Transformers: Fall of Cybertron Gets New Dev Diary Video, Focuses on Freedom

A brand new video for the upcoming Transformers: Fall of Cybertron game has appeared, in which developers from High Moon Studios talk about the player’s freedom in terms of missions and gameplay. Transformers games don’t exactly represent the pinnacle of interactive entertainment, especially the tie-ins to the Hollywood movies, but the more recent Transformers: War for Cybertron title has certainly improved lots of things, delivering an impressive experience. With Fall of Cybertron, developer High Moon Studios wants to really showcase just how great a Transformers game can actually be. After seeing the first gameplay video last week, the studio, together with publisher Activision, has released a developer diary, in which members of its team talk about the features of the upcoming game. "When...

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BlackBerry App World Achieves 70,000 Apps Milestone, Still Unimpressive

Last month Research In Motion reported BlackBerry App World, its own application store, had more than 60,000 apps and over 2 billion app downloads.  In addition, the Canadian company confirmed its applications store had more than 174 million apps downloaded each month, with an average of 6 million apps downloaded per day. One month after RIM’s statement, BlackBerry App World’s portfolio increased to more than 70,000 apps, but kept the same numbers: 2 billion app downloads to date, 177 million apps downloaded monthly, with the same average of 6 million apps downloaded per day. Although the achievement is nowhere near as impressive as Apple’s App Store’s, that has nearly 600,000 apps, or Google Play store’s, with over 450,000 apps, it’s...

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Sony Launches NEX-FS700U 4K-Capable Cinema Camera

Sony has completed the development of the NEX-FS700U, known in Europe as the NEX-FS700E, a large-sensor camcorder with Super Slow Motion, among other things. The NEX-FS700U/E is probably one of the most advanced camcorders of today, and we wouldn't be surprised if we saw it used for shooting Hollywood films. Granted, in order for it to work well, it will need a compatible Sony recorder and probably a projector too, but we digress. The newcomer will be capable of shooting video in a resolution of 4K bitstream (total 11.6 million pixels). We say “will be” because the camcorder won't be able to do it right off the bat. Owners will have to wait for firmware upgrade. That said, the product relies on a 4K "Exmor" Super 35 CMOS sensor and built-in...

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FCC Tests Lenovo IdeaPad U310 and U410 Ultrabooks

Lenovo isn't ready to launch its two newest Ultrabooks yet, as that will only happen this May (2012).  Still, the hardware is mostly ready, far enough along, in fact, that it was up for analysis by the Federal Communications Commission.  All the tests and results are tallied here, in the FCC's regular, virtually bureaucratic manner.  The IdeaPad U310 and U410 Ultrabooks measure 13 and 14 inches in diagonal, respectively, and will have prices of $700 / 525.60 Euro.  Granted, the European price will probably be closer to 600 Euro or more, but that is still a long way from the $959 / 725 Euro that the IdeaPad U300e require.  Lenovo's machines will no doubt use next-generation Intel CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, all the expected...

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Nokia 808 PureView Gets Previewed in China, Sample Pictures Show Impressive Details

Unveiled back in February at the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, Nokia 808 PureView has just been previewed in China. The folks over at IT168 got their hands on Nokia’s new camera-phone flagship and took some sample pictures that show an impressive level of detail. However, this shouldn’t be a surprise as the phone boasts a 41-megapixel rear camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia’s new PureView technology. Nokia’s innovative technology allows the 41-megapixels camera to take standard size pictures (5-megapixels or 8-megapixels), but with impressive details.  The camera can use oversampling to combine up to 7 pixels into one and eliminates the visual noise that is usually found on other mobile phone cameras. In addition, Nokia claims that users will be able to zoom up to 3X...

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Nokia Pushes Lumia 710 Software Update, Adds Better Audio Quality and More

Nokia Lumia 710 has just received a new minor software update, which is currently being rolled out internationally.  It will update Nokia Lumia 710 firmware to version 1600.3013.8107.11502. According to Nokia, this update is only available via Zune PC software. Among the most important changes added by this update it is worth mentioning the better audio quality when using the built-in loudspeaker. In addition, Nokia enhanced calling to service numbers containing the * and # characters, along with the usability with text messages (international characters, longer messages). Initially launched in India and Singapore, the update is now pushed in other countries as well, including France, Malaysia and the UK. Keep in mind that this also...

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LTE iPad 3 Houses 19 Additional Chips for Cellular Networking

Silicon expert Chipworks has torn down the new Apple iPad with the main purpose of analyzing each and every piece of semiconducting material in it. They’ve confirmed that the 4G / LTE version has an additional logic board that houses a lot of extra chips. The tech-savvy team at iFixit usually works hand in hand with the people at Chipworks to provide insight regarding the chips used inside Apple’s devices. iFixit teardowns can be read by pretty much everyone. They’re not only written in a humorous manner, but they also explain technicalities with regular terms that everyone can relate to. The same thing cannot be said about Chipworks’ teardowns, which focus more on the chips themselves and, in particular, what’s inside their silicon housings. “The...

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Samsung GALAXY Pocket Approved by FCC, Headed to AT&T

Samsung announced the Galaxy Pocket budget-friendly smartphone two months ago, but the handset has yet to make its entrance on the market. Although the handset maker did not reveal that the smartphone might be slated for a North American release, the folks at Engadget have recently spotted the Galaxy Pocket at FCC (Federal Communications Commission). It appears that the phone has just been approved with GSM 850 / 1900 bands, as well as UMTS Band V, which might be an indication that Galaxy Pocket is en-route to AT&T. Samsung Galaxy Pocket is powered by Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform and packs a 832 MHz single core processor, 3GB of internal memory and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB). The phone comes with a decent...

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Script: ArtSlide

ArtSlide is a simple content slider plugin for jQuery. It does exactly what it says, graciously sliding images/content panels with a side slide motion. If you’re looking for an image slider, you might get inundated these days with lots of options and different solutions. ArtSlide is just one of them, but instead of using a complicated and pretty big animation engine, it just simply slides content panels from left to right. It's surely not super attractive like some solutions such as Nivo Slider, but if you’re ever looking for something that puts emphasis on speed and fast load times, ArtSlide is a good plugin to take into account. ArtSlide can rotate images and HTML content the same way, while offering slide pagination controls, along with...

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AMD’s PS4 GPU to Be Powerful Enough to Run 4K Resolution Games

SONY probably hopes to raise interest for 4K high-definition TV sets that will likely sell in the following years. AMD promises the Japan TV maker a powerful GPU that will ensure playability at the likely standard of 30 frames per second. For SONY, making 4K resolution a standard for the PlayStation 4, will be a wonderful money-making idea. They can thus sell very expensive 4K capable TV sets, re-master and resell old popular movies and sell those too, and, of course, re-master older popular games for some extra money. When it comes to games, making them run on the new PS4 console might be a problem as it’s really hard to port customized software made for the Cell processor over to a new x86 architecture.  But SONY might rely on the...

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Report Puts iPhone 5 Release Date on June 15th

A highly speculative Monday feature by Dubai Media Incorporated claims Apple has provided all the clues that point to a June 15th unveiling of the next iPhone. Citing “recent developments” and “a good amount of common sense,” Emirates24|7 says we should have every reason to believe “that it will be a summer release rather than a fall one.” One of these recent developments include Tim Cook’s visit to China, where the Apple CEO met with Chinese government officials and paid a visit to Foxconn, the company’s longtime partner. Cook is also believed to have had talks with the country’s wireless operators to carry the upcoming iPhone. This doesn’t necessarily indicate the potential launch date of the handset. After all, a CEO needs to plan his...

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ZOTAC GTX 680 Extreme Edition Reaches 1.4 GHz

The mystery of the mini USB type-B connector has been solved: it’s likely to be a separate way that ZOTAC uses to have its overclocking software monitor the SMBUS components. This is quite peculiar of ZOTAC as the SMBUS can usually be read by the means of the driver interface, but there’s still the fact that NVIDIA sometimes blocks access to some components they decide are too sensitive to let their partners meddle with. This way ZOTAC’s Firestorm OC software has a more direct way to monitor the video card. ZOTAC is touting the possibility that their Extreme Edition of GeForce GTX 680 will reach even 2 GHz, but that will probably happen only if lots of conditions concur: you get lucky and stumble upon an extremely capable GPU sample, you do have extreme cooling solutions for the card, you...

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AMD Radeon HD 7990 Dual-GPU Has 1 GHz Clock

The report we're going to talk about was published yesterday, April 1, 2012, which means that it might have been an April Fools’ joke, but the folks at the source essentially promise that is not the case.  TechPowerUp published the specifications of the AMD Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU graphics card, or what they claim are the specs.  Their post included a photo of the product and a GPU-Z screenshot even.  We're not going to believe the words until Advanced Micro Devices confirms or denies them, once the official announcement is made.  Fortunately, we won't have to wait overmuch. After all, previous rumors said the release would be this month and, to TechPowerUp's credit, the new report agrees (April 17 is the supposed date).  That...

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Alleged Screenshots of Nokia Carla Emerge

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is moving closer to the release of a new version of the Symbian platform, supposedly set to arrive on devices under the name of Carla.  Following a wide range of rumors on this platform release, alleged screenshots with the platform have made an appearance on the Internet.  Through them, we can make a better idea of what the OS will have to offer to those who own Symbian Belle-based devices from Nokia. Said screenshots emerged over at Nokianesia, which claims that Symbian^3 phones won’t receive the update.  Nokia Carla is meant for handsets such as the Nokia 700, 701 and the 603, as well as the Nokia 808 PureView that was made official in February during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,...

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Gainward’s Phantom GTX 680 Is Official

Video card company Gainward has finally announced its Phantom version of the GeForce GTX 680 on its official website. This is a dual-fan custom-cooled beauty that will make the insides of your PC look good. The card is heavily factory overclocked as its GPU base clock is rated at 1085 MHz, 7.7 percent up from the NVIDIA default reference clock of 1006 MHz. The ‘Boost Clock’ is set up at 1150 MHz, that’s 8.7 percent higher than the standard 1058 MHz ‘Boost.’ The GDDR5 memory is also clocked higher than the 6 GHz reference speed and is rated at 6.3 GHz, being 5 percent faster.  All of this overclocking is fueled with ‘clean’ power coming from the 6-phase PWM. The card has 2 extra phases to help enthusiasts get even better overclocks than...

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Pixel Qi Creating Higher-Resolution, Low-Power Displays

We've barely heard anything about Pixel Qi lately, but that has changed and, hopefully, we'll see the displays more often down the line. Pixel Qi panels are different from common displays through their ability to operate in transflective mode. Essentially, they can absorb ambient light and, thus, don't need a backlight during the day, leading to low power needs. Even more importantly, they are totally clear even under the brightest sunlight, as opposed to most other screens that aren't that good in similar conditions. Alas, despite their benefits, Pixel Qi panels just haven't seen much success. Still, according to this recent blog, the time may come when all will change. So far, about a dozen consumer electronics devices...

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