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Friday, September 09, 2011

drag2share: Cricket intros the Samsung Vitality, the first Android to offer Muve Music

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/cricket-intros-the-samsung-vitality-the-first-android-to-offer/

If executed properly, Muve Music could be a pretty nifty idea. But up until now, the all-you-can download music service from Cricket Wireless has been offered on the Samsung Suede featurephone... and that's it. Fortunately, the Samsung Vitality will come to the rescue as the prepaid carrier's first smartphone to provide the beats. We've seen this device before as the Admire, which runs on Android 2.3, has a 3.5-inch HVGA (480 x 320) display and is powered by an 800MHz CPU. The phone also includes a 3.2 megapixel cam, 1,600mAh battery and a 4GB microSD card. It may not sound all that tempting, but the price could turn a few heads: the Vitality will be available for $200 -- that's sans contract, folks -- and requires a $65 plan which will hook you up with unlimited data, voice and music. Sounds like this Muve Music feature has sprung back to life. Follow the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Cricket intros the Samsung Vitality, the first Android to offer Muve Music

Cricket intros the Samsung Vitality, the first Android to offer Muve Music originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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drag2share: Windows 8 will deliver Hyper-V virtualization tech to all, power users rejoice

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/windows-8-will-deliver-hyper-v-virtualization-tech-to-all-power/

Hyper-V

Hear this nerds? Windows 8 will ship with Hyper-V virtualization software integrated into the OS. Until now Hyper-V was limited to Microsoft's server products, but now consumers (whether they care or not) will be able to fire up virtual machines without the need to download VirtualBox or some other VM software suite. Now, the average person probably won't care too much, but power users will be thrilled. And, if virtualization can be integrated seamlessly to enhance security (through sandboxing) and compatibility with legacy apps (say, via an included XP license), it could be a huge boon to casual users -- even if they don't realize it's there. For more details about Hyper-V from the Windows 8 devs, including a nice demo video, check out the source link.

Windows 8 will deliver Hyper-V virtualization tech to all, power users rejoice originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Extreme Tech | source

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Building Windows 8 | Email this | Comments

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drag2share: Sony brings new media streaming box and updated Google TV hardware to CEDIA

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/sony-brings-new-media-streaming-box-and-updated-google-tv-hardwa/

Yesterday was the big day for Sony's 4K projector (still no exact price, but reps mentioned it would be sub $25k -- we know you can afford that) and the US debut of its funky 3D helmet, but now that the CEDIA show floor is open we stopped by its booth and got our hands on a couple of other treats. In one corner we've got its Google TV hardware, updated with a near-release upgrade to Honeycomb and showing off some highlighted apps picked by Google. Over in the other, we have its new SMP-N200 streamer. Check the gallery for a few snaps of us pawing the SMP-N200 (smaller than a bread box, way bigger than a Roku 2) and after the break, a live demonstration of Google TV running Honeycomb -- it's not much, but consider this a taste before Google delivers the Market and other goodies around the end of this month.

Gallery: Sony CEDIA 2011 booth

Continue reading Sony brings new media streaming box and updated Google TV hardware to CEDIA

Sony brings new media streaming box and updated Google TV hardware to CEDIA originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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drag2share: Google Maps update adds top-rated reviews, photos to Places

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/google-maps-update-adds-top-rated-reviews-photos-to-places/

Updates can be somewhat of an addiction to the Android faithful -- just peep those XDA forums. And even though this particular Google upgrade isn't exactly the Ice Cream Sandwich of our Autumn dreams, it's still a noteworthy bump to the oft-used Maps app. Bundled up in version 5.10.0 are two minor, but useful tweaks that'll display your four and five star rated Places, as well as letting you tack a photo onto your review. We managed to download the update directly to our phone, but last we checked, the web-based marketplace still hadn't refreshed with the latest offering. Make sure to hit the source link below to keep your Gapps up to snuff.

Google Maps update adds top-rated reviews, photos to Places originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AndroidCentral | source

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drag2share: Motorola throws Italia a smartphone curveball with splash-resistant Wilder (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/motorola-throws-italia-a-smartphone-curveball-with-splash-resist/

Ciao bambini! Motorola just lifted the veil on its latest ruggedized phone, the Wilder, which is destined for Italian shores later this month in all its underpowered glory. The GSM dual-band phone packs a 2.8-inch QVGA display, a two megapixel camera with 15fps video, and 5MB (yes, MEGABYTES) of on-board storage -- so it's not going to be blowing anyone away with lightning-fast performance. Moto is rather light on specs, with no mention of processor speed, OS, or 3G support, but there's nothing here to imply that this thing has been sprinkled with even the slightest amount of Google dust. However, we do assume it's powerful enough to run pre-loaded Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and YouTube apps, and browse the web with Opera Mini. There's also a secondary notification display, expandable storage (up to 32GB), and some embedded games like Tetris and Need for Speed. The Wilder may only be available in Italy initially, setting you back a cool €89 (about $126), but based on these specs, your dough may be better spent on a few kilos of splash-resistant spaghetti.

Continue reading Motorola throws Italia a smartphone curveball with splash-resistant Wilder (video)

Motorola throws Italia a smartphone curveball with splash-resistant Wilder (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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drag2share: US Senate passes patent system reform bill, Obama expected to sign into law

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/09/us-senate-passes-patent-system-reform-bill-obama-expected-to-si/

Think it's time to change our patent system? So does Congress. Yesterday, the Senate approved the America Invents Act by an 89-8 vote that could bring about the most drastic changes to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in five decades. Under the bill, which the House approved back in June, patents would be awarded not to the first person to invent a technology, but to the first one to actually file with the USPTO, bringing US policy in line with protocol adopted in most other countries. It also calls for a streamlined application process and would allow the USPTO to charge set fees for all apps. The revenue generated from these fees would go directly to a capped reserve fund, allowing the office to retain the lion's share of the money, rather than funneling much of it to Congress, as had become the norm.

Supporters say this extra revenue will give the USPTO more power to chip away at its backlog of some 700,000 patent applications, while a new third-party challenge system will help eliminate patents that should've never received approval in the first place. Opponents, meanwhile, criticized the bill for not eliminating fee diversion altogether (an amendment that would've placed more severe restrictions was ultimately killed, for fear that it would jeopardize the bill's passage), with Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell questioning the legislation's impact on small businesses, calling it "a big corporation patent giveaway that tramples on the rights of small inventors." But Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who sponsored the bill, argued that yesterday's approval marks a major and historic inflection point in US patent policy:

The creativity that drives our economic engine has made America the global leader in invention and innovation. The America Invents Act will ensure that inventors large and small maintain the competitive edge that has put America at the pinnacle of global innovation. This is historic legislation. It is good policy.

The America Invents Act will now make its way to President Obama's desk, where it's expected to receive his signature. For more background on the legislation, check out the links below.

US Senate passes patent system reform bill, Obama expected to sign into law originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Electronista | source

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PC World | Email this | Comments

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drag2share: Superconducting sapphire wires are as cool as they sound

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/09/superconducting-sapphire-wires-are-as-cool-as-they-sound/

Copper wire's relatively cheap, pliable and can conduct electricity, but it's hardly ideal. Powering cities requires cables meters wide and the metal loses a lot of energy as heat. Fortunately, a team from Tel Aviv University thinks it's solved the problem. Borrowing a fiber of sapphire from the Oakridge National Lab in Tennessee, it developed a superconducting wire barely thicker than a human hair that conducts 40 times the electricity of its copper brethren. Cooled with liquid nitrogen, the sapphire superconductors carry current without heating up, which is key to their efficiency. The team is now working on practical applications of the technology -- because it's so small and pliable (unlike previous superconductors) it could replace copper in domestic settings and its cold efficiency makes it perfect to transmit power long distances from green energy stations. The wire's going on a world tour as we speak and will touch down at the ATSC conference in Baltimore in October. Anyone who makes jokes about wires and Baltimore will be asked to leave, politely.

Superconducting sapphire wires are as cool as they sound originally appeared on En! gadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 05:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AF Tel Aviv University | Email this | Comments

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drag2share: Dell jams a terabyte of SATA3 SSD storage into Precision M6600 laptop

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/09/dell-jams-a-terabyte-of-sata3-ssd-storage-into-precision-m6600-l/

Dell Precision M6600 and M4600

Dell is tweaking some of the options offered on its Precision M6600 and M4600 mobile workstations. You can now choose to add 512GB SATA3 SSD drives and (in the case of the M6600) a 4GB NVIDIA Quadro 5010M card. The interesting thing though, is that the 6600 has space for three drives: two full size and one mini-card slot. That means you could outfit this 17.3-inch beast with a pair of 512GB SSDs and one 128GB SSD, for a grand total of 1.1TB of solid state storage. Of course, with each half-terabyte drive adding a whopping $1,120 to the price of this professional lappy it's not exactly for those on a budget. But, we wouldn't be shocked to see this trickle down to high-end, portable gaming rigs (we're looking at you Alienware) relatively soon.

Dell jams a terabyte of SATA3 SSD storage into Precision M6600 laptop originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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drag2share: Bit.ly quantifies internet impatience, old links get no love

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/09/bit-ly-quantifies-internet-impatience-old-links-get-no-love/

Oh internet, we love your animated GIFs and sad Keanu websites, but how much attention are we really giving each link? According to a recent study by URL shortener Bit.ly, a standard link is clicked for an average of three hours until traffic subsides by 50 percent, eventually fading away into oblivion. If we're talking about a super timely news story like an earthquake hitting the east coast, well, its half-life was a paltry five minutes. When URLs are shared on social networks, they last around 3.2 hours on Facebook and 2.8 hours on Twitter, but those on YouTube persist more than twice that long. There, link half-life is 7.4 hours -- probably because it's home to phenom bomb memes like the one found after the break.

Continue reading Bit.ly quantifies internet impatience, old links get no love

Bit.ly quantifies internet impatience, old links get no love originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

New York Times | source

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Bitly Blog | Email this | Comments

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Thursday, September 08, 2011

Teaching Digital Strategy and Marketing at #RutgersCMD

drag2share: Citrix's GoToMeeting app now freely available for Android, comes pre-loaded on Droid Bionic

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/citrixs-gotomeeting-app-now-freely-available-for-android-comes/

Motorola and Citrix have already teamed up to pre-load the latter company's GoToMeeting and Citrix Receiver apps on the Droid 3, and they're now back doing the same with the long-awaited Droid Bionic. The good news for everyone else this time around is that Citrix has also decided to release GoToMeeting as a free app on Android Market. Granted, GoToMeeting may not be quite as exciting as the latest augmented reality app or a mobile version of Minecraft, but it is a fairly significant piece of the enterprise puzzle, which Motorola in particular seems to be targeting heavily these days. Hit the link below to try it out for yourself (provided your phone makes the grade), and head on past the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Citrix's GoToMeeting app now freely available for Android, comes pre-loaded on Droid Bionic

Citrix's GoToMeeting app now freely available for Android, comes pre-loaded on Droid Bionic originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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drag2share: Single-chip DIMM stacks integrated circuits like shingles for greater DRAM efficiency

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/single-chip-dimm-stacks-integrated-circuits-like-shingles-for-gr/

Cellphone screens may be getting bigger, but the push to shrink all other computing components continues unabated. Invensas is well aware of this, and has come up with new, multi-die memory that promises to be both smaller in size and more capacious than existing DRAM. Called xFD, it mounts integrated circuits in a "shingle-like configuration" on top of one another to accomplish the trick. Such stacking increases speed while reducing power consumption due to much shorter connections between RAM dies than what's found in multi-chip DIMM. Of course, the memory won't be popping up in PCs anytime soon, but the company will be showing off its new tech at IDF next week. While you wait, there's more RAM reading in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Single-chip DIMM stacks integrated circuits like shingles for greater DRAM efficiency

Single-chip DIMM stacks integrated circuits like shingles for greater DRAM efficiency originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Extreme Tech | source

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Invensas | Email this | Comments

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drag2share: World Famous Economist Paul Krugman Talks a Whole Lotta Shit About Bitcoin [Bitcoin]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5838089/world-famous-economist-paul-krugman-talks-a-whole-lotta-shit-about-bitcoin

Nobel Prize-winnng economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman engages in a verbal smackdown on Bitcoin, pointing out that the cybercurrency has experienced "massive deflation" and is creating a community of Bitcoin hoarders. [NY Times]

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drag2share: The Icon iDo Is an Audiophile-Grade Amp for the iPhone and iPad [Amps]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5838204/the-icon-ido-is-an-audiophile+grade-amp-for-the-iphone-and-ipad

If you want better audio quality from your iPhone or iPad, the Icon iDo is an amp that's supposed to pump out audiophile-grade sound. Just plug in your iOS device to the amp, plug the amp into your stereo system and enjoy the sweet sing songs of tunes.

We can ignore the fact that a real audiophile would probably skip listening to music from an iPhone or iPad altogether but the Icon iDo is supposed to improve your crappy mp3s and imperfect Apple Lossless songs by cleverly extracting the original audio data stored on the iOS device and converting the files on its own for bit-perfect playback. The idea is that music on an iPhone is limited by the iPhone's hardware, the iDo enhances the process. Less compression, less quality loss, better sound.

Alternatively, you could plug headphones into the Icon iDo and the iDo will figure out the optimal level to power your cans to maximizes audio quality. The whole name of the game is to make those little tweaks for delicious eargasm causing music. Sounds good to me. $250 [NuForce]

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drag2share: AMD ships 16-core Bulldozer chips for servers, makes consumers wait their turn

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/07/amd-ships-16-core-bulldozer-chips-for-servers-makes-consumers-w/

AMD's Interlagos, its server-styled Bulldozer chip -- Mr. Opteron 6200 to you and me -- is being pushed out to retailers and OEMs ready for an October launch. AMD is calling it the first 16-core x86 processor, although as we know from the required reading, it has eight two-core shared modules rather than 16 independent ones. The chips are compatible with Socket G34 motherboards, but most of this first production run will go straight into supercomputer projects. AMD remains mute on progress of the consumer-level Zambezi, but rumors are that the company can't clock it fast enough to compete with Intel's Core i7 -- the very class that Bulldozer was designed to bury.

[Thanks, Sebastian]

Continue reading AMD ships 16-core Bulldozer chips for servers, makes consumers wait their turn

AMD ships 16-core Bulldozer chips for servers, makes consumers wait their turn originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Extremetech | source

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