Hasta La Gadget!

Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

I was listening to someone, somewhere, on something — not really sure where, and it doesn’t matter — but someone said that they’d rather be alone than have friends who make them feel alone. It’s probably been said by many people in many different ways, but for some reason, that saying has attached itself to me as I engage in my twice-daily social networking while comparing it to what I’m actually doing in my downtime that doesn’t qualify as “work.”

Social networks make us feel alone. I’m not claiming to be the first to notice this, but now that there’s a social network for pictures, for videos, for 140-character updates, for business networking, for food, for our pets…

Filed under: Misc, Internet, Facebook

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Say you have some scribbles in an unfamiliar language you want to translate. Better find a native speaker. Or you could just turn to Google Translate, which now supports handwritten translation in 45 different languages.

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Yesterday, we saw the official unveiling of the new Nexus 7, and it’ll be arriving in the US on July 30. However, while the tablet would be coming to the UK, there was no word on when that would happen, exactly. According to a couple of UK listings, though, the Nexus 7 will arrive in the UK on September 13, and pre-orders are now live.

Both Currys and PC World have the new Nexus 7 up for pre-order, priced at £199.99 for the 16GB version and £239.99 for the 32GB flavor. Both the tablets list a September 13 release date, but folks in the UK are able to pre-order the tablet right now at either one of these retail establishments.

Obviously, this is a long wait for UK folks to get their hands on the new tablet — almost a month and a half late, to be exact. While consumers in the US have to wait a few days for release, they have it easy, while those located across the pond will have to wait it out for a significant amount of time.

Obviously, though, the date they have listed may be subject to change, but seeing as how both Currys and PC World were launch partners for the original Nexus 7, we’d be surprised if the listings were wrong. There’s also no sign of a 4G Nexus 7 model, so it could be that an LTE variant is an even longer way off.

The new Nexus 7 sports the same 7-inch display as before, but comes with a much higher resolution of 1920×1200, making it the most pixel-dense display of any tablet currently on the market. The new device also runs on a quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz and comes with 2GB of RAM on board.

VIA: Android Central

SOURCE: Currys, PC World

New Nexus 7 UK pre-orders now live with mid-September arrival is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook is the world’s biggest social network. It has been quite some time since it passed the one billion total user milestone, but the social network is certainly not stopping there. During its announcement of quarterly fiscal results, the company […]

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While it was reported back in May that indie developers wouldn’t be able to self-publish on the Xbox One, Microsoft has come back and confirmed that this is not the case. In fact, the Xbox One will indeed support indie game developers to self-publish their work, and the company is starting up its own program for just that.

Microsoft’s vice president of Xbox, Marc Whitten, confirmed the news said that “every person can be a creator,” and the company wants “every game and experience to take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox Live.” This includes self-publishing, as well as Kinect, cloud abilities, and achievements.

Whitten said that more details about self-publishing would be revealed at Gamescom in August, where Microsoft has been scheduled to appear and reveal even more details about the Xbox One. Previously, the Xbox 360′s Arcade section was most made up of smaller games by larger publishers and there was hardly any room for small indie devs to make a difference.

That’ll no longer be the case this time around with the Xbox One. Whitten also revealed that “every Xbox One can be used for development,” which means that when you buy an Xbox One at launch, it will also be able to run game code and debug it. This is huge, as debug versions of consoles can usually cost way more than their retail counterparts.

This is another huge win for gamers, as they’ll be able to play the latest and greatest indie games on the cheap. By now, Microsoft has pulled a reversal on all of their previous policies that went unliked, which is good, but will gamers still hold resentment toward Microsoft at launch, considering that the company tried to get away with these new policies?

SOURCE: Major Nelson

Xbox One indie self-publishing on the way is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.