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Acer Iconia Tab A700 images leak, said to have 1920×1200 display and Tegra 3 processor

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We had heard about the Acer Iconia Tab A700 before but this is the first time we’re seeing actual images of the device. Well, not of the actual device because what you see below is just a dummy but that’s basically what the A700 will look like when it will launch.

As we had heard before, the A700 will have a 1920 x 1200 resolution display, the highest on any tablet so far and will be powered by the same quad-core Tegra 3 processor ticking inside the ASUS Transformer Prime. Read more »

LG announces 84-inch 3D Ultra Definition TV, will show it to you in person at CES

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LG is on a roll with the incredibly awesome televisions. After the 55-inch OLED TV that we saw last week, which also happened to be the world’s largest OLED TV, today they have announced the gigantic 84-inch 3D Ultra Definition TV, which, again, is the largest in the world.

The key feature here is the Ultra Definition panel, which has a resolution of 3840 x 2160, four times the resolution of current Full HD panels. It uses LG’s Slim and Narrow Bezel design, which makes the display look like it’s going from edge to edge and does not jut out too much from your wall. The TV will come with a set of passive 3D glasses. Read more »

RIM treats buyers with an end of year sale, slashes PlayBook price down to $199

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These days it seems there are only two ways to sell a tablet. Either you have to be Apple and your tablet is called the iPad or you bring the price down so low that people just cannot resist buying them. The first strategy has worked out well for Apple and second is working well for Amazon and in the past for a short time for HP too.

RIM hasn’t had much success with their PlayBook so for the past few months they have constantly been offering great discounts to entice buyers. Today we have another one of those sales that will end along with the year 2011. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy S II T989 and Skyrocket suffering from display issues

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Do you have a T-Mobile Galaxy S II (SGH-T989) or an AT&T Skyrocket? Then you might want to check if your display is having any issues.

According to a thread on xda-developers forum, a lot of T989 and Skyrocket users are complaining about vertical lines, blobs, circles and pixellation on their displays. The defect is especially pronounced at lower brightness levels, where you can see strange vertical lines as shown above depending upon what background you have. Read more »

Intel planning to bring Thunderbolt technology to PCs by April 2012

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The Thunderbolt technology, developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple, has great potential but so far has been limited to Apple’s computers. Soon, however, that will not be the case.

Digitimes is now reporting that Intel has notified its partners that the company will fully release the technology in April 2012, with several first-tier PC manufacturers already planning motherboards, notebook and desktop PCs to be released with Thunderbolt next year. Read more »

Samsung acquires Sony’s stake in S-LCD joint venture for $933 million

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A few years ago, Sony and Samsung entered into a joint venture to develop S-LCD panels. Today, the two companies have announced that Samsung will be buying Sony’s stake (50%) in the joint venture for 1.08 trillion Korean won, which is roughly US$933 million dollars.

The new agreement allows both the companies to continue cooperative engineering efforts focused on LCD panel technology and for Sony to secure a flexible and steady supply of LCD panels from Samsung, based on market prices without the responsibility and costs of having their own manufacturing facility. The transferring of shares and payment is expected to close by the end of January 2012. Read more »

JXD S7100 combines 7-inch Android tablet and gaming console into one, sells for $139.99

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Ever wanted a 7-inch Android tablet that also had gaming keys on the side? Then JXD has just the thing for you. Although the company usually spends its time making PSP clones, this time they have gone ahead and made something original. Oh, wait. Never mind.

The device has a 7-inch display with a rather unimpressive 800 x 480 resolution. What is impressive, however, is the processor it runs on. The S7100 has the same dual-core Cortex A9 with Mali-400 GPU found under the hood of Samsung’s Galaxy S II. Read more »

Apple’s Newsstand app helped increase readership, Popular Science sees growth of over 13% in the first week itself

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Some of you iOS users might think that the Newsstand app on your homescreen is absolutely useless but certain publications, particularly Popular Science and all its new readers will want to disagree with you.

According to the chart above, courtesy of Mag+, a division of Popular Science’s publisher Bonnier Corporation, you can see that sales of the magazine suddenly shot up in the second week of October this year, with a growth of over 13% in that week alone and also an increase in the growth of the magazine after that period. Read more »

LG to showcase 55-inch OLED TV at CES 2012, claims it to be the world’s largest

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LG has a special treat in store for CES visitors next year, a massive 55-inch TV that uses an OLED panel, the largest to be used on any TV yet. LG claims that the panel has a contrast ratio of 100,000:1.

Compared to other OLED TVs, the LG TV uses a White OLED or WOLED panel. Unlike AMOLED panels that use RGB subpixels placed next to each other, WOLED panels stack the subpixels one above the other, which results in lower error rate, clearer picture and low color distortion at wider viewing angles. Read more »

Google pays Mozilla close to a billion dollars to stay the default search engine in Firefox

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There is a good reason why companies like Mozilla can give away their software for free. That’s because they get a lot from search engine providers to include their search engines inside the browser. So far Google has been the default search engine in Firefox and now they have signed another three-year contract with Mozilla to keep their position at the top of the search box.

This time however, they are paying a lot more to Mozilla than they did last time, almost three times as much. Google will be paying around $300 million per year for three years, which is close to a billion dollars. So how did Google suddenly become so generous? The reason is Microsoft. Read more »

Developer roots MOTOACTV, lets you play Angry Birds on it while you run into a lamppost

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There was a time when if something could stand still long enough someone would install Linux on it. The same is true for Android today. And so the latest gadget to get an Android port is the recently announced sports tracker, Motorola’s MOTOACTV.

In its defense the device already runs a highly disguised version of Gingerbread but it still wouldn’t have been easy. Developer Chris Wade, the guy responsible for the useful but woefully misnamed Dingleberry jailbreak for the BlackBerry PlayBook, is the one responsible for achieving this feat. But before he actually installed the new OS, he ripped open the device apart first. Read more »

Sony promises Ice Cream Sandwich update to Tablet S, fails to mention a release date

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Sony may not have had a lot of success in the tablet market but it is not going to abandon those who decided to spend their money on their Tablet S. And so to show that it will continue to support the device, Sony has just announced its intention to upgrade the tablet to Ice Cream Sandwich.

Unfortunately, Sony failed to mention any release date for the update, instead requesting its users to stay tuned. They did not say anything about the Tablet P either, which also runs Android Honeycomb at the moment. Read more »

Nokia adds classic Snake game to their Facebook page, brings back old memories

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Before there was Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies, there was Snake. One of the two games found on old Nokia phones (the other one being Space Impact), Snake is single-handedly responsible for taking away many hours of precious time from people’s lives, none of which they regret because it was just so much.

Unfortunately, you don’t get Snake on Nokia phones these days. Not the old fun one, anyway. And Nokia seems to understand how much people miss it. So they have brought it back, but it’s not on their phones anymore but on Facebook. Read more »

Rovio puts the ‘Play’ in PlayBook, brings Angry Birds to the tablet

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Other than the lack of a native email, calendar and contact app, the biggest item on the list of things you can’t do on a BlackBerry PlayBook is play Angry Birds. These days you can probably play Angry Birds on washing machines and microwave ovens as well, so its absence on the PlayBook was a bit disappointing.

However, if you’re one of the PlayBook owners or planning to buy one now that the prices have dropped so much, you don’t have to worry about missing out on all the bird flinging action because Rovio has just launched the entire Angry Birds series on the BlackBerry App World. Read more »

AMD’s $549 Radeon HD 7970 launched, gets benchmarked

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The highly anticipated AMD 7xxx-series GPU are finally arriving and the first one out of the gate is the Radeon HD 7970. This is the first GPU to utilize the 28nm process technology and according to AMD is the fastest single-GPU graphics card in the market today.

The 7970 is clocked at 925MHz and can be overclocked to 1.1GHz. It has 2,048 stream processors and 3GB of GDDR5 memory with 384-bit memory bus. It is also the first graphics card in the world to use the Direct3D 11.1 technology and AMD’s Graphics Core Next GPU architecture and natively supports PCI Express 3.0. Read more »