has shown to be quite fond of pixels on displays, it's really just a matter of time before the iPad Mini joins the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch in Retina-land. According to...

More information is coming out regarding the NSA’s PRISM program wherein the agency has been requesting/demanding data on U.S. citizens from major Internet companies. (We have further reading on the subject here, here, and here.) After adamant declarations from some companies, perhaps most notably Facebook--Mark Zuckerberg wrote a personal,...

Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One console represents the company's most ambitious effort to date to propel gaming into the cloud. Physical media will still exist, but by and large, Microsoft envisions console gamers purchasing and organizing titles in a Steam-like fashion, a method that has worked well for PC gamers. Steam's distribution platform...

It's easy to take broadband Internet access for granted when you live in a city or the suburbs. Companies like Charter, Comcast, and other ISPs have done a good job making sure densely populated areas can receive fast Internet service, but once you venture off the beaten path, broadband is a bit more difficult to come by. The situation is...

Since even before the release of Windows 8, Acer has been one of the more outspoken critics of Microsoft's hardware strategy, especially as it pertains to Surface RT/Pro. As for smartphones, however, Acer's been a little more receptive, although it still isn't ready to make the jump into Windows Phone 8 territory. It's not that Acer has a...

It was just this past autumn that MakerBot opened a 3D printing retail outlet, and the New York store was a first of its kind (a novelty, or a marvel) for those who are into this emerging technology. Staples also recently added Cube 3D printers to its inventory, and suddenly, things have gotten significantly more mainstream for 3D printing,...

While the issue of divvying up spectrum isn't exactly fun to talk about around the water-cooler, it's an important one inside of the telecommunications industry. And, of course, that extends back to Washington. President Obama today issued a Presidential Memorandum that urges federal agencies to make better use of available spectrum. Obama's...

Cellphones have transformed the way society as a whole can receive important information from governmental entities. In Asia, Japan in particular, there are systems established to alert entire swaths of customers as to when potential storms are coming. And now, Americans using Apple's iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S will be able to receive government-issued...

Samsung really isn't holding back when it comes to expanding the Galaxy line, but who are we to blame them? With 10 million Galaxy S4 handsets sold within a month, it's obvious that Samsung would be wise to strike while the iron is hot. So, the company is creating even more versions of the S4 for an even more select group of customers. The...

There was a rumor last fall that Android 5.0, codenamed Key Lime Pie, would be announced on October 29th at an Android event. (Note: No Key Lime Pie there.) Now, a new rumor has emerged indicating that Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie may launch at the end of this October, a full year after we’d first hoped to see it. Image credit: VR-Zone According...