Hasta La Gadget!

Kogan’s Agora brand may not drive techies wild like Galaxies or iThings do, but its motto is clear: try to deliver reasonable hardware at the lowest possible price. The company’s first bid for a piece of the smartphone pie launched earlier this year, and today we’re learning of its sequel. Design-wise, this second Agora handset is a little curvier than the last, with a soft key replacing its predecessor’s physical home button. A 5-inch, 720p IPS LCD display occupies the face, and inside we’re looking at a 1.2GHz quad-core MT6589 Mediatek SoC (Cortex-A7), 1GB of RAM and 4 gigs of internal storage, expandable with up to 32GB cards of the microSD variety. It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, hosts two SIM slots, an 8-megapixel main camera, 2-megapixel front-facer, 2,000mAh removable battery and 3G (850 / 1900 / 2100), WiFi (802.11b/g/n) and Bluetooth 4.0 antennae.

Most importantly, it costs $189, £149 or 199 Aussie dollars — it’s up for order now at the relevant source links and is expected to ship to the US, Australia, the UK and other European countries, as well as a couple of Asian markets starting October 3rd. We’re hoping to get a review unit through soon, so keep an eye out over the coming weeks for our impressions. In our opinion, anything that rings up at under $200 is worth a fair trial.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Kogan (UK), (Aus), (US & elsewhere)

Verizon expects the Nexus 7 LTE to be 4G certified “shortly” after addressing complaints that Google’s Android tablet could not be activated on its network. The carrier blames extensive wireless testing for the delay, claiming to have begun examining the slate back in August. Meanwhile, rival carriers AT&T and T-Mobile USA already support the Nexus […]

The notion of personalized, contextually aware search is nothing new, but it can put a tremendous strain on servers by asking for a lot of data at once. NC State has developed a search technique that could ease that burden. Its code prioritizes results based solely on the “ambient query context,” or the concepts related to a person’s recent search history. Look for politicians, for example, and a search for Ford is more likely to bring up Gerald Ford than the car company. By focusing on just a fraction of a user’s search habits, the university can customize results using far fewer processor cycles: while a test server could only handle 17 active searchers with an old approach, it can manage 2,900 with the new method. The query engine won’t be confined to the lab, either. NC State tells us that a community-driven search beta is due within several months, and there are plans to commercialize the technology in the long run.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Alt

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Source: NC State

Tim Blais had to clone himself to record this song.

(Credit: Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET)

I dare you to listen to “Bohemian Gravity,” a rewritten version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” without throwing in a little head-banging action. While you’re rocking out, you just might learn a little something about string theory.

“Bohemian Gravity” is an a capella take on Queen’s famous song redone with physics lyrics. It’s all by one man: Tim Blais, a physics graduate student at McGill University in Canada. One of his hobbies is recording science-y cover versions of popular songs.

Here’s a lyrics selection to get you in the mood: “Space is a pure void. Why should it be stringy? Because it’s quantum not classical. Nonrenormalizable. Any way you quantize. You’ll encounter infinity. You see.” Freddie Mercury would have loved this.

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Part of what makes this version spectacular, besides the lyrics, is that Blais had to multi-track himself to create the layers of vocals needed for the song. The video shows him tackling all the parts a… [Read more]

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iOS 7 is very controversial, but it does include quite a few new features you may not know about, things that will help you and your users work more efficiently on your devices. Be ready for the next release by knowing what comes next.