Movies, Music, Video Games, Social Networks and Lifestyle News And Reviews
Product reviews and news of digital entertainment products and services in movies, music, video games, game streaming, social networks and lifestyle products.
The last time we looked at Dell's Alienware X51 series of console-sized gaming PCs was back in mid-2013. Back then we were working with Intel's 4th generation Haswell Core Series processors and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 600 series GPUs based on their Kepler graphics core. Our man Paul, frankly, was spouting off a bit...
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Love it or hate it, Apple's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines have remained a watermark for which the majority of notebook manufacturers aspire to, whether it's enthusiast gaming companies like Razer with their Blade, or mainstream vendors like Dell via their outstanding XPS 13. Enter Asus. They've utilized their ZenBook line to...
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In November, Amazon announced the latest addition to its hardware line-up, the Amazon Echo. The Echo smart speaker doubles as a digital assistant and home entertainment device. It’s an always-connected, always-available Siri or Cortana-like device designed for your home that can provide answers to common questions...
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Dell's Alienware division has a knack for making a splash with PC system design, whether it's with their big, bad unapologetic notebooks, unique X51 small form-factor PCs, or their no-holds-barred Area-51 killer gaming rigs. In fact, for some folks, Alienware designs can be an either "you love it or hate it" affair. Full disclosure: personally,...
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Dell’s Alienware gaming team impressed us with its Area 51 desktop earlier this year and we’ve been impatiently awaiting the 2015 version of the Alienware 15 mobile gamer ever since. The laptop is finally here, and there’s a twist: Instead of sending a money-is-no-object configuration (like it did with the Area 51)...
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Valve’s Steam Machine was all the rage at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, but as we enter 2015, the SteamOS gaming platform (and Valve’s tantalizing Steam Controller) are still works in progress. SteamOS hasn’t been written off, but Dell, which was one of the first PC makers to build a custom console-sized system for SteamOS...
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The PC laptop market is a funny place. Good laptops are fairly easy to find, but great laptops are staggeringly rare. This is true even at the boutique end of the market, where manufacturers have a tendency to choose powerful components, but cram them into a chassis that can't handle the heat without sounding like a jet turbine, or pick...
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In the interest of full disclosure, I’m going to start this piece off with a bit of a confession: Last year, when I was first exposed to NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology, I turned to one of our contacts at the company and said, “The moment someone comes out with a nice 4K version, I’ll hand over my credit card”....
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The ability to stream movies and other content to your TV is relatively commonplace thanks to set top boxes such as the Roku 3, Apple TV, gaming consoles that support streaming, and built-in functionality that comes with many of today’s Blu-ray players and TVs. Even so, there’s always room for additional competition, right? Amazon...
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NVIDIA holds the lion's share of the market in mobile graphics hardware, but it's not the only competitor. When Alienware asked if we'd be interested in looking at a notebook based on AMD's top-end R9 M290X in a single-GPU configuration, we agreed. This system is based on exactly the same hardware and chassis as the Alienware 18-inch model...
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There’s a new battlefront in the tech field, it involves air space and the Internet, and it’s an exciting front. Google and Facebook are forerunners here, and the former just snapped up drone maker Titan Aerospace, which the latter was reportedly interested in buying recently. Facebook ended up with drone...
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AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack the datacenter, breaking the...
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Major tech firms are lobbying for more user privacy as it pertains to the U.S. government's practice of collecting sensitive data. In an open letter to President Barack Obama and Congress, eight technology companies said there's a need to "reform government surveillance" now that the balance has tipped too far in...
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Leaks are all-too-common in the tech industry, and really, they can come from virtually anywhere. Sometimes, people at the source of the product manufacturing could spill the beans, and other times, people at the company's HQ can feel a little mischievous. Sometimes, it could even be a completely unrelated party, such...
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Years ago, privacy never stuck me as being a truly hot topic online, and if there's a reason for that, it's likely because many of us didn't realize the extent that some companies go to, to make it almost nonexistent. As has been proven time and time again, your privacy online is almost nil if you make use of any social networking site, but...
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Edward Snowden's leaks have shaken something loose in the IT industry. For years, companies have been afraid to talk about the requests and data sharing procedures the NSA and FBI have forced upon them as a result of the Patriot Act. Companies that went to court to fight these demands lost, and lost in silence...
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Politicians and fear mongers love to blame society's ills on violent video games. It's a rally call we've heard time and again, despite the fact that there are numerous studies out there -- both old and new -- debunking the claims that violent games transform gamers into these unfeeling creatures that go on shooting...
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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...
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Times are tough all around these days, but shop wisely, and you can stretch a dollar into a double cheeseburger from McDonald's, a song on iTunes, or any number of items from your local dollar store. You can even buy the HTC First, otherwise known as the Facebook phone, with a dollar bill and have a shiny copper penny...
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Do I look a little crazy to you? If I do, it's probably Facebook to thank, since I, and apparently many others, have "Internet addiction". Well, truth be told, I don't have an addiction to the extent that some do, as Dr. Uri Nitzan exposed in a paper published to the Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences this past fall. Some can...
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Avast, makers of the popular free antivirus software of the same name, today announced that it has acquired Secure.me, a privacy protection company that's mostly focused on social network security and helping users to keep sensitive information private. Secure.me's Facebook security app, which uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze and alert...
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At this point in time, it's pretty-well assured that the vast majority of people are getting a little annoyed by North Korea's ongoing antics, and while we'd love to see things settle down and people be reasonable, that's not the restrictive state's way. It seems that the country has only one outcome in...
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