General Gaming Article |
- Special Edition Star Wars Xbox 360 Coming This Spring
- Microsoft to Sell Lumia 800 Unlocked in $899 Bundle
- RIM's App World Numbers Not as Great as Reported
- Solid State Shakeup: Intel 520 vs Patriot Pyro SE vs OCZ Octane
- Motorola Droid 4 Drops at Verizon on Friday for $200
- Acer Initiates Legal Action Against Former Chief Lanci for Joining Lenovo
- The Legality Of "Used" MP3 Sales Is Headed To Court
- Android Ice Cream Sandwich Gets Delicious Chrome Topping
- $35 Home Theater-Friendly Raspberry Pi PC To Start Shipping Soon
- MIT Scientist Offers $100k Prize To Anyone Able To Prove Quantum Computing Is Useless
| Special Edition Star Wars Xbox 360 Coming This Spring Posted: 07 Feb 2012 03:07 PM PST
Buyers will get a 320GB console painted to resemble R2-D2, and a controller with a C-3PO gold finish. The box also includes a Kinect sensor and two games; Star Wars Kinect and Kinect Adventures. The latter has been around for since the Kinect launched, but Star Wars Kinect has five game modes plucked from the Star Wars saga. There are podraces, lightsaber duels, Galactic Dance-off (for some reason), and more. The Xbox 360 is coming toward the end of its life cycle, so the wisdom of getting a new console now is dubious at best. Although, if you're going to get one, this might be justifiable for the Star Wars fans out there. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft to Sell Lumia 800 Unlocked in $899 Bundle Posted: 07 Feb 2012 02:52 PM PST
The Lumia 800 is the international Nokia flagship device. The screen is slightly smaller than the 900, and it lacks a front-facing camera, but the 800 will be unlocked in the bundle. In addition to the phone, buyers will get a Nokia Play 360 wireless speaker, a Purity HD headset, and a Bluetooth earpiece. Unlocked devices regularly clock in at $600 or more, so it's not that bad of a deal for those interested in a contract-free unlocked device. At this time, Microsoft has not plans to sell the Lumia 800 sans bundle deal. If $899 is too steep, you'll have to pick up a Lumia 900 from AT&T on contract, or wait for the price to come down. Anyone biting on this? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| RIM's App World Numbers Not as Great as Reported Posted: 07 Feb 2012 02:38 PM PST
It was reported that App World was more profitable for developers than the Android Market or the App Store. What Heins actually said, was that a higher percentage of App World devs make over $100,000, 13% in all. This is what you would expect with a smaller pool of developers for users to buy from. The other number that caught people off guard was the assertion that there are 43% more daily downloads per app on BlackBerry than on iOS. This was reported as '43% more app downloads,' but it's only saying that each app is downloaded 43% more often. Again, this is what you would expect in a smaller app store with fewer choices. Despite the fuzzy reporting, the numbers cited do at least show that App World isn't withering on the vine. It's not as big as the App Store or Android market, but developers can still make a living making BlackBerry apps. For how long we cannot say. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Solid State Shakeup: Intel 520 vs Patriot Pyro SE vs OCZ Octane Posted: 07 Feb 2012 02:35 PM PST Let's play a little game. We have three solid state drives—one each from Patriot, OCZ, and Intel. Two of them are powered by the ubiquitous SandForce SF-2281 controller, and the other marks the consumer debut of a new 6Gb/s SATA controller. Guess which drive has the new controller? If you guessed the Intel drive, time for a spit-take. It's the OCZ drive that's got the new controller, and the Intel drive which is SandForce-powered. What in the name of the MLC gods is going on? Patriot Pyro SE 240GBCan the Pyro SE's speeds match its fiery nomenclature?Back in October 2011, we reviewed the 120GB Patriot Wildfire, the company's first SF-2281-based SSD. With 32nm Toshiba asynchronous NAND, the Wildfire was a solid, if unremarkable, drive—awesome compared to nearly every other drive, but not quite up to the standard set by Corsair's Force GT, OCZ's Vertex 3, or OWC's Mercury Extreme Pro. With the Pyro SE, Patriot hopes to change that. The Force GT, Vertex 3, and Mercury Extreme Pro have one thing in common that the Wildfire lacked: 25nm synchronous NAND. Now a Patriot drive has the same stuff. The 240GB Patriot Pyro SE uses 16 128Gb modules of Micron 25nm synchronous NAND. Can the smaller process and synchronous NAND help the Pyro SE keep pace with the best SF-2281 SSDs on the market?
Yes. The better NAND pushes the Pyro SE past its stablemate and into the rarified air at the top of the SandForce-powered heap. With sequential read and write speeds at 482MB/s and 300MB/s, respectively, as measure by CrystalDiskMark, the Pyro SE is about as fast as the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro, and its 4KB random write speed, at over 91,000 IOPS, is the fastest we've ever seen from a 6Gb/s SATA drive. The synchronous NAND makes the most impact on sequential write speeds, offering a 40–50MB/s boost over the asynchronous NAND in the Wildfire. As with all top-tier SandForce SF-2281-powered drives, the Pyro SE is optimized for small random write cycles; in sequential tests, Samsung's 830 Series SSD holds the crown. The Pyro SE is priced competitively with other drives that use the same NAND and controller, like the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro, and it performs competitively, too. If you're looking for a top-tier SSD with a SandForce controller and speedy 25nm synchronous NAND, the sparkly gray Pyro SE is just as good as the sparkly blue OWC drive. So get whichever one matches your rig better.
$450, www.patriotmemory.com Patriot Pyro SE 240GB MEET THE PYRO Performance identical to top-tier SandForce drives.. MEET THE MEAT Sequential speeds can't match Samsung 830. 
Intel 520 Series 240GBIf you can't beat 'em, join 'emFor every season, there is a spin. Intel's first consumer SSDs, the X-25M series, didn't have the fastest performance, but they gained a reputation for reliability. We had high hopes for Intel's 320 Series SSDs, which turned out to be really great 3Gb/s SATA drives, at a time when everyone else was shipping 6Gb/s drives. When Intel did ship a 6Gb/s SATA drive, the 510 Series, it used a Marvell controller, not an Intel one. Well, Intel's finally released its second 6Gb/s consumer SSD series, and it's powered by… SandForce? Yep. The 520 Series may ship in Intel's familiar 7mm aluminum chassis with a 2mm black spacer, but inside it's running the same SandForce SF-2281 as everyone else. It does use 25nm Intel synchronous NAND and Intel-validated firmware, which Intel says make it better, faster, and more reliable than plain-Jane SF-2281-based drives.
We'll have to wait and see if the reliability claim is accurate, but the "better and faster" is, well, kinda true. The 520 Series is certainly faster than SF-2281 drives that use asynchronous NAND. Compared to other drives with 25nm synchronous NAND, like Patriot's Pyro SE above, the differences are smaller. The 520's CrystalDiskMark sustained read speed of 470MB/s, for example, is 12MB/s slower than the Pyro SE, and in Iometer the 520 gets 4,000 fewer IOPS on our random write test. Real-world scores in PCMark 7 and Premiere Pro are virtually identical to the Pyro SE, while the Intel drive lags behind in PCMark Vantage, an older test. Intel reassures us it hasn't given up on its own controllers, and Intel's upcoming 20nm IFMT tech should offer big improvements in NAND density and performance in the second half of the year. So we have that to look forward to. The 520 series may not be very special, but at least it's up to current-gen standards, and it replaces the kinda crappy Marvell-powered 510 series. On the other hand, $510 for a 240GB drive is a lot, considering the Patriot Pyro SE is $50 cheaper and just as good. Intel's betting its reputation for reliability still means something to SSD buyers. We think it does, but does it mean they'll pony up an extra fifty bucks?
$510, www.intel.com Intel 520 Series 240GB FIVE GOLD RINGS Fast SF-2281 controller and 25nm NAND; Intel reliability FOUR COLLY BIRDS $50 more expensive than near-identical drives from Patriot, OCZ 
OCZ OctaneThe first fruits of OCZ's acquisition of IndilinxRemember Indilinx? The company's Barefoot SSD controller was the first really good solid-state controller. It was one of the first controllers to offer TRIM support, as well as sustained read and write speeds near 200MB/s, and it ruled the roost until SandForce's SF-1200 controller leapt ahead of Barefoot's capabilities. The company's next-gen controller was delayed, and in March 2011 OCZ bought the company. It's been nearly a year, but OCZ finally has a consumer drive with the new Indilinx Everest controller. Was it worth the wait? The 512GB Octane drive OCZ sent us contains 16 256Gb 25nm Intel synchronous NAND modules, two 2Gb Micron DDR3 SDRAM cache modules (512MB total), and of course the Indilinx Everest controller, all in standard 2.5-inch SSD form factor. In CrystalDiskMark, it averaged 445MB/s sustained reads (35–40MB/s slower than the SandForce drives we've tested) and 315MB/s sustained writes (15MB/s faster). Its single-queue-depth 4KB random writes were competitive at around 5,600 IOPS, but at QD32, it only put out 22,000 IOPS—Samsung's 830 Series does 35,000 and the Patriot Pyro SE does over 90,000. The Octane's maximum response time in Iometer, at 429ms, is a bit worrying, too—its competitors have max response times of around 40ms. The Octane's video encoding performance was within seconds of the other drives, and its PCMark Vantage and PCMark 7 scores, though lower than the rest, weren't too shabby.
We're not 100 percent sure OCZ knows what "infused" means. So where does that put the Octane among today's 6Gb/s SATA SSDs? It's better than drives with the Marvell 9174 controller, like Plextor's M2 and Crucial's M4, and even some SandForce-powered SSDs with cheaper asynchronous NAND. But aside from a slight write-speed advantage, the OCZ Octane falls behind SandForce drives with synchronous NAND in most benchmarks, and its random write speeds at depth are much, much lower. The biggest problem with the OCZ Octane is Samsung's 830 Series, which is available in the same capacities (aside from the Octane's unmatched 1TB model), is faster in every single benchmark, and is cheaper than the Octane—by $100, at the 512GB capacity. The Octane has more-than-reasonable performance and we like the fact that it has the new Indilinx controller, but given its price and the existence of cheaper, better alternatives, it's not the best bang for your buck.
$900, www.ocztechnology.com OCZ Octane 512GB OCTOROK New controller, plenty of cache; decent speeds; strong writes OCTOMOM Low random IOPS; not the best value 
Benchmarks
Asterisk (*) denotes highest score. Our current test bed is a 3.1GHz Core i3-2100 processor on an Asus P8 P67 Pro (B3 chipset) running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests used onboard 6Gb/s SATA ports with latest Intel drivers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Motorola Droid 4 Drops at Verizon on Friday for $200 Posted: 07 Feb 2012 12:02 PM PST
The Droid 4 lands at Verizon on February 10, 2012 for $200 with a two-year service agreement. In addition to the above mentioned specs, the Droid 4 also boasts an 8MP rear-facing camera with 1080p video capture, 1.3MP front-facing camera for video chat. 16GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot for up to an additional 32GB of storage space, a generous heaping of 1GB of RAM, and the usual assortment of goodies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. So what's the verdict, is the Droid you've been looking for, or are you waiting on something else? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Acer Initiates Legal Action Against Former Chief Lanci for Joining Lenovo Posted: 07 Feb 2012 11:35 AM PST
Lanci joined Lenovo as a consultant in September of last year, and then was brought in on a permanent basis in January 2012 to head the company's new Europe, Middle East, and Africa division. None of that has been sitting well with Acer, which claims Lanci was bound by a 12-month non-compete agreement, the Financial Times reports. Acer brought Lanci on board in 1997. Over the course of the next decade and beyond, Lanci proved instrumental in Acer's rise to the near top. But things came to a head when he and Acer's board disagreed on a product strategy in the emerging mobile handset landscape, and specifically the amount of focus that should be put on smartphones and tablets. "On the company's future development, Lanci held different views from a majority of the board members, and could not reach a consensus following several months of dialog," Acer said in a written statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Legality Of "Used" MP3 Sales Is Headed To Court Posted: 07 Feb 2012 11:27 AM PST
At the heart of the matter is a lawsuit EMI tossed at ReDigi, CNET explains. ReDigi resells digital music tracks; if you want to ditch a song, ReDigi peeks through your hard drive, copies the track, and wipes the original from your PC. In return, you're given 20 cents worth of credit towards buying "used" music through ReDigi, which normally cost $0.79 a track. ReDigi doesn't offer new music of its own; the only tracks available for purchase are "used" tracks uploaded by users. When a "used" MP3 is sold, it's wiped from ReDigi's servers. Because of that, ReDigi claims its sales are protected by the "First Sale" doctrine that allows you to legally sell your Wilco vinyl back to your indie record store. EMI claims that First Sale doesn't apply here because ReDigi isn't selling the original music file, but what EMI asserts is an illegal copy of the original file. The company was hoping the court would issue an injunction to immediately bar ReDigi from conducting business, but the presiding judge declined and said that he wants the "fascinating" issue to hit trial. He said the trial would decide whether the sale of "used" MP3s is legal or "just Napster with an in-between step," the New York Times reports. What do you think? Should you be able to sell "used" iTunes tracks, or is EMI correct in calling the files illegal copies? Image credit: redigi.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Android Ice Cream Sandwich Gets Delicious Chrome Topping Posted: 07 Feb 2012 10:46 AM PST
Chrome for Android sports the same V8 JavaScript engine found in the desktop build, but was constructed from the ground up for mobile devices. "We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet," Google said in a blog post. "You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you're holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the Web." Chrome for Android makes clicking on links easier by zooming in and presenting a "Link Preview." If you sign in to Chrome, you can sync your bookmarks and view tabs you have open on your computer. And of course there's the ever popular Incognito mode for, uh, shopping surprise gifts for your significant other. You can download Chrome for Android here. Image Credit: Google | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| $35 Home Theater-Friendly Raspberry Pi PC To Start Shipping Soon Posted: 07 Feb 2012 10:45 AM PST The delay of the Raspberry Pi PC has had geeks hankering for some serious on-the-cheap computing action pulling out their hair in frustration. The charity foundation offering the $25/$35 Pi has been teasing us with videos of its awesomeness for months, showing off the PC's chops at playing 1080p video and Quake 3, shifting media via AirPlay technology, running XBMC and loads more. Unfortunately, the Pi missed its initial launch window. But don't worry: the Raspberry Pi foundation just committed to a new manufacturing date and even released a datasheet for the Broadcom SoC powering the Pi.
The first round of 10,000 Raspberry Pi PCs are set to finish manufacturing in China on February 20th. After that, they'll be shipped to the U.K, where the foundation hopes to start shipping out orders by the end of February. The reason for the delay? The quartz crystals used in the Pi were readily abundant in England, where the PC was designed, but a newer, cheaper crystal had helped to dry up supplies of the component in China. The team reports the problem is now taken care of and everything is ready to go. The foundation also coaxed Broadcom into releasing a 205 page datasheet detailing nitty-gritty about the BCM2835 SoC that supplies the brawn for the Raspberry Pi. Dive in here (PDF) if you want, but be warned: the water's deep, dense and difficult to swim through if you don't know the tech inside and out. Be sure to check out this article showing Raspberry Pi in action, and thanks to Geek.com for pointing this out! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| MIT Scientist Offers $100k Prize To Anyone Able To Prove Quantum Computing Is Useless Posted: 07 Feb 2012 10:17 AM PST
Basically, you'd need to prove that quantum computers will never be able to do anything useful. Critics have already jumped out of the woodwork to accuse Aaronson of the equivalent of trying to disprove Bigfoot, but he disagrees. "To me, though, that completely misses the point," he writes. "Whether Bigfoot exists is a question about the contingent history of evolution on Earth. By contrast, whether scalable quantum computing is possible is a question about the laws of physics." Scientifically disproving the scalability of quantum computing would be a gargantuan task -- and it would also render Aaronson's ongoing work moot. Still, Aaronson isn't worried. (If he was, he wouldn't be ponying up $100k of his personal money.) Plus, he notes, if this inspires someone to scientifically cast quantum computing into the fires of Mordor, Aaronson's cash will be a drop in the bucket compared to the Nobel prize money the recipient would likely receive for one of the most important physics discoveries in a long time. Aaronson's blog has all the details, and he's been very responsive to answering questions from commenters. Or, if you want to brush up about recent happenings on the QC front, feel free to check out our articles about the "World's First Programmable Quantum Photonic Chip," entangling ions with microwaves, or breaking the laws of single-particle physics with ultrapure gallium arsenide semiconductor crystals. Oh, and thanks to Popular Science for pointing the contest out! Image credit: cacm.acm.org |
On April 3rd of this very year, we know exactly where you can find 
If you're got a hankering for a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone and don't want to wait for the Lumia 900 to drop on AT&T, Microsoft might have you covered very shortly. Microsoft will reportedly be selling 
At RIM's BlackBerry DevCon in Amsterdam today, new CEO Thorsten Heins made a bit of a splash by throwing out some 
With such a steady clip of Droid devices marching into the smartphone marketplace, eventually you're bound to find the Droid you're looking for. Maybe it's Motorola's Droid 4 you've been holding out for, a 4G LTE smartphone with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, five-row QWERTY keyboard, and a 4-inch qHD display with scratch and scrape resistant glass. If so, you only have to wait a few more days.
The breakup between Acer and its former Chief Executive Officer, Gianfranco Lanci, was mildy tense, but swift and free of any drama when the two parted ways almost a year ago. And it probably would have stayed that way too, except Lanci accepted a gig with Lenovo, a move that prompted Acer to file a lawsuit in Italy for an alleged breache of a non-compete clause Lanci signed with his former company.
Courts have said it again and again: consumers have the right to resell their used physical media. That's why used game sales are booming at GameStop and you can pick up old Michael Jackson CDs at a buck a pop down at your local flea market. But do those same rights apply to digital versions? Can you "resell" an iTunes track? We'll know soon enough, as the concept is slated to have its day in court soon.
Depending on whose market share numbers you believe, Google Chrome is the second or third most popular browser on the desktop, by a hair either way. Now you can download Chrome on your Android smartphone or tablet, but only if you're running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). It's available as a beta app in the Android Market, and just like the desktop version, Google said it focused on speed and simplicity.
We've heard you snickering in the corner. Quantum computing is definitely a solid theory; scientists have been able to make a couple of electrons dance to the same proverbial tune for a while now. But what use is that? Critics say that quantum theory is mostly a mind exercise and will never be able to scale up for useful applications. Well, one MIT quantum scientist is sick of hearing that crap, and Scott Aaronson is putting his money where his mouth is in the form of a $100,000 prize to anyone able to demonstrate that "scalable quantum computing is impossible in the physical world."| You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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