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USB 3.1 demo shows new spec well on its way towards 1.2GB/sec goal
At CES this January, Jeff Ravencraft, the president and chief operating officer of the USB Implementers Forum USB-IF), told The Reg that the unfortunately named "SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 would double its throughput from 5Gb/sec to 10Gb/sec in its 3.1 incarnation. We recently sat down with him again and saw it in action.
The demo was …
Microsoft: Surface a failure? No, it made us STRONGER
Microsoft's Surface fondleslabs haven't been selling as well as it or its retail partners would have liked, but top execs say that building hardware in-house is an essential part of Redmond's strategy, and one that has already paid off.
Speaking at a meeting with financial analysts on Thursday, Microsoft chief operating officer …
Deep inside the iPhone 5s lurk a few surprises
Teardown The gleeful geeks at iFixit and ChipWorks have torn apart Apple's latest flagship iPhone, the 5s, and inside they found a lot of glue and a few surprises – including the manufacturer of the A7 processor and the source of the sensor-wrangling M7 chip that was much touted at the rollout of Apple's latest smartphones last week. …
Mini-Me, stop humping the 'L-A-S-E-R': New 3D tech can make a Mini-You
100% Design The way 3D printing enables ideas to move from the drawing board and become actual objects in a matter of hours has certainly inspired designers. To highlight this point, London-based 3D printer supplier iMakr appealed to visitors' egos at the 100% Design trade show in London's Earls Court this week.
iMakr 3D printing examples …
Cook: 'We're not in the junk market segment'. Not on PRICE, anyway
QuoTW This is the week when fanbois around the world prepared for the launch of a new iPhone - and some other piece of rubbish called the 5C, though the C doesn't stand for cheap. When Tim Cook said that Apple was uninterested in the "junk business", just the day before the mobes went on sale, he was talking about price not quality. …
One of last few iPhone 5Ss STOLEN from within MASSIVE POLICE CORDON at Apple Store
Exclusive A man's new iPhone 5S was stolen in Apple's flagship London store just seconds after he bought it this morning.
Despite more than a dozen cops turning up at the packed Regent Street shop - where the latest mobe went on sale today at 0800 BST - an enterprising pickpocket managed to swipe the gear.
The Register understands the …
Ubuntu penguins strain to squeeze out bug backlog by mobe OS deadline
Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical is rushing to finish the smartphone-friendly version of its distro for its 17 October launch.
Um Bongo engineer Nicholas Skaggs, writing here, confirmed version 1.0 of Ubuntu Touch will be based on Ubuntu 13.10, which is code named Saucy Salamander.
“As part of that release [Saucy Salamander], …
WHY do phone cams turn me into a clumsy twat with dexterity of an elephant?
Something for the Weekend, Sir? I was a little dismissive last week about the technical improvements Apple says it is introducing to the photographic capabilities of its blinged-up iChav smartphones.
Just because mimicking street fashion smacks of corporate desperation at – is it cuz I iz gold, innit? – this should not mask the details of the much-improved …
Nokia Lumia 1020: It's an imaging BEAST... and it makes calls too
Review Nokia's marketing department is comparing its new imaging champ, the Lumia 1020 smartphone, to digital SLR cameras. That's just silly.
But what the Lumia 1020 can lay claim to is that it takes the best photos of any current modern smartphone – by a clear head and shoulders. And Nokia has packaged it into a modern phone, rather …
First look: Apple iPhone 5S and 5C
Apple has a weird problem. Way back in 2008 when it launched the iPhone 3G it just about nailed the spec of a great smartphone.
The iPhone may have grown, acquired an extra camera and sped up in the years since, but its hardware and software user interfaces remain essentially unchanged. Each new model therefore feels incremental …
Qualcomm turns back hands of Toq smartwatch
Qualcomm isn't entering the smartwatch business after all.
Two weeks ago the company fired up a fancy website that offers the chance to “Be the first to know when Qualcomm Toq is available for purchase” and generally hinted at a grand future for the device.
Since that page went live, Taiwan-based tech outlet VR-Zone met …
Fanbois shun 'crappy plastic' iPhone 5C
Video Fanbois have once again queued to obtain the new iPhone in Australia, where an accident of time zones means punters willing to do without sleep can be among the very first in the world to play with Apple's latest.
The Reg dropped in to Apple Store Broadway, a Cupertinian outpost in a small mall on the fringe of Sydney's central …
Apple iOS 7 remote wipe: Can it defeat the evil scrumper scourge?
The two lawmen who fired up the Secure Our Smartphones Initiative – an effort to get smartphone makers to install kill switches in their handsets – have kind words for Activation Lock, the feature of Apple's iOS 7 that allows users to remotely wipe their iDevices, and which requires their owners' Apple ID and password to be …
Apple CEO Cook: 'We're not in the junk business'
Apple CEO Tim Cook has defended his company's strategy of sticking to the high end of the device market – read "expensive" – rather than competing at the low-cost, low-margin low end.
"There's always a large junk part of the market," Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek in a wide-ranging interview on Thursday. "We're not in the junk …
Knock, knock. Hello, delivery person: I am this building's SKYPE OVERLORD
100% Design London’s Earl’s Court plays host to 100% Design again this week, the UK’s largest showcase event for architects, designers and manufacturers. It's not all supercool decor, furniture and lighting though, as you'll find some tech gems among the design icons too.
Got a Skype account? Who hasn’t? Skype’s great for distance calling, …
Hiroshi Yamauchi, bizlord who gave the world Donkey Kong, dead at 85
The man who took Nintendo from a small family business into an international megacorp has copped it, aged 85. Hiroshi Yamauchi died of pneumonia in a Japanese hospital on Thursday morning.
Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo in 2002, and left the board in 2005, but remained the largest individual shareholder and was …
Tracking the history of magnetic tape: A game of noughts and crosses
Feature America began its love affair with tape following WWII, when Jack Mullin, serving in the US Army Signal Corps, dropped in on German radio broadcaster Bad Nauheim and returned home with two portable Magnetophons and 50 reels of tape.
News of his 1947 Hollywood equipment demos reached entertainer Bing Crosby who recognised the …
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it ... Win Phone 8? No, it's APPLE'S iOS 7
Review Apple's iOS 7 has come some way since its initial preview release and public unveiling back in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Back then the focus was inevitably on the operating system’s new visual styling, and Apple does seem to have taken on board the early criticism of the new look.
The ultra-spindly font …
Nokia Lumia 625: Quality budget 4G phone ... but where's UK's budget 4G?
Review Nokia's latest Lumia, a budget 4G smartphone, alights on an odd perch in the marketplace, where it finds itself all alone. 4G voice contracts in the UK are currently a luxury good - with luxury price tags attached.
For most Britons, LTE is only practically available at not-so-budget prices from one network, EE, with a 2GB …
Windows Phone overtakes Apple's market share ... in India
Windows Phone has confounded the sceptics by beating iOS for the third consecutive quarter to take second place in the Indian smartphone market, but analysts have warned handset branding will be key to its future growth there in the wake of Microsoft’s Nokia buyout.
Redmond was quick to issue a release online this week, touting …
Apple brings iCloud bookmark sync to Windows
Apple today issued iOS 7, bringing with it the usual complaints of clogged networks and imperfect installs.
But the company also slipped out a pair of browser plugins that bring the bookmark-synchronisation functions of its iCloud service to the Chrome and Firefox browsers. iCloud is baked into MacOS, so the extensions are aimed …
Everyone's waving their 5-inchers: BlackBerry outs new supersized Z30
Slumped phone giant BlackBerry has announced its fourth BlackBerry OS 10 mobe: the Z30, a five-inch OLED-touchscreen device.
The display is not all that's big. The new mobe, pictured below right, sports a suitably supersized 2880mAh battery giving 25 hours of "mixed use", and similarly large internal mobile radio antenna, …
Official crackdown on Apple fanboi 'shanty town' ahead of London iPhone launch
Exclusive The British authorities have told two of Blighty's most passionate Apple fanbois to remove a "shanty town shack" they have constructed outside London's Regent Street Apple Store.
Two diehard Apple nuts set up camp outside the fruity firm's UK flagship shop yesterday in hope of being the first to pick up the new iPhone 5S when it …
Apple beckons fanbois back into its golden era... of, er, 2010
As the world mutters about Apple's uncertain future, the fruity firm has offered out-of-date fanbois a way to relive its glorious past.
Cupertino's online App Store will now let users of old iPhones and other iThings download previous versions of software, so they can continue to use such technological innovations as the Fart …
‘Priceless’ unique Palm ‘FAILEO’ laptop goes under the hammer
Pics It was the product that was almost immediately dubbed the ‘Faileo’. It was announced but never released. And it can now be yours - if you pony up enough cash to beat other bidders to a one-of-a-kind auction item.
Devised by Palm co-founder and chief engineer Jeff Hawkins, the Foleo - to give the gadget its correct handle - was …
Microsoft puts something hard and sensitive in your pocket
Microsoft says one of the big selling points for Windows Phone is that some customers like the idea of using its software everywhere.
Redmond imagines customers keen on messaging will run Exchange on Windows Server and then use Outlook or a modern email app under Windows 8 on a PC or fondleslab, and Windows Phone 8 for mobile …
Dog bites man: Apple's Macs trounce all Windows PCs in customer love
Once again, Apple's Macs – desktops and laptops – have outscored any and all windows PCs in a customer-satisfaction survey: the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
"Apple maintains the strong lead it has held for a decade, inching up 1 per cent to an ACSI score of 87," the consumer-surveymeisters write in a report ( …
It's Grand Theft Auto 5 day: Any of you kids remember GTA the First?
Antique Code Show Grand Theft Auto 5 – one of the most keenly anticipated video games ever – was officially released today, although a few people apparently got their packages a few days ago.
The preview videos show it to be stunningly accomplished, and no doubt it will sell phenomenally well. Yet many of the young adults who make an excited …
Peak Apple: Has ANYONE at all ordered a new iPhone 5c?
Apple has failed to disclose the sales figures for its new iPhone for the first time since 2009, sending fanbois and investors into a spiral of doubt and fear.
The fruity firm normally thrusts upon the world a boastful press release announcing how many gazillions of new iMobes ordered even before the things have hit the shelves …
Stylus counsel: The rise and fall of the Apple Newton MessagePad
Archaeologic It will forever be remembered as the butt of a-thousand-and-one jokes about its poor handwriting recognition, but Apple’s MessagePad was bold in its conception. Its legacy is ARM’s conquest of the mobile microprocessor world.
The company said on 8 August 1993:
The Newton MessagePad is the first in a family of communications …
Chap unrolls 'USB condom' to protect against viruses
A US-based chap has invented a gadget he's calling a USB condom.
The prophylactic dongle is advanced as protection for the largely hypothetical problem of malware injection from fake USB chargers.
Such polluted ports come in two varieties. The first got an airing at Black Hat, where researchers demonstrated a USB charger that …
Boffins demo on-chip entanglement at macro scale
Quantum computing watchers are familiar with the idea of entanglement – the “spooky action at a distance” that gives rise to quantum teleportation. Now, a team led by the University of Queensland is claiming a different kind of first: quantum teleportation between two spots on a single chip.
Not only that: but unlike schemes …
Apple to uncloak new iPads, iMacs at October 15 event?
If you're a follower of Apple product rumors you know that the slimmest of evidence is enough to get the grapevine a-buzzing – and Monday's report that Apple is planning to hold an event on October 15 to announce new iPads, iMacs, and maybe more is as anorexic a bit of speculation as they come.
The French website MacGeneration …
Tokyo Apple Store staff rescue iPhone-queueing fanbois from typhoon
Japan is being lashed by a deadly typhoon that has forced a half-million people from their homes in advance of its torrential rains, but there are a handful of lucky fanbois who are riding it out in the Apple Store in Tokyo's tony Ginza district.
Not to make light of the deadly seriousness that is Typhoon Man-yi, but in addition …
Nokia quiz: Do you know what a phablet is?
Gadget blogs and tech specialists may know what "phablet" means, but Nokia isn’t whether civilians do.
The phone-maker took the unusual step on Friday of gaining feedback on the word. Nokia was measuring familiarity with the word and how favourably it is received. The company has yet to launch its first "phablet" but is about to …
How to get a Raspberry Pi to take over your Robot House
Behold: The RaZberry is a daughter board which snaps onto a Raspberry Pi, turning it into a Z-Wave controller capable of integrating, and controlling, a home automation network though a web, or JSON, interface.
We all love the Raspberry Pi, don't we? It could have been built for home automation, offering low power consumption …
Google cooks web dev teaching tool for Raspberry Pi
Google has jumped aboard the Raspberry Pi badwagon, releasing an operating system called “Coder” designed to get kids into web development.
Operating system might be flattering Coder a bit, as it offers a constrained environment dedicated to web development and based on Node.JS, which itself is an implementation of Google's V8 …
In MASSIVE surprise, world+dog discovers Nokia checked out Android
Reports have emerged over the weekend that Nokia had run up research lab versions of its Lumia phones running Android, and that this was somehow linked to Microsoft's decision to finesse the Finns.
Kicking off the clickfest was the New York Times with this post that offered the following analysis:
A team within Nokia had …
Microsoft mocks Apple and new iPhones in vids it quickly pulls
Microsoft has posted and then pulled several videos in which it mocks Apple's new iPhones.
The seven videos first appeared over the weekend on the Windows Phone YouTube channel. All have since been made private, but as will happen online various folks pinched copies of the vids so we can all enjoy them. Here's one titled “ …
'Liberator' 3D printed gun enters London's V&A Museum
The Liberator, the 3D printed pistol that debuted earlier this year and quickly earned a ban from The US State Department and The Reg's scorn , has found its way into London's prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum.
The V&A, as the museum is affectionately known, specialises in decorative arts and design. The Liberator falls into …
Billionaire engineer Ray Dolby, 80, dies at home in San Francisco
Obit Ray Dolby, the engineer who for most of the last half century has improved our ability to record and play high-fidelity sound and who founded Dolby Labs, has passed away at his home in San Francisco after being diagnosed with acute leukemia earlier in the year.
"Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary," said Kevin …
Microsoft announces iPad amnesty for fanbois
Sick of your iPad and want to swap it for something that's far less desirable? Microsoft wants to help you out.
Redmond has launched a scheme offering a $200 gift card in exchange for a "gently used" iPad 2, 3 or 4. You'll need to give them your charger cable as well and make sure your fondleslab is wiped clean - both on the …
