Surface, the sorta-tablet-sorta-laptop that shouts the future, goes on sale today. We got to peek (and touch, a little bit!) behind the scenes, with access to Microsoft’s secret labs never granted to anyone else before. So, should you buy a Surface? Very possibly—the thing seems pretty fantastic. More »
Foxconn, the manufacturer responsible for assembling different products for companies like Apple and Microsoft, has admitted that it hired interns that were under China’s legal working age of 16. The company conducted an internal investigation at one of its facilities, and discovered that some of the interns were between 14 and 16 years of age.
Foxconn issued a statement saying that the practice was “not only a violation of China’s labor law, it is also a violation of Foxconn policy.” The company is taking “immediate steps” to return the underage interns to school. The company is “also carrying out a full investigation, in cooperation with the respective educational institutions, to determine how this happened” and are ensuring that something like this “can never happen again.”
According to China Labor Watch, the schools that the underage interns belonged to were sent to Foxconn, but the company failed to check IDs of the students. China Labor Watch says that the schools involved are primarily responsible, but Foxconn is also at fault for not checking the ages of the interns. However, Foxconn has taken full responsibility and apologized for what happened.
Interns at Foxconn are able to gain relevant industry experience while also earning the same compensation as the company’s full-time entry-level workers. Interns also have the opportunity to become full-time Foxconn workers after school should they prove their worthiness and hard work to the company.
[via CNET]
Foxconn admits it hired underage interns is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
No more shall lefties wanting Google Glass toil under the oppression of right-handed overlords. Not if Google’s newly granted design patent is an indication, at any rate. The filing simply puts the eyepiece on the other side for those who are either naturally left-inclined or just that much opposed to the optical status quo. There’s no guarantee Google will be so accommodating when Glass reaches the general public, although we’re hopeful: when early adopters are already paying a small fortune to leap in, it wouldn’t hurt to produce a batch for left eye use and give the more committed southpaws among us the freedom they’ve craved since Google I/O.
Filed under: Wearables, Google
Google nabs design patent for left-eyed Google Glass, frees southpaws from tyranny originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sunday morning you’ll be able to see the Orionid meteor shower spawned from Halley’s Comet a few hours before dawn. And it should be absolutely stunning. More »
It’s no secret that all five major U.S. wireless carriers will be getting Samsung’s Galaxy Note II, but they’ve mostly tended to dance around the issue of firm release dates or price points. Well, that’s not the case anymore as Sprint finally has an official launch date on the books: Samsung’s latest phablet will hit the carrier’s sales channels on October 25, complete with a $299 price tag.
Sure, U.S. Cellular was the first out of the gate to talk up the device’s $299 on-contract price tag, but the carrier offered little other info on availability other than a “late October” launch window. Now that we can cross Sprint off the list, all eyes are now on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile to make their own announcements (Samsung has a launch event planned for the 24th, after all).
Just about all of the Galaxy Note II’s particulars have been extensively documented — as you may recall, the international version was showed off this past August at IFA in Berlin — but here’s a super-quick recap just to jog your memory. The phablet sports a 1.6GHz Exynos quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and (of course) an updated S-Pen. It sports a slightly taller 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display to boot, though Samsung managed to shave a few millimeters off its waistline to keep things as handy as possible. Sprint will carry both the white and gray variants of the Note II, and it thankfully plays nice with Sprint’s LTE network (assuming you can actually get on it, that is).
If you’re an owner of the Boxee Box, originally launched back in November of 2010 and distributed up until today, the announcement this morning from the creators of this lovely bit of technology isn’t going to be your most welcome update. In introducing the Boxee TV, a machine that links together Live TV, Internet Apps, and Cloud DVR, the team has let it be known that the original Boxee Box is done for. With a single software update to bring about a better working Flash player and a selection of bug fixes, the Boxee Box will officially go into maintenance mode.
This doesn’t mean that the Boxee Box will not have any more software updates at all, as bug fixes will continue here and there, but you shouldn’t expect any “major updates” from the company as they move to the Boxee TV. With the Boxee team’s partnership with D-Link praised here in 2012 and the original November 2010 launch date now called a milestone, the Boxee TV will now take over the major bit of attention over at the Boxee business.
“Our small team has poured our hearts and souls into the Boxee Box and it has been great to meet users from all over the globe. Some loved it, some wanted more features, others complained, but everyone was passionate. We hope you have enjoyed it and will continue to use it in your living rooms, dens, bedrooms or wherever else you set it up (I met one guy who installed it in his yacht!). If you are living in the US, we would love for you to continue our journey with us and order Boxee TV when it comes out.” – Avner Ronen, Boxee
The new Boxee TV is a device that’s made with a brand new chipset coming from Broadcom, software that’s been written “from the ground up”, and support through the future from the Boxee team. Of course you never know, support could be done in just a couple of years. By that time you’ll be on the next machine anyway though, right?
Have a peek at our short collection of Boxee updates in the timeline below and let us know how you feel about this news of discontinuation of Boxee Box support. If you own a Boxee Box now, will you buy a Boxee TV in the near future?
[via Boxee]
Boxee Box user support ends entirely is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The Xbox 360 dashboard hasn’t received much of a redesign or update in a while — not that it really needs one, but I’m sure a lot of gamers are wanting something new and fresh with a console that’s over seven years old. However, Microsoft is rolling out a dashboard update today with some new features and more apps.
The update now includes Internet Explorer for Xbox and the new Xbox Music app that we heard about yesterday, as well genre search and the extension of voice search for the YouTube app. Other than that, Microsoft rearranged a few things and made very minor changes like font resizing, but they also added more tiles to the screen, which means you can see more content on a single page.
The overall look of the Xbox 360 dashboard hasn’t change at all, though. It’s still the same Metro-like tile UI and we have a feeling that won’t change for a while, since Microsoft is looking to add uniformity across all of its products. However, one of the most-welcomed new features in the update is the ability to “pin” your favorite apps, TV shows, music or websites right to the Xbox 360′s home screen.
Internet Explorer is probably the biggest new feature besides Xbox Music. The new browser is based off of IE9, but is designed with a TV screen in mind, so text and windows are larger than the desktop version. Obviously, typing still sucks if you don’t have a chatpad for your Xbox 360 controller, but that’s not uncommon. The dashboard update will be slowly rolling out today for all Xbox 360 users and will coincide with the release of Xbox Music.
[via Gizmodo]
Xbox 360 dashboard update rolling out today is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Racy undewear can often be described as shocking, but rarely has that statement been literally true. Neuroscientists have designed a pair of pants that look a bit like cycling shorts and which send tiny electric currents to the wearer’s bottom. The undergarment has the potential to prevent pressure ulcers in people with mobility problems. This could save the US an estimated $12 billion annually. More »
Boxee has long been a popular name in the set-top box industry. They’ve been offering tons of streaming content and even live television with their Boxee Box device, and now the company has announced a new product called Boxee TV. The device will allow you watch live TV in HD from ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and more.
The new set-top box works with antennas as well as unencrypted basic cable lines. The device also has two tuners, which allows you to watch one show and record another show on a different channel in the background — a feature that only advanced DVRs usually have. Instead of having to watch what you’re recording, you can flip to another channel and watch the recorded show at a later time. And of course, the Boxee TV will come with an assortment of apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora just to name a few.
Probably the best feature of the Boxee TV is the unlimited storage space of DVR recordings. Instead of storing your recordings on a local hard drive like almost all DVRs, they get uploaded to the cloud, and there’s no storage limit. You can also watch your recordings anywhere, whether it’s on your laptop, tablet, or your TV.
However, the unlimited DVR feature is only rolling out to eight markets in US: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., with additional markets coming later in 2013. The service will cost $14.99 a month. The Boxee TV device itself will cost $99 and will be available sometime in November.
Boxee announces Boxee TV is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apple has yet to announce the event at which it’ll supposedly announce an iPad mini, but the rumors are reaching a fever pitch the way they generally do around a new product launch. Now, a new report from AppleInsider provides new info regarding possible iPad mini configurations, suggesting four different storage options and three different types of connectivity, for a total of 12 different models, or 24 if you count color options between black and white.
That’s a lot of different iPads, and more than were reported by German blog Schimanke in a report yesterday, which seemed to indicate only Wi-Fi and cellular versions. AppleInsider’s info suggests instead that there will be distinct 3G and LTE models, meaning the cellular category is divided into two, presumably at different cost points. That’s an assumption on AppleInsider’s part, though, and some other variance could account for the difference, including the presence of a Retina Display on top-end models. That kind of product differentiation would be unprecedented, and decidedly against Apple’s general strategy of keeping its hardware offerings as streamlined as possible.
Think about 12 different SKUs for an iPad mini, and what that would mean for cost distribution: Apple would likely start around the $299 mark ($249 at the outside), and then ramp up from there. At the top end, with three different specs for each storage level of 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, that would make for a price range that could span up easily into even near the top end of regular-sized iPad territory. It’s a move that would put the iPad mini in price competition with both the iPod touch and the regular iPad, rather than occupying a distinct third spot.
Of course, if there’s one thing Apple isn’t afraid of, it’s cannibalizing its own product lines. All of its biggest successes have arguably stepped on the toes of its past triumphs, including the iPad (the Mac) and the iPhone (the iPhone). It also knows from surveying the market that there’s an appetite out there for a low-cost, small screen tablet device, and from experience with the iPad that tablets which are expensive but feature-rich still have a large potential market. Providing a variety of connectivity or display options would allow Apple to target a range of buyers on a variety of budgets, but in doing so it also risks watering down the appeal and impact of the product overall.
We’ve heard relatively little about the iPad mini’s display, and whether it’ll be Retina-ready or not. Two versions, one supporting Retina resolution and one not, would be a problem in terms of development, but it could account for the wide variety of SKUs found in this new report, as could different wireless communication standards. Still, I’d be surprised to see Apple offer such a potentially complex and differentiated line in a product category that it was reluctant to enter in the first place. I’m still of the opinion we’ll see a more standard cellular/Wi-Fi product division, along the lines of current iPads, but if Apple really wants to ensure it has a tablet offering to meet every user’s needs and budget, we could still see greater variety in an iPad mini.
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