Hasta La Gadget!

While Samsung has yet to announce an actual date for its new Galaxy Players in the US, their international counterparts are already heading towards other parts of the world for a head start. The Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 is said to be debuting in Russia followed by other countries, whereas its 5.0 sibling will be launched in Switzerland. In terms of specs, not much has changed since we last saw these 1GHz, DivX-friendly Android PMPs, and yes, they’ll still be shipped with Froyo “with a possibility to upgrade to 2.3 Gingerbread.” As always, we’ll let you folks know when we eventually find out about the US launch (if ever), though to be frank, we’d rather just go for the beefier Galaxy S II instead.

Continue reading Samsung’s Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 and 5.0 now rolling out to countries far away from you

Samsung’s Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 and 5.0 now rolling out to countries far away from you originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 May 2011 23:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

During the holiday season of 2009 when netbooks were the hot commodity, Apple lost share in the PC market. It had nothing to compete with the sunken prices and shrunken sizes of those miniature laptops. PC vendors such as ASUS and Acer, on the other hand, did well in the netbook segment, as they could call on their expertise in building inexpensive Windows notebooks.

After the iPad’s introduction, though, the tablets were turned. While many PC vendors loathed the low profitability of netbooks, they were now faced with competing with their own products. With the exception of HP, which shelled out billions of dollars for webOS, the iPad set PC vendors scrambling to choose which operating system might best compete. Is it Windows, the devil they know, or Android, where they have far less experience than competitors from the smartphone market?

Switched On has already taken on the role that Windows might play in future tablets, but what about Honeycomb? In contrast to the original version of Android, which was in the works prior to the introduction of the iPhone, Honeycomb arrived a year after the iPad. Android licensees, particularly smartphone vendors, surely beseeched Google for a tablet-optimized version of their preferred mobile OS. But Google may also be a victim of the iPad’s jujitsu.

Continue reading Switched On: Honeycomb or the highway

Switched On: Honeycomb or the highway originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 May 2011 20:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

It looks like Sony will be able to market the upcoming Playstation 3 as a “medical miracle” because of its integration with folding@home. BBC News is reporting that the PS3, which is scheduled for release in November, can be setup to donate the system’s idle time to the folding@home project.

The folding@home project was started in hopes to gain an understanding of protein folding and misfolding. Here is a snippet from the project’s homepage that describes why that is important:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.”

…

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

To help the team learn more about protein folding they have asked PC users for years to donate your computer’s idle time to simulate the folding process. The problem is that it takes a normal PC 10,000 days to simulate one complete fold even though it takes 10 microseconds to happen in your body.

Surprisingly, the processor that is in the PS3 (which is called a cell) has the ability to run up to 10 times faster than current PC’s. It is estimated that 10,000 PS3′s working together would have the same computational power as IBM’s BlueGene/L System supercomputer. That’s more than 280.6 trillion calculations each second!

Of course, it will be kinda cool to put it on your PS3 because “the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering.” Here is a quick video on what that will look like:

Read more about this on the folding@home PS3 announcement page.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Even a woman with a 40 Gbps internet connection might feel a twinge of jealousy at this news — Japan has successfully tested two separate 100 terabit per second data links that use a single optical fiber to carry their loads. New Scientist reports that NEC scholars stuffed the light from 370 lasers into 165 kilometers of fiber to achieve a speed of 101.7 Tbps, while NICT researchers set a new record of 109 Tbps using a special fiber with seven cores to manage the trick. We imagine that Alcatel-Lucent and NTT aren’t sitting still. Not that we really care who has the fastest fiber… just so long as one end leads to our house.

Researchers create two 100 terabit per second optical connections, dare us to torrent something originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 May 2011 16:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What happened to the HTC Trophy, long overdue on Verizon 3G? How about the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, mysteriously missing a Verizon release date long before Japan’s catastrophe? Will Verizon commit to carrying the BlackBerry PlayBook this year? Just how much will LTE data cost for the Xoom and its tablet friends?

We may finally have some of the answers, thanks to Verizon’s fancy new online catalog. RIM’s tablet, the PlayStation Phone and the HTC Trophy are all listed as “coming soon,” and that’s not all — both the BlackBerry Bold 9650, Curve 3G 9330 and the Droid 2 Global are all “while supplies last,” suggesting successors may be inbound. Meanwhile, tablet LTE data plans look like they’re going to cost the same as 3G ones — $20 for 1GB, $35 for 3GB, $50 for 5GB and $80 for $10GB as usual. LTE netbooks will only be able to take advantage of the two highest-priced plans, but there are a pair of them on the way, including the 11.6-inch HP Pavilion dm1 (with a 1.6GHz AMD Fusion chip) and the 10.1-inch Compaq Mini CQ10 with an Intel Atom N455 processor.

Mind you, the catalog’s URL explicitly mentions “2011 Winter,” so it’s quite possible that “soon” won’t be as soon as you’d like, but to get a peek at all the goodies, check out the gallery below or shoot on over to our source link.

[Thanks, Thump3rX17]

Verizon doc suggests BlackBerry PlayBook, HTC Trophy and Xperia Play ‘coming soon’, prices LTE tablet data and intros 4G netbooks originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 May 2011 14:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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