IBLOG SPACE

It appears that we’re right now getting our first real-world look at the HTC Vigor, a device that’s been rumored to be Verizon’s follow-up device coming right after the DROID Bionic. This device appears in these photos to be a rather large display-having HTC device that’s got HTC’s Sense user interface aboard, four Android menu buttons across the bottom front letting us know that it’s still going to be running something before Ice Cream Sandwich, a front-facing camera, a back-facing camera with dual-LED flash, a lovely speaker grill on the front, two mics on the back for noise cancellation, another speaker grill in the back near the bottom, the HTC logo nicely framed on the back by ribs that cover the palm of the area where your hand will be resting, and – what’s that – a red rim around the camera lens. Previously we’ve heard just a bit about this device, specs that seem fairly possible given the current progression of things at the moment: a 4.3-inch display with 1280 x 720 pixel reso

If you’re one of the 10 people in the world that actually simply rented a bunch of television shows from iTunes over the last year or so, you’re going to need a tissue. Apple has decided to pull the plug on all TV show rentals from iTunes, leaving only two options for the viewing of TV-related media: the purchase of individual episodes or the “Season Pass” for a year of your favorite show. This should come as no shock to the public, but does point toward a couple of future options for Apple as far as how they handle television content, the first being the relatively new “iTunes in the Cloud” service we first saw a few months ago. The second option is of course the one that’s been proven successful since its inception: allowing users to pay for the show once and keep it forever. One of the two groups on board with the TV episode rental program’s 2010 price drop was Fox as owned by News Corp, (the other being Disney, a group which Steve Jobs is and was on the board of directors and is th

Just as we find Skype picking up its latest awesome relatively-new app group in GroupMe group chat service, the video chatting group has now launched their very own app directory for third party apps working with Skype’s telephony service. At the moment the platform is rather sparse, but as with what seems like every move Skype has made in the past few months especially, this program has great potential. As Skype’s brand power and collection of users grows, so too does this Skype App Directory have the possibility of growing with it – what wonders will we find? This is not the first group in existence to create its own app directory filled with apps related to their core values and- better yet – literal bits of their code. Just earlier this week we took a look at NVIDIA’s new web-based version of their “Tegra Zone” app directory, it containing applications and news bits directly tied to their newest dual-core mobile processor. Skype’s directory is a bit different in that it’s based on

Despite Windows 8 details and technical information remaining under wraps until Microsoft’s Build conference in September, some developers have already begun work on Windows 8 apps—well, at least the interface designs.ZDNet has come across two such apps, one a news reader for USA Today and the other a social travel app by Jetstream. The USA Today app was showcased in the portfolio of the company’s Art Director Robbie Dillon, who says that the design is in preparation for the Windows 8 release. However, that’s still several months away in 2012. Dillon also notes that the USA Today design will retain the look and feel of the Windows Metro UI to showcase the company’s content. Similarly, the social travel app by software development company Jetstream also doesn’t stray far from the Windows 8 Metro theme. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and boasts, “by the time most companies begin development on applications for a new operating system, we’ve been using it daily for month

The ongoing legal battle between Apple and Samsung has seen preliminary injunctions granted on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany as well as the Galaxy smartphones across Europe. But Samsung’s legal woes continue here in the US as well, with the trial for Apple’s main lawsuit against Samsung now moved to an earlier date, which will give the South Korean company less time to prepare its defense. The Northern District of California court has issued an order setting the new trial date for July 30, 2012. The date is still further out than the February 2012 date that Apple would have preferred, but is also much sooner than the March 2013 date that Samsung was hoping for. According to Foss Patents, most lawsuits of this complexity usually take 23 months to get to trial in California, making this 15.5-month time frame rather ambitious. The case involves 43 different claims between the two companies, including at least 12 utility patent counterclaims from Samsung. It’s also only one of 19

We know we’re getting close to the launch of the much delayed Motorola Droid Bionic when we start seeing official Verizon teaser videos for the phone. The most recent featured a Natalie Portman look-alike wielding a sword, but the phone itself never made an appearance. Perhaps more helpful for those who actually want to see the phone, is this newly leaked walk-through video. The video is silent but goes for a full four minutes to walk through the Droid Bionic interface, showing its static and live wallpapers and even throwing in an LTE speed test and pointing out a home screen bug. Overall, the phone is looking mighty speedy as animations and transitions pop up in a snap. And now that the Samsung Galaxy S II won’t be heading to Verizon, the Droid Bionic will indeed be the first and only dual-core LTE bad boy on the Verizon network for now. The phone is set to get a 1GHz dual-core processor, a 4.3-inch qHD display, a VGA front-facing camera, and a 8-megapixel rear-facing camera capabl

It seems almost obvious that the most requested function of a social networking initiative being produced in our modern world would be the ability to ignore or completely block someone from your spot in that social network. You wouldn’t want to have to interact with someone, would you? Heck no! It is because of that and because everyone is already fatigued of the trillion different opinions people have about the Steve Jobs transfer of power that Google has introduced a brand new Ignore function for their social networking site Google+. Soon you’ll be all alone once more! Before we go any further, you should know that there’s essentially always been a Block option in Google+ as well. As it happens, Google has newly modified that option to give you more of a definitive block for when you literally just want that certain person to go away for good. +Olga Wichrowska, a Google+ Engineer, explains the Ignore function while her co-worker +Sean Purcell explains the updated Block option in a vi

It appears very likely, now that we’ve got a cool slightly pixelated photo and everything, that Samsung will be releasing the Samsung Galaxy S II in the USA next week on three of the big four USA carriers with slightly different configurations, software and hardware included. What we’re still not clear on is why news has popped up surrounding Verizon not being on this list. Given another bit of very possibly legit information we got this morning, a Samsung Galaxy S II upgrade is on the way as well, this time with a slightly larger 4.5-inch display and 4G LTE capabilities. What could this possibly mean for Verizon? There are several factors to consider here, the first and very possibly the most important of which being that there’s a new iPhone coming to at least a couple of carriers in the next few months. Verizon is certainly on the list for future iPhone devices, so carrying a Samsung Galaxy S, perhaps the iPhone’s biggest competitor yet, may not be in the cards. On the other hand, i

New images have surfaced of the back casing of what could be a prototype of either the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5. The case is labeled with EVT for Engineering Verification Test and is dated June 7, 2011, but looks nearly identical to the current iPhone 4 design without any of the rumored design changes. The casing is also labeled with an internal model number of N94, which has been associated with the next-gen iPhone when the number first appeared in an iOS 4.3 SDK. The N94 was identified as supporting an A5 processor, which is the same that’s used in the iPad 2 and the same that’s believed to be in the iPhone 5. However, the iPhone 5 has long been rumored to feature a larger screen with a more dramatic design overhaul, featuring an almost tear-drop profile and a more rounded backing, whereas the leaked photo clearly shows a device with little change from the iPhone 4. Rumors persist that Apple may be introducing a cheaper variant of the current iPhone 4 in addition to the iPhone 5 and

As you may have already heard, that being if you do not live under a rock on the moon of course, that HP recently announced they’d be discontinuing production of their webOS-related products, including the TouchPad tablet, as well as looking to take an alternate path with webOS – more than likely attempting to keep the platform alive by licensing it out to alternate hardware manufacturers in the near future. While it seemed to some that announcing they’d be giving up on the hardware end of webOS in the first place sounded the death bell for the mobile OS, HP has taken a seemingly well conceived gamble and made the HP TouchPad webOS tabletcost between $99 and $149, resulting in monster sales and sold-out stores all across the USA. What they’re doing today is taking major advantage of the situation by offering up a handful of otherwise pay-to-own apps as completely free downloads. What you’ll be doing here, assuming you’ve got a TouchPad in your possession now or that one is heading your

The long rumored iPad-killer that could be Amazon’s upcoming tablet is expected to launch sometime in September or October. But with the recent $99 fire sales of the discontinued HP TouchPad doing amazingly well, there are new reports that Amazon may introduce their tablets at a similarly low price point to excite the masses. According to the New York Post, an insider source has revealed that the Amazon tablet will sell for “hundreds less” than the entry-level iPad, which retails for $499. Although that doesn’t mean the tablet will go for $99, it does mean it could be sold at most around $299. This sounds about right if Amazon is going the budget tablet route, as recent contenders in that space, such as the Vizio 8-inch Tablet, have had to drop down to that price point. Amazon is also known to take loss leaders with extreme discounts made up for by increased volume and distribution of other content and services from the Amazon ecosystem. The two rumored Amazon tablets include an entry-

Remember those videos we showed you a few days ago displaying what Samsung was teasing as their next BIG thing, this next big thing coming out at their IFA 2011 “Samsung Unpacked” and appearing very much to be an upgrade of the Samsung Galaxy S II? Turns out that’s more than likely the truth, as SammyHub say’s they’ve “confirmed” with Samsung that IFA 2011 will play host to a 1.5 GHz dual-core Samsung Galaxy S II with LTE capabilities and a lovely new form factor. Now we’re normally pretty willing to trust SammyHub when it comes down to it, but the way this story is written doesn’t appear to hold QUITE as much water as we’d normally expect from a source that says it’s speaking directly with Samsung. On the other hand, the specs that are now being listed do line up pretty darn close with what we know as the Samsung Celox, a Galaxy S II variant that lives in Korea and bumps the 4.3-inch display of the original Galaxy S II up to a 4.5-inch display, has a 1.5GHz dual-core snapdragon proces

Razer has long been known for their stylish gaming peripherals, but the company has now introduced its first ever gaming notebook, dubbed the Blade. The 17-inch laptop is meant as a desktop replacement and takes some styling cues from the 17-inch MacBook Pro with an aluminum unibody. However, it actually beats the Apple laptop in thinness. It also manages to be black, which is a color that Apple couldn’t seem to achieve with its MacBook Airs despiterumored attempts. Inside, the Razer Blade features a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-2640M processor, 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M with NVIDIA Optimus Technology, and 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 video memory. It also has a built-in HD webcam with a 320GB (7200RPM) SATA HDD. But what stands out the most is an integrated LCD touchscreen to the right of the keyboard that doubles as both a secondary display and a multitouch trackpad. It also includes 10 customizable shortcut keys that have their own displays. For all this gaming goodness, how

Google is shutting down its Slide team, which has been running as an independent unit since it was bought over a year ago for $200 million. Slide was a social apps startup with its acquisition part of Google’s plans to get more social. But, that was before the success of Google+. All of the Slide apps, including the newer ones that the team has been developing for the past year within Google, will get axed except for one. These soon to bid farewell apps include Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, and even the recently launched Photovine. The only one left standing is Prizes.org, which was developed for Google by the Slide team in China. The Slide acquisition last August was under the direction of past CEO Eric Schmidt, who sought not only Slide’s social advantage but also its proven leader Max Levchin, who was the founder of PayPal. Since then, Larry Page has stepped in as CEO and the Google+ efforts are proving to be strong under the lead of existing execs, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horo

IBM is staffed with some geeks with big aspirations for sure. The gang at IBM has whipped up a little storage array for an unnamed customer that will use it for some unnamed task. The storage array happens to be the largest in all the land at 120 petabytes. That is 120 million gigabytes. Apparently, the storage array is being designed for a new supercomputer installation IBM is working on. Some applications benefit from a huge amount of storage space. Things like climate modeling, and things having to do with genetic research, weather modeling, and the gas/petroleum industry can benefit from lots of storage. The 120-petabyte array is made up of 200,000 standard HDDs in a single massive pile of storage. IBM has tweaked the array so that when a disc goes down the data is slowly written back to the new disc to allow the supercomputer to continue operating normally. If you are wondering 120 petabytes could store about 24 billion 5MB MP3′s and more video than you could watch. In fact, the m

Here’s a really neat tablet concept that combines a transparent screen with augmented reality capabilities and a scanner. The different ways in which a tablet of this combination can be used seems endless, from purely scanning documents to translating text while hovering over a page to being an easy augmented reality navigation tool. The Iris tablet concept was created by a group of designers: Liu Wei, Yao Kai Chi, Hong Ruei Hong, and Cheng Ya Fang. Its transparent screen for augmented reality concept isn’t competely new, in fact, we’ve seen Apple file a patent application for something similar. But, to see the idea brought to life in renderings is a lot more exciting than patent diagrams. The scanning capabilities also aren’t far fetched, given the recently shown off LG LSM-100 prototype mouse that has very similar scanning capabilities. The mouse can be easily swiped over documents to scan them and it has it’s own neat concept video below. So, the Iris tablet concept is quite plausib

The Acer Aspire 3951 Ultrabook has been revealed with more detail in some leaked photos. We’ve seen some renderings of the ultra-slim laptop in the past when it was first rumored back in early August. These new images, however, are photos of the actual laptop out in the wild. The Aspire 3951 will be the first ultrabook from Acer and has most recently been rumored to launch as early as September to go head to head with an ultrabook from ASUS. Both ultrabooks, however, will ultimately be tempting fate against the popular MacBook Air. The Acer ultrabook is expected to initially be available in only a 13.3-inch model running Intel’s Sandy Bridge Core processor. It can be configured with either a 250GB HDD or a 500GB HDD. Another option is a 160GB SSD. Connectivity will include WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI, and USB. Pricing is estimated to be between $768 and $960.

Earlier this week we mentioned that QNX using Blackberry smartphones would get access to Android apps. Another interesting tidbit about a Blackberry product has now surfaced. This time it has to do with the PlayBook tablet and a leaked version of OS 2.0 that turned up online. Version 2 of the PlayBook OS is a QNX-based OS and if the leaked screen shots are legit, some changes are in store. You can see the images hint that the next version will have some new native apps like email, calendar, and contacts. However, one thing that is very interesting and of note on the leaked screens that support for Exchange Active Sync with IMAP, POP, CalDav, and CardDav accounts. What is notable missing in these screen shots is support for Blackberry’s own stuff. There is no support for Blackberry Exchange Server or Blackberry Internet Server accounts listed. Previously there had been rumors that other RIM smartphones like the Colt would not get BES support because it was too hard to implement. One of

Samsung’s legal team may have inadvertently confirmed rumors that the company is indeed working on the next Google phone dubbed the Nexus Prime. Rumors that the Nexus Prime would be the first handset to sportAndroid Ice Cream Sandwich emerged back in June. In an attempt to squash another rumor, the Samsung legal team issued a cease and desist letter that has the Nexus Prime literally written all over it. The cease and desist letter was a warning to an individual believed to have in possession the upcoming firmware for the Nexus Prime with the intention to release it to the public. The letter stated that “the Nexus Prime firmware is the exclusive property of Samsung and/or its partners, suppliers and affiliates.” Although details on the Nexus Prime are still scant, the phone is rumored to sport a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED display with a Texas Instruments OMAP4460 1.5GHz dual-core processor and possibly 4G LTE connectivity.

We have talked about a lot of DJ gear around here over the months. One of the last DJ systems we talked about was the Pioneer DDJ controllers for the Traktor software. I didn’t realize that Traktor also made its own DJ gear. Traktor has unveiled the new Kontrol S2 DJ controller that has a 2+1 setup with sample decks and mixing controls along with effect features. The DJ controller was specifically designed for use with the Traktor Pro 2 software that is used on other DJ systems as well. The S2 is intended to be a more portable alternative to the control S4 with four decks. The S2 uses the same jog wheels that the S4 uses and the S2 has ergonomic controls for cueing, looping, and effects. The integrated sound card is a 24-bit/96kHz unit with dual stereo outputs. Using the two playback decks and the sample decks the DJ can add up to eight simultaneous one-shot samples or beat-synced loops to the mix. The S2 also has a third channel for more creative techniques. Pricing and availability i

Those of us that can hear don’t understand what it’s like to not be able to hear at all or not be able to hear well. My grandfather used to have to turn the TV up as loud as it would go to hear what was being said. The rest of us couldn’t be in the same room when he watched. Many shows on TV today can be subtitled if the viewer needs, but few movies in the theater are subtitled. Sony has been working on a solution that would allow the hard of hearing to be able to watch a movie in the cinema along with the general audiences with no need to have the films subtitled. The glasses are simply called subtitle glasses at this point, they appear to be very bulky and odd looking, but they are able to shoot the subtitles onto the little screens in a green font. BBC News tested the glasses with a man that is hard of hearing. He said that the glasses work very well and you get the feeling that the subtitles and the film are one, not that the subtitles are close and the film is far away. If these g

The last time I talked about the Olympus PEN E-PM1 digital camera was back in late June when photos of the camera leaked. At the time, we didn’t know when the camera would land or what it would sell for. The wondering is now over with the camera officially debuting this week. The E-PM1 digital camera will sell for $499.99 and comes in six different colors. The size and price make this the most affordable and smallest camera in the PEN line. The camera will record 1080i HD video and promises the same image quality as the larger and more expensive PEN cameras. The cam has a 12.3MP image sensor and a selection of 23 scene modes including a 3D mode and more. The rear LCD is 3-inches wide with 460-dot resolution. The camera also has in-body image stabilization. The camera can shoot 1080i video for up to 29 minutes per session with Dolby Digital Stereo. That video recording capability can be activated directly with a HD Movie button. The camera also has a wide range of manual and automatic s

I have long said that one of the technologies with the most promise to change our world is battery tech. The batteries that last longer and charge faster are key elements to improve everything from smartphones to cars. A company called MicroGen Systems has been developing cool battery tech for small, low power sensors that generates power for its on-board battery by harnessing vibrations. These batteries are ideal for low power sensors like the ones in late model cars that power the TMPS system that monitors tire pressures. The little battery generator has a cantilever that vibrates back and forth when the motion of a car on the road shakes things around. That cantilever motion is turned into electrical energy to power the sensor. Granted the current batteries in those sensors are good for roughly the usable life of the vehicle as it is. However, this is a nice stepping store to possible future uses of similar tech. The cantilever array is made from a piezoelectric material that produc