Tag Archives: Gear & Gadgets

Samsung Galaxy S 4 now officially available at Verizon Wireless

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Verizon Wireless customers can purchase the Samsung Galaxy S 4 handset today online or from a Verizon retail store. The carrier is offering the handset for $199.99 with a new two-year contract, or you can stick with the “month to month” service and get the device for the full $649.99.

The handset features a 1080p Super AMOLED screen, Android 4.2.2, a Quad-core 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 SoC, and 2GB of RAM. It will be sold at Verizon with 16GB of memory, though the phone does support up to a 64GB microSD card.

Hat tip to Android Police for this one: AT&T today also teased its “aurora red” version, which can be purchased for the subsidized price of $199.99. It’s $639.99 for those who want to go contract-free. The preorders for the red handset begin tomorrow, but it isn’t slated to arrive until June 14th. It will feature 16GB of storage and it is apparently exclusive to AT&T.

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Source: HTC has sold around 5 million One smartphones

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Despite the fact that HTC is shedding executives like cat hair onto a new black suit, things aren’t all doom and gloom at the company. The Wall Street Journal recently spent some time with an unnamed HTC executive who noted that the company has sold about 5 million One handsets since the smartphone’s launch.

The HTC One.
Florence Ion

“Orders are pretty good so far and are still more than what we can supply,” the executive told the WSJ. What isn’t clear from the source’s statement is whether the 5 million number actually refers to smartphones in the hands of consumers or if it’s simply the number of handsets sold to retailers. If it’s the latter, a lot of those HTC One smartphones could still be sitting in unopened boxes.

Five million seems like a lot, but it’s only half the number of Galaxy S 4s that Samsung has moved. However, Samsung’s 10 million “sold” number explicitly refers to sales to carriers and retailers. There aren’t yet 10 million S 4 handsets in the wild.

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AMD aims to win the converged device era with new Xbox One-like chips

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AMD today is announcing three new families of chips that it hopes will dominate the market of high-end tablets, low-end laptops, and converged hybrid devices. The chips—which will come to market variously as the A4 and A6 Elite Mobility series; the A4, A6, and E series; and the A6 and A10 Elite series—are close siblings to the processors found in both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

All the processors are built around the same building blocks: two or four Jaguar CPU cores, paired with AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU. They support AMD’s heterogeneous uniform memory access technology, too, designed to make it easier to share data and computation between the CPU and GPU. The differences are their power usage, clock speeds, number of GPU cores, and level of integration.

Formerly codenamed Temash, the A4 and A6 Elite Mobility series are full systems-on-chip, adding PCI express, SATA, USB, and other I/O controllers to the CPU and GPU. SKUs range from a 3.9W dual-core 1GHz part with a 225MHz GPU to an 8W quad-core 1.4GHz (maximum)/1GHz (base) part with a 400/300MHz (maximum/base) GPU, the A6-1450.

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Wi-Fi chip pushes 1.7Gbps over four streams using 802.11ac standard

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Quantenna today announced an 802.11ac Wi-Fi chipset that pushes 1.7Gbps of data over four wireless streams.

The first chips based on the 802.11ac standard hit 1.3Gbps last year by creating three streams of 433Mbps each. (With the older 802.11n standard, the maximum throughput for a single stream is 150Mbps.) Quantenna’s QSR1000 chips based on 802.11ac are thus a minor evolution over what was already available, using Multi-user MIMO technology with four spatial streams to hit 1.7Gbps.

The new Quantenna chips will be available to manufacturers in Q3 2013, but there’s no word on availability of wireless routers using the chips. “The chip is designed for home routers as well as for enterprises in need of wire-like reliability,” a Quantenna spokesperson told Ars. Quantenna’s announcement said the chips will be “equally at home in access points, set-top boxes, and consumer electronics.”

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Google pushes an update to Drive, giving it a much needed makeover

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Google released an update today for its Drive application that adds a new user interface and categorizes items in the company’s signature card-style.

A sidebar pops in for navigation.

Documents are splayed out in tile form.

Get a preview of your documents and view them, one-by-one, in the Drive application.

Users can swipe between files to see quick previews and download a copy for offline viewing. The update also includes a “scan” function, which uses the camera to snap photos of receipts and important documents and then converts them into PDFs. After you snap the photo, you can adjust the crop or select whether or not you want to leave it as a color document or convert it to black or white. Drive can also recognize the text in scanned documents with Optical Character Recognition, so you can search for keywords and phrases within those files.

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Several senior HTC employees depart following HTC First disaster

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The HTC One is good. Some employees appear to think it’s not good enough, soon enough.
Casey Johnston

HTC appears to have shed several key team members following the launch of its HTC One and HTC First phones, per a report from The Verge. The most recent departure is the company’s chief product officer, Kouji Kodera, who left HTC last week.

The Verge notes that Kodera is only the latest in a slate of exits, which, over the last three months, have included a product strategy manager, global retail marketing manager, and director of digital marketing. The first two former employees are now at Microsoft, while former digital marketing head John Starkweather is now at AT&T.

The HTC One launched mostly to rave reviews. But the flagship HTC phone found itself, yet again, in the shadow of Samsung’s high-profile Galaxy S 4 launch, just like the HTC One X with the Galaxy S III. While reviewers have praised the design and camera on the HTC One, it appears to not be enough to overcome Samsung’s Android market dominance—the S 4 was last week on track to hit 10 million units in sales, despite having been on the market only a few weeks. It doesn’t help that HTC’s golden phone has been hamstrung by manufacturing shortages.

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Yahoo gives Flickr a new face, a new app, and a new business model

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Recent activity on the Web site.

Buying Tumblr isn’t the only big thing that Yahoo has done today. Flickr, the photo storage and sharing site bought by Yahoo way back in 2005, has been brought into the 21st century with a new look, new pricing, and a new Android app.

Gone is the old Flickr interface of small thumbnails, gobs of whitespace, and lots of metadata. In its place, the site has big thumbnails, full-screen pictures by default, and metadata for each image tucked below the fold. Flickr’s Lightbox view, that removes the clutter around the page and shows pictures on their own, remains available.

The home page now shows photos of everyone you subscribe to with the most recent handful of pictures that your contacts have uploaded. Each user’s photostream displays a big tiled view of their pictures. This isn’t entirely new to Flickr—it was a feature of the site’s Explore page—but it’s new to individual user pages.

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Arduino and Wi-Fi, together in the immediate future

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The Arduino Yún (Yún means “cloud” in Chinese.)
Arduino

At today’s Bay Area Maker Fair, Arduino announced its new board, the Arduino Yún. The board is an Arduino Leonardo running Linino, a Linux fork based on OpenWRT. The board is Wi-Fi capable, which Arduino hopes will encourage people to use the boards to make cloud-ready projects.

In an official statement the company explained: “Historically, interfacing Arduino with complex Web services has been quite a challenge due to the limited memory available. Web services tend to use verbose text based formats like XML that require quite a lot or ram to parse. On the Arduino Yún we have created the Bridge library which delegates all network connections and processing of HTTP transactions to the Linux machine.”

Earlier this week, another company called Spark Devices also launched a similar idea on Kickstarter called Spark Core, putting forward a Wi-Fi capable board for Arduino projects that permits wireless programming and the ability to interface with Web services. The company had originally asked for $10,000, and has since raised over $300,000. (The campaign ends June 1).

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