Tekken Tag Tournament 2 DLC Revealed Through Video

Namco Bandai has published a brand new video of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, showing off the first four characters that would be released as downloadable content after the game is actually launched in September. After many years since the release of the first Tekken Tag Tournament title, Namco Bandai is finally set to reveal a sequel, in the form of the aptly-named Tekken Tag Tournament 2. While the game’s launch happens in September, this hasn’t stopped the Japanese company from posting a video with the first four characters that will be available as downloadable content for the fighting game. As you can see in the footage above, players will be able to download Michelle, Angel, Ancient Ogre, and Kunimitsu. While no other details are available, the video above is quite...

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Nokia Releases Transport 2.0 Beta for Its Lumia Phones

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has made available for download the beta flavor of its Nokia Transport 2.0 application for its devices running under Windows Phone.  With this application, users will be able to find nearby stations, as well as info on departure times and on types of transit lines available near their location. Moreover, the application arrives with better search capabilities, being able to remember last search query, while enabling users to search without leaving the journey view. The performance of the application was also improved, with faster display of upcoming journeys, and with faster journey request. Nokia encourages users to download and install the new Nokia Transport 2.0 beta application on...

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TP-Link launch its AV500 Gigabit Powerline Adapter

Powerline adapters might not be suited for everyone, but there is no question as to whether or not it is very convenient to set up a home network just by plugging a couple of adapters (or more) in wall power sockets.  TP-Link's new powerline network product is called AV500 Gigabit Powerline Adapter and can stream data over up to 300 meters (984 feet). The name isn't really a correct hint as to what the item can do though. Despite being called a “Gigabit” adapter, it is limited to 500 Mbps, hence the AV500 moniker. Keep that in mind before you go and place a pre-order. Speaking of which, the online price is $89.99 on Newegg, Amazon, TigerDirect and Walmart, or 70 Euro according to exchange rates.  "Our flagship...

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Dell Latitude 6430u Business Ultrabook Spotted

Even though they haven't really been selling as well as companies hoped, ultrabooks are the subject of discussion for the media and IT companies alike, so we're not surprised to read about a new one. Dell is the company in whose labs the new device originated, or we should say will have originated once the company actually makes the formal introduction. For now, we can only look at a report from Tweakers. Fortunately, said report is quite informative, if not in a language we are overly familiar with. The Latitude 6430u is not a regular ultrabook in that it isn't meant for ordinary consumers. Instead, it is the sort of thing that businessmen will be more likely to appreciate. One of the features people won't find on...

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Samsung Galaxy S III (SCH-I535) Spotted at Bluetooth SIG, Possibly Coming to Verizon

A certain Samsung Galaxy S III (SCH-I535) has just been approved by Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) organization.  Although the smartphone is said to come with CDMA support, unless we see some bands listed, we can’t be sure that the Galaxy S III will be launched at Verizon Wireless. According to the documents filed at Bluetooth SIG, Samsung SCH-I535 is aimed at the North American market, though Verizon is not the only CDMA carrier in the region. Obviously, the smartphone is integrated with Bluetooth version 4.0 technology, allowing for wireless connection to optional, compatible hands-free accessories such as Bluetooth technology enabled headsets and car kits.  Lately, we’ve seen multiple...

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ASUS and Acer Preparing Upgraded Netbooks

Although most notebook manufacturers are retreating from the dying market, big players like ASUS and Acer are still reportedly working on upgraded models. The processors to be used are upgrades of Intel’s l Atom N2600 and N2800 models. The upgraded models in question are most likely higher clocked Medfield CPUs, or even Clover Trail versions. The netbook domain is losing serious sales with a reduction of over 32% when compared with the sales achieved last year. These are quickly becoming some sort of poor man’s laptops, as the netbook manufacturers that are still producing such devices base their volume sales estimations on the strong demand from the emerging markets. The battery life will probably be very impressive,...

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MSI Wind U270 Netbook Comes with AMD’s Brazos 2.0

MSI, the well-known mainboard manufacturer is also in the business of making mobile PCs, such as the fastest Ivy Bridge notebook called GT70, or today’s Win U270 that has just been listed on the company’s official website. The netbook is powered by AMD’s E2-1800 processor. The operating system of choice is Microsoft’s Windows 7 Home Premium that comes preinstalled on a 320 GB HDD. Wind U270 comes equipped with 2 GB of DDR3 memory, but it can be upgraded to a total of 8 GB DDR3 system memory using the single SO-DIMM slot available. The iGPU is AMD’s Radeon HD7340 Discrete-Class graphics and offers much more performance than anything Intel has accompanying the Atom. The 11.6” screen offers a mediocre 1366 x 768 resolution...

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Gigantic Shipment Rise for AMD Desktop APUs in Q1

Advanced Micro Devices managed to get the long end of the stick in graphics sales during the first quarter of the year (2012). Sure, laptop chip shipments dipped about 2%, but desktop APUs (accelerated processing units) managed an 84% jump. Jon Peddie Research says so anyway. Coupled with boosts of 4% to desktop GPUs and an 8% climb in notebook graphics, this all enabled a 0.3% improvement to the overall graphics market share, leading to a nice 25%. Keep in mind that this was before Trinity even came around, so we can only guess how things will go from here. We won't speculate much, but we will point out that the Sunnyvale, California-based company has recently brought out the R-Series embedded chips, so the customer...

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Samsung Galaxy S III Goes for Sale Early in Dubai

Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone is set to make an official appearance on shelves in late May, yet it appears that some stores around the world are selling it early.  In Dubai, the handset is already listed as available for acquisition, and it’s not just for pre-orders, a Reddit user has found out. The handset is listed with a price tag of around $667 (AED2,450), and units were said to already be in stock, waiting for eager users to grab them.  No specific info on why the handset went available in Dubai beforehand has been provided for the time being, but those who already managed to purchase it are certainly not complaining. Samsung has set the release date for Galaxy S III for May 29th in some markets,...

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HTC EVO 4G LTE Confirmed to Start Shipping on May 24

It looks like HTC EVO 4G LTE’s saga is almost over. Although the smartphone was slated for a May 18 release at Sprint, the EVO 4G LTE was blocked at US Customs until recently, due to an ITC exclusion order. Along with the EVO 4G LTE, HTC One X shipments have been blocked at US Customs as well, but it looks like the problem has been solved and the first stocks might arrive at major US carriers later this week. True to its promise, Sprint has issued an official statement letting people who pre-ordered the HTC EVO 4G LTE know that they might receive their devices by the end of the week: “Customers who pre-ordered HTC EVO 4G LTE…Your wait is almost over! Sprint expects to begin shipping HTC EVO 4G LTE for arrival on or around...

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Workaround Enables S-Voice App on Non-Galaxy S III Phones (Again)

The first official Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for Galaxy S III leaked over the weekend, along with all those goodies that Samsung included, such as S-Voice, S-Beam, Direct Call, Smart Stay and more. The folks over at XDA Developers have been able to extract the S-Voice personal assistant from the original ROM and made it available for everyone to download. Unfortunately, it took only a few days for Samsung and Vlingo to block access to all non-Galaxy S III devices that were running the application. It appears that the S-Voice sends requests to Vlingo’s servers every time its voice capabilities are used. Samsung and Vlingo made it so these requests would not be processed anymore unless the device sending them...

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Under Google, Motorola Will Focus on a Few Great Devices

The Motorola acquisition is officially done. It's been many months in the making, but as one of the largest such deals and certainly Google's biggest acquisition, it underwent quite a lot of scrutiny.  China was the last to give the go-ahead, but once it got that approval, Google was quick to make the official announcement. It has now completed acquiring the phone maker so the interesting part starts. Nothing spectacular is going to happen in the short term, but it will be really interesting to see how Google and Motorola work together and how Google will fare in the hardware space. This marriage is even more important as Apple and Google compete on more and more planes and as Android is getting stiff competition from...

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Windows 8’s Desktop Arrives with No Aero Glass

One of the major interface changes that Microsoft will include in Windows 8 compared to the previous versions of its desktop platform is the lack of Aero Glass.  The company introduced this UI in Windows Vista and refined it in Windows 7 and in the first versions of Windows 8, but it will no longer pack it inside the next Windows 8 releases, it seems. Jensen Harris, director of program management for Microsoft’s User Experience team, explains in a blog post that the idea is to bring the desktop closer to the Metro aesthetic, and that they flattened surfaces, removed reflections, and scaled back distracting gradients. However, he also notes that Windows 8 would continue to use black text on light-colored chrome, as...

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VIA's $49 Tiny Android PC

Miniature PC systems are bound to become better-known after the Raspberry Pi phenomenon, so we think VIA might finally get some of the recognition it deserves.  The company has launched the APC 8750, where APC stands for Android PC (personal computer). Sure, the name isn't really accurate, since there is no case. This is more of a half-size mini-ITX motherboard than anything else really. VIA calls the new motherboard size neo-ITX  (170 x 85mm / 6.69 x 3.34 inchs). At any rate, one can simply buy a mini PC chassis separately. Sure, it will add to the cost, but at $49 (38.37 Euro) the APC 8750 is more than cheap enough for an extra buck to be worth it. Of course, you'll also have to buy an USB stick...

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Alienware Laptops Get Killer Wireless-N 1202 Wi-Fi Cards

Add-on wireless network cards aren't really all that popular, even though they are quite a bit better than the integrated solutions usually found in motherboards and laptops.  Most people won't really be able to tell the difference all that easily between the two, mostly because the data capacity that needs to flow through a connection during normal web browsing isn't really spectacular. When playing high-end games, though, lag can definitely cramp peoples' style, even cripple their ability to play properly. Killer Technology kept this in mind when it released the Killer Wireless-N 1202 laptop card.  Unfortunately, it failed to get a laptop partner, which led to the product falling in limbo and being forgotten. Until...

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Nokia 808 PureView “Making Of” Video

With only a few days until the Nokia 808 PureView release, the Finnish company unveiled a video showing how the phone came to be one of the best camera phones on the market. The entire 8+ minute video has been shot with the Nokia 808 PureView and describes how the creators of the camera, Eero Salmelin and Juha Alakarhu, came up with the idea of developing a camera-phone that would not sacrifice quality while zooming. It took Nokia about 5 years to design the smartphone, which is expected to arrive in multiple markets around the globe by the end of the month. Given the fact that the smartphone boasts the 41-megapixel camera, it could not be embedded into a Windows Phone device, which is why Nokia chose Symbian for PureView 808. Check out the video above for more in-depth...

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ASUS P8C WS Professional Motherboard Launched

Intel's Xeon E3 series central processing units need motherboards just like all other CPUs out there, so ASUS decided it was time for its labs to spawn another platform.  The motherboard we are looking at here is called P8C WS, uses the LGA 1155 socket and the brand-new chipset C216. The WS in the name stands for “workstation,” making it clear that this item isn't something that consumers should be interested in. Of course, in addition to Xeon E3 CPUs, 32nm and 22nm Core i3 processors are compatible with the mainboard, from both the second and third generations. There are two PCI Express Gen 3.0 x16 slots (dual x8 mode), for graphics cards, alongside two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, a PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot and...

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Galaxy S III Pre-Orders in the UK Are Above Expectations

On May 29th, Samsung and its partners will finally make the new Galaxy S III smartphone available for purchase on the market in the UK, after registering increased interest in the device during the pre-order period.  The handset will land in the country both via third-party retailers and on the networks of various wireless carriers, while also being sold via Samsung’s own retail locations. Leading vendor The Carphone Warehouse will be among those to launch the device on day one, and it is currently reporting increased interest in the device. The company says that thousands of users have reserved the new mobile phone the first day it was put up for pre-order, and that the overall number has exceeded expectations.  “The...

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AMD to Launch Tamesh CPUs for Windows 8 TabletPCs in Early 2013

Microsoft’s Windows 8 launches in October and, like we mentioned before, AMD will be ready with Hondo CPUs. Considering that Hondo CPUs are still made in 40 nm manufacturing technology at TSMC, the company is reportedly preparing a 32 nm version to better counter Intel’s Clover Trail on power consumption. As advanced as AMD’s iGPU inside Brazos 2.0 is, it is still manufactured in 2010 TSMC 40 nm technology. From the power consumption point of view, this makes it look like a dinosaur next to Intel’s smaller and more mature 32 nm manufacturing technology. As most of you know, Intel’s top Atom offerings manifest much slower performance when compared with AMD’s Bobcat cores, and they are not manufactured in Intel’s latest and most...

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Intel Intros Gigabit Ethernet Modem

Intel is famous for its CPUs, but it dabbles in other technologies, like network modems, and it is precisely one such product that we are writing about now. During the Cable Show, the Santa Clara, California-based IT giant revealed a DOCSIS 3.0 gateway, or cable modem as the term goes. It is codenamed Puma 6, like all DOCSIS 3.0 products, and will let Internet cable providers allow their customers faster web data transfers. By that we mean that downloads will attain 1 Gbps rates and upstream bandwidth of up to 240 Mbps, depending on how channel bonding is configured by the cable service company. Eight channels are needed for the maximum upload speed and 24 for maximum download rates. Unfortunately, consumers we'll...

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