ACTA Protests a Success, Germany Takes a Step Back

The global protests against the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act (ACTA) seem to have left their mark on state leaders, the latest country to pull back being Germany. While they didn’t clearly state that they were against ACTA, German officials decided to postpone their decision on whether or not the agreement would be signed, waiting for the European Parliament to make the first move, ZDNet UK reports. At the end of January, 22 states part of the European Union signed ACTA, but since none of them ratified the act they can proceed with caution, many of them being highly influenced by the mass protests that take place worldwide. In the case of Germany, three political parties, the Pirate Party, the Left Party and the Greens, showed...

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No 15-Inch HP Envy Spectre Ultrabook for Now, Just a Mistake

Yesterday, many websites reported that HP unveiled a 15-inch version of the Envy Spectre Ultrabook in Taiwan, after citing an article published by DigiTimes. The news however seems to be wrong as Laptoping has recently uncovered that the notebook everybody thought to be a larger 15-inch Envy Ultrabook was actually the standard Envy 15, which is already available in the US.  Although these two laptops have similar names, they’re entirely different beasts, the Spectre coming as a thin and light Ultrabook, while the Envy uses the regular notebook form factor. So far, Samsung is the only company that has announced the launch of a 15-inch notebook, which will take the form of a Series 9 model.  This will include a 1600x900 resolution...

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Sara, a Siri Alternative for All iPhones and iPads

A company called iSoft JSC has released an alternative to Siri, the digital assistant that does things just by asking on your iPhone 4S. Sara works on older-generation devices, starting at iPhone 2G, and allegedly does even more than Apple’s Siri. The Vietnamese group at iSoft JSC says Sara is actually an advanced alternative to Siri. In addition to offering regular Siri capabilities, Sara accepts custom commands via plug-ins. Don’t worry about having to code your own because if this thing takes off, programmers will be flocking to get their plug-ins out so everyone can enjoy them. Sara also works in many countries. In fact, it supports 37 languages. Beat that Siri! Unfortunately, Sara does come with a small caveat - you need a jailbroken...

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Intel 2012 Haswell CPUs Will Feature Improved Multi-Core Support

Intel has recently announced that its next-generation 22nm processors based on the Haswell architecture will support Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), a new instruction set designed to allow cores to work more efficiently together. These new synchronization extensions (Intel TSX) are useful in shared-memory multithreaded applications that employ lock-based synchronization mechanisms. In a nutshell, Intel TSX provides a set of instruction set extensions that allow programmers to specify regions of code for transactional synchronization. According to Intel, with transactional synchronization, the hardware can determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize through lock-protected critical sections, and perform serialization...

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iPad 3 Developers May Be Required to Own Retina Macs Soon

There’s a pretty good chance Apple will introduce an all-Retina Mac lineup this year, one programmer theorizes. If anything, at least development machines will sport double the pixel count, he suggests. iOS developer David Smith has created a chart to demonstrate that coders who use Macs to craft the apps for Apple’s tablet computers may require Retina-grade graphics, should the Cupertino giant indeed release a Retina-display iPad 3. “It is now widely accepted that Apple will be releasing a new iPad early in March. It is expected this will include a Retina display like the iPhone,” Smith writes. “This would have a resolution of 2048x1536 (double its current resolution of 1024x768).” “I find numbers like that often hard to visualize so I...

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First Official RUU Based on HTC Endeavor Leaks

Shortly after HTC Endeavor's specs sheet leaked online, along with the approximate release date, one of the test ROMs for the quad-core smartphone appeared in the wild as well. The folks over at XDA Developers are “guilty” for this new leak, which has yet to be tested and ported to other HTC devices.  Thanks to XDA forum user capychimp who got his hands on this test RUU for the HTC Endeavor and was willing to share it with the community, we will hopefully see more ROMs based on this leak. According to capychimp this RUU also includes the latest HTC Sense 4.0, but details on other featurs of the leaked RUU are a bit scarce for the moment.  Head over to the original thread on XDA Developers forums for more details on the latest leaked...

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Jetway JNF9C-2600 Is a Low-Profile Intel Cedar Trail Motherboard

Intel’s Atom processors definitely aren’t as popular as just a few years back, but this hasn’t stopped Jetway from developing a new mini-ITX thin-profile motherboard based on the chip maker’s latest Atom Cedar Trail platform. Jetway’s motherboard is called the JNF9C-2600 and just as its name implies this is based on an Intel Atom N2600 processor. This chip was built by Intel in order to be used in netbooks and other mobile devices and sports dual computing cores clocked at 1.6GHz, with Hyper-Threading support and 1MB of shared L2 cache memory. In Jetway’s creation, both this CPU and the NM10 chipset accompanying it are cooled by low-profile aluminum heatsinks.  In order to save up space, Jetway decided to drop the regular DIMM memory...

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DROID XYBOARD 8.2 and DROID XYBOARD 10.1 Taste Software Updates

Motorola and Verizon Wireless are gearing up for the release of a new software update for the DROID XYBOARD 8.2 and DROID XYBOARD 10.1 tablet PCs on the carrier’s network.  The new software will arrive as version 1.6.0M_279-MZ609 on the DROID XYBOARD 8.2 and will be pushed as version 1.6.0M_279-MZ617 on the larger DROID XYBOARD 10.1.  The new software update is meant to bring along a nice range of enhancements on the two devices, including support for global GSM networks, a nice addition to their set of features, that’s for sure.  Following the installation of this new software update, DROID XYBOARD owners will be able to enjoy data connectivity on their devices in 25 countries around the world. At the same time, they will...

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Thermalright Releases Silver Arrow SB-E Cooler

Thermalright decided this was a good time for a new CPU cooler to grace the consumer market, so it has released the Silver Arrow SB-E. This thing is one large beast with two fin towers and just as many fans. It supports AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+ and FMI CPUs from AMD, as well as LGA 2011, 1366, 1156, 1155 and 775 chips from Intel. That said, it comes with no less than eight nickel-plated copper heatpipes, whose thickness is of 6mm. Furthermore, the two TY PWM fans measure 140 mm and 150 mm in diameter, as opposed to the original Silver Arrow model that has two 140 mm fans. Unfortunately, no price tag was announced, but that didn't stop online vendors from putting the thing up for order at 78 Euro/ $103. Just know that shipments won't begin until...

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Siri's Rival Speaktoit Is Now Available on iOS

One of iPhone 4S' selling points should have been Siri, the intelligent software assistant, which allows users to do certain things, like text or call someone, as well as opening an application, by simply talking to the phone. Unfortunately, the application was nowhere near completion, as many iPhone 4S complain that it does not recognizes all voice commands or interprets them wrong. Apple claims that one of the strong points of Siri is the ability to learn and adapt to the user's preferences. The longer it used the more accurate it should be. It is also worth mentioning that based on user's preferences, Siri can make recommendations and preform various actions such as finding nearby restaurants or getting directions via GPS. Shortly after...

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All MacBook Pros Getting Air-Like Design in 2012 - Report

A report citing people familiar with Apple’s roadmap is reiterating an old rumor saying the company will revamp its entire MacBook Pro line, both inside and out, giving the laptops a design akin to that of the popular MacBook Air. The news is exactly breaking, since there has been a lot of talk about the Air-like design in the past. People who are close to the Cupertino-based Mac maker are now telling AppleInsider that “Apple plans to exit 2012 having completed a top-to-bottom revamp of its notebooks lineup that will see new MacBook Pros adopt the same design traits that have made its MacBook Airs an increasingly popular choice among mobile consumers.” As for the existing lineup, it will be entirely phased out over the course of this year,...

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PowerColor Radeon HD 7970 Packs Custom Dual-Fan Cooler

More than a month after AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 reached retail, add-in board makers still come out with new solutions based on this graphics card design, the latest to do so being PowerColor which just launched the HD7970 Dual Fan.  The card is based on a proprietary PowerColor design and includes two large fans (presumably 92mm), backed by some pretty thick copper heatpipes, for dissipating the heat produced by the card while running. Despite the improved cooling system, PowerColor chose not to overclock the card past AMD’s reference frequencies thus the HD 7970 Tahiti XT GPU is run at 925MHz, while the video buffer is clocked at the usual 1,375MHz (5.5GHz). The video output configuration was also left unaltered, so this latest PowerColor...

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Motorola DROID 4 Has 16GB Memory, Shows only 8GB

Motorola DROID 4, the latest addition to Verizon’s popular DROID lineup, comes to the market with 16GB of internal memory, yet users won’t see in it more than 8GB.  The handset went for sale at Verizon yesterday, featuring a price tag of $199 on contract (though some retailers have it available for much less than that), and users have already started complaining regarding the promised internal memory and the actual available storage.  Apparently, there’s a simple explanation for this state of facts. Motorola did put 16GB of storage space inside Motorola DROID 4, but split it in three, the same as inside the DROID RAZR. Thus, 8GB of this storage space is available for the user, 3GB is meant for applications, and the other 5GB for...

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