After iPhone users lost Street View thanks to the Apple Maps mess, it’s coming back, and Apple can’t stop it even if it wanted to. While an official Google Maps app might be miles off, that’s not stopping big G slapping Street View into its web app. It should be here within two weeks. [NYT via Engadget] More »
The Best SSD: Corsair Neutron GTX 256GB vs. Samsung 840 Pro 256GB [Battlemodo]
Posted in: Today's Chili The pace of development in the SSD world is staggeringly awesome, as each generation of SSD controllers has delivered substantial increases in performance and reliability, while at the same time we’ve seen flash prices drop like a stone. It’s a great time to be storing and accessing data, for sure, but we’ve also seen the market dominated by a trio of SSD controllers from SandForce, Marvell, and Indilinx, with different vendors applying their own tweaks to the drives’ firmware to differentiate them. Though these controllers are all pretty sweet, we were beyond stoked to see two brand-new drives from Samsung and Corsair arrive this month, both with all-new SSD controllers. Will either of them put a dent in the SandForce/Marvell juggernaut? More »
We’ve seen a few Windows 8 phones in the flesh, namely the HTC 8X and 8S, plus Nokia’s Lumia 920 and 820, but no one’s had a chance to thoroughly poke around Microsoft latest and greatest yet. Until now that is; courtesy of a leaked, final WP8 SDK, meet Windows Phone 8. More »
New Zealand Police Blamed for Kim Dotcom’s Illegal Surveillance [Megaupload]
Posted in: Today's Chili The case of Megaupload’s founder Kim Dotcom gets odder by the day, with the latest official documents revealing that the police simply didn’t know, or didn’t bother checking, if Kim Dotcom was a New Zealand citizen or not. More »
A Water-Cooled Chip That Concentrates the Sun to Desalinate Water [Science]
Posted in: Today's Chili Anyone who’s dropped a cellphone in the bath knows that water and microelectronics don’t usually mix well. But at IBM’s Swiss lab in Zurich, marrying the two is becoming almost commonplace: microprocessors with water coursing through microchannels carved deep inside them are already crunching data in SuperMUC, an IBM supercomputer – with the heat that the water carries away used to warm nearby buildings. More »
Photos that appeared online over the weekend appear to have been taken with an as yet unannounced Samsung phone, which seemingly fits in with Samsung’s Nexus device naming system. More »
In the early days of the web, the technology space was flush with not only money, but a specific type of optimism: that this new medium would allow anybody to make whatever they wanted, and have the world see it (assuming it was any good). This was before Facebook, of course. If you wanted to put something out there, you sometimes had to make it yourself, with something called HTML. More »
iPhone 5 vs Galaxy S III: Smartphone Display Technology Shoot-Out [Iphone 5]
Posted in: Today's Chili The iPhone 5 has been the most anticipated mobile device of 2012 together with its cousin the iPad Mini, which we expect to be seeing shortly. Apple has made displays their most prominent marketing feature because it determines the quality of the visual experience for everything on a smartphone or tablet—including apps, web content, photos, videos, and its camera. The retina displays on the iPhone 4 and the new iPad were significant advancements—not just in sharpness but in picture quality and color accuracy, which is what provides the display’s real wow factor. More »
Watson, the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer developed by IBM, could become a cloud-based service that people can consult on a wide range of issues, the company announced last week. “Watson is going to be an advisor and an assistant to all kinds of professional decision-makers, starting in healthcare and then moving beyond. We’re already looking at a role for Watson in financial services and in other applications,” says John Gordon, Watson Solutions Marketing Manager at IBM in New York. More »
Samsung Building 128GB Flash Memory Chips For Next Year’s Superphones [Guts]
Posted in: Today's Chili There might just be a 128GB memory option when it comes to upgrading to the Galaxy S4 next year or the S5 the year after, thanks to Samsung now mass producing 128GB memory chips for use in mobile devices. More »