Sony forces up PlayStation Plus

Finally, Sony makes a move that may finally unseat Microsoft's dominance of the online home gaming experience.

This week PlayStation Plus members can download 12 games free, including major titles such as Infamous 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, and Saints Row 2. The company expects to start bringing more free games to the table each month, suggested Sony PlayStation President Jack Tretton who announced the addition today at E3.

Launched in June 2012 (and announced at E3 2010), the PlayStation Plus premium subscription service currently offers users discounted games, full game trials, access to betas and demos, and other services for the PlayStation 3. It never truly caught on with consumers the way Microsoft's Xbox Live online service did, but Plus still added much needed value to the PS3 online experience.

Will bolstering the games available through the PlayStation Plus subscription service be enough to entice gamers to open their wallets? We'll see.

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Verizon's 300 Megabyte per second Fios strategy to price $205

Verizon spurred our interest last week when it declared that it would twice the rate of its top-tier Fios strategy but didn't expose how much it would price.

The new assistance, which will increase connections to 300 Megabyte per second for downloading and 65 Megabyte per second for submissions, will price clients $204.99 monthly, according to supposed training material (see below) sent to The Brink by an unknown Verizon worker. While that may sound like a lot to spend on Websites, that price is only $5 more than Verizon clients pay for the present top-tier, 150 Megabyte per second strategy.

Price and rate changes are coming to Verizon's lower-speed programs as well. The price of the organization's base 15/5 Megabyte per second assistance will improve $10 to $64.99, while the costs for the new 50/25 Megabyte per second and 150/65 Megabyte per second programs will remain the same from their forerunner programs, at $74.99 and $94.99, respectively.

Month-to-month programs will equipment on another $5, as will programs that aren't associated with current telephone assistance. The two top-tier programs also require an equipment update that will price $100, but it won't apply to new clients, present 150 Megabyte per second clients, or those who make to a two-year agreement for the assistance, which is predicted to go into effect May 17.

Verizon CFO Fergie Shammo unveiled last 30 days at an buyer meeting that the organization organized to improve the costs and fees of its Online registration programs. The organization is working to profit the $23 million it's invested on its Fios roughage network through 2010.

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New samsung Universe S III teardown exposed

Okay, so after months and months of hype – quite possibly even too much hype – the Samsung Galaxy S III is finally a known quantity. Of course there are some details that still have yet to be sewn up, but at least we’re no longer holding our breath trying to figure out every little thing like if it’s the Galaxy S III or the Galaxy S3. The one thing we really want to see, though, is what’s really inside.

Enter iFixIt, one of the most popular resources for information about all the inner workings of the latest electronic devices. Apparently it was pretty easy for the folks over there to dig into it since the only things holding the phone together were standard screws. On the face of it, it’s very similar to the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Nexus.

However, there are a lot of components inside the frame that sits right below the motherboard. It also looks like the construction of the device is pretty easily understood, making it likely pretty easy to perform repairs and troubleshoot mechanical problems. In addition, this means that hardware modifications probably won’t present much of a problem.

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iPhone Oddities: 10 Unique Ways that Apple company Creates, Provides Its Legendary Handset

Apple’s iPhone is officially the world’s most popular smartphone. Tens of millions of units of the device are sold to customers around the world each quarter and there is currently no product on store shelves today that can come even close to matching that figure. The iPhone is the benchmark by which all other smartphones are judged, and it’s widely viewed among reviewers and consumers alike as a device that deserves that crown.

But that doesn’t mean that the iPhone is perfect. As noted before, the iPhone has some flaws, including a less-than-desirable camera and lack of 4G, that doesn’t make it ideal for everyone. In addition, the device is surrounded by some rather surprising market and feature quirks that raise questions about how Apple made some of its decisions. From its choice to ignore T-Mobile to its old debate over not offering Flash support, Apple has made some odd decisions over the last several years.

Read on to find out what sort of oddities are surrounding Apple’s iPhone, and why, at least in some cases, they’ll never end:

1. No friend to T-Mobile

Apple has always offered the iPhone on AT&T’s network and last year brought the device to Verizon and Sprint. This year, it has made a serious push into the regional carriers. Along the way, however, Apple has turned its back on T-Mobile. It’s an odd decision, considering T-Mobile is a major carrier and has more customers than any of the smaller regional carriers. Why is Apple ignoring T-Mobile? And more importantly, when will it stop?

2. Apple’s no-4G stance

Although Apple has brought 4G LTE to the iPad, the company has yet to give the same treatment to its iPhone. It’s an odd decision, considering so many competitors have already introduced 4G smartphones. Hopefully Apple will support the ultra-high-speed network when the iPhone 5 launches later this year.

3. High subsidies: take it or leave it

In the vast majority of cases in the mobile space, smartphone makers aren’t so willing to charge carriers an exorbitant amount of cash to carry their products. In fact, they usually come to some sort of agreement to make it easier for carriers to want to sell their devices. But with Apple, everything is different. For years now, the company has been selling the iPhone for $600 or more to carriers, and Apple has given no indication it’ll budge from those prices.

4. Touch...to a point

Apple might have been the first company to truly popularize touch screens in the mobile space. But to call its iPhone a fully touch-enabled device would be incorrect. Since it was released, the iPhone has come with a home button and in order to quickly change volume settings, set the phone to vibrate, or turn off the screen, physical buttons are required. When will Apple finally go all-touch?

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New samsung Universe Observe LTE vs Samsung Android Razr Maxx: Will Samsung's Mobile phone Defeat The Motorola's Best Bet?

The Samsung Galaxy Note LTE was released in January and comes with the trademark large screen that allows users to view more with less scrolling and transitions. It also features the S Pen stylus, which integrates with the device's native apps to offer a richer and more interactive experience.

The Motorola Droid Razr Maxx is a feature-packed smartphone that offers a powerful battery as well as high-speed 4G LTE compatibility.

Samsung's Galaxy Note LTE features a gigantic 5.3in Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1280x800 pixels at 285 pixel per inch (ppi). It includes the TouchWiz User Interface. The Droid Razr Maxx comes with a 4.3in Super AMOLED Advanced capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 960x540 pixels at 256 pixels per inch (ppi). It includes Corning Gorilla Glass which protects the screen from damages, as does the Galaxy Note LTE.

Processor

The Galaxy Note LTE is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8660 Snapdragon chipset with a dual-core 1.5 GHz Scorpion processor. Motorola's Droid Razr Maxx is powered by a 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core CPU and TI OMAP 4430 chipset. Both the Galaxy Note LTE and the Droid Razr Maxx sport 1GB of RAM.

Camera

Both the Galaxy Note LTE and the Droid Razr Maxx boast an eight megapixel rear-facing camera with auto-focus and LED flash. The sporting features are geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection and image stabilisation. Both smartphones allow users to record video of 1080p.

The Galaxy Note LTE features a two megapixel front-facing camera, whereas the Droid Razr Maxx includes a front-facing camera of 1.3 megapixels.

Operating System

Both smartphones run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), which is upgradable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

Storage

Both the Galaxy Note LTE and the Droid Razr Maxx have 16GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot with additional memory space of 32GB.

Connectivity

The Galaxy Note LTE features Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi hotspot. It offers support to Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP and EDR.

The Droid Razr Maxx comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot. It supports Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP, LE + EDR technology.

Battery

The Samsung smartphone packs a Li-Ion 2500mAh standard battery that allows for talk time of up to 10 hours and stand by time of up to 252 hours.

In comparison, the Droid Razr Maxx comes with Li-Ion 3300mAh standard battery that provides for talk time of up to 21 hours 30 minutes. It allows for stand by time of up to 380 hours.

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Panasonic to expose PS3, Vita e-book platform

If you like the idea of ebooks, but hate the fact that you can’t read them from 10 feet away on the living room sofa, Sony might have the solution to your problems. Okay, we’re exaggerating a bit. There’s a rumor that Sony is working on a digital books section to the PlayStation Store, but it is hardly going to try to be a competitor to the Kindle, iBooks, or Nook.

According to a report on MCV, the service will be called “Storyteller” and it is likely that it will also be available on the more portable Playstation Vita system. Downloadable books and other content will be available through the Playstation Store, potentially via a brand new dedicated channel in the same way that games and video are currently broken up into different sections within the digital download platform.

According to the report, there will be an emphasis on children’s content, meaning Sony sees this as perhaps an interactive storybook platform for your children. Unfortunately for Sony, it doesn’t exactly have a great track record in this space. Even though its Reader ebook device beat the Kindle to the market, it failed to captivate consumers. And specifically within the Playstation business, Sony launched a digital comic service for the PSP, allowing users to download comic books and read them in between gaming sessions. That service was subsequently shut down due to lack of interest.

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Serious Dev Group Produces 'Absinthe' Jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1

Ready to jailbreak your iOS device? Great! You're in luck – a brand-new update to a popular jailbreaking tool was just released yesterday and, with it, you'll be able to perform the most elegant of the jailbreaking techniques: The fabled "untethered" jailbreak.

Gibberish? Gotcha. We'll start from the beginning. The Chronic Dev Team, prolific iOS exploiters that they are, released their updated Absinthe 2.0 tool yesterday. The software couldn't make it any easier for owners of a wide list of iOS devices (detailed on the official Green Pois0n website) to jailbreak them, so long as they're running the latest 5.1.1 update for Apple's iOS.

What does jailbreaking allow you to do? First off, you can tap into third-party app stores (like Cydia) to grab apps and games that you wouldn't otherwise be able to find on Apple's App Store. Additionally, a number of these apps allow you to use your device in ways Apple wouldn't allow: For example, IntelliScreenX jacks up your Notifications Center with all kinds of crazy new options, whereas Gridlock allows you to set exactly where you want your icons to go on your home screen (no automatic alignment!)

Convinced yet? Here's one downside to jailbreaking your device: Installing new updates from Apple can be a pain in the butt, as they might very well jack up your device or revert it back to its normal, unjailbroken state. Tread carefully. Also, any problems you have with your iPhone or iPad that might be taken care of by Apple's Genius Bar could be yours to deal with exclusively – jailbreaking does void your Apple warranty, for what it's worth.

On the plus side, the Absinthe tool simplifies jailbreaking down to a (nearly) one-click process. To start, you'll want to connect your device to iTunes and back everything up – a step that's not to be overlooked, trust us. Because once you've done that, you're going to want to wipe your device back down to its factory defaults using the "Erase all Content and Settings" option found within your device's Settings menu.

After that, make sure your device is still connected to your computer via its USB cable and run Absinthe. Click on the big "Jailbreak" button. Make a sandwich… and don't disconnect your device until Absinthe is done.

Once finished, go back to your device in iTunes and restore all of the content you previously backed up. Ta-da! Your iOS device is now jailbroken, your information has been placed back onto your device, and you're free to fiddle around with the grand new (jailbroken) world you've opened up.

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From the Android version OpenSignalMaps found nearly 4,000

If you look at all the different ways people can modify their Android software and all the various kinds of hardware and operating systems, do you know how many different platforms you’ll find? Apparently, there are nearly 4,000 “distinct” Android devices in the wild right now. You read that right – four thousand. You think iOS has that many?

 

That data came from a company called OpenSignalMaps, which has collected information from 681,900 Android devices through its app. So what this means is that of those 680,000+ devices, there are 3,997 that are unique. The most popular one, for example, is the Samsung Galaxy S II, with 61,389 people owning that phone and running the same version of Android.

So how are there so many? “One complication is that custom ROMs can overwrite the android.build.MODEL variable that we use for the device model,” the company noted. As a matter of fact, “A staggering 1,363 device models appear only once in our database.” If you drill down to the main factor, the main version number, Android seems to be more fragmented than ever. The most common version of the OS is Gingerbread, but even as the #1 version, it’s only powering 55.4% of devices.

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GeForce Grid, Cloud Games Without Lag obviously has announced NVIDIA

GPU manufacture NVIDIA today announced GeForce Grid, a cloud gaming platform capable of “streaming next-generation games to virtually any device, without the lag that hampers current offerings.” The tech leverages NVIDIA’s Kepler-based family of graphics processors to deliver low latency gaming over the cloud. A single Grid instance can simultaneously encode up to eight game streams, allowing providers to scale efficiently with less overhead in regards to power and costs.

What’s under the hood? A Grid GPU boasts 3,072 CUDA cores — the same as NVIDIA’s flagship GTX690 card. It also includes 8GB of VRAM, with memory and shader performance clocking in at 320 GB/sec and 4.7 TFLOPS, respectively. The wattage rating comes in at a respectable 250W — reasonable when you consider how much power the card is packing.

Impressively, with the Grid tech, NVIDIA says server power-consumption per game stream has been reduced to about one-half that of previous implementations. Under ideal conditions, the Grid platform reduces server latency to as little as 10 milliseconds. According to NVIDIA, “gamers will feel like they are playing on a gaming supercomputer located in the same room. Lightning-fast play is now possible, even when the gaming supercomputer is miles away.”

OnLive competitor Gaikai will be one of the first providers to deploy the new tech. Additionally, several industry figures and developers have praised NVIDIA’s latest effort.

“Cloud has the potential to deliver an even more powerful experience in the future by enabling ultra-high-end GPUs like the GeForce GTX 680 to stream ultra-high-quality graphics such as those made possible by UE4 to a huge range of devices, well beyond console capabilities. The result will be that more people can enjoy EPIC’s games on more devices at higher quality,” said Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney.

“It is exciting to watch how cloud gaming is becoming mature and gives better and better user experience — and NVIDIA’s GeForce GRID technology is example of it. We are looking forward to see how cloud computing using this technology will change the future of gaming and the overall gaming experience and how it will affect consoles and PCs,” said CD Projekt RED lead programmer Bartlomiej Wronski.

Many have questioned the viability of cloud-driven gaming platforms in the past, but it goes without saying that NVIDIA’s Grid tech looks to be a game-changer. Going forward, it’ll be exciting to see how the platform evolves.

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Bid to kill the lawsuit antitrust has been missing from E-book publishers

Apple and five book publishers lost their bid to have a private antitrust suit over electronic book pricing dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan denied on Tuesday a request by the defendants to throw out the complaint by plaintiffs seeking to represent a class of consumers. They say Apple and the publishers violated federal and California state law by conspiring to raise the price of e-books.

Last month, the U.S. government sued Apple and the publishers, Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster, saying they broke the law in setting prices for e-books. Cote is overseeing the government suit and private antitrust suits filed in federal court.

SOFTWARE

Juror dismissed in Android case

A juror in Oracle's lawsuit against Google over Android software was dismissed by the trial judge, who said the case will proceed with 11 jurors.

The juror was dismissed after she said car trouble forced her to miss Tuesday's session in federal court in San Francisco.

TELEVISION

ESPN confers with AppleTV

Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN sports network is talking with Apple about including the WatchESPN application on the computer maker's television device, network executive Sean Bratches said.

ESPN subscribers with AppleTV would gain access to the network's Internet service on their sets. The sports network said a deal isn't imminent.

The most-watched U.S. sports network is making more programming available online and on mobile devices to reach viewers away from their TVs. ESPN already provides the app to subscribers with Microsoft's Xbox video-game console as part of some pay-TV plans, including those from Verizon Communications' FiOS and Comcast.

CLOUD

Nvidia advances remote access

Nvidia Corp. introduced a version of its processors that will work in cloud-computing centers, offering users the ability to stream advanced graphics through the Internet to remote devices such as Apple's iPad.

Nvidia collaborated with software maker Citrix Systems to make the technology work, Chief Executive Officer Jen-Hsun Huang said at a company conference Tuesday in San Jose. Nvidia is one of the top three providers of graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Huang said his company is working on several applications of the technology intended to improve the capabilities of electronics devices such as smart phones, tablets, televisions and personal computers. He demonstrated a new, high-end video game being played by two competitors via the Internet, one using a tablet and the other using a television.

"With the cloud we can literally put GPU computing in the hands of billions of mobile users around the world," he said.

In an another demonstration, Huang showed an iPad remotely accessing a PC running Microsoft's Windows operating system. The technology may be deployed by customers such as phone-service providers or Internet-access providers.

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