IBLOG SPACE

There’s a whole mess of tablets coming in 2012, and if what Acer is presenting already in leaked photos is any indication, their Iconia Tab A700 10-inch tablet is just one tip of the iceberg, with it’s NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor and Ice Cream Sandwich putting it in the running for world’s greatest aside the ASUS Transformer Prime. There’s no way to gauge if this machine will stand up the tests its predecessors the A500, A501, and A100 were subject to, but by the looks of it, Acer’s certainly stayed the course with design sensibilities on the outside. Look for this device to appear at CES 2012 aside its A200 brethren without a doubt. This tablet is appearing in photos today courtesy of Russian site NoMobile which also has its hands on some rather nice press photos of the A200 we’ve gotten a glimpse of before as well. This lovely machine will have a 10.1-inch display at 1920 x 1200 pixels, a 5 megapixel camera on the back, and again, a quad-core processor from NVIDIA. This is t

There’s something about device information leaks that gets everybody’s engine going, and certainly there’s no greater time to get a new tank of gas than right before the year’s biggest event, CES 2012 – LG and Intel know this to be true, and are denying any an all claims that they are shaking hands for a Medfield device come Spring. What we’re hearing from the Korean Times, on the other hand, is that they’ve got confirmation from “high ranking executives” from both LG and Intel saying that LG will produce the first market-ready Intel-toting smartphone with Android for a March release. More than likely we’ll be seeing something along the lines of a smartphone or two running the Medfield SoC, LG or not, come early January. We’ll be there to tell you what’s going on right as it happens at CES 2012 starting on January 9th, straight from the Las Vegas Convention Center. It’s there that all the sweet news will originate from, and its there that we’ll certainly get confirmation or denial in

Though the actual origin of the name Apple Computer and how it was brought up might not set the world on fire with inspiration, the time between Steve Jobs’ passing this year and now has been one furious maelstrom of interest in the historical leavings of the mastermind himself – so more than likely, you still want to know. The source of the information comes from a recently revealed (in short by the Associated Press) Stanford warehouse containing a vast archive of Apple-related media. Inside this historical treasure trove are documents, books, software bits, videos, and of course the original blueprint for the very first Apple computer, donated in 1997 after Jobs returned to Apple after his extended “hiatus”, if you know what I mean.

We’re pretty certain that someone at General Motors is in a whole heap of trouble this week as its been discovered that a batch of their Chevrolet Sonic cars with missing brake pads have left the factory and were sold in kind to unsuspecting customers. While these missing pads aren’t currently being rated as something so fatal that GM is recommending a total instant freak-out on the part of car owners, if you are one of those owners, you probably should bring your car in to be checked. Nothing like cruising into grandma’s house for New Years and finding yourself on the other side because you brakes just… you know… aren’t there. Currently GM is saying that there haven’t been any crashes or injuries related to the missing brake pads, but you never know! Some Sonics are currently missing an inner or outer brake pad, this resulting in increased stopping distance than the norm. The entire recall covers exactly 4,296 of GM’s Chevrolet Sonic models sold inside 2011 (of the 2012 model, mind

Sega is coming on strong on the Sonic tip here at the end of 2011, first with Sonic CD for the mobile platform, now with Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode 2 for Android devices sporting either an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core or Tegra 3 quad-core processor onboard! What you’ll be playing here is a new vision of Sonic in the classic setup: complete with the rebirth of an old enemy and the return of no less than everyone’s favorite sidekick: Tails! And just wait until you hit the go button on the video to hear that classic “SEGA” sound effect – flawless victory! You’ll be dunking down tubes and flipping over television boxes full of rings just far enough to accidentally smash into a trio of spikes, and all of it in style with NVIDIA’s set of fabulous systems on chips. You’ve got brand new character animations, a reworked physics engine for superior effect, and all of it tuned to perfection by the developers at Sega working with the specialists at NVIDIA. Can you imagine such a cool customer made

There comes a time in every operating system’s life when it needs to have an emergency patch slapped over a security hold in its guts, and for Windows, that time is today – and it’s an emergency. What you’re going to see here is a bulletin by the name of MS11-100 that acts as a sort of public service announcement as Microsoft wants you to update your system several weeks before the regularly scheduled “Patch Tuesday” in mid-January. What this patch does is to cut off access to a security hole that’d allow hackers to launch a DoS attack against people with Microsoft’s ASP .NET application framework in place. What you’ll have to do is head over to here: [Security Bulletin List] and see if your software is amongst those affected. If you never access the internet, you’ve probably got nothing to worry about – but since you’re here now, probably you should check. This attack works through a certain type of HTTP request that consumes 100% of the processes of one CPU core. Several requests o

The Chinese may be a bit upset that they were never invited to the ISS party, but they aren’t sitting around angry about it. The country is set to start an ambitious space exploration program that will see them eventually aiming for manned mission to the moon. The Chinese are already working on assembling their own space station in orbit to use for research and experimentation. Some are worried about the plans the Chinese have for space even though China maintains the missions are for peaceful purposes. One reason for the fear is that China has in the past fired a missile and blown up one of its own defective satellites. The issue there was more than the fact that they used a weapon against orbiting satellites. The destruction also created a huge amount of debris that has the potential to damage other satellites in orbit. If China puts a man into space, they will be the third country to do so behind the US and Russia that put men in orbit decades ago. The Chinese would use a future

I have worked at real jobs in the past surrounded by people that were possibly the biggest idiots on earth. I knew we have all wondered at one point who exactly interviewed this person next to us in the office and decided they were worth hiring. If you don’t know that person in the office, odds are you are that person everyone wonders about. I’ve never been asked a really weird question in a job interview, but I would be willing to be that many geeks have. Mashable has a listed of the nine oddest questions that interviewees were asked when trying to land a job at a tech firm in 2011. Some of them are really strange. It’s easy enough to figure out that what the interviewers are trying to do is throw the candidates off and get a real answer rather than something they have been practicing for a while. Google reportedly asked one person at an interview, “A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?” I would wager he ran out of gas in Vegas. Other strange questio

We have already seen the Wii U with its superior graphics and fancy touchscreen controller and it looks really cool. If you are counting the days until that console launches you will get a kick out of this. Unsurprisingly Nintendo will be offering an app store for the game console. According to the reports that app store won’t be like the DSi or the Wii stores, but will be the full-blown type. A source cited by The Daily claims that the Wii U store will go far beyond what Nintendo has now and will offer a wide variety of game apps and more. What sort of apps will be offered are unknown, but we can make some interesting guesses and assumptions. Naturally, Netflix and other apps will be offered since they are on the Wii already. Story Timeline Nintendo Wii U is 50% more powerful than PS3/Xbox 360 tip devs on Jun 14th 2011 Wii U lacks ability to play DVDs or Blu-ray flicks on Jun 15th 2011 Nintendo 3DS and Wii U will get paid DLC on Aug 1st 2011 Wii U launch no time soon: Hardwar

Earlier this week we talked about the security breach that happened with anonymous hacked the servers at a security firm based in Austin, Texas called Stratfor. The breach resulted in a huge number of passwords and credit card details being stolen. Anonymous has claimed that a huge amount of money had been donated to charity using the stolen credit cards already. The hacker group has now posted the data dump of much of the content stolen to pastebin. The dump included 75,000 names, addresses, and credit card numbers along with the md5 hashed passwords for everyone that has ever paid for Stratfor services. The data dump also has 860,000 usernames, email addresses, and md5 hashed passwords for everyone that has registered for the Stratfor site. There is also 200GB of emails that will be published later after they are redacted. The hacker group has also promised to hack law enforcement targets from coast to coast on New Year’s Eve.

There have been a lot of hints and suggestions of what the Windows Phone LTE offerings will look like next year. Paul Thurrott over at Winsupersite says that with all the rumors and suggestions he is just going to out the real plans and then goes on to lay out the LTE scheme. He says that Microsoft and its smartphone partners do intend lots of LTE devices next year. The smartphone will start to land in a six-month period next year and all of them will be offered on the AT&T network. That seemingly means that Verizon might not be testing the Lumia 800 on its LTE network as previously reported or perhaps after the six months that Thurrott mentions for AT&T, Verizon will get in on the LTE WinPo action. It’s not clear if Verizon will ever carry windows Phone devices with LTE, but it would be surprising to me if the carrier didn’t.

If you are an Android fan, you undoubtedly look forward to the occasional tweet from Andy Rubin. One of the best tweets to come from Rubin was posted back in October of 2010 when Rubin tweeted the definition of open in response to something that Steve Jobs had said. Apparently, that tweet later disappeared. There were some out there that assumed Rubin or someone else working his twitter account had deleted the post. One possible reason was that the server that had that code had been hacked. Another reason was that the code had changes so the definition of open was no longer technically true. The reasons were varied and no one really knew the truth. As it turns out the tweet, being removed has nothing at all to do with Rubin or anyone else that might have access to that account. As it turns out that definition of open tweet was one of a number of tweets that twitter lost due to a bug that occurring during maintenance. Twitter later found those tweets and restored them so Andy’s defi

I always find the battle between the vague sources that are cited in reports around the web about Apple gear that is coming and other tech products rather funny. At any given time you can find sources claiming that a new product is coming and sources claiming that the product isn’t coming, which is why all rumors need a healthy dose of sodium with them. Take the rumor yesterday that two new versions of the iPad would be coming in January. Sources cited by DigiTimes allegedly from the supply chain tipped the mid-range and high-end iPads with the high-resolution screens and quad-core processors would be coming next month. Today we have a source cited by The Loop claiming that there will be no iPads in January at MacWorld. I don’t have to check sources to agree with the MacWorld bit. Apple hasn’t been to MacWorld in years now. I wouldn’t put it past Apple to unveil new products during the same time frame that MacWorld was going on though. Story Timeline iPad 2 production damped for

If you’ve been following the latest rumors surrounding Apple’s television plans, you know that a new report claims the Cupertino, Calif.-based company is only planning to offer 32- and 37-inch options starting next summer. Now, before we get into this, I should note that the rumor comes from Digitimes, a publication that has been wildly wrong in the past, but continues to pump out rumors at an astounding rate. So, even if the idea sounds convincing, it’s best to take its report with a grain of salt. However, for this column, let’s assume that the Digitimes report is true and Apple really is planning to launch 32- and 37-inch TV models. Am I the only one who would hate the idea of buying such a small set? Yes, I know that I’ve said here before that I will buy the Apple television no matter what. But that was based on an earlier report that suggested the smallest Apple TV screen size would be 42 inches. Now, with the prospect of getting a small, 32-inch set, I just don’t see any re

Market research firm comScore has released its November 2011 report on US mobile subscribers, revealing unsurprisingly that Android continues to take the lead in smartphone platforms while Samsung is still on top in smartphone manufacturer market share. However, Apple saw increasing growth while the others plateaued likely due to a boost from its iPhone 4S sales. The comScore study surveyed 30,000 US mobile subscribers and looked at the three-month average period ending in November. When it comes to the top five smartphone OEMs, Samsung maintains first place at 25.6 percent, a 0.3 point change, while Apple comes in fourth at 11.2 percent, a more dramatic 1.4 point change. In second and third is LG and Motorola at 20.5 percent and 13.7 percent, each seeing a drop of -0.5 and -0.3 point changes. Google’s Android continues to lead in the top five smartphone platforms, now at 46.9 percent, a 3.1 point change that’s dropped from the 4.4 point change reported in the three month period en

Man I love the Internet. It has everything you ever wanted to know. It also has thousands of things you really don't want to know. I'm one of those odd people who loved school. From kindergarten through college and beyond tell me something I didn't know and I'm fascinated. You can even pick subjects I don't care about, and I'll try to absorb everything and ask for more. Thirty years ago, you would find people like me trolling through libraries with my nose in the card catalog . I'd have mapped out every new and used bookstore in town. I'd even plan my vacations around discovering new bookstores in other towns. Today, I can sit anywhere in my house, library, coffee shop and mall and surf the web. Unlike the people of yore, I have the Internet at my fingertips. But I find hyperlinks are both a blessing and a curse. They make finding new information very easy. But like any drug, it's a hard habit to break. The Online Pack Rat If you were to vis

Microsoft has found the root cause behind the SMS vulnerability in its Windows Phone operating system. The bug was reported earlier this month by Khaled Salameh, who found that the platform could be exploited via a malicious SMS message that forces a Windows Phone device to reboot and then disables its messaging hub. Although it’s good that Microsoft has found a fix for the bug in Windows Phone devices, the exploit may also affect its other applications. So far it’s known to work not only through SMS messages but also through Facebook chat or Windows Live Messenger. The malicious code could be used to crash Windows Live Messenger in a way that would prevent all your contacts from signing in. Microsoft is still investigating its other products that may be affected, including its desktop applications. Salameh revealed that the following applications are vulnerable to the SMS attack string: Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Silverlight-based apps, Visual Studio 2010, Expressi

ASUS has announced two new USB audio devices, the MS-100 USB speaker and the HS-W1 Wireless USB headset. Both products feature a sleek and minimalist style that’s easy to pack away for travel as well as premium audio quality with easy plug-and-play usability. The MS-100 is a compact stereo speaker powered completely by a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port. It features a minimalist cone design that houses large 54mm speaker drivers that can generate up to 93 dB of sound with less than 3% distortion, providing rich highs and full low tones. It works right out of the box without additional software when used with a Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine. The HS-W1 is a wireless USB headset offers natural comfort through large 70mm leather earpads and provides crisp clear sound through 40mm tuned drivers with a built-in equalizer. The 2.4 GHz wireless technology transmits CD quality sound from a small USB dongle to the headset. It also allows up to twice the distance compared to Bluetooth wireless techno

The US Patent and Trademark Office has just published a patent application today from Apple that reveals the company’s plans for implementing face recognition and presence detection technology. Apple intends to implement the technology in iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, as well as in its MacBook laptop computers. The presence detection technology can be used to automatically turn on a device when it senses a user’s presence. The face recognition technology then can be used to unlock a device in lieu of entering a password. Devices can also be configured to recognize faces from a group of users such as among family or at the workplace. Apple’s solution for facial recognition relies on a simple weighted difference map, rather than the traditional and more computationally heavy correlation matching technology. In this way, it uses less system resources and could reduce the impact of lighting and skin variation. It can also tap directly into the GPU of an iOS d

Following reports that Verizon may be unleashing a $2 convenience fee policy on its wireless customers, the carrier has responded today to Phonescoop confirming that the change will indeed go into effect starting January 15. The fee will apply to one-time credit card payments made online and via telephone. There are payment options that let you avoid the $2 convenience fee, including paying via electronic checks sent through My Verizon Online, My Verizon Mobile, or over the telephone. Other methods of payment that avoid the fee include electronic checks, credit, debit, or ATM card payments made on an auto=pay plan or at an in-store kiosk. Verizon Wireless gift cards and rebate cards paid in-store, online, or by telephone are also exempt as are standard paper check or money orders mailed directly to Verizon. The change will take effect starting January 15 but the fee will be disclosed up-front throughout all transactions so that you will be informed whether the fee applies to your c

HTC and Samsung are preparing two LTE-equipped Windows Phone devices that are expected to launch in early 2012, says The Verge, citing sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans. The sources also reveal that the two devices will be running an updated Mango version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system instead of the next-gen Tango platform. The HTC device is called Radiant, a codename that’s been spotted before and originally believed to be running the next-gen Windows Phone Tango operating system. Little else is known about the specs for the HTC Radiant other than 4G LTE support. The Samsung device is codenamed Mandel and will sport a screen larger than 4.3 inches. Both devices are expected to launch in early 2012 alongside Nokia’s LTE Windows Phone, all likely heading to Verizon. However, there may not be enough time for the device to make an appearance at CES, but they could debut at Mobile World Congress in February.

Samsung’s larger than life smartphone known as the Galaxy Note isn’t a smartphone at all but actually a phoneblet. After being unveiled at IFA it apparently has been selling like hotcakes even without launching in a wide array of markets. With no US launch yet, and only being on the market a few short months Samsung has confirmed sales are strong for this unconventionally sized device and they’ve already sold more than 1 million worldwide. While our first impressions with the device were quite favorable, we were worried that the size would be too much to pocket but with the kind of sales it has already seen it’s proven to be a surprise hit. Obviously the Note doesn’t have Galaxy S II type sales numbers but then it’s not on almost every carrier imaginable either. The beautiful and large display bundled with a phone, and a stylus has made this a bigger success than we originally thought. Our own Chris Davies loved the Galaxy Note and you can see his amazing pictures and thorough review