Hasta La Gadget!

Ballmer and Co. have been tight lipped when it comes to Surface sales figures, but they’ve just opened up a little to Uncle Sam. An SEC filing reveals that the first-party tablet raked in a total of $853 million in revenue between its debut and June 30th, the end of the firm’s fiscal year. To put that in perspective, the cash Microsoft managed to rake in is eclipsed by a $900 million hit it took through Surface RT inventory adjustments. To make matters worse, the company spent more on advertising for Windows 8 and Surface ($898 million), than its tablet brought in. Though details on how many slates have shipped or sold are still MIA, price drops make us suspect that those numbers are still too modest for Redmond’s taste.

Filed under: Tablets, Microsoft

Comments

Via: WinBeta

Source: SEC

This stitched-together photo is a self-portrait of Curiosity.

(Credit: NASA)

The Mars Curiosity rover is the space mission that just keeps on giving. Most people won’t get an opportunity to step into mission control and quiz the scientists, but a Reddit Q&A has given us all a glimpse behind the scenes. Ten scientists and engineers fielded queries, covering everything from how long the mission could last to which songs are played at late-night NASA dance parties.

When asked about the rover’s most important discovery, deputy project scientist Joy Crisp chose one of the big ones.

“The results from our first rock drilling told us that the past environment, when that mudstone rock formed, was suitable for life,” says Crisp, pointing out that microbial life could have possibly existed on the planet, but that Curiosity isn’t equipped to detect it.

The rover’s official mission is scheduled to cover one Mars year (two Earth years), but the team expects the rover’s work to continue beyond that if it stays healthy. It could even last a decade. Just don’t expect it to cover too much ground.

“Curiosity will most likely never leave Gale crater – it is a big place (96 miles across) but there is so much to look at, many layers of rock that represent billions of years o… [Read more]

Related Links:
NASA serves up first glance at solar system’s comet-like tail
All-new Chevy Impala and Range Rover Sport (CNET On Cars, Episode 22)
Dropbox buys mobile-app maker Endorse
Season 4 bloopers: Singing, dancing, and a fire hose
Military robot deploys CO2 to lure ticks to their doom

Microsoft made $853m in revenue from Surface tablets in its 2013 fiscal year, a disappointing figure that failed to even cover the company’s $900m inventory adjustment charge for the poorly selling Surface RT. The figures, confirmed in Microsoft’s most recent 10K filing, paint an underwhelming picture of the Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, though doesn’t specify exactly how many units have been sold.

Microsoft has been coy on giving those figures out, though that hasn’t stopped industry observers from guesstimating around the company’s sales. In March, sources with unofficial access to the numbers claimed that Microsoft had sold around 1.5m units.

Earlier this month, Microsoft admitted it had taken a $900m hit on inventory adjustment around the Surface RT. The news came just a day after Microsoft slashed the price of the tablet by around $150.

Overall, Microsoft still managed to pull together a rise in Windows revenue for the year, though pushing Surface didn’t help. Sales of the tablets failed to even cover the extra $898m the company spent on marketing them and Windows 8, the 10K reveals.

Next up, so the rumor mill would have it, is a new range of second-gen Surface tablets, still running either Windows RT or Windows 8, with a broader choice of processors. There have also been whispers of LTE-equipped versions, to better take on Apple’s 4G-enabled iPads, along with 7-inch versions to challenge the Nexus 7 and iPad mini.

VIA Dina Bass

Surface tablet revenue just $853m Microsoft reveals is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s not every day that you see two tablet leaks in one day with the same processor under the hood – but that’s just what’s happened with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 in this afternoon’s appearance of the fabled Nokia tablet. This tablet works with code-name Nokia RX-114 and likely runs either full Windows 8 or Windows RT, pushing with it the same processor we saw appear on this morning’s reboot of the Kindle Fire.

Could the Qualcomm suggestion that every major OEM in the industry has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor-toting device in the pipeline? It would seem that in addition to the devices we already know run the Snapdragon 800 – like the Samsung Galaxy S 4 LTE-Advanced, we’ll be seeing this quad-core SoC hit the tablet world with force.

Here the Nokia RX-114 is appearing via benchmarking suite GFXBench – which, if you’re curious, can be spoofed – with the following screen size attached: 1371 x 771. That’s pixels across its long side and its short side, suggesting this machine isn’t your everyday ordinary tablet. Microsoft’s Surface works with 1366 x 768 pixels across its 10.6-inch face, so it wouldn’t be that far off from the competition.

Of course when you compare that to even last years’ Nexus 10 tablet with its 2560 x 1600 pixels inside 10.055 inches of display, there’s really a different generation of device appearing. Either this Nokia device is a phablet, or it’s about to find itself out of sorts before it launches.

But consider that – what if it is a large display-toting smartphone? We just saw a faceplate that might match up in a 6-inch panel leaked to a factory floor, and the Nokia Lumia 625 was just delivered with a low-resolution display and a small price tag.

Perhaps we’ll see something similar in the very near future.

VIA: MyNokiaBlog

Nokia tablet (or large handset) RX-114 appears with Snapdragon 800 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

On Wednesday there’s an enormous animation art auction in L.A. that includes some gorgeous pop culture history. It will include original animation cels from Fleischer Studios, concept art from Disney legend Mary Blair, and an original production drawing from Winsor McCay’s classic 1914 film Gertie the Dinosaur. There’s even some 1970s and 1980s Jetsons art that should pique the interest of any retrofuture fan. But there’s one thing noticeably absent among the Jetsons pieces: any production cels from the 1962-63 iteration of the show—which was its first and only season until the 1985 reboot. But how can that be?

Read more…