BlackBerry has unveiled a method to allow users to give BlackBerry 10 OS a test run before shelling out for a new Z10. BlackBerry has put together a mobile website that demos the features of BB10 and allows you to test out various aspects of the new operating system.
Potential customers can check out the interface, test the predictive keyboard, BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry Hub, and other BB10 programs. The demo doesn't operate as smoothly as it would on the actual device, but it at least conveys the idea of the new OS. You can check it out on your iPhone or Android device by heading to BlackBerry.com.
Thanks to a video just posted on YouTube, you can check out the difference between Unreal Engine 4 on the PC and on the upcoming PlayStation 4:
In my own opinion, the PC version of the benchmark appears to feature better graphics, though not by as much as you would expect. Both versions of the Elemental demo are impressive, to say the least. I am looking forward to Unreal Engine 4 and the games that will be created.
Continue reading 'Unreal Engine 4: Elemental demo PlayStation 4 vs PC comparison video posted on YouTube' (full post)
Famous game studio LucasArts has been closed by Disney as a result of Disney trying to minimize risk. LucasArts is responsible for two decades of classic games, including such favorites of The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we've had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.
Any current games in development have been scrapped. This means that Star Wars 1313 will not be seeing the light of day. Instead, Disney plans to license the right to make games based upon the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises to other developers.
Pictures of the upcoming Android-powered Facebook phone have surfaced showing off what the purported Facebook Home will look like. The UI clearly has design inspirations from Apple in that the design is minimal, clean, and simple.
The design is definitely pleasing and features Facebook integration into nearly every menu. We'll get to see more and know more tomorrow at 10a.m. Pacific when Facebook holds its event. You'll be able to read all about it right here on TweakTown.
Continue reading 'Pictures of Facebook Home UI leak ahead of tomorrow's unveiling' (full post)
Seagate has begun to ship the world's first 4TB hard drives that feature 1TB platters. Seagate says that the four platter design is one that allows for the highest performance possible, while doubling capacity and reducing cost.
The drives are said to also feature the highest average data rate of any desktop hard drive that is currently sold on the market today. The new design consumes 35-percent less power than competing drives, and features 64MB of total cache space.
To put things into perspective, a 4TB HDD can house 450 hours of HD video, 1 million+ songs and 800,000 DSLR quality photos. The 4TB model has more than 800,000 times the storage capacity of the first Seagate HDD introduced in 1979 and is hundreds of times smaller in physical size.
Today Amazon announced that it will be adding vinyl records to its AutoRip service. AutoRip is a service by Amazon that offers purchasers of music on physical storage, free MP3 downloads of the same album.
From now on, any physical disc purchased on Amazon will include a free digital copy of the same album, which is placed in your free Amazon Cloud Player. In addition, digital copies of purchased tracks will not count against your storage total on the cloud service. Amazon says the service is available now for "thousands of records," including titles from every major label with more titles being added daily.
"We're thrilled to extend this experience to vinyl records," said Steve Boom, Vice President of Digital Music for Amazon "Many of our music customers are vinyl fans and it's traditionally been very difficult to make digital versions of vinyl records-now customers can enjoy the albums they buy wherever they are, not just when they have access to a record player."
A new Nexus 7 from Google could arrive as soon as this coming July, if rumors we are hearing are true. Reuters is citing two separate sources that claim that Google is preparing to ship roughly eight million new tablets by the end of the year.
The sources say that the new Nexus 7 will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon instead of an NVIDIA Tegra 4. One source says that we could see a the new Nexus 7 drop down to the $150 price point, while the other stated that $200 was the magic number.
If these rumors are true, then we will most likely see the device surface at next month's Google I/O event, which has been sold out for months. Last year's event saw the original Nexus 7 unveiled as well as a demo of Google Glass.
BlackBerry is hoping to convince Android and iOS users to switch over to the dark side by offering up a demo of key BlackBerry 10 features through a new HTML5 web app. Dubbed BlackBerry Glimpse, the app walks users through 10 demonstrations that include the BlackBerry Hub, Screen Share, Time Shift and the unique BB10 predictive keyboard.
I tried out Glimpse on my very dated Sprint Motorola Photon 4G and the "demo" felt more like a slideshow that used gestures to control rather than a true interactive demonstration. The keyboard demo was so fast that I barely caught what it was trying to illustrate.
Not all was bad though, I actually do like the UI that BlackBerry has created. It does have a very Android feel to it which is something that I prefer. Will this "demo" cause a mass migration to BlackBerry 10? I doubt it, but it is a pretty cool marketing idea. If you would like to try it out for yourself head over to the Source #2 link below.
This morning the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it has revised the way it believes companies should use social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook to inform their investors about company information.
The revision comes after the commission investigated Netflix CEO Reed Hastings over a post on Facebook about his personal holdings in the company, which caused the company's stock value to rise. The revision requires companies to notify investors that their social media accounts could post information that could affect stock values.
"Personal social media sites of individuals employed by a public company would not ordinarily be assumed to be channels through which the company would disclose material corporate information. Companies should review the Commission's existing guidance - it is flexible enough to address questions that arise for companies that choose to communicate through social media, and the guidance does so in a straightforward manner."
Forty years ago today, then Motorola exec Marty Cooper walked out of his office, met with a reporter on the sidewalk in front of his office building and proceeded to make a world-changing phone call to the CEO of Bell Labs (a division of AT&T).
This event was most likely one of the top 3 most significant phone calls in the history of the world, as it was the very first cellular phone call ever made. Sure there were car phones at the time, but this was a completely mobile, hand held all-in-one device. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that Cooper used went on to be known in pop culture as "The Brick" because it resembled one in both size and weight. The 2.5lb device would set you back a cool $3,995 and featured a single line LED text display.
Fast forward 40 years and Google now owns Motorola's mobile division and modern smartphones are tens of thousands of times more powerful. Instead of being limited to the uber rich, now even the poorest people communicate via cellular phones. If you were wondering, in the first cellular call Cooper said to the Bell Labs CEO "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end."
Quickoffice is definitely one of the better office suite apps out there at the moment and now users of Google's Apps for Business subscribers can now download the productivity suite for free.
This morning Google announced that Android and iOS users of its Apps for Business service would be able to download Quickoffice for free. This is something the iPad version has had for some time now, and Google felt that it needed to be extended to the full range of devices used in the business environment.
Quickoffice has also received a few improvements in preparation of the announcement. The software now shows Google Drive folders such as Recent, Shared With Me, and Starred. Subfolders are also visible and there is an option to zip folders.
Continue reading 'Quickoffice now free on iOS and Android for Google Apps for Business users' (full post)
It looks like Nokia need to make a bigger smartphone if they want to succeed in the increasingly sharp smartphone market, according to analysts. During an interview with Bloomberg, IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said that big-screen devices are "a trend that can't be missed" because "people are using smartphones in different ways now, consuming media by streaming over faster mobile networks."
CSS Insight research director, Ben Wood, chimed in with a similar opinion stating that phablets are an important trend and he has told Bloomberg that "Nokia needs to make sure they don't miss the boat" by not building one of their own.
If you haven't been keeping up with the current affairs of the world, North Korea are testing the waters of war at the moment - all while South Korea and their very tight and even more capable ally, the United States, play their war games with B2 Stealth Bombers, among other expensive military toys.
All while this is happening, Anonymous are jumping into the ring where the hacking collective are said to have started an initiative called "Operation Free Korea" and they're demanding that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un resign and install free democracy in the country.
Anonymous have also demanded that North Korea abandon their nuclear ambitions, and for the NK government to give universal and uncensored Internet access to their citizens. The hacking collective have claimed they've hacked into the North Korean intranet, mail servers and Web servers, threatening to wage war if their demands aren't met. The group has written:
We got all over 15k membership records of Uriminzokkiri.com and many more. First we gonna wipe your data, then we gonna wipe your badass dictatorship 'government.'
Get ready for some serious bandwidth to hit us in the near future, with the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium publishing their HMC Specification 1.0. This will allow companies to build platforms and RAM with 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB chips baking in the stacked, power-efficient technology all without those pesky compatibility issues.
The HMC Specification 1.0 has some impressive potential with eight links, a memory cube can push a peak 320GB/sec of aggregate bandwidth - opening up a can of whoop ass on the current 11GB/sec that DDR3 gives us.
The Consortium have decided to lift the dress a little higher on HMC, saying that the next-gen blueprint is already getting scribbled on, and that it is due early 2014. This should give us double the individual data link speeds - pushing the 15Gbps to 28Gbps. Let's hope this isn't some pipe dream, and we see actual consumer products with even close to these insane speeds in the near future.
Registrations for Microsoft's upcoming BUILD conference are now open, with the first 500 registrations scoring a nice $500 off of the price of admission. The BUILD conference will take place on June 26-28 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.
The three-day event will see sessions held on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Blue and a bunch of other topics. The Redmond-based software giant are also hosting a hackathon that starts the night before, at 7pm. Attendees can work by themselves, or team up to build apps from scratch using Windows, Windows Phone or Windows Azure, where they can win prizes.
We should also see the Windows 8 update codenamed Windows Blue to be shown off at BUILD, with the unveiling of the update to Windows 8 reportedly set to be the only public preview of the OS before it is ready for public consumption later in the year.
Continue reading 'Microsoft BUILD conference registrations are now open' (full post)
During a Branch chat, Daring Fireball's John Gruber has said that iOS 7 is running behind schedule, and that when it is released it'll include a big change to the user interface (UI). He said:
What I've heard: iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it. (Let me know if you've heard this song before.)
Gruber also noted that iOS 7 is set to have a "significant system-wide UI overhaul" and that iOS engineers who are toting the next-gen mobile OS from Apple are required to have a special privacy filter on their devices that reportedly limits viewing angles on their devices. This stops others from getting a look at the new-look iOS.
iOS has needed an UI overhaul for a while now, something I've been itching for since the iPhone 3GS. Android has been making strides in the UI department, something Apple should've been on the ball about. iOS 7 should hopefully be quite striking to both look at, and use.
If the 5.5-inch screen on the Galaxy Note II wasn't big enough, get ready for some even bigger phones from Samsung if the latest rumors are true. SamMobile has the news from their 'insider', stating that Samsung has changed the name of their upcoming Galaxy Fonblets to Galaxy Mega.
There will be two new smartphones introduced, the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and Galaxy Mega 6.3. The Mega 5.8 has the codename of GT-I9152 while its bigger brother, the Mega 6.3, has the codename of GT-I9200. The Mega 6.3 is reported to have a 6.3-inch display, which is what the rumored Galaxy Note III smartphone was meant to have.
We should expect the Mega 5.8 and 6.3 to be unleashed in June.
Google have now enabled the ability for users to upload full-sized photos from any web browser to Google+. All you have to do is enable the option and let it do the photo uploading for you.
There are limits on the file size of the photos, with anything over 2048 pixels across (and videos over 15 minutes long) will still count toward your Google Drive cap.
It's that time of the month again, when we find out just how the Android OS is doing with its users. Google have changed up the way they collect these numbers, where they now only collect data from devices that have visited the Google Play store in the last month.
Previously, Google used to count all phones that checked into their servers. This change in collection methods hasn't changed the numbers that much, with Jelly Bean sitting pretty at 25% of the Android market share. Ice Cream Sandwich actually climbed a little, with 29.3% of devices running the deliciously-named OS.
The War Z has had its fair share of troubles, but it has just gotten much more serious with its forum and game database being hacked. This has put users' data at risk.
The user data include e-mail addresses, forum passwords, both of which OP Productions has said were encrypted. E-mail addresses to log into The War Z, game passwords, in-game character names and the IP addresses of gamers on both the forum and in the game were also leaked. OP Productions has said that they don't collect names and passwords of their customers, so unless it was posted on the forum itself, you should be okay.
So if you're using the same (or similar) passwords as your The War Z account, or the forum, we would suggest you change all of your passwords just in case.