Author Archives:
Switch view

Watch this amazing aerial video shot in the snow

by 8 comments

Snow is an awful thing, right? It slows down traffic, makes a mess of the sidewalks and makes the very idea of going out seem like a nightmare.

Except that it doesn’t always have to be like that. If you have lots of free time, a spark of creativity, warm boots and a multirotor RC helicopter at hand you might turn all that snow into art. Read more »

Facebook now has 845 million active users, won $1 billion last year

by 10 comments

As you probably know, Facebook filled for IPO yesterday. We are not going to bore you with the technical information about it, as those are mostly of interest to banks and their corporate clients at this point, but the documents submitted mention a few quite interesting facts about the social network.

Obviously, the network still hasn’t reached saturation point as its user base keeps growing. By the end of last year Facebook had 845 million users, who formed 100 billion friendships, uploaded 250 million photos per day and generated 2.7 billion daily likes. Read more »

Sony posts grim Q4 results, lost $2 billion

by 17 comments

Sony just posted its financial report for the last year and its final quarter and things are looking pretty bad for the Japanese giant. The company missed targets and lost $2 billion in the holiday quarter alone.

This led to adjusting the company’s forecast for the full financial year (which in Sony’s case ends in March) – Sony is now expected to bring its total loss for the 12-month period to the mind-blowing $2.9 billion. Read more »

Intel announces 7 new Sandy Bridge CPUs

by 19 comments

Intel has just unveiled seven new members of its Sandy Bridge family of CPUs. We got three quad-core desktop processors of the Core i5 variety and four Celeron CPUs meant for use in mobile devices.

The first and most powerful of the new processors is Core i5-2550K, which is an unlocked-multiplier CPU with a stock clock speed of 100MHz higher than the i5-2500K. The i5-2550K runs at 3.4GHz, with frequencies of up to 3.8GHz possible with the Turbo boost. Read more »

Firefox 10 now available for download, not fully official just yet

by 20 comments

Eager to get the latest and greatest browser of the Mozilla Foundation? Well you’ve got your chance now as the company has made Firefox 10 available for download.

Bringing a few UI changes and some nice performance tweaks, Firefox 10 is still unavailable for an automatic update, but you can download it manually. Read more »

BlackBerry Bold 9790 battery life tested, details inside [TEST]

by 37 comments

We welcome another BlackBerry smartphone to our battery test arena. The Curve 9380 hardly aced our benchmarks, but maybe the more expensive Bold 9790 would be a better match for the other top dogs.

We already gave you the BlackBerry Bold 9790 numbers on Friday, when we published our review, but now we are going to focus on how does it do in comparison to the other smartphones we have tested so far. Read more »

Angry Birds hitting Facebook on February 14

by 5 comments

This Valentine’s day may be quite lonely for a lot of people, whose significant others are into Angry Birds. Rovio just confirmed that their immensely popular title is hitting the world’s largest social network on February 14.

Rovio plans to hold a huge launch event in Jakarta, which according to the company is the “global capital of Facebook”. The Facebook version will brings some nice new twists to the gameplay, so it’s definitely one worth checking out. Read more »

iPad still dominates the tablet realm, but Android is getting close, analysis shows [UPDATED]

by 59 comments

We just got the report on the tablet market in 2011 from Strategy Analytics and it tells some interesting stories. The iPad managed to just over double its sales compared to 2010 and is still the dominant force, holding a market share of 57.6%.

However, the iPad is no longer able to keep up with the overall market growth, which is fueled by the strengthening Android sales. The green robot tablets shipments grew over three times year-over-year and that helped them reduce the gap to their iOS counterparts. Read more »

Samsung tears the Galaxy Note to pieces, saves iFixIt the effort

by 32 comments

Normally, it goes like this – a cool product enters the market and the crafty guys from ifixit take its shiny new body to pieces and expose every chip hiding inside. Well that didn’t happen with the Samsung Galaxy Note, so the Koreans took it upon them to perform the task.

Samsung has provided detailed descriptions of all the important Galaxy Note functional elements. You should keep in mind that what we have here is the US version of the Note, featuring a Qualcomm chipset and LTE, instead of Exynos and HSPA+. Read more »

Asus Transformer Prime to get its bootloader unlocked in February

by 2 comments

Asus surprised nastily quite a lot of people, when they shipped their Transformer Prime monster of a tablet with a locked bootloader, but it seems that things are about to fall back into place. The company just announced through its Twitter account that the tool for unlocking the quad-core beast is on its way.

According to Asus, it should be coming in February and that is just a week away now. There are no more details given, but we guess those will be made available when the tool is finalized. Read more »

A new unofficial ROM lets you taste the MIUI flavor of Ice Cream Sandwich on your Galaxy S II

by 14 comments

Those of you that are eager to take Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for a spin on their Samsung Galaxy S II just got another option. In addition to flashing the leaked Samsung beta ICS ROM (which we tried), you can now try the ICS-based latest version of the MIUI ROM.

The unofficial release is said to be quite stable and ready to do the job as your everyday ROM. Of course, MIUI comes with a heavily customized interface, so if you are a fan of the stock ICS looks you probably don’t need to bother with this one. Read more »

Samsung keeps the ad war going – adds two more videos to its arsenal

by 82 comments

Samsung continued its controversial (but admittedly rather funny) promo campaign of the Galaxy S II with a couple of new videos.

Just like the previous ads that we covered, these two take a dig at the die-hard Apple fans, who seem to be so detached from the world, that they would prefer spending hours in queues and even camping in front of the store, instead of getting an obviously superior product like the Galaxy S II. Read more »

Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author and iTunes U

by 32 comments

Just as expected, Apple made three important education-related announcements at their event in New York today. The company unveiled the next version of iBooks for iPad – iBooks 2, which now features interactive textbooks.

Apple also unveiled iBooks Author – a Mac OS X application that should greatly facilitate the creation of those textbooks (or other interactive books) and iTunes U iOS app, which lets you access complete courses from leading universities and plenty of free educational content. Read more »

IPv6 to finally go live on June 6 2012, countdown begins

by 7 comments

We knew it had to happen eventually, but now we already have an exact date to look forward to. Google has just announced that it will be joining a bunch of other major internet companies in a coordinated launch of the next-generation Internet protocol on June 6 this year.

IPv6 is the replacement for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, which ran out of addresses quite some time ago. Read more »

Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II vs Samsung I9100G Galaxy S II – know the differences [TABLE]

by 82 comments

As you might have heard, Samsung introduced a second Galaxy S II international version, called I9100G in November. Back then the company plans for the device were unclear, but now we are starting to see what it’s all about.

The Samsung I9100G Galaxy S II replaces the original I9100 Galaxy S II smartphone in some markets. Many of our readers contacted us sharing their experience of buying a I9100, only to find out that they got the I9100G version.

The question is, should you really care if you get one or the other. To help you answer that we’ve put together a comparison table, which should highlight the differences between the two international Galaxy S II versions. Read more »