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Acer is hyping things up with a teaser page on their website for the unveiling of a new “notebook PC concept” to take place New York later today.
Clearly not with the concept of a world wide web, whatever is to be revealed, described by Acer as an “innovative, industry-first, laptop design” will not be shown in the UK until a press event on Thursday 20th March.
source:pocket-lint
The Beatles would go digital with their back catalogue in 2008. Cue a whole host of rumors, and, on Monday, his promise seemed to have come true with the story that the remaining Beatles had done a $400 million deal with Apple to put their entire back catalogue on iTunes.
But the very next day, one of the companies that owns the rights to a vast majority of the back catalogue denied the reports.
Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the joint venture owned by Sony and Michael Jackson, branded them “untrue”, adding that if a deal had been made, they would know about it.
And today, it’s Apple that has stepped up to deny the claims.
The computing giant has told Reuters that the story is “unsubstantiated speculation”, and added: “This is not news nor is it a scoop”.
source:pocket-lint
AMD, at CeBIT 2008, has announced its latest graphics driver release to advance the Ultimate Visual Experience for PC gaming enthusiasts and casual gamers alike.
Expected to be available for download starting, ATI Catalyst 8.3 is a software update in delivering both CrossFireX for Windows Vista – the world’s first quad-GPU support, and scalable, cost-effective three GPU support – as well as ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology for casual gamers. These multi-GPU capabilities provide gamers a more realistic and immersive experience allowing them to play at high resolutions with demanding image quality settings.
ATI Catalyst 8.3 also introduces ATI Hybrid Graphics support for Windows Vista. The company maintains that up to 70 percent increases in performance are possible in some gaming scenarios based on PCs comprised of an AMD 780G motherboard and ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series graphics product in Windows Vista. ATI Hybrid Graphics also support up to four independent displays through the SurroudView feature.
ATI Catalyst 8.3 is available here. http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html.
source:tech2
Unlike cracks which have been floating around since Vista RTM was released in late November, this crack doesn’t simply get around product activation with beta activation files or timestop cracks – it actually makes use of the activation process. It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn’t require product activation – apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient.
As the crack is tied to specific product keys, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will be able to do anything about shutting out machines activated using this method. But their work will be made much more difficult now that such machines have completely bypassed the online activation process, and are connecting as legitimate copies of Windows.
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Tata Communications plans to connect 200,000 retail customers using WiMax by March 2009, the company said Tuesday.
The company, which is targeting both retail and enterprise customers, said that it plans to roll out WiMax in 110 cities for its enterprise customers and 15 cities for retail customers this year.
The company expects to invest US$500 million in this venture over the next three years, a company spokesman said.
India is relatively under-served in broadband Internet services, particularly for consumers. The country, with a population of 1.1 billion, had 3.24 million broadband subscribers at the end of January this year, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
This figure, which includes connections of a speed higher than 256 Kbps (kilobits per second), is a fraction of India’s mobile connections, totaling 242 million at the end of January.
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OnePlace, to be launched in the second quarter of this year, allows users to mark links, news feeds or search results that lead them to fresh information on favorite topics when clicked.
Bookmarking tools are anything but new — Yahoo’s own del.icio.us is one — but Yahoo says mobile phones, with their small screens, require a different approach and far greater emphasis on sharing.
Yahoo is driving to outmaneuver Google’s clear lead in computer search and advertising by custom-building elegant services for cell phone users and forming alliances with telecoms carriers.
Customers would be able to access the service either through telecoms carriers who have deals with Yahoo such as Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica or Vodafone or directly download it from Yahoo, Boerries told Reuters.
“It’s not Web links you can click on but it’s smart bookmarks that are alive and will give you current information,” he said in a telephone interview.
“There are 52 content types that OnePlace understands,” he added, naming videos, cities, musicians, albums or stock prices as examples of categories. “For all of those types, we have implemented algorithms for what’s most relevant for that type.”
Users can also choose to automatically direct content they mark in social bookmarks manager del.icio.us, post on Facebook or star in Google newsreader to OnePlace, he said.
They can also sort their bookmarks by local relevance or popularity with friends and contacts.
source:pcworld
The Latitude XFR D630 is Dell’s first fully ruggedized notebook. Designed for outstanding performance in virtually any environment, the XFR meets strict military standards for extreme conditions, MIL-810F.
The Latitude XFR D630 meets environmental challenges by offering a variety of innovative usability options, including:
* Industry’s first fully rugged 14.1″ wide-aspect LCD with DirectVue(tm) technology
* Optional touch screen supports finger, gloved or passive stylus inputs
* Next generation performance with Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo processors
The rugged laptop, intended for government and commercial customers, is available now in the US and starts at $3,899.
source:dell
Vodafone is demonstrating a trial service called “Otello”, which is a search engine that uses images, rather than words.
Rather than use a word as a search term, Otello users can send images via MMS from their mobiles and the search service which then returns the results to the user’s phone as an “ordinary” search result.
A picture from a newspaper, billboard, book cover or place are all examples of what can be searched for.
Vodafone is running trials with a German newspaper that lets users find out more about stories by photographing the images that appear in the article and MMSing the images.
source:pocket-lint
Intel has formally announced that it has chosen the name ‘Atom’ for its new family of low-power processors (previously codenamed Silverthorne and Diamondville) designed specifically for mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and a new class of Internet-centric computers arriving later this year.
The Intel Atom processor is based on a new microarchitecture designed specifically for small devices and low power, while maintaining the Intel Core 2 Duo instruction set compatibility consumers are accustomed to when using a standard PC and the Internet. The design also includes support for multiple threads for better performance and increased system responsiveness. The chip measures less than 25 mm, making it Intel’s smallest and lowest power processor yet.
source:tech2
YouTube will launch a live streaming service later this year, which will mean users will be able to create live feeds of events and broadcast them around the world.
The Google-owned site said lack of resources has stopped it offering the service to screen live footage previously, but it is something that will launch later in 2008.
Users will be able to film events and upload them directly onto YouTube. Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, said: “We’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google we hope to actually do it this year.”
source:pocket-lint