At long last, Apple released Intel’s highly anticipated
Posts Tagged ‘article’
Hands on: new Android Market app sells books and movie rentals
August 5th, 2011
admin Google has started rolling out a major update of the Android Market application for smartphones. It offers a more sophisticated layout, an improved visual style, and some significant new features—including support for renting movies and buying books. Virtually all of these features are already present in the Honeycomb version of the Android Market, but were not previously available in the smartphone version. The update brings feature parity and a unified look and feel between the phone and tablet variants of the market. Read the comments on this post
AT&T to begin throttling heaviest data users on October 1 (Updated)
August 5th, 2011
admin Move over, Verizon: AT&T may begin throttling the data speeds of its heaviest wireless users as soon as October of this year. The move remains unconfirmed as of yet, but sources speaking to 9to5Mac claim that AT&T will begin implementing a network congestion plan similar to other carriers in order to battle the 80x increase in data traffic it has seen since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. According to the site’s sources, AT&T’s throttling plan will mirror that of Verizon’s, which was implemented in February just before the introduction of the Verizon iPhone. Under that system, Verizon reduces the data throughput speeds for the five percent of customers who “use an extraordinary amount of data.” The throttling typically lasts through the remainder of the current billing cycle and returns to normal at the beginning of the next one, though under some circumstances, it’s possible for the reduced speeds to spill over into the next billing cycle as well. Read the comments on this post
Post-PC TV: how and where we watch Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube
August 5th, 2011
admin Not so long ago, it was pretty hard to watch online streaming video on anything but a personal computer. It was a big deal that Apple’s iPhone came packed with an integrated app for YouTube. Last year, the walls came down, as video services and device makers rolled out new native applications for one machine after another, from phones and tablets to smart TVs and set-top boxes. I love this kind of gadget news. I lived off it writing for Gadget Lab last fall. But shiny apps and feature wars are one thing—whether viewers actually use these services and how they interact with them is very different. Bit by bit, the data is starting to come in. Read the comments on this post
Apple, Samsung top smartphone sales as feature phones decline
August 5th, 2011
admin The touchscreen smartphone revolution continues to shake up the mobile phone industry, with Apple displacing Nokia as the top smartphone vendor in the world. In fact, Apple has also displaced longtime mobile industry players like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to become the number four mobile phone vendor globally. But Apple’s rival Samsung, holding the number two spot in both mobile and smartphone market share, is poised to take both crowns if its massive sales growth can be maintained. The overall mobile phone market grew just over 11 percent year over year for the second quarter of 2011, for a total of 365 million units, according to market research firm IDC. Growth has been slower than expected, perhaps due to a 4 percent drop in feature phone shipments. That’s the first decline in feature phone sales since the third quarter of 2009. Read the comments on this post
How one undergrad built the largest solar farm in Michigan
August 5th, 2011
admin Building a solar farm isn’t hard if you have the money; you just pay contractors to show up, install electrical service, build the solar panel support infrastructure, and truck in the panels. But if you want to do it cheap, you could buy some land from a friend and set up your own fabrication shop, spending an entire summer welding together 50,000 pounds of structural steel and pouring concrete around 20,000 pounds of rebar to save serious cash on the infrastructure. Connor Field, a Michigan resident who built the largest solar farm in the state this way in late 2009, said drily, “I would not do that again.” “Do you know how to weld?” I asked him when we met recently in Ann Arbor to discuss the project. “I do now.” Read the comments on this post
Physical keyboard, but at a price: Motorola Droid 3 review
August 5th, 2011
admin The Motorola Droid line of phones has arguably been one of the most successful to carry Google’s Android OS. But the standard Droids are members of an increasingly rare breed—phones that give users the option of a physical keyboard. While the Droid 3 packs some decent internal hardware, most of the commendations belong to its OS, Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Since Gingerbread is available on many other phones that offer a better feature package, the primary reason you’d opt for the Droid 3 is that keyboard. Unfortunately, we found it a bit of a hassle to use, and the phone’s lack of 4G and other small problems don’t help. The Droid 3′s body is a minor revision of the Droid 2, and the basic form factor—slide the screen up to get at the physical keyboard—is the same. A sleep switch is centered at the top of the phone, as is a headphone jack. A volume rocker is on the right hand side, micro-USB and mini-HDMI ports on the left, and an 8MP camera with flash on the back is capable of taking 1080p video (we found the detail in shots to be good, but the color was lacking a bit). A front-facing VGA camera sits next to a blinking indicator light on the front. Read the comments on this post



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