Hasta La Gadget!

The iPhone 5 already proved Apple’s desire to move away from existing processor designs and exert more control over these fundamental components. Is it too crazy to imagine that Cupertino would like the same sense of freedom with its laptops? Perhaps not, especially since the biggest company in the world just hired a guy called Jim Mergard, who helped to pioneer AMD’s low-power Brazos netbook chips and who had only recently moved to Samsung. A former colleague of Mergard’s, Patrick Moorhead, told the WSJ that he would be “very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple” — possibly based on a mobile-style SoC (system-on-chip) rather than a traditional PC approach. That’s pure speculation of course, but funnily enough it’s where Intel seems to be headed too.

Filed under: Laptops, Apple, Samsung, AMD

Low-power chip guru quits Samsung for Apple, with heavily implied implications originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Wall Street Journal  | Email this | Comments

You know you are on to a winner here with the $39.99 Mega Stomp Panic Audio Reality Costume, especially when everyone else dresses up as a traditional witch, mummy, or even vampire for this coming Halloween. You can choose to be a robot, a zombie, or even an 8-bit hero – it does not really matter, as the Mega Stomp Panic Audio Reality Costume comes with clip-on motion-powered sound effects, where you are able to draw from its reservoir of 9 sound banks in all. One thing is for sure – the traditional costume which functions as a disguise based upon visual appearance will be no more, as you can now create a costume with but sound.

All sounds from the Mega Stomp are synchronized to your steps and stomps, which is ideal for giving out the illusion that you yourself are the maestro in orchestrating them, as though you were generating them yourself. It is more than enough to geek out even the most hardcore Halloween celebrating geek, and also to scare more neighborhood kids than most compared to your peers with their (now plain in comparison to yours) costumes.

[ Mega Stomp Panic Audio Reality Costume copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

AllThingsD is reporting that “people familiar with Apple’s plans” say that the iPad Mini will be unveiled at an event to be held on October 23rd. More »

We’ve all heard the term “bill shock” before, although for those who haven’t, it’s usually referred to the moment when one receives their phone bill and sees a price quoted at the bottom which was way more than they had expected. Bill shock usually results from exceeding data usage which is then charged per kilobyte (this depends on your carrier), or by placing too many international phone calls, or sometimes it’s merely the error of the telephone company themselves. This is pretty much what a customer in France experienced when she received a bill that was worth, get ready for it, 11,721,000,000,000,000 Euros!

How on earth did she manage to rack up that huge amount? Well according to the story, she wanted to opt out of her contract and was warned that there would be a penalty for doing so, although we doubt anyone could have expected that amount. As it turns out, there was some sort of printing error involved and after many persistent calls and what seemed to be rather unhelpful customer service, the customer managed to get her carrier to concede that this was a printing error and that the amount due was 117.21 Euros – phew!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Bill shock no more at the end of the month, 30 million Americans experience bill shock,

Amazon makes no profit on its Kindle hardware sales, CEO Jeff Bezos has confirmed, with the ereaders and Kindle Fire tablets sold “at our cost” so as to promote ebook, video, and music downloads. The online retailer has long been tight-lipped on its pricing strategy around Kindle, with ongoing rumors that the hardware was sold with minimum profit in mind or, even, at a loss. That’s not quite the case, Bezos told the BBC.

“We sell the hardware at our cost, so it is break-even on the hardware” the chief executive said. “We want to make money when people use our devices, not when people buy our devices.”

The strategy has allowed Amazon to continue to increase pressure on its ereader rivals, with price cuts by Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others all usually being parried by trimming of Kindle pricing too. More recently, Amazon has introduced its “Special Offers” system, in which the price of the ereader itself is discounted in return for showing advertising on the lockscreen and homescreen.

According to Bezos, Amazon’s approach has paid off in media sales. “What we find is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle” he explained. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, do they necessarily switch entirely to digital. ”They don’t stop buying paper books” Bezos revealed, “Kindle owners read four times as much, but they continue to buy both types of books.”

Amazon put the new Kindle Paperwhite up for preorder in select European countries today, having seen the illuminated ereader sell out in the US. It will be accompanied by an expansion of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library system, which allows Amazon Prime subscribers to borrow ebooks as part of their subsidized shipping package.

Amazon confirms zero Kindle hardware profit is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.