RIM Launches BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing 2.0

Research In Motion has just announced that a new version of BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing is now available for download from App World. BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing 2.0 brings lots of new features and enhancements in comparison with previous versions of the application. Popular among business users, the application automatically turns an email thread into a conference call with the help of the user’s conference bridge details. In addition, BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing can dial multiple conference call numbers that, a conference ID and other codes, with a simple one-click. It also tries to reconnect automatically any dropped call from the conference. According to RIM, the new version of the application comes with BlackBerry Calendar,...

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Intel Plans to Retire Several Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 CPUs in 2012

Intel has just announced its plans to retire five Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 CPUs released earlier this year from its product lineup, including three Pentium processors and two second generation Core models built using the 32nm fabrication node. The chip maker announced its decision through a Product Change Notification (PCN) document which says that market demand for these chips has shifted to other Intel products. The processors affected are the Core i5-2300 and Core i3-2100T, both tray and boxed, as well as the Pentium G840, G620 and G620T. Customers can place orders for these chips until June 29 of 2012. The last shipments of tray Core i5-2300 and Core i3-2100T will be sent towards customers on December 7, 2012, while boxed CPUs will be shipped...

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EVGA’s X79 FTW LGA 2011 Motherboard Now Available in Retail

Introduced in mid-November, EVGA’s X79 FTW motherboard for Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E processors using the LGA 2011 socket has now become available in retail with pricing being set at $399.99 which roughly translates into 299 EUR. The X79 FTW is one of EVGA’s most advanced motherboards based on the Intel X79 chipset, is only surpassed by the XL-ATX Classified, and uses the EATX form factor in order to provide users with 3-way SLI support. Graphics cards can be installed in the five PCI Express x16 slots available, which are accompanied by an additional PCIe x1 slot for less pretentious add-on cards. The rest of the expansion options include support for two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps drives, while on the rear I/O panel users will find other...

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Broadcom Makes Bluetooth Device Batteries Run for 10 years

If anything can put a dent in the appeal of a wireless peripheral, it is how they tend to run out of power at the worst moments, since it is always a bad moment when they are in use. Broadcom means to make this problem go away through its latest invention. What the company did was create a special Bluetooth chip that uses so little energy that a single battery charge will last for years. In other words, Bluetooth keyboards (and a lot of other things too) will go on for a long, long time without having to be recharged, or getting their batteries changed. Certainly, the maximum lifespan will depend on the quality of the batteries as well. For those who want some numbers, Broadcom envisions a period of about ten years without the keyboard...

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Intel to Discontinue P55, H55 and H57 LGA 1156 Chipsets

The days of Intel’s LGA 1156 socket are numbered since the Santa Clara-based chip maker announced recently that at the end of next year it plans to retire three of its most widely spread desktop chipsets that support this platform. The chipsets in question are the P55 Express, the H55 Express and the H57 Express, the first one of these being launched in September of 2009 while the two other solutions were made official in Q1 of 2010. Intel announced its decision through a Product Change Notification (PCN) document which revealed that the last orders for these chipsets can be placed on June 29, 2012. Intel will continue to manufacture the controllers even after that date and the last shipments of P55, H55 and H57 will leave the company’s...

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Core i7-3667U and i5-3427U Are Intel’s 2012 Ultrabook CPUs

For Intel, 2012 will mark the introduction of its 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture and among all the CPU models to be included in this series two particularly interesting chips are the Core i7-3667U and i5-3427U. These are of course destined to be used in Ultrabooks and as such have a TDP of just 17W making them highly efficient in terms of power consumption. But outside of their low TDP, the two U-Series Ivy Bridge chips also have some other tricks up their sleeves such as an Intel HD 4000 built-in GPU, two computing cores with Hyper-Threading support as well as Turbo Boost support. Furthermore, as VR-Zone reports even their operating clocks are set at an impressive 2.0 and 1.8 GHz with Turbo Boost raising these frequencies up to 3.2GHz...

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Nokia Lumia 900 and Champagne Spotted Once More

Nokia already made its first handsets running under Windows Phone available for purchase in various markets around the world, and info on new devices from the company has just started to emerge.  Among these, we can mention Nokia Lumia 900, the high-end device that emerged on the web a few times before, along with another handset from the company, codenamed Champagne. Both smartphones were spotted in the stats of a news reader available for the Windows Phone platform, namely Times Of India, which clearly indicates that they are powered by Microsoft’s mobile OS. What the app stats show is that Nokia Lumia 900 users have accessed the software, indicating that the device might be in field testing at the moment. If so, then we might see...

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Universal USB Cable Fits Every iPhone, iPad, iPod

The people at Innergie have come up with a cool accessory that should eliminate some of your wire-caused clutter by building three USB connections into one. Care to see how they did it? Read on. The idea pretty simple (though I’m sure it’s not as easy to envision without seeing it done first). It's an interchangeable USB charging cable with multiple tips that overlap one-another via a Russian Nesting Doll style connection. The first two connections are micro-USB and mini-USB. The final connection is a 40-pin connector that matches your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. The ‘Magic Cable Trio’ is designed to charge everything from your mp3 player and GPS unit to your BlackBerry or iPhone handset. There’s a Duo version that sells for the same price ($19.99)...

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AMD Radeon HD 7690M Powered HP Envy 17 Notebook Spotted in Europe

Soon after AMD made official the Radeon HD 7000M-series of mobile GPUs, an European retailer has added to its offer a new version of the HP Envy 17 notebook that includes one of the graphics chips announced today. The chip in question is the Radeon HD 7690M, which is the most powerful GPU to be introduced by AMD in its “new” product family. As we have reported in our previous article detailing AMD’s HD 7000M-series, the 7690M is actually a rebranded Turks core that includes 480 stream processors, 24 texture units and 8 ROP units as well as a 128-bit wide memory bus. In HP’s creation this is linked to 1GB of GDDR5 memory, but unfortunately we don’t know the exact frequency that the GPU or the memory are setup to run at. Outside of the AMD...

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Windows 8 Beta in Late February, 500M Windows 7 Licenses Sold to Date

One of the details that Microsoft shared with the world when unveiling the new Windows Store was the fact that Windows 8 will be released in Beta in Late February 2012.  Some of the latest rumors on the matter already suggested this, yet official confirmation arrived only yesterday during an event in San Francisco. Of course, Microsoft kept mum on any detail on the upcoming Windows 8 milestone, and it appears that we’ll have to wait for CES to kick off in January to learn more on this. In the meantime, however, we’ll have to rely on leaks to make an idea of what the Redmond-based company might have up its sleeve for us. One major change from the currently available Windows 8 Developer Preview will be the availability of applications...

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AMD Fusion '12 Comes Together Next June

Advanced Micro Devices, like Intel, doesn't let the years go by without building upon or starting new collaborations with software makers, so it is already thinking of a certain event that will occur next year. Between June 11 and June 14, 2012, the annual Fusion gathering will take place at the Meydenbauer Center and the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue. “As the only provider of world-class APUs, GPUs and CPUs, AMD is leading advancement of heterogeneous computing and OpenCL, both of which have reached a tipping point as demand grows for new user interfaces and immersive computing experiences,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program. “AMD has a history of customer-driven innovation based on industry standards...

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