The Acer Predator 8 gaming tablet uses Intel’s new Atom x7 and rocks four speakers
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Gaming tablets are somewhat of a rarity in the Android world – NVIDIA’s SHIELD Tablet does seem quite lonely sometimes – but it seems there is another challenger. Announced today at Computex 2015, the Acer Predator 8 is a mean, lean, gaming machine and to help it in its plight for ultimate gaming glory, it rocks the new Intel Atom x7 processor and has four front-facing speakers. Yes, four.
In case you were wondering, the Atom x7 is the same processor that comes in some of the new Windows Surface 3 tablets, which means this tablet has decent gaming chops, for an Android device at least. Furthermore, it just looks like a badass tablet with its sharp edges and angry colours, which again, is another rarity in the Android world. Despite all this, the Predator 8 is still going to be a bit of a niche product, but it’s good to see more of these devices emerging to give Android gamers an option should they want one. Unfortunately we don’t have much in the way of details just yet, but hopefully we will in the near future.
What do you think of the Acer Predator 8 gaming tablet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
The post The Acer Predator 8 gaming tablet uses Intel’s new Atom x7 and rocks four speakers appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
Thync’s mood-changing wearable arrives for $299
How eager are you to calm down (or psych yourself up) at a moment’s notice? If the answer is “enough to buy a fairly expensive gadget,” your solution is now within reach. Thync has launched its namesake mood-changing wearable at the hefty price of $299. That’s a lot to pay simply to feel different, but the company is betting that its funky, triangular neurosignalling device is just the ticket if you tend to be stressed or lethargic at inopportune moments. Use the phone-controlled device and it should either relax or revitalize you for up to an hour, with “carry-over impacts” lasting for hours longer. The hardware worked well enough in our early hands-on, so it might be worth giving Thync a shot if you’re often out-of-sorts — it may well beat drinking coffee or beer to achieve the same effects.
Filed under: Wearables
Source: Thync
Vodafone expands 4G roaming to the Carribean and beyond
With its Feel at Home free roaming perk, Three is undoubtedly the most jetsetter-friendly carrier in the UK, but Vodafone’s not too far behind. It’s WorldTraveller add-on lets you use your usual call, text and 4G data allowances abroad for a £5 daily fee, and from June 15th, it’ll cover an extra 22 foreign destinations. That’s a slightly misleading figure, however, since many of the new destinations are the small island nations peppered in and around the Caribbean, with Bermuda, El Salvador, Guyana, Panama and Suriname making up the numbers. Still, it means you won’t have to pay through the nose to post hotdog leg snaps from a Caribbean beach this summer holiday.
The last Pirate Bay co-founder has served his jail time
For years, authorities had played a game of cat and mouse with the co-founders of Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. The long game eventually paid off, with Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Warg and Fredrik Neij all being sent to prison within a six month period. Sunde and Warg have since walked free, leaving Neij as the final site founder still serving a custodial sentence. At least until now. TorrentFreak reports that the 37-year-old has been released after serving two-thirds of what should have been a ten-month stretch.
Since their arrests, The Pirate Bay’s founders have moved to distance themselves from the site. One month after his release, Peter Sunde admitted he would prefer that The Pirate Bay stay closed following a major raid. He noted that it had moved away from what it was supposed to represent and was plastered with ads that when he felt couldn’t get “more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse.” With Neij serving his time in a Swedish prison, it’s likely that he will now return home to Laos to rejoin his wife and children.
[Image credit: Daniel Mott, Flickr]
Source: TorrentFreak
Google boosts employee diversity but is still mostly white guys
As of the start of this year, 53,600 people work for Google full-time. Too many of those workers, according to the company’s detractors and its own assessment a year ago, are male, and white or Asian. In order to counter this gap, Google has looked for ways to boost female and minority hiring. Per its just updated diversity report, 21 percent of the company’s technical hires last year were female. However that translates into just a 1 percent increase in the total number of women hired to technical positions. Women in general constitute just 30 percent of Google’s employees. Additionally, the onboarding rates for both Black and Hispanic hires increased faster than the company’s overall growth for the year but still only constitute 2 and 3 percent of the company’s entire workforce, respectively.
Those numbers don’t sound like much progress because, well, they aren’t. Google called the results “early” and points to the efforts it’s undertaking, like spending millions to increase the number of technologists, change the corporate culture and recruit from a more diverse pool of sources. The company says it will keep working to “build a workforce more reflective of the diversity of people we serve”, even if the results haven’t shown up on the stat sheets just yet.
[Image Credit: Getty Images]
Source: Google Diversity Report
Corning unveils its improved Lotus XT Glass
Corning has announced its latest glass substrate for high performance LCD and OLED displays named Lotus XT Glass. Lotus XT Glass is the next generation of Corning’s Lotus Glass, which was unveiled back in 2011.
The company boasts increased brightness, higher resolution and lower power consumption for devices making use of its new Lotus XT Glass. This has been accomplished by Corning’s focus on to maintaining its glass’ total pitch variation performance in a wide range of manufacturing temperatures. The glass is said to maintain its performance with both low-temperature and high-temperature LTPS and oxide TFT processes.
Pitch Variation is essentially the distance that display components, such as color filters, move during heating. These have to be lined up with the backplane transistors and glass that varies too much has to be discarded. Corning says that variation is improved by up to 60 percent over its competition. Production yields should be improved thanks to these changes, which should help device manufacturers reduce their costs. You can see more about the improvements in the video below.
While Corning’s well-known Gorilla Glass is used to protect a wide range of smartphone displays from scratches and shattering, Lotus Glass is used within the display themselves, nestled closely to the backplane transistors and light emitting components. Improved yields will reduce the costs currently associated with higher resolution, high quality displays.
Lotus XT Glass is now commercially available for manufacturers to make use of, although we’ll have to wait and see which device manufacturers are the first to make use of Corning’s new glass.
Second-generation composition features host of new capabilities
CORNING, N.Y., May 16, 2013 – Corning Incorporated (NYSE: GLW) today announced the commercial launch of Corning Lotus(TM) XT Glass, a second-generation glass substrate specially formulated for high-performance displays. The company will feature its latest specialty glass innovation – alongside its other advanced glass technologies – in its booth (#801) at the Society for Information Display’s (SID) Display Week in Vancouver, British Columbia, May 21 – 23.
Lotus XT Glass features best-in-class total pitch variation, which is integral to efficient panel manufacturing. Essentially, total pitch – usually measured in microns or parts per million (ppm) – is the distance features move during panel processing.
“If you can predict the amount the glass shifts, then you can account for this movement. Deviation – or variation – from this predictable movement can ultimately result in yield loss,” said John P. Bayne, vice president and general manager, Corning High Performance Displays. “Lotus XT Glass is designed to have improved thermal and dimensional stability over higher temperatures, generating higher yields for our customers.”
The Corning Lotus Glass platform enables organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays and liquid crystal displays (LCD) that use either low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) or oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) backplanes. The result is an energy-efficient, immersive display device that features high resolution, fast response times, and bright picture quality.
In addition to Lotus XT Glass, the Corning booth will feature each of its advanced glass technologies, including: Corning EAGLE XG® Slim for a-Si displays; Corning® Willow(TM) Glass, the company’s ultra-slim, flexible glass; and Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3 with Native Damage Resistance(TM). Corning experts will provide daily demonstrations of Gorilla Glass 3, the industry-leading, damage-resistant cover glass. Attendees should consult booth staff for exact times.
Display Week attendees will also have the opportunity to hear several of Corning’s technology experts deliver presentations at the conference.
“Display Week is a time to take stock of the industry and its future,” Bayne noted. “The industry is changing, and Corning believes each of its innovative glasses helps solve tough technological challenges – advancing displays even further.”
For additional information about Corning’s presence at SID Display Week 2013, please visit http://www.corning.com/SID2013.
LG showing off its latest display technology at SID 2015
The technology conference season is in full swing, and today we’re bringing you news from SID 2015.
The Society for Information Display (SID) conference in San Jose is the foremost event of the display industry, an opportunity for the biggest players to show their wares to prospective clients and partners. Among them, LG Display always has a big presence, and this year is no exception.
The display manufacturing arm of LG is showing off LCD and OLED panels for devices ranging from smartwatches to 4K TV sets, across a keynote address and 20 presentations.
This year, LG Display’s main attractions are large OLED panels for TVs, including this crazy bendable panel the thickness of a credit card that you can literally stick to a wall mount with magnets.
Another highlight is a flexible OLED panel that can bend at a radius of three centimeters without suffering any damage. This industry-first 18-inch flexible panel is another stepping-stone towards devices that bend, fold, and roll. Of course, manufacturers will need to adapt other components as well, but research on flexible batteries, circuit boards, and other components is well underway.
Other OLED panels that LG will show at SID include a 1.3-inch circular panel for smartwatches (probably the same display used on the G Watch R and Watch Urbane), a 5.5-inch curved panel (similar to G Flex 2), a 6-inch active bending panel (for flexible products?), and a 12.3-inch automotive display. LG will also be promoting its Advanced In-Touch and AH-IPS Plus technologies. The former offers a 20 to 30 percent improvement in transmittance, allowing for lower power consumption at the same resolution.
Stay tuned for more info on new display technologies from the SID 2015 conference, starting today.
Chrome OS update brings credit card autofill, physical keyboard autocorrection, and more
Chromebooks have come a long way in just a few years. What was once an online-only affair has expanded into a much more capable platform with a growing number of offline-capable apps, a handful of Android apps, and increasingly complex online apps as well.
Chrome OS continues to evolve all the time, and in the latest update hitting the stable channel (43.0.2357.81), is bringing a number of unspecified bug fixes, performance improvements, and a few new features to the table that will make the Chromebook experience even better.
Probably one of the biggest changes here is autofill settings for credit cards from Google Wallet, which should make filling out payment information online much easier. Next on the list are some keyboard changes. First, the physical keyboard will now offer auto correction, handy for those who do a lot of typing and are looking to sort out minor typos on the fly. Second, the virtual keyboard UI on Chrome OS is getting a Material Design upgrade.
The last noteworthy change in the update will affect the least amount of users, as it is only for the 2nd-gen Chromebook Pixel. Pixel owners will now be able to say “Ok Google” anywhere in the OS, making voice search much more useful on Chrome OS.
The new Chrome OS update should be rolling out to many users right away, though it could take a few days to reach everyone.
LG G4 Dual-SIM variant launched in India, priced at INR 51,500 (~ $808)
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A month after officially unveiling its flagship smartphone offering for 2015 – the LG G4 – the company has officially launched it in India. The LG G4 Dual-SIM is priced in India at INR 51,500 (~ $808), and has already been listed for pre-order in the country. The device is already up for pre-order, and the company is bundling what it calls Smart Benefits that comprises of a metallic finish back cover worth $31, one-time screen replacement worth $102, and an extra battery with a charging cradle worth $55. The ones who pre-book the device will get a chance to meet celebrity actor Amitabh Bachchan and receive the phone from him.
As opposed to the international variant, LG has launched a dual-SIM variant of the G4 (D818N) in India due to high demand of dual-SIM smartphones in the country, becoming the only high-end smartphone in the country to offer the feature. The LG G4 Dual-SIM features a 5.5-inch QHD Quantum IPS LCD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection, Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with LG UX 4.0, Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor with Adreno 418 GPU, 3GB RAM, 32GB ROM, microSD card slot (that supports up to 2TB microSD cards), and a 3,000 mAh battery.
On the imaging front, the South Korean company is offering a 16-megapixel primary camera with a 1/2.6-inch sensor, phase-detection autofocus bundled with Laser Autofocus, three-axis OIS, and that can record videos in 4K resolution. There’s an 8-megapixel front-facing camera that can record 1080p videos. In terms of connectivity features, the device features two SIM card slots, 4G LTE connectivity, dual-band Wi-Fi ac/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.1 LE (APT-x), A-GPS with GLONASS, NFC, and a microUSB 2.0 port that can double up as HDMI SlimPort (4K).
The LG G4 competes with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S6, the HTC One M9+, the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, and the Sony Xperia Z3 in the country. It is priced quite competitively, and if LG drops the price like it did with the LG G3 last year, it would be a great sell for consumers.
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Intel beefs up fifth-gen Core chips with IRIS graphics
Intel has revealed a crop of new fifth-gen Core chips for mobile and desktop that should tide over power-users and gamers until next-gen “Skylake” CPUs arrive later this year. There are five new models for desktop and five for mobile, all packing the latest Iris Pro 6200 graphics. The most interesting model for desktop users is the Core i7-5775-C, a CPU that will replace the current i7-4790S for around $365. Thanks to the Iris chip, Intel says that model will double its predecessor’s graphics performance and boost media chores by 35 percent. The top new laptop model is the $623 Core i7-5950HQ chip, which doubles the overall performance of older i7-5600U models.
Obviously, a mobile CPU that pricy is destined for only the best gaming and graphics-targeted laptops. But if you end up with any of the new Core i7 or i5 models in a new Ultrabook, you’re going to get a big boost in graphics performance without the added cost of discreet AMD or NVIDIA chips. Also, Intel says that the arrival of Iris Pro-level graphics to LGA desktop chips for the first time means faster media encoding, better 4K support and smoother gaming on mini desktop models, all-in-ones and other small form factor PCs. You’ll see new systems packing the chips within 30-60 days.
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Intel
Source: Intel
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