Smartwatch face off: Pebble, MetaWatch and new hi-tech timepieces
If the rumours are to be believed, Apple and Microsoft are both developing "smartwatches" - wrist-worn gadgets that do rather more than simply display the time.
The Apple rumours kicked off after smartwatch-pioneer Pebble’s Kickstarter campaign generated kilometres of column-inches, and with Cupertino on the case, it wasn’t long …
WTF is... LTE Advanced?
Britain now has a 4G network, run by EE, and others are being rolled out. We’re behind the curve, though.
The world’s first 4G network, based on the LTE (Long-Term Evolution) specification defined by mobile telecommunications standards-setter 3GPP (Third-Generation Partnership Project), went live at the very end of 2009, and …
Nvidia opens pre-orders for handheld Shield console three days early
Nvidia is now taking orders for its Shield handheld gaming console, three days early, though the Android-running Tegra-powered gadget won’t make its way into punters’ hands before the end of next month at the earliest.
Shield, which incorporates a clamshell design to hold a flip-up 5-inch, 1280 x 720 “retinal quality” screen, …
Tablet? Laptop? HP does the splits with Tegra-based SlateBook x2
HP is to follow its Windows 8-based tablet keyboard combo, the Envy x2, with an Android Jelly Bean version - the computer giant’s take on Asus’ popular Transformer series.
Set to ship in August - in the US at least; the UK release is less certain - the SlateBook x2 will be built around a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200 IPS LCD screen …
Mystery Sony big-screen ereader to sport E Ink bender
E Ink reckons its "Mobius" flexible epaper screen will be the first of its kind to go into mass production, an event the company claims will take place some time later this year.
The Mobius will make its debut as a 13.3-inch panel built into a unnamed “digital paper product” made by Sony, which co-developed the panel with E Ink …
Which petite model likes a fondle and GETTING WET? Sony's Xperia ZR
Sony has come up with a new waterproof smartphone: the Xperia ZR, which is essentially an Xperia Z with a slightly smaller screen.
The gadget giant's other hydrophilic phone, the Z, is, our reviewer thought, “a bit of a slab”. Thankfully, the Japanese manufacturer has launched a slightly more compact model.
The Xperia ZR's …
Løvefïlm signs hit beards’n’berserkers series Vikings
British and German fans of horned helmets, dragonships, bloodeagles, forked beards and berserker frenzies will need to avail themselves of a LOVEFiLM LoveFilm subscription if they want to catch the History channel’s popular new historical potboiler, Vikings.
The Amazon-owned video streaming service blew its gold-rimmed horn …
'Ultimate nerd chick’ prompts C64 clone cancellation
A damning tweet from one Jeri Ellsworth, described by a Register reader as “the ultimate Commodore 64 nerd chick”, has put the mockers on Project Bread Bin, one retro-tech fan’s dream to build a cut-price Commodore 64-compatible computer in a keyboard case.
Earlier this week, C64 fan Daniel Biehl called out to the crowd to …
Retro-tech fan seeks cash for Commodore 64 clones
A brand new 1982-style Commodore 64 for just $75 (£48)? Yes, it is crazy, but that’s not stopping one enterprising retro-tech fan from trying to make it happen.
Daniel Biehl has a Commodore 64 - a real one - but he knows it won’t last forever. So he wants to build a machine that will run all the C64 software out there and work …
Nokia teases world+dog with snap of new 4G Lumia 928
Nokia nerds are all aquiver about the Finnish giant’s latest smartphone, the Lumia 928 - but it appears to be little more than a Lumia 920 for US operator Verizon.
The 928 model now has a page on the Nokia website albeit with little information beyond a picture of the device which, with the page’s URL, confirms the phone’s …
Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness
You reboot a popular science fiction series, but you cleverly restart the series’ timeline too, to give you not only a fresh, clean page on which to begin writing a brand new mythology, but also a fan-friendly way to tie it all in to the established continuity.
That’s the trick director JJ Abrams - he of Lost fame - and …
Can't beat the Nexus 7? Join it: Nook tablet gets Google Play store
Tablet maker and bookseller Barnes & Noble is to add Google’s digital shop front, Play, to its Android-based Nook HD and Nook HD+ slates.
To date, the two tablets, which run Android but keep it buried under B&N’s own UI, have sold film, music and ebook content through the company’s own virtual outlets. Software too has come …
Star Trek: The original computer game
Ah, the simple pleasures of the earliest computer games - and you don’t get much earlier than 1971.
As Star Trek: Into Darkness warps onto UK cinema screens this weekend, we look back at not only the first attempt to bring the franchise to computer screens, but what was arguably one of the most popular, certainly the most …
Barnes & Noble bungs Raspberry Pi-priced Nook on shelves
In a perhaps desperate bid to drum up sales, Barnes & Noble is selling its Nook E Ink-based e-book reader for a pound less than 30 quid - a discount of £50.
If you want the version with an illuminated screen, it’ll be £69 - £40 less than it usually is. Oh, and the firm’s 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet has also had its price slashed, …
Brit horologist hammers out ‘first’ ATOMIC-POWERED watch
Could this be the chronometrist’s ultimate timepiece, the peak of horological haute couture? British bespoke movement maker Hoptroff today claimed to have produced the world’s first personal chronometer with an on board atomic clock.
The result, says Hoptroff, is a accuracy of 1.5 seconds every 3.15 x 1010 seconds - that’s 1000 …
BlackBerry: THE TRUTH about that 5.1 per cent UK market figure
BlackBerry has rebutted a claim that its UK smartphone market share was just 5.1 per cent during the first three months of 2013.
It says independent sales figures show it notched up ten per cent of the market during that period.
The smaller figure comes from Kantar WorldPanel ComTech, a market watcher, and was released earlier …
Fanbois vs fandroids: Punters display 'tribal loyalty'
Does how you feel about your current smartphone really inform the handset you’ll acquire two, three or four years hence? The Yankee Group, a market watcher, thinks it might. And that’s good news for Apple. Possibly.
Apple currently sits just behind Google in the future purchasing stakes. According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, …
iPhone 5 totters at the top as Samsung thrusts up UK mobe chart
Apple’s three most recent mobiles together took more than a quarter of smartphones sales in Britain during the first three months of 2013, we're told.
The iPhone 5 was the period’s most popular handset, but the Cupertino giant's UK market share continues to be eroded by Android - and even Windows Phone 8.
Google’s Linux-derived …
Next Xbox to be called ‘Xbox Infinity’... er... ‘Xbox’
The next Xbox will be called the Xbox Infinity, if a piccy of an allegedly leaked logo is to be believed.
Or perhaps it’ll just be plain Xbox, as a separate, equally unofficial, just as questionable logo suggests.
The Xbox Infinity - not actually a name, just the word XBOX with an infinity symbol superscript - and the tagline “ …
Ten ancestors of the netbook
Come 2015, we’re told, the netbook will be dead and gone, out-evolved by the more fleet of foot, more desirable media tablet.
We shouldn’t mourn the netbook’s passing, though. It has had, in one form or another, a good innings. While some folk may look back to the category’s debut in 2007 with the launch of Asus’ Eee PC 701 - …
PEAK iPHONE? Apple mobe growth slumps to ‘lowest in its history’
Samsung has extended its lead over Apple by shifting considerably more smartphones than its adversary during the first quarter of 2013.
The South Korean giant also managed to ship 56 per cent more mobes in those three months than it did in the same period a year ago.
Among the world’s top five smartphone vendors, Apple - …
High-rollers’ shop pitches wallet-pounding, wall-pummelling MONSTER TV
Suddenly found yourself with £35,000 in your pocket and can’t think what to spend it on? Wander on down to posh shop Selfridges which says it has the answer: Samsung’s S9, an Ultra HD enormo-telly boasting 4K x 2K resolution.
And you’ll get a whole penny in change.
Selfridges, which describes the Samsung set as “truly a work of …
Tough luck, lappies: Brits favour fingersome fondleslabs, phones
Tablets have been outselling desktop and notebook PCs combined here in Blighty, and they could well be about to generate more revenue for their manufacturers too, data from GfK, a market watcher, suggests.
Slates have accounted for more than half of the sales volume of computer products in the UK since October 2012, GfK’s …
Boffins KALQ-u-late the ultimate 'board for two-thumb tablet tappers
Boffins in Scotland, Germany and the US of A have calculated what they claim is the most efficient two-thumb keyboard it’s possible to put on a tablet, at least for folk writing in English on a 7-inch slate.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Montana Tech crunched the …
Black-eyed Pies reel from BeagleBoard's $45 Linux micro blow
Open-source hardware outfit BeagleBoard has formally announced a major revision of its BeagleBone board computer that ups the spec and downs the price.
The BeagleBone Black's single-core processor jumps from its predecessor’s 720MHz to 1GHz. It’s a Texas Instruments AM335x system-on-a-chip, which uses ARM’s Cortex-A8 …
Review: Corsair Voyager Air 1TB wireless hard drive
Corsair has made a name for itself offering solid-state drives, fast memory and other components to fit inside high-performance PCs.
But its latest product takes the supplier out of its comfort zone and into the world of smartphones and tablets. It also carries the company into the network-attached storage arena.
It’s a good …
Sord drawn: The story of the M5 micro
It took Japanese micro maker Sord more than six months to launch its M5 home computer in the UK, but in April 1983, the company said the Z80A-based machine would finally go on sale during the following month - half a year after it was originally scheduled to arrive over here.
It was a bold move. Even in November 1982, when the …
More Brits ditch Apple tablets for Amazon, Google, Samsung kit
Almost a fifth of the UK’s adult population now owns a fondleslab, and while most of them have a tablet with a bitten fruit icon on the back, Apple’s dominance is slipping.
So says YouGov, a pollster, which regularly asks Brits about their technology purchases. During the first three months of 2012, 73 per cent of British tablet …
Boffins build ant-sized battery, claim it's tough enough to start a car
Electronics continue to shrink to ever smaller sizes, but researchers are having a tough time miniaturising the batteries powering today’s mobile gadgets. Step forward, bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes.
Smartphones use smaller power packs than they did five years ago, it’s true, but that’s because their chips and radios are …
Manual override: Raspberry Pi beginners' books
The Raspberry Pi has been out for just over a year now. It has undergone a couple of revisions during that time, most recently around October 2012, but a short while ago I decided it was time I ought to try it out and see what the diminutive, Linux-running micro can do.
Entirely coincidentally, the Raspberry Pi Owners’ Workshop …
Hardware hacker unifies 15 retro consoles in format frenzy
Most fans of old-skool videogame hardware rely on emulators for their retro gaming kicks. But not some fellow going by the handle Bacteria. Three years ago, he decided he needed 15 original games consoles in his living room and that he wanted them all in a single box.
Project Unity Game cube: the console offering a feast of …
Logitech launches MEGA-PRICEY 15-in-1 remote
Swiss mouse master Logitech will whip out a pair of new Harmony “universal” remote controls this month, extending the range to take in home automation kit as well as your home entertainment rig.
First, the Harmony Ultimate, the latest in Logitech’s line of programmable controllers. This one can control up to 15 devices and has a …
Gigabyte bats Brix at Intel's tiny NUC PC
Taiwan’s Gigabyte is to take on Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC), the chip company’s ultra-compact Core i3-based desktop computer. Last week, it demo’d Brix, a box with a slightly bigger footprint than the NUC but around only half as tall.
Gigabyte promises four Brix systems with, respectively, Celeron, Core i3, i5 and i7 …
WTF is... H.265 aka HEVC?
When Samsung unveiled its next-generation smartphone, the Galaxy S4, in March this year, most of the Korean giant’s fans focused their attention on the device’s big 5-inch, 1920 x 1080 screen, its quad-core processor and its 13Mp camera. All impressive of course, but incremental steps in the ongoing evolution of the smartphone. …
The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Does a computer need to look sexy? You might say that the looks of such a pragmatic gadget don’t matter. After all, most of us have, at one time or another, had to make do with bland, beige boxes almost exactly like everyone else’s bland, beige box, and it didn't hinder us from getting the job done, or made play any the less …
Review: Intel Next Unit of Computing barebones desktop PC
Intel must really like the sound of its own ‘voice’. How else can you explain the fact that sliding open the box containing the chip giant’s latest desktop package plays the ding-da-ding-ding-ding jingle as soon as you open it. Amaze your friends! Irritate your colleagues! Keep opening and closing the box to replay the ditty …
Review: Jabra Revo Wireless headphones
I’ve tried a fair few wireless headphones over the past ten years, almost all of them unsatisfactory in one way or another. Many of the early ones were over-the-ear jobs with those round-the-back-of-your-head bands, but all suffered from either excessive weight - thanks to the on-board battery - or simply didn’t play for long. …
The Lynx effect: The story of Camputers' mighty micro
Not all of the early 1980s British home computers were fated to be as successful as Sinclair’s ZX series or Acorn's BBC Micro. Many were destined instead to be loved solely by keen but small communities of owners. For all these users’ enthusiasm, there were too few of them to sustain the cost of developing, manufacturing, …
Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story
They would, Clive Sinclair claimed on 23 April 1982, revolutionise home computer storage. Significantly cheaper than the established 5.25-inch and emerging 3.5-inch floppy drives of the time - though not as capacious or as fast to serve up files - ‘Uncle’ Clive’s new toy would “change the face of personal computing”, Sinclair …
Comixology cloud fails to Make Mine Marvel
Digital comic fans are a fairly honest lot, generally prefering to buy their sequential art reading matter than pinch it. But that doesn’t mean they ignore the regular weekly batches of new issues shared online. An apology from Dave Steinberger, head of Comixology, the largest digital comics retailer, reveals one reason why. …
Intel's Centrino notebook platform is 10 years old
Ten years ago, Intel decided notebook computers needed a boost. The technology wasn’t new, but while a fair few mobile workers had portable computers, and some even had modem cards or were using Bluetooth-connected phones to reach the internet, laptops weren’t seen as a truly mobile networkable device.
And so the chip maker …
Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan
Zap guns, robots, lightspeed-smashing spaceships and bikini-busting princesses do not real science fiction make. Just ask George Lucas.
Star Wars defined movie SF in the mind of many a mainstream viewer. But while the film and its sequels and, er, prequels certainly provide the sci-fi enthusiast with thrills a-plenty - guilty or …
Proto Steam box may feel your arousal, hints Valve daddy
Game developer Valve will be pushing out prototypes of its living room download-and-play games box sometime in the next “three to four months”, company chief Gabe Newell has revealed.
The machine, dubbed the Steam Box, is essentially a Linux PC linked to Valve’s online games shop, Steam. Being a PC, it’s easy to build, but …
BlackBerry Z10: Prices pruned despite eager iPunter interest
How well is the Z10 from BlackBerry - née RIM - faring? Reports on the handset’s retail success, on which BlackBerry’s recovery as a business is riding, are mixed.
Late last week, Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone separately pruned the price of the handset, not a good sign for a premium device that has been on sale for less than a …
Architect pitches builder-bothering 'Print your own house' plan
WikiHouse, the "print your own open source pad" project, has called for contributors and cash to help it establish an online archive of downloadable dwelling designs.
The site’s aim is nothing short of the democratisation of the construction industry: to allow, in short, “anyone to design, download and 'print' CNC-milled houses …
MasterCard tries to zap PayPal with own-brand mobe wallet
Walk into any of Apple’s 400 shops, pick up an accessory, boxed software or any one of the other items the Mac maker’s stylish emporia have out on shelves, and, if you have an Apple ID and an iPhone, you can buy the products you want without having to interact with one of the firm’s happy-clappy minions.
The system works with an …
Four firms pitch hi-def DRM for Flash cards
Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba have begun licensing their new DRM technology for memory cards to anyone who feels the world needs yet another copy protection technology for HD content. They hope many content providers do indeed want a new DRM system, specifically one that secures content but doesn’t prevent content …
Blackberry Z10 sales fail to impress analysts
It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of BlackBerry, the renamed Research in Motion, is hanging on success of its new BlackBerry smartphones, the Q10 and, particularly, the Z10. Revised forecasts from a number of market watchers suggest the troubled company has not yet put its woes behind it.
Earlier this week, two …
WTF is... Miracast?
Less than six months ago, there were just a handful of Miracast-certified products listed in the Wi-Fi Alliance’s kit database. Now there are nearly 150. A spectacular improvement for a little known technology. So what is it?
Miracast was formally launched in September 2012, but it was Google’s announcement a month and a half …
Sony promises PC-based PlayStation 4 for Christmas
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Sony PlayStation 4 - or, as we say in the trade, a PC.
Yes, the PS4 will indeed be based on an octo-core x86-compatible processor, incorporate 8GB of GDDR 5 and will be equipped with a PC-centric GPU. It’ll have a hard drive too, plus the inevitable Blu-ray drive. It will incorporate 802. …
