| This Week's Hottest Reviews on TechRadar Posted: 19 Apr 2013 03:55 PM PDT 
HTC First review Call Facebook ubiquitous and you're understating your case. Unlock any random smartphone and you're guaranteed to find a little blue F icon waiting on the home screen. Facebook is so big, so everywhere, so omnipresent that it's already on everyone's phone, but apparently that's not enough for the sharing mogul. Now Facebook has decided to completely take over devices with Facebook Home, and has collaborated with HTC to create the HTC First, a phone meant to show just what that experience can be. The First moniker comes from being the first phone with Facebook Home preloaded. It's a well built, unassuming little handset, nowhere near as big, flashy or as fast as the quad-core HTC One. 
Nokia Lumia 720 review Being the middle child is always difficult, so in that respect the Nokia Lumia 720 has it tough as it nestles slap bang in the center of the Finnish firm's Windows Phone 8 range. Arriving on the scene alongside the budget-focussed Nokia Lumia 520 at MWC 2013, the Lumia 720 provides a happy middle point in a line up which also includes the Lumia 620, 820 and 920. The Nokia Lumia 720 is available for around $460 SIM-free, while on contract you'll be able to pick it up for free with two year contract. 
Jawbone Up review Like love, sensors are all around us. The astronomic growth in smartphone uptake means that most of the people you know now carry around a device that is constantly monitoring movement, light, sound and location. To date, the data captured by these sensors has found limited application, but this will soon change. At its core, the Jawbone Up is a pedometer, but with pretensions of being much more. Within its "medical grade" rubber casing, the Up houses a number of motion sensors and shares the information it collects with a smartphone app for iPhones and Android. Other reviews on TechRadar this week: Computers HP Envy TouchSmart 4T-1102 review Phones Nokia Lumia 520 review Motorola Razr HD review Hands on: Samsung Galaxy Mega review LG Venice review GPS Hands on: TomTom Multi-Sport GPS Watch review Cameras Nikon Coolpix P520 review Hands on: Nikon Coolpix P330 review Hands on: Ricoh GR review Nikon Coolpix A review Media Streaming Device StreamPort Universal review Portable memory Transcend Wi-Fi SD Card review Tablets Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 review Amazon Kindle Fire HD review |
| Rasberry Pi vs. Intel NUC Posted: 19 Apr 2013 01:50 PM PDT Rasberry Pi vs. Intel NUC The unique $35 Raspberry Pi computer set the PC world on its ear last year. Part computer science project and part incredibly cheap PC, the DIY single-board computer is such a hot item, some retailers are charging double what the unit originally cost. Of course, where there's money, there's Intel. The chip giant has formally introduced its $320 "Next Unit of Computing," or NUC, PC concept—basically a bare-bones, hobbyist kit PC. While this is admittedly an apple–to-orange comparison in many respects, we felt that hobbyists deserve to see an accounting of the pros and cons of each in a head-on fight. Round 1: Size Intel's NUC is built around an amazingly small 4x4x2-inch chassis that Intel is hoping to make the standard for subminiature-but-powerful PCs. The NUC isn't the first we've seen this small, though. The Zotac Nano XS is slightly thinner than the NUC, by about half an inch, and VIA has its Pico-ITX boards. Of course, the Raspberry Pi has them all beat. It comes as a single-board computer at just over 2x3 inches for the whole package. Winner: Raspberry Pi 
Other single-board computers have been available, so the Raspberry Pi's real breakthrough is its $35 price, making it exceedingly accessible for experimentation.
Round 2: Pricing Intel's Ivy Bridge chips have been amazingly lean on power consumption for the high-performance x86 chips they are. The NUC ships with a 65-watt power brick, and the dual-core Hyper-Threaded Core i3 is rated at 17 watts. Pretty impressive for an x86. However, when you consider that the Raspberry Pi can run off your cell phone charger (provided it puts out 700mA), Ivy Bridge and even the next-gen Haswell are unlikely to ever compete with the Pi in the power- consumption game. Winner: Raspberry Pi Round 3: Applications We don't mean applications as in specific apps, but the possible uses for these wee PCs. The NUC can be used as an HTPC, a mini Big Picture Steam Box, or slung behind a monitor to create an almost-all-in-one. The Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, is the perfect hobbyist machine for students and tinkerers young and old. It's being used to run everything from MAME cabinets to controlling quad-copter drones. As a device intended to introduce folks on super-tight budgets to computing concepts and programming, the Raspberry Pi is a win no matter how you cut it. However, Intel's NUC is also quite superb at what it's meant for. With its included VESA-mount adapter, it can be used in signage applications and is basically an incredibly powerful small machine. Winner: Tie Round 4: Specsmanship At $35, the Raspberry Pi is pretty low-powered. As a desktop UI, for example, it's not exactly something you want to push regularly, with its 700MHz Broadcom ARM 11 CPU, 256MB of RAM, HDMI, and LAN and USB support. The NUC, on the other hand, is like everything Intel does: a tour de force of specs and hardware. The NUC we have here packs a 1.8GHz dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3 chip and has Mini PCI Express slots to run an mSATA SSD and wireless card. With its HD4000 graphics, the box is capable of reasonable gaming with older titles, too. Hell, our version even packs that new-fangled ultra-fast Thunderbolt port. This round is an easy win for the NUC. Winner: NUC 
Intel's Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is meant to spur interesting and unique uses for Intel hardware.
Round 5: Performance Again, there's no debating this. The NUC's size isn't really exciting, but its performance is. Most mini PCs have been based on VIA's CPUs, which aren't exactly speed kings, or AMD's Brazos chips, which don't light any fires themselves. The NUC is really fast for its class. The Raspberry Pi, while incredibly cool for $35, isn't something we'd be happy pushing all day. Yes, it can run a desktop OS, and yes, it can stream some media, but would you really want it to? The answer is no. And the Winner Is… The fact is, both are winners. OK, now quit your bitching; we honestly wouldn't feel right if we called this for one or the other. We think the Intel NUC is a freaking-cool little box and we can imagine it at the heart of several projects around the house and car. At the same time, the Raspberry Pi has so much charm and the price is so damned good (that's the Raspberry Pi's real breakthrough, you know) that there's no reason not to buy one or two of these bare-bones kits to experiment with. So maybe those of you who thought these two devices couldn't be compared were right.
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| Geekbox Ego Maniacal Review Posted: 19 Apr 2013 12:13 PM PDT A matte-black benchmark bruiser Geekbox's Ego Maniacal system pays homage to Maximum PC's Dream Machine—but probably not the one you're thinking of. Sure, last year's Dream Machine featured the same Silverstone TJ11 chassis as the Geekbox Ego Maniacal, but we're told that the actual inspiration for this custom-built box was 2002's Dream Machine, which was painted to match a classic BMW 2002 Turbo. Except Geekbox has updated its tribute to the car by nodding its head to the more current special edition BMW M3 in "frozen black." 
The Ego might owe its inspiration to that Dream Machine of old, but its internals are a closer match with 2012's DM. Full details of the Ego's specs are down below, but the highlights include Intel's new king, the 3.5GHz Core i7-3970X, a pair of liquid-cooled GeForce GTX 690 cards, two 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSDs, 32GB of Corsair DDR3/1866, and a 1,200W Corsair AX1200i PSU. The most impressive part of the Ego may be its liquid cooling, which uses both a quad-rad and dual-rad to keep the parts cool—that includes the voltage regulation modules on the Asus Republic of Gamer board. That's probably a good idea, too, because the Ego pushes the new 3.5GHz Core i7-3970X to a very stable 4.8GHz. That's about 1GHz further than our zero-point's overclocked six-core, and with its 25 percent higher clocks, the Ego offers that much more of a performance edge. In fact, the six-core Ego gave our zero-point—which is certainly no slouch in specs—a pretty good pummeling in every single benchmark. What about something a bit beefier, such as DM2012? 
Geekbox individually sizes and sleeves the cables for each PC it builds. Between the two, it was a classic battle of cores vs. frequency, with DM2012 sporting eight cores at 3.1GHz vs. the Ego's six cores at 4.8GHz. In the apps that can't exploit all the cores of the DM2012 (or even the Ego, for that matter), clock speeds won out, with the Ego pulling up a score 27 percent faster in Stitch.Efx 2.0 and 30 percent faster in ProShow Producer 5.0. When you get into the heavily multithreaded tasks, however, the cores-vs.-frequency argument gets interesting. The Ego was faster than the DM2012 in Premiere Pro CS 5.0 by about 4 percent and about 1 percent faster in the x264 HD 5.0 benchmark. That's a victory for frequency, but at the same time, we're talking about a 1.7GHz difference between the six-core and eight-core chips, so the core crowd can claim a moral victory. We also have to acknowledge that the Ego set benchmark records in all six official benchmarks we run. Although not everything was by a large margin, it's still one hell of an accomplishment for one single system to sweep all six. The real magic of the Ego is in the phenomenal amount of detail paid to its construction. Geekbox says it spends no less than 40 hours to build its high-end custom machines and it shows, from the washers on the case-door screws that prevent scratches to the paint, to the custom-length cables that are each sleeved and heat-shrunk by hand (nary a zip tie is present). There are other loving details about the case that we just don't have the space for here, but we must admit we were a bit let down by the decals. Rather than covering them with a clear coat, Geekbox just stuck them atop the matte-black paint job, which is decidedly less impressive—you can feel the decals' edges when you slide your hand over them. It's also odd for the company not to include mass storage, but Geekbox says that's more of lifestyle statement. In your garage, you'll have your M3 for weekends and your minivan for weekdays, so why clutter the M3 with baby seats? We understand that rational but we don't buy it, because while this machine is fast, it's also expensive at $7,995. Yeah, that's a deal next to DM2012's $11,055 but one HDD couldn't hurt. Despite the interesting storage configuration and heart-stopping price, we can't argue with the raw performance and attention to detail that might take custom rigs to the next level. $7,995, www.geekbox.com |
| Razer Accidentally Leaks 90 Percent Off Promo Code, Will Honor Purchases Posted: 19 Apr 2013 11:38 AM PDT  Some lucky gamers in the U.K. received a massive discount on Razer peripherals.
Razer today issued a statement via email in regards to a leaked 90 percent off coupon code for its U.K. portal that went viral, resulting in thousands of orders being placed in the span of just a couple of hours. This wasn't an authorized or approved coupon code, but one that was generated by a third party in order to test the site's shopping cart. Even so, Razer said it will honor the discounted orders that were placed. "While we have the option of cancelling the orders legally, we've always had a customer comes first policy at Razer and in respect of this incident, we have decided to honor the orders that were placed using the unauthorized code by Razer fans buying single products for their own use," Razer explained in its email. "Unfortunately, as the products are being sold well below their cost, it will likely cost us an insane amount of losses to make good on the orders which will really, really hurt us as we're still a small company - that much said, we want to do right by the community." To mitigate the damage to its bottom line, Razer said those who purchased multiple units of a single product using the coupon code -- likely to sell on eBay or Craigslist -- will have an opportunity to purchase a single item of each product ordered at a 90 percent discount. Razer recently launched its Edge gaming tablet, a pricey piece of hardware that starts at $1,000. A 90 percent off discount code would bring the cost down to just $100, or half the cost of a Nexus 7 - ouch! "Our focus is on doing the right thing for our fans, the gamers and the community, not for resellers or users to profit from this. That's not gaming, that's not our deal," Razer added. Razer said it could take a few weeks, or even a few months in certain cases, to process and ship the deluge of orders. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| LulzSec Hacker Receives One-Year Sentence for Sony Shenanigans Posted: 19 Apr 2013 08:12 AM PDT  Sony breach cost the company over $600,000.
A U.S. judge ordered Cody Kretsinger, otherwise known as "Recursion" by his LulzSec cohorts, to serve a year and one day in prison after the hacker pleaded guilty to computer crimes related to an organized breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment last year. As part of Kretsinger's plea bargain, the 25-year-old is also required to perform 1,000 hours of community service, pay Sony $605,663 in restitution, and serve a period of home detention following his time behind bars. Specifically, Kretsinger pleaded guilty to one charge each of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer as part of this plea agreement, Reuters reports. Kretsinger admitted to hacking the Sony Pictures website via SQL injection and then sharing that information with other LulzSec members, who then posted confidential details of thousands of users to Twitter and its own website. The breach Kretsinger participated in is separate from the one that caused Sony to take its PlayStation network offline for 40 days in 2011. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| AMD's Beats Expectations, Cuts Losses Significantly in Q1 2013 Posted: 19 Apr 2013 06:30 AM PDT  Restructuring efforts are paying off for AMD as the PC market transitions to mobile.
Go ahead and fire up Survivor by Destiny's Child and fast forward to the chorus, as there may not be a more appropriate string of lyrics to describe the attitude at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). With the PC market making a mad dash towards mobile devices and system sales down in general, AMD somehow managed to trim losses in Q1 2013 by about $444 million compared to the same quarter a year ago, beating out expectations in the process. AMD announced first quarter revenue of $1.09 billion, an operating loss of $98 million, and a net loss of $146 million, or $0.19 per share. A year ago, AMD was reporting a net loss of $580 million, or $0.80 cents per share, and just last quarter losses added up to $473 million, or $0.63 cents per share. "Our first quarter results reflect our disciplined operational execution in a difficult market environment," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "We have largely completed our restructuring and are now focused on delivering a powerful set of new products that will accelerate our business in 2013. We will continue to diversify our portfolio and attack high-growth markets like dense server, ultra low-power client, embedded and semi-custom solutions to create the foundation for sustainable financial returns." AMD's Computing Solutions segment revenue decreased 9 percent sequentially and 38 percent year-over-year during a period when global PC shipments suffered the worst year-on-year decline in almost two decades, according to data by International Data Corporation (IDC). Rival Intel saw its PC Client Group revenue decrease 6.6 percent sequentially and 6 percent year-over-year, though the chip maker still managed to make a profit in Q1 to the tune of $2 billion. One thing that should help AMD's bottom line going forward is the inclusion of its custom 8-core "Jaguar" APU in Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 console. The PS4 also uses Radeon graphics. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Newegg Daily Deals: Graphics Cards Galore! Posted: 19 Apr 2013 05:49 AM PDT |
