Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to Tuesday, folks. It was a busy day today, and there’s plenty of news to cover, so let’s get right into it. It appears that the worldwide mobile phone market is falling a little bit year-over-year, and the Motorola DROID RAZR HD might be launching sometime in October. Fisker is currently at work investigating the fire that claimed one Karma EV over the weekend, and we received word of another EV catching fire during the Pikes Peak Hill Climb that took place in Colorado this past weekend as well.

A new Apple patent was uncovered today, just in time for the rumored reveal of the new iPhone, and Groupon has released its financial report for quarter 2. It seems that Toshiba is backing out of the Windows RT tablet market, and the Samsung SGH-T899 Windows Phone was confirmed to be heading to T-Mobile. We also reminded you check in with us here at SlashGear tomorrow for coverage of Samsung’s press event, which is where many are expecting the company to show off the Galaxy Note 10.1. In other words, you don’t want to miss it.

It was all about tech and gadgets in the morning, but this afternoon, SlashGear became SlashGames, as Electronic Arts and Sony both gave their pre-Gamescom press conferences. There were a lot of things to talk about too, with Electronic Arts announcing Battlefield 3 Premium Edition and letting loose Dead Space 3‘s release date. Registration for the upcoming SimCity beta is underway, Activision gave us our first taste of Black Ops Declassified gameplay, and Sony pulled the veil back on some new PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale characters. That wasn’t all though, as Sony also gave us a release date for the first PSOne Classics on PS Vita during the press conference, and gave us the first trailer for Guerrilla’s upcoming Killzone: Mercenary.

We were thinking for a little while that Valve would reveal Half-Life 3 during Gamescom, but the studio was quick to quash those rumors, and Sony announced a new PlayStation Mobile initiative for iOS and Android, so keep an eye out for that. One very brave thief tried to steal $60,000 worth of computers from Steve Jobs’ home, but was unsuccessful in his efforts, and new rumors are telling us that Apple has been forced to lay off some its Apple Store employees in the UK. The Acer TravelMate P243 notebook PC was revealed today, complete with Intel’s Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, and the Samsung Galaxy S III might be getting an update to Jelly Bean toward the end of the month. Finally tonight, RIM says that BlackBerry 10 will be ready for licensing soon, and the Curiosity rover sent back another image for that massive 130-picture panorama of the surface of Mars. Be sure to give that a look.

That does it for today’s evening wrap-up, so go out and enjoy the rest of your evening!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: August 14, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it’s easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don’t escape without notice, we’ve gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!

Continue reading Refresh Roundup: week of August 6th, 2012

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablet PCs, Software

Refresh Roundup: week of August 6th, 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Aug 2012 21:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to Engadget’s back to school guide! The end of summer vacation isn’t nearly as much fun as the weeks that come before, but a chance to update your tech tools likely helps to ease the pain. Today, we’re leaning back with our tablets — and you can head to the back to school hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the month. Be sure to keep checking back — at the end of August we’ll be giving away a ton of the gear featured in our guides — you can hit up the hub page right here!

Your back may be straining from the textbooks, laptop, gym gear and lunch in that dangling overstuffed messenger, but you’re still gonna want to save room for one more item — a tablet. After all, while you can surf, tweet, play games and watch video from your other devices, there’s nothing like doing it from a simple glass window that sits in the palm of your hand. As the hardware gets more powerful, these devices are rapidly becoming versatile enough to let you justify leaving the laptop at home on less-intensive days, so why not check out our picks of the finest devices you should be using and abusing before, during and after class.

Continue reading Engadget’s back to school guide 2012: tablets

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Engadget’s back to school guide 2012: tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ultrabooks now come in countless shapes and sizes, and we’ve seen display quality vary just as much. Though 1,366 x 768 may still be the norm, 1,600 x 900 panels aren’t unheard of in this ultraportable category. But what about a screen that bucks the 16:9 aspect ratio for an extra-wide 21:9? Toshiba is mixing things up with its new premium Satellite U845W Ultrabook ($1,000 and up), the first laptop to feature that odd aspect ratio.

Styled in the fashion of movie theater screens, the U845W’s 14.4-inch, 1,792 x 768 panel adds more horizontal pixels — ostensibly to enhance the movie-watching experience. In theory, too, that setup should allow for more room to multitask with windows side by side. So how good of an idea is a 21:9 screen in practice? Join us as we put it to the test.

Continue reading Toshiba Satellite U845W review: an Ultrabook with a screen size all its own

Filed under: Laptops

Toshiba Satellite U845W review: an Ultrabook with a screen size all its own originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba has rolled out the REGZA Dynamic 40S5 affordable 40-inch LED-backlight TV in the Japanese market. Priced at 85,000 Yen ($1,090), the new LED-backlight TV features the REGZA Engine and a 5,100,000 dynamic contrast ratio. The REGZA Dynamic 40S5 also provides a digital TV tuner, a USB HDD recording mode and a built-in Stereo speaker. [Ubergizmo]