Visiting factories in the Far East often offers an amazing experience. For us westerners, it is easy to often criticize the living conditions in the factories, while conveniently forgetting the world outside the factory walls. In order to get to those factories, one must travel through the real, non-touristy China that has five star hotels without a dedicated sewage system, showing signs of country that is going from 19th century into a 21st century, skipping a lot of phases of development which made the western world inflexible. Yet the level of information that can come from those products can blow your mind. While touring the
Blizzard News: Starcraft II and WoW Trailers, New Game on PAX East?
Leading up to the imminent release of the second part of StarCraft II called Heart of the Swarm, Blizzard Entertainment released an epic cinematic trailer for the game. The game will be released on March 13th but for now, this is as close as it gets: Not only will Blizzard deliver the next installment of StarCraft II in less than two weeks, the release of a major content patch for the current World of Warcraft expansion (Mists of Pandaria) is scheduled to be released very soon. While an official release date is not yet announced, chances are the patch will arrive as soon as next
Exclusive: Qualcomm-Powered Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-i9500 Performance Revealed
On March 14th, 2013 executives of Samsung Mobile will gather with select members of the international media in New York City to unveil the successor of the Samsung Galaxy SIII. Thanks to Power Board, we now know what the performance is. Last year, we broke the story about Samsung Galaxy SIII and its relatively disappointing performance in the world version of the phone. Even though this was one of first quad-core phones to arrive on the market, we were unpleasantly surprised to see that the Exynos 4412 SoC inside the GT-I9300 (Galaxy SIII) featured Mali-400T series graphics processor. Needless to say, we had a fair
HTC Announces the 4.7" HTC One 1080P Phone with Ultrapixel Camera
HTC today announced their newest flagship phone, simply called the HTC One. This phone has been originally rumored as the HTC M7 and some of the latest leaked photos actually nailed the product shots on the dot. The HTC One is simply a culmination of all of the work HTC has done over the years in terms of design and hardware functionality. It is a 4.7" phone with a 1080P screen, which amounts to a resolution of 468 PPI, the highest of any phone ever. Yet, internally, the phone is equally impressive featuring a 1.7 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chip and 2GB of RAM, which
Nvidia GeForce Titan Launches February 18th, 2013: Loses to GTX 690, AMD HD 7990
The rumors are turning into a pre-launch mountain of news. According to popular technology websites, on Monday, February 18th at 12:01AM EST Nvidia will lift the NDA on GeForce GTX Titan, "world’s most powerful graphics card." Our sources are placing the date on other dates in the week, such as Tuesday, or even February 25th/26th, but we believe that is the standard tactic to find out who is leaking. But let’s leave politics and sneaky tactics aside, because this product is one to be watched. Let’s move onto the specs, shall we? Introducing the GeForce GTX TitanAs you know by now, the GeForce GTX Titan is
Crazy Rumor: Intel to Acquire Nvidia, Jen-Hsun the New CEO of Intel?
The semiconductor business is a highly cyclical one, with average length of technology agreements lasting for not more than four quarters. Thus, as the end of every year approaches, you’ll see various rumors taking shape – which are a typical result of companies discussing supply for the next product cycle. One traditional rumor is the negotiation for the Apple TV between Apple and Sharp, for example – which if true, would typically be agreed around 2-3 cycles in advance, rather than a "let’s do it tomorrow" gung-ho approach which rumor sites typically insist on. Thus, when we heard a rumor that Intel and Nvidia are
New Quadcore Sony Flagship 1080P Phones for 2013 Rumored
Thanks to our friends over at PhoneArena, we’ve caught wind of a Chinese Sony rumor site‘s forum post we’ve been able to discover some rumors about Sony’s planned flagship phones for 2013. These phones will all feature Qualcomm’s latest S4 class SoCs, which is no surprise considering that all of Sony’s current phones do as well. The rumored phones are the Sony Xperia 4, Sony Xperia 5R, and Sony Xperia 6 and one unnamed phone. The first of the three phones will be a 4" phone with a 720P resolution and 360 PPI (higher than the iPhone). Additionally, this phone will have a 12MP camera
Semiconductor Rumors: 14nm Node and 450mm Wafers by 2015
According to DigiTimes, quoting TSMC?s R&D boss Shang-yi Chiang, TSMC will begin volume production on 14nm in 2015. Intel has been shipping in production volumes on its 32nm process since 2009 and originally intended to start shipping 22nm process this year. However, there are rumors that the 22nm node will be delayed. DigiTimes said earlier this month: "Intel has recently decided to delay its Ivy Bridge platform launch from the end of 2011 to March 2012…" – and the server "Romley" platform is plagued not just by issues with 22nm process, but with chipset issues as well. Intel?s technology road map in late spring called
Rumors: GlobalFoundries Building Second Fab in New York
Thursday, the Times Union, a Mohawk Valley New York newspaper, started the rumor that GlobalFoundries is building an additional fab. They claim a local labor union official has the inside scoop. Frank Natalie, business agent for Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 7 labor union, said Tuesday at a labor rally in East Greenbush, New York: "What we’re hearing is they’re applying to the state for a substantial amount of financial assistance." GlobalFoundries is located near Malta, New York on the Luther Forest Technology Campus, a 1,414-acre (573 hectares) site specifically designed for semiconductor and nanotechnology manufacturing and other innovative technologies. GlobalFoundries owns 223 acres at Luther
Rumors of Fraud Rock OCZ?s Stock on the NASDAQ
Today marked the day when an article published by a company known as Copperfield Research caused OCZ?s stock to drop by 30% in a matter of minutes. The article only gained traction once it was posted on the popular investment website Seeking Alpha. It makes 15 allegations pertaining to the company?s statements, financial transactions, and company practices including those of the CEO. They also stated in their disclaimer that they, ?As of the publication date, the author of this report has a short position in the company covered herein and stands to realize gains in the event that the price of the stock declines. The
Striking Infographic Rounds Up iPhone 5 Rumors
It’s hard to stay sane with all the hoopla surrounding a fifth-generation iPhone. Per usual, the blogosphere is playing the guessing game and recycling wild Apple predictions coming out of the rumor mill. For non-technophiles contradicting reports make it difficult to separate wheat from chaff. Big media isn’t helping either. Historically, there has been little credence in speculative reports based on "sources familiar with the matter" that, need I say, prefer not to be named because "they were not authorized to speak publicly" on the matter. Don’t take it all to heart. This is infotainment-based society and we readily accept rumor mongering as part of our
Rumor: iPhone nano to Drop Local Memory in Favor of Cloud Storage
Rumors about a miniaturized iPhone version intensified last week when Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch harmonized with reports based on talks with "people familiar with the matter." This week, a seal of approval from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal gave the rumor a new breathe of life. Folks who allegedly saw a prototype device codenamed N97 reiterated that Steve Jobs, who recently took medical leave for an unspecified period, is focusing his energies on a line of inexpensive iPhones to be sold alongside its bigger counterpart. "Significantly lighter" and "about half the size of iPhone 4," the rumored iPhone nano is described as featuring "an edge-to-edge touchscreen"
Rumor: Apple Adding Verizon-Compatible iPad 2 to the Mix
Asia is on a roll regarding a rumored iPad 2 hardware refresh. On Tuesday, Taiwanese trade publication Digitimes reported about Apple’s purported plans to expand on the current iPad offering of WiFi and WiFi+3G models with a brand new CDMA model. The Cupertino company will assemble about half a million iPad 2 units in January, with the shipment ratio of Wi-Fi, UMTS and CDMA models at 3:4:3. The official iPad 2 launch is expected at the end of the first quarter, sources said and added the remaining iPad inventory should be enough to fill the gap between January and April of next year. This shift towards
HP Slate Dead On Arrival? And Other Rumors
Apple’s Steve Jobs said at their October earnings announcement that 7-inch tablets were dead on arrival. Seems the HP Slate team didn’t get Steve’s memo. HP’s enterprise-centric, MS Windows 7-based, tablet PC, is supposedly sold out. HP Slate is supposedly sold out… due to low number of units available. The HP Slate 500 features an 8.9" touch-screen, inward- and outward-facing cameras for video conferencing, a 1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540 processor, 64GB of NAND flash storage, and a Webcam port. Pricing starts at $799, and HP offers the device only through its Website. Rumors are that 9,000 units were sold and HP only
Wednesday?s Child Buyout Woes – A Rumor of Some Strength
A persistent rumor has surfaced recently and after checking around it seems to have some veracity. A well known startup company making splashes in the Solid State Storage sector is about to become the latest buyout of the year on Wednesday. We learned about the buyer and well, the potential announcement could not sound better. Naturally, disclosing it right now would be speaking out of school now, wouldn?t it? And then again it just may be a well placed rumor? tied well with the recent announcement of closing in on another round of funding. Take your best shot at guessing the involved players in the
AMD Launch on the Way, Dismisses Delay Rumors
Recently, we learned that AMD is launching their refresh of Evergreen architecture on the week starting October 18th. Soon after, rumors appeared that AMD is postponing the launch into November. We have talked with multiple sources in AMD’s own add-in-board ecosystem [AIB Partner List], and they all dismissed the rumors and confirmed to us that they will have Radeon HD 6000 series [desktop codename: Southern Islands] available for purchase in the week starting October 18th, 2010. Partners are from one side, enthused about the number of products that will be available for launch, but also worried about the performance of the parts now branded as
HTC Rumored To Have Tegra 2 Tablet in the Works
Monday evening at the Press get together for the GPU Technology Conference the rumor was that HTC had contracted Pegatron Technology to build a Tegra 2 tablet. According to the rumor, the HTC tablet PC will use nVidia’s Tegra 2 platform and Google’s Android operating system, a standard mix for nearly a dozen rumored tablets that have not begun shipping. The usual claims about features for the device are circulating and include a multi-touch panel with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels, a 32GB SSD [solid state drive], 2GB of RAM memory and several functions such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. No mention was made of
VisionTek rubbishes rumors, confirm secured funding in place
Several web sites ran a story that VisionTek, AMD’s North American channel partner – is about to go bust. Now, there are several types of events that happen prior to launching such a story but we won’t go and explore them now. What matters is that according to the information we have at hand, the rumor about VisionTek going bust looks like a bad re-run from 2002 [the first rumor of VisionTek going bust]. We spoke with Michael Innes, COO of VisionTek and in a long conversation we learned a lot of details about the company. According to Michael, it is not a secret that