Samsung Galaxy S III: The complete FAQ

J. TECH - May - 4th

After months of hype and rumors, Samsung's Galaxy S III smartphone is finally in front of us.
By JR Raphael May 3, 2012

Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S III at a media event in London Thursday afternoon. The phone is set to launch on May 29th in Europe and throughout the U.S. and other countries later this summer.

So what's the new Galaxy all about, and when can you get your hands on it? Here are answers to all of your burning questions. What does Samsung's Galaxy S III look like? A fine first question, indeed. According to Samsung, the Galaxy S III is "inspired by water, wind, leaves, and pebbles." It's also "designed for humans" to "mimic the warmth and beauty of nature." Er…right. Marketing mumbo-jumbo aside, the Galaxy S III is a 5.4 x 2.8 inch phone with a hefty 4.8-inch display. It may be large, but it's thin, measuring in at just 0.34 inches in depth; it also has a thin bezel that helps keep the device from feeling too bulky. It's light, too, weighing 4.7 ounces. The HTC One X, for comparison, weighs 4.6 ounces, while the U.S. version of the Galaxy Nexus and the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx both weigh 5.1 ounces. The Galaxy S III features a contoured design that's reminiscent of the Galaxy Nexus. Like the Nexus, it also has plastic casing — no HTC One-esque metal material here — but this device features a new finish, available in either "Pebble Blue" or "Marble White" design.

Read more here –>blogs.computerworld.com

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AMD teams with GameFly for major gamer push

J. TECH - May - 2nd

By Chris Burns, May 1st 2012

It appears that AMD is bringing the heat back to the world of gaming, or at least some pointed focus, with a deal they’ve struck with GameFly. This online video game rental and PC download service has a membership program which will be given for free (for 30-days) to purchasers of any of several new AMD processor packs.

This membership also includes a 20 percent discount on brand new PC game purchases via GameFly’s own PC store.It is with great pleasure the AMD crew offers this fabulous deal up with any of the following: AMD A-Series APUs, AMD Athlon II CPUs, AMD Phenom II CPUs, or AMD FX Series CPUs – select models of each, of course. GameFly is certainly up for a new partnership here and there, and with AMD’s support in the form of hardcore gaming enthusiasts being ushered into their ranks, they can expect some hot growth in the coming season. AMD is also pointing toward their AMD Gaming Evolved program here whose mantra is none other than “Gamers Come First!” What AMD and GameFly have to prove now is that not only are they both dedicated to bringing sweet games and sweet gaming to the world for PC users.

Read more here –>slashgear.com

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Apple Founder Inventor Steve Wozniak: Why I Love My Windows Phone 7.5 Mango

J. TECH - Apr - 30th

By Gina Smith 4/30/2012

Our +Dan Patterson, +Todd Moore and +Gina Smith caught up with Gina’s coauthor and friend Steve Wozniak, who invented Apple technology and co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs. It’s noisy in there — but this podcast is a fun conversation with Wozniak over why he thinks the Windows Phone 7 UI is just the bee’s knees.

He shows us that he carried two Apple iPhones (both 4S), a Motorola DROID RAZR and, to our surprise at the time, a Nokia Lumia. It was a Lumia smartphone running Microsoft Windows 7.5 Mango. My co-host +Dan Patterson asks Steve Wozniak why his favorite phone — of a dozen models with Android or iOS — is the one with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. Steve Wozniak chose the Windows 7.5 Mango phone. He loves the interface. Even though that smartphone’s hardware specs are impressive — and its camera is hobbled — the phone runs best, fastest and and most reliably, he told us today. Listen to Dan Patterson and Gina Smith interview Wozniak about what he loves about the Windows 7.5 Phone — the tiles in the interface. This podcast is at our lunch while Steve laid his four phones down for us. Blew our minds that he chose the Nokia Lumia — a Windows 7 phone — as his favorite of the four. He said it was no contest.

Read more and listen to interview here –>anewdomain.net

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Kindle Fire now #1 Android tablet, Google control over Android ecosystem could lessen

J. TECH - Apr - 30th

By Ryan Paul April 29, 2012

Data published by comScore shows that Amazon's Kindle Fire has emerged as the dominant Android-based tablet. At the end of February, the Kindle Fire accounted for 54 percent of all Android tablets. The next most popular Android tablet product line is Samsung's Galaxy Tab family, which dropped from 23 percent of Android tablets in December to 15 percent in February.

The success of the Fire is no surprise to those paying attention to the tablet market—as we wrote last year, there is healthy demand for a low-cost iPad alternative. Amazon can afford to offer the hardware at a lower price than its rivals because it can make up the difference in content sales. The key factors driving sales of the Fire are likely its low price point, the strength of the Kindle brand, and the breadth of the Amazon content ecosystem. The rising prominence of the Kindle Fire will have significant implications for the Android tablet market. Amazon is using its own application store and a fork of the Android operating system that is based on version 2.3. As Amazon continues to advance the software in its own direction, it could reduce Google’s control over the Android tablet software ecosystem. Third-party application developers who are building software for Android tablets obviously have a big incentive to ensure that their applications are compatible with Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire. But in order to make an application compatible with the Kindle Fire, it can’t be developed using APIs that are exclusive to Ice Cream Sandwich (the latest version of Google’s operating system). It’s not clear yet if Amazon intends to update its fork of the operating system to bring it into alignment with Android 4. Amazon’s changes to the operating system are said to be much deeper than the kind of cosmetic changes that handset manufacturers typically make to differentiate their products. As Amazon’s flavor of the platform continues to diverge, application developers will likely follow in order to reach the device’s audience.

Read more here –>arstechnica.com

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Microsoft to Take Stake in Barnes & Noble’s Nook Unit

J. TECH - Apr - 30th

BY MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED APRIL 30, 2012

Microsoft announced on Monday that it would invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division for a 17.6 percent stake. The deal values the e-reader business at $1.7 billion.

The move by Microsoft will help bolster the standing of Barnes & Noble’s fastest-growing unit. The bookstore giant had said earlier this year that it was exploring strategic options for the business, including a potential divestiture or strategic partnership. The company has wagered heavily on the Nook, whose e-readers and tablets compete against Amazon’s best-selling Kindle devices in the hotly contested world of electronic books. Both companies are spending heavily to maintain a foothold in light of Apple’s success with the iPad. The Nook division’s growth has come at enormous financial cost, weighing down on Barnes & Noble’s bottom line and prompting the strategic review. The retailer added on Monday that it was still weighing other options for the business. Through the deal, the two companies will settle their patent disputes, and Barnes & Noble will produce a Nook e-reading application for the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, which will run on traditional computers and tablets.

Read more here –>dealbook.nytimes.com

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HP Powers the AMD cloud

J. TECH - Apr - 26th

By David Chernicoff April 25, 2012

AMD announced today that their worldwide datacenter consolidation and upgrade process was enabled by their use of the HP Critical Facilities Service to do everything from provide consulting and design services to building a new datacenter designed to be the backbone of AMDs cloud infrastructure.

Looking to flatten and control their networking infrastructure, spread across their 18 datacenters, AMD has gone with the HP 12500 and 5820 series switches as the networking backbone for their virtualization and clustering needs. AMD also selected HP’s AMD-powered Proliant BL465c G7 servers to upgrade the computing power of their internal engineering cloud, which they state performs up to 40 million engineering simulations a month. The HP servers are used to support not just the virtualized computing environment, but also the company’s business applications. This is the first step in the AMD- HP networking upgrade process as they plan to migrate their other sites to the HP networking infrastructure in the near future. AMD and HP are claiming that the implementation of HP server and networking technologies has improved the performance of their computing environment while reducing their datacenter footprint more than 50%.

Read more here –>zdnet.com

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Microsoft to unveil new streaming music service at E3

J. TECH - Apr - 26th

By Matthew Hawkins April 25, 2012

A new streaming music service from Microsoft is in the works, according to The Verge. It will replace the current Zune media service and is set to debut next month in Los Angeles, at E3 2012.

There is no name for the new service as of yet. For the time being, it's being referred to by its codename, "Woodstock." It looks to be part of Microsoft's continued effort to build the Xbox brand as the centerpiece of digital media consumption and management. Because it's debuting at E3, presumably during Microsoft's Xbox-focused presentation, the new platform will likely find a prominent home on the game console. But it's ultimately intended for cross-platform compatibility. Not only will "Woodstock" be available for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices, but Android and iOS as well, along with any Internet-connected platform with a browser. The Verge describes it as being "Spotify-like," and will integrate seamlessly with Facebook, to allow friends to build group playlists. It is also expected to have a "scan and match" function, similar to iTunes Match, which will acknowledge a user’s pre-existing music collection. Given that Microsoft has claimed on multiple occasions that it will not be unveiling a Xbox 360 successor anytime soon, in favor of pushing the current console's abilities beyond just gaming, "Woodstock" falls perfectly in line with such a strategy.

Read more here –>ingame.msnbc.msn.com

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Apple = Sony

J. TECH - Apr - 26th

Apple will decline in the post Steve Jobs era. Here's why.

by George Colony on April 25, 2012

Sociologist Max Weber created a typology of organizations in his 1947 book The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. He described three categories: 1) Legal/bureaucratic (think IBM or the U.S. government), 2) Traditional (e.g., the Catholic Church) and 3) Charismatic (run by special, magical individuals). Charismatic organizations are headed by people with the "gift of grace" (charisma from the Greek).

"He is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities." Followers and disciples have absolute trust in the leader, fed by that leader's access to nearly magical powers. "Charismatic authority repudiates the past, and is in this sense a specifically revolutionary force." Sound familiar? Quoting from Adam Lashinky's book Inside Apple: "…Jobs made all the decisions." "He was the final arbiter on matters of taste." Lashinky points out that Apple was an entrepreneurial company, "…but its people generally are not entrepreneurs — and they are not encouraged to be." In other words, there was one charismatic entrepreneur at the center with followers connected via "…an emotional form of communal relationship" in the words of Weber, with the leader.

One of the primary challenges with charismatic organizations is succession. In bureaucratic organizations codified processes like elections yield new leaders. In traditional organizations, long-held rituals (smoke emitting from the Sistine Chapel) elevate the new head. In charismatic organizations, the magical leader must be succeeded by another charismatic — the emotional connection of employees and (in the case of Apple) customers demands it. Apple has chosen a proven and competent executive to succeed Jobs. But his legal/bureaucratic approach will prove to be a mismatch for an organization that feeds off the gift of grace.

Read more here –>blogs.forrester.com

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Apple loses court case on defective Nvidia GPUs in MacBooks

J. TECH - Apr - 20th

By: Ryan Whitwam Apr. 19, 2012

A few years back, Apple released an updated MacBook Pro with a more powerful graphics chip, the Nvidia 8600M GT. That proved to be a decision Cupertino would regret. The Nvidia GPU was defective, and as a result, the failure rate of the logic board in that generation’s MacBook was startlingly high.

One Apple customer, who goes by the name of Seattle Rex, has spent the last few months trying to get Apple to pay for the repairs it promised for his defective computer, and that took him all the way to small claims court. The verdict is in, and the little guy won. Instead of replacing the defective machines, Apple agreed to repair the boards for free when they failed for up to 4 years. Rex’s machine was still in that window when it finally gave up the ghost due to the bad GPU. When he tried to get it repaired, Apple said that because the machine was un-bootable, they could not confirm the GPU was the problem, and he would have to pay for the repair. After months of back and forth, the issue came before a judge. Often times, a company won’t bother to send a representative to small claims court, resulting in a default judgement. But Apple isn’t just any company — it has $500 billion lying around, so it sent two people to court that day. Our everyman hero made his case, and Apple countered with an assertion that his laptop was a different model than the one covered by the warranty. This was, of course, a lie which was exposed immediately. According to Rex, Apple tried a number of ways to talk him out of compensation, but the judge was impressed with Rex’s knowledge of the hardware. The eventual ruling compensated him for the $4000 MacBook Pro, plus court costs. A judgement in hand, the next order of business is to collect the payment. It’s unclear if Apple will continue to fight it, or just pony up the cash.

Read more here –>geek.com

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Intel’s first smartphone, the Xolo X900 arrives April 23 in India

J. TECH - Apr - 20th

By Jose Vilches April 19, 2012

Indian handset manufacturer Lava today announced the imminent launch of what will be the world's first Intel-based smartphone to hit the consumer market, beating Lenovo and Orange to the punch.

Dubbed Xolo X900, the device will launch Monday April 23 in India and will be sold at a street price of approximately 22,000 rupees, or about $420, through a national chain of megastores called Croma. In terms of specifications, the Xolo X900 packs a 1.6GHz Atom Z2460 (Medfield) processor with a 400MHz graphics chip clock capable of full-HD video encoding and playback, HDMI-out, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with burst mode, 16GB internal storage, HSPA+ 3G connectivity, and a 4.03-inch 1024×600 LCD screen. It also supports Near Field Communication and additional storage through microSD cards. Intel claims battery life of up to 5 hours with 3G browsing and 8 hours of talk time. Initially the phone will run on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but an over-the-air software upgrade to the more recent Ice Cream Sandwich release of Google's mobile OS is planned "shortly," according to Lava and Intel. With this, Intel has made good on its promise to launch its first smartphone in 2012. The launch marks a major milestone for the company, which has has been synonymous with the PC industry but struggled to break into the mobile segment while ARM licensees like Qualcomm and Nvidia took all the glory.

Read more here –>techspot.com

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