Hasta La Gadget!

Sony vowed a long (long, long) overdue PlayStation Store remake starting this week, and it delivered just that today with launches in Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand. As promised, the PS3 shop’s cleaner design scales more elegantly from standard to high definition, brings more intelligent searching and makes it easier to find everything related to a given game. We still wouldn’t be too eager to dive in just yet, as there’s been hiccups early on — the sheer amount of traffic has reportedly brought the new store to a crawl, on top of teething issues with adding funds and recognizing PlayStation Plus memberships. Sony has promised fixes, but we’re suddenly not feeling so bad about having to wait for that October 23rd North American launch.

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

PlayStation Store redesign goes live in Australia, Europe and New Zealand with a rocky start originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Raspberry Pi mini computer just got a RAM upgrade – from 256MB to 512MB — but the $35 price-tag is staying the same. Eben Upton, chip design and founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, said the extra RAM follows frequent suggestions for a more expensive version of the Pi with more RAM for those who want to use the Pi for general computing purposes. But Upton notes the Foundation is “very attached to $35 as our highest price point” — in a recent interview with TC, Upton described price as “our differentiator”.

“There were a lot of boards like Raspberry Pi in the $200 range but not a lot in the $25 to $35 range,” he told me. “You’ve got to see [price] as our differentiator. The big impressive thing we’ve done, as far as I’m concerned, is to make this stuff cheap and available – we’re not making anything that didn’t exist before, but we’re making a thing that previously was very expensive [affordable].”

Upton also said the Foundation is starting to see interest in the Pi from developing countries for use as a general purpose computing device — noting: “[It’s] got an enormous amount of potential to really go and democratise access to information technology in places where maybe people have just bought their first television – emerging middle class in Africa — this is a little additional expense which will connect to your television and help you get more value out of that investment.”

Originally, the Foundation had set out with the idea to build a device for kids to learn to code — thinking they might be able to sell a thousand in the first year. In the event, they sold 100,000 on the first day of sale — and the market for the Pi has been much broader than they initially envisaged. Oracle has demoed Java SE embedded running on a Pi, for instance.

Writing in a blog on the Foundation’s website to announce the RAM upgrade, Upton said from today all Model B Raspberry Pis will ship with 512MB of RAM as standard (Model A refers to a forthcoming $25 version of the Pi that does not include Ethernet).

Here’s his blog post in full

One of the most common suggestions we’ve heard since launch is that we should produce a more expensive “Model C” version of Raspberry Pi with extra RAM. This would be useful for people who want to use the Pi as a general-purpose computer, with multiple large applications running concurrently, and would enable some interesting embedded use cases (particularly using Java) which are slightly too heavyweight to fit comfortably in 256MB.

The downside of this suggestion for us is that we’re very attached to $35 as our highest price point. With this in mind, we’re pleased to announce that from today all Model B Raspberry Pis will ship with 512MB of RAM as standard. If you have an outstanding order with either distributor, you will receive the upgraded device in place of the 256MB version you ordered. Units should start arriving in customers’ hands today, and we will be making a firmware upgrade available in the next couple of days to enable access to the additional memory.

I’d like to thank our partners, RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell, and the suppliers, particularly Samsung, Sony and Broadcom, for all their help in delivering a smooth transition to the 512MB. I’m looking forward to seeing what you all get up to with your shiny new Pis.

Last year, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) told us there were five billion mobile subscriptions worldwide at the close of 2010, and now it’s reporting that at the end of 2011, that figure hit a staggering six billion. China and India account for one billion a piece, and it brings us ever closer to having the equivalent of one subscription for every person on the planet. (According to the CTIA, there are already more cellular plans in the US — around 322 million — than there are inhabitants.) In a stat-heavy release from the ITU, it also ranked the most advanced telecoms countries, with South Korea placing first, Japan eighth and countries in Europe filling the remaining spots.

Interestingly, the number of global mobile broadband subscriptions now outnumbers fixed ones by two to one, and mobile internet services showed the biggest growth rates in 2011: 40% worldwide and 78% in developing markets. The ITU attributes the latter figure to the relatively high price of fixed access in these countries, and the increasing availability of mobile alternatives. The CTIA also commented on mobile broadband use, reporting that from July 2011 to June this year, Americans consumed 104 percent more data — no doubt due, in part, to people taking advantage of expanding 4G coverage. As usual, we’ve given you the cheat sheet, so if you’d like the full reports and have got a thing for statistics, there’s plenty more in the source links below.

[Image credit: Chris Jordan]

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Wireless, Internet, Mobile

International Telecommunication Union: worldwide mobile subscriptions hit six billion in 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung will unveil a smaller version of its flagship Galaxy SIII handset in Europe tomorrow – shrinking the screen from the 4.8 inches of its current flagship to an iPhone 5-sized 4 inches. Reuters is reporting the handset will be launched in Europe. There’s no word yet on whether Samsung plans to bring the device to the U.S.

The only other confirmed detail at this point is the name of the phone: the Galaxy S III mini. Samsung provided TechCrunch with the following statement confirming the planned launched

GALAXY S III mini will come with 4″ display and we are going to unveil the product tomorrow (Oct 11th). – JK Shin, head of Samsung Mobile Communications

We’ve asked Samsung for more details about the phone and will update with any response.

Engadget has some leaked info on the device (via a German site called MobileGeeks) which suggests the S III mini may be rather more mid-range than flagship — with an expected price of 399 euros ($510). While it will apparently have a 4 inch Super AMOLED display, the resolution will only be 800 x 480 (which would give a lowly pixel per inch rate of 233). The site also reckons Samsung is replacing the S III’s quad-core Exynos processor with an STE U8420 chip clocked at 1GHz. RAM is 1GHz, while the rear camera is reportedly 5 megapixels.

Reuters’ story quotes a Samsung spokeswoman citing Shin saying: “We think there’s strong demand for 4-inch screen models in Europe.” The company also told the news agency that the Galaxy S III mini would not be an entry-level model — contrary to the leaked info from MobileGeeks.

Early last month Saumsung released sales figures for the Galaxy S III – saying it had sold over 20 million units in the first 100 days of launch: 6 million in Europe, 4.5 million in Asia (ex. Korea), 4 million in North America and 2.5  million in Korea. The company is clearly hoping to maximise the reach of the device by adding a smaller version to appeal to people with smaller hands (and pockets).

Samsung is also not the only mobile maker to be thinking (a little bit) smaller when it comes to smartphone screen sizes. Motorola’s recent Droid Razr M packs a 4.3 inch screen — putting in the same ballpark as the iPhone, albeit still a smidge bigger. Perhaps the rampant screen inflation we’ve seen in the smartphone market in recent years has just about run its course (let’s hope so).

The Galaxy S III is just one of scores of phones in Samsung’s portfolio — which run the gamut from kid-friendly devices with very small and cramped screens all the way up to ‘phablet’ devices, its Galaxy Note range, with can pack screens in excess of 5 inches.

Offering an extensive range of different screen sizes (and price points) has been one of the ways Samsung has differentiated its Android-powered smartphones from other Android-based devices, such as HTC’s. It’s also a counterpoint to Apple’s strategy of offering just a handful of iPhone models with only very limited choice in screen size (and price).

The incredibly bright, somewhat terrifying yellow Nintendo 3DS XL that Japan got last month is now heading to Europe, according to a Europe-specific Nintendo Direct press conference this afternoon (via Joystiq). The Pikachu-themed 3DS doesn’t have a solid release date just yet, but it’s said to arrive at some point in 2012. A price also isn’t included (though it costs ¥18,900/$238 in Japan), nor is it known if the device will be exclusive to one retailer — in Japan, you can only buy a 3DS XL plastered with Pikachu’s indifferent smirk from a Pokemon Center. Regardless, it’s clearly super, super cute, and we’ll have more definite information on it soon.

Does this mean it’s coming to the US? Keep those poke-fingers crossed, trainers.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Mobile, Nintendo

Pika? Yes, pika: this very yellow Pokemon-themed Nintendo 3DS XL is heading to Europe this year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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