Huawei Ascend P1 Confirmed for Mid-April in China, Other Countries Soon to Follow

Unveiled back in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Huawei Ascend P1 is one of the slimmest Android smartphones, only 7.7mm thick. Although the device was announced a few months ago, the Chinese company did not mention the exact release date of the Ascend P1.  In the meantime, Huawei announced the Diamond series of smartphones, which includes top notch devices such as the Ascend D quad. Anyway, it appears that the Huawei Ascend P1 will be launched on the market in mid-April, the folks at ePrice claim. Initially launched in China, the Ascend P1 will make its entrance in other countries soon afterwards.  Huawei Ascend P1 will be shipped with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich platform out of the box and a dual core...

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If Apple Sold You Water, You’d Probably Buy It

Here’s a nifty little poke at Apple’s iconic marketing materials that’ll make you drool over this simple bottle of H2O. Actually, if you were to ask scoopertino.com, it’s not a simple bottle of water. It’s Water (Apple Water). The marketing pitch reads: “If you’ve been drinking the juice, you’re ready to drink the water. Apple Water is designed especially for the Apple connoisseur: beautifully packaged, easy to drink, and perfectly overpriced. A magical blend of hydrogen and oxygen, Apple Water says everything they need to know about you.” The product’s key features include instant waterfication, built-in display (a temperature sensitive logo that shifts from red to blue when the temperature is in Steve Jobs’ acceptable limits), molecular...

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HTC Wind Dual-SIM Smartphone with Android 4.0 ICS Gets Launched in China

It appears that HTC has different plans for the Chinese market. Although the handset maker confirmed it would produce less smartphones this year, it looks like HTC changed its mind. After announcing its HTC One series of smartphones last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Taiwanese company promised that all devices will be available on the market within the next 60 days. Most of HTC One series smartphones are already available for pre-order in various regions with an April release tag attached to it. However, the folks over at UnwiredView have spotted an unannounced HTC device that doesn’t belong to the HTC One series, or at least it shouldn’t. The smartphone is known as HTC T328w Wind and will soon be available for purchase...

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iPad 3 Charge Meter Lies to Protect the Battery, Report Suggests

Following reports that the new iPad lies about reaching a 100% charge, ZDnet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes upholds that the iPad 3 battery meter is not acting up. He says it is a general misconception that the iPad 3 charge mechanism is flawed. The indicator is actually doing you a favor, by not telling you when the battery is, indeed, at 100% charge, according to the man. He claims Apple displays the 100 percent charge indicator at a lower capacity, to keep the battery “safe and healthy.” This is not the first time Apple has done this, he says, but it’s the first time people notice because the new iPad has a considerably larger battery, which takes more time to recharge. “The battery on the new iPad is huge, with a total charge capacity of a...

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Mysterious Motorola RAZR-Like Device Emerges as “Blade”

It looks like a new Motorola device has just surfaced online. The mysterious handset features a RAZR-like design and strongly resemblance the recently leaked DROID Fighter. However, there are several differences between these two smartphones, which makes us believe this is not a Chinese version of the DROID Fighter.  First of all, the unnamed device gets the secondary camera to the left of the in-call speaker, while the DROID Fighter has the front-facing camera placed to the right. The back cover is much more prominent where the module camera is, which might suggest that this is an improved photo snapper in comparison with standard DROID devices available in the United States. The photo snapper on the back is HD, and it could be 13-megapixel,...

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AdvancedIO Launches V5031 10GE Network Card

Financial markets can be a bit tricky to participate in over the web, due to latency and how delays can cost millions, so AdvancedIO decided to try and do something about it. What the company created is a new and improved 10GE network card with four optical ports, advanced memory configurations and a scalable Stratix V FPGA. Dubbed V5031, it is the fifth generation programmable product for use in risk control, trading strategies and running algorithms as close as possible to the network. V5031 is based on Altera's 28nm Stratix V FPGA and goes beyond the performance limit of existing small form factor cards. “AdvancedIO’s application-centric approach to providing real-time low latency solutions for the financial markets coupled with Altera’s...

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AT&T HTC One X with Snapdragon S4 CPU Shines in Benchmarks

Back in February when AT&T confirmed plans to carry HTC’s One X high-end smartphone, everyone thought that the dual-core processor version will be outperformed by the international version that comes with a quad-core CPU. However, it looks like an AT&T device tester was able to run some benchmarks which prove that the US-bound version of HTC One X is even more powerful than the international variant. Those who are not familiar with the difference between the two devices should know that AT&T will offer the HTC One X equipped with a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Krait processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, while the international model packs a 1.5 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU. AT&T’s HTC One X was tested with Vellamo and Quadrant...

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Script: jQuery HTML5 Fullscreen Slideshow

This jQuery plugin creates true fullscreen image slideshows. By true fullscreen we are referring to the entire area of the screen, not just the viewport, which was first supported by the HTML 5 API. For non compatible or really old browsers, when starting the slideshow, the image will be shown on the entire area of the viewport, using some simple jQuery magic. The plugin works as designed for all Firefox 10+ and Google Chrome 15+ browsers. The plugin's homepage says it will probably work on Safari 5.1+, but when we tested it with Safari 5.1.3, the image showed up only on the viewport, so don't get your hopes up just yet. The slideshow also supports some other features like the possibility to add a caption (text description) to the image,...

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NEC's Tactile Touchscreen Lets You Feel What's on Screen

Senseg may have been the first company to make a touch panel capable of emulating the feel of things, granting tactile feedback, but NEC and the Tokyo Institute of Technology wanted something easier. What they came up with was a fairly simple idea involving wires anchored on each corner of the display. When force is being shown on the panel, the wires jerk the screen in the corresponding direction. Obviously this idea is still in its beginning stages, and we imagine that durability isn't one of its strong suites. We also figure the whole moving display will become noisy after a while. Still, an idea is an idea, and we even have a video of the thing in action, courtesy of Diginfo, so we are definitely not going to complain about the concep...

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Planex Releases Wall-Socket Wi-Fi Router

Nowadays, most homes have wired networks already in place, so Planex decided to do something for those people who want less cable clutter. Out comes the MZK-KR150N, a WiFi b/g/n router that plugs into a wall socket. More precisely, it runs on AC power and links to the worldwide web through and Ethernet cable. The front of the product has an antenna, plus a downstream Ethernet cable, configuration buttons and LEDs. The wireless connection reaches up to 150 Mbps, while the wired ports enable common 100 Mbps connections. April is when sales will begin, for the price of 9,800 JPY, which translates into $118.4 / 89.24 Euro. Eventually, the company may start shipping a version with two downstream Ethernet ports. There does seem to be a blank socket...

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ASUS Launches the Z9PE-D8 WS Wonder Motherboard

ASUS has officially announced the latest member of their famous WS-Line of motherboards: the Z9PE-D8 WS. This is a dual LGA 2011 socket monster and packs no less than 7 PCI-Express x16 slots along with eight DDR3 DIMM slots, four for each CPU on the mainboard. Out of the seven PCI-Express x16 Slots, 4 of them work at full 3rd Generation PCI-Express x16 speed and are colored in blue while  two of the 3 black ones are 2nd Generation PCI-Express x8. The bottom one is PCI-Express 2.0 operating at x4. The eight DDR3 DIMM slots support up to 256 GB of RAM and the seven PCI-Express x16 slots ensure compatibility with AMD’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI technologies. You need Registered memory for a full 256GB of RAM configuration but if you manage...

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SAMSUNG’s Exynos 5 CPU Is Ready

The new ARM-based design from Samsung is called Exynos 5 and it is a true A15 Core solution on 32nm. Unlike Qualcomm’s SnapDragon S4 that can be characterized as being “A15-like,” the Exynos 5 is a Direct A15 Core. The Korean company did not want to experiment with 28nm manufacturing process just yet, fearing difficulty with low yields and low scalability. Instead it went for their tried and true 32nm process and managed a 2GHz clock speed that’s even faster than what Qualcomm managed to get out of TSMC’s 28nm process for their SnapDragon S4 chips that rage between 1.5GHz and 1.7 GHz. The Dual Core 32nm chip is based on Samsung’s High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process and, despite being bigger, it’s stable enough to reach such high working frequencies. The...

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Linux Kernel 3.2.13 Is Available for Download

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few days ago, on March 23rd, the immediate availability for download of the thirteen maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.2 series.    Linux kernel 3.2.13 includes a few important fixes for the AFS, Perf tools and PowerPC, as well as networking IPv6/IPv4, iwl3945 and nilfs2 fixes.   "I'm announcing the release of the 3.2.13 kernel. All users of the 3.2 kernel series must upgrade."   “The updated 3.2.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.2.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary" - said Greg...

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 Pictured. Maybe

There have been murmurs about a new tablet for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 series, murmurs that picked up in volume not too long ago.  Granted, it still isn't known if the alleged Galaxy Tab 11.6 will ever actually become reality.  Still, people are watchful of what they consider important, and this applies here as well.  Long story short, a photo of an unreleased tablet has made its way to the web somehow.  In looks, it resembles the Galaxy Tab 2, the one showcased at the Mobile World Congress.  The photo actually first showed up on the product page of the Exynos 5250, which is the chip expected to power the galaxy Tab 11.6, hence the assumption that the one in the photo is it. We'll keep an eye out for anything...

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17W TDP Sandy Bridge Based Celeron Coming in Summer

Intel plans to release two new mobile CPUs in Q3 2012, the first one being named Celeron 887 Mobile, with a 1400MHz working frequency, and the second one being a 100MHz "faster" Celeron 807. It comprises two cores with no HyperThreading involved along with 2 MB or cache memory. As expected, it has Intel HD Graphics built-in and it supports DDR 1333 MHz memory. It can clock its iGPU from 350MHz to 1Ghz  according to the task it is working on. The CPU is part of Intel’s Ultra-Low voltage family and it will end up inside entry level mobile solutions. The other mobile CPU in Intel’s future Ultra-Low voltage line is the Celeron 807. Regardless of the numbering scheme that might lead you to believe this CPU is just a lower-clocked Celeron...

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Intel's Valleyview Atom SoC to Have Multiple Versions

We learned about the Valleyview system-on-chip devices from Intel a few days ago, but the information was sparse, to say the least.  VR-Zone managed to provide some actual details on the product series, starting with the correct spelling of the brand name.  At least, we guess it is the correct spelling. Initially, the SoCs were called Valley View but now the report writes the name in a single word: Valleyview.  Then again, this is not all that important in the end, since the chips will still be called Atom.  Valleyview (really Valleyview 2) is actually the name of the Atom core, not the SoC itself. The latter is named Bay Trail in fact.  There will be two versions of Bay Trail, neither of which is intended for consumers.  There...

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The Battle for 14nm Manufacturing Begins

The first publicity blow of showing a series 14nm silicon wafer belonged to IBM this year. SemiAccurate’s Charlie is reporting that, in the second week of March, the company has showed one of their first 14nm silicon wafers containing IC dies.  The piece is certainly a test wafer and the chips on it have not been identified, but IBM has something to show for while Intel’s FinFETs are still a while away from manufacturing. The VP of IBM’s Semiconductor Research & Development Center, Gary Patton said, at the Common Platform Technology Forum two weeks ago, that the company would use SOI technology for all of its 14nm products, including its own server products as well as for their Fab clients. Samsung also showed a 14nm wafer last...

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Nokia Belle FP2 Disappoints in HTML5 Benchmark, Tizen OS Outshines All Other Platforms

Nokia announced it would continue to support its Symbian operating system, especially after the Finnish company launched several smartphones that are meant to strengthen its proprietary OS market share. Although the company decided to outsource the development of Symbian software and support activities to Accenture, Nokia included the transfer of 2,800 employees in the deal. Nokia employees transferred are to focus solely on developing and supporting Symbian software. In the meantime, the Finnish handset maker decided to change the new platform’s name to Nokia Belle. The next-generation operating system was launched on the market along with several new smartphones, such as Nokia 603, 700 and 701. Nokia also confirmed that these smartphones...

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Apple, Bring Back "Save As" in OS X Mountain Lion

Apple has a mission with OS X Mountain Lion, whether it likes it or not. It has to bring back some of the features that made people fall in love with the Mac. And that also includes one fundamental function in computing called “Save As.” We published a feature piece on OS X Lion last year highlighting a surprising change in the operating system – the removal of "Save As" from a number of first-party applications, including Preview, and TextEdit. As it was expected, Apple fans quickly took to the comments to explain how this omission thwarted their workflow. Everyone had an example of how they used Preview to quickly save a photo with a different name, or how they employed TextEdit to quickly edit documents, then save to a specific location,...

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NVIDIA Dares Intel to Start Making Chips for ARM Designers

NVIDIA’s sparring with Intel has been well publicized in the last few years. NVIDIA claims their GPUs do a much better job than Intel’s FPUs and Intel is fighting back with better iGPUs and software integration.  Ever since Intel decided not to allow NVIDIA to make chipsets for their new-generation CPUs some years ago and then basically shut NVIDIA’s  solutions out of their market as Intel’s own CPUs gained GPU capabilities, the two companies have been involved in a serious boxing match. In the dawn of the first battle, NVIDIA even got a 3 billion dollar payment from Intel and then both signed an agreement. So there is serious friction between the companies.  Now, NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsun Huang has been quoted by HotHardware...

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Colorful GTX 680 iGame Kudan Graphics Card Pictured

Even though it has already been several days since the official launch of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680, there seems to be no stopping the downpour of custom models.  Then again, this is not so much a report concerning a new video board, but a rumor about a model that has yet to come forth.  Much like Galaxy, Colorful is developing a special iteration of the Kepler-based graphics card.  It will be called GTX 680 iGame Kudan and will use the best air cooler that the company has in its collection.  Called iGame Kudan (hence the card name), the cooling solution is actually modular, meaning that owners can modify it themselves, to some extent.  The heatsinks can be handled independently (the VRM and memory can be covered...

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IBM Power 7+ Pictured

IBM is still the packaging king as they’ve been for the last decade or so. They were first to the market with a really big MCM module of “bubble memory” back in the ’70, a huge MCM server design using their Power5 architecture in 2003, and now they are back with a new packaging technology. On Friday, Charlie Demerjian’s camera from SemiAccurate caught eye of IBM’s new baby, fully exposed.  The chips pictured here are part of the new Power7+ family and they are, from left to right: four P7+ CPU dies mounted on an interposer with no lid; four P7+ CPU dies with organic packaging, also without lid; and, on the right, one unnamed stacked die with and without the heat spreader.  Nobody else can show such advanced technology on such a...

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