If you follow the rumors surrounding Apple, you know that the company is reportedly working on a television. That television, rumors suggest, will come with iCloud support, apps, and perhaps even Siri. More importantly, it’ll deliver the kind of image quality often not found in today’s televisions. However, like so many other Apple products, it’s highly likely that the television will boast a high price tag.
Can a mainstream SUV really be fun to drive? Mazda thinks so, and so it tore up the rule book and started from scratch with the new CX-5. The crossover-SUV debuts Mazda’s SKYACTIV technology, a combination of weight reduction, efficiency improvement and design rethinking that, the company promises us, makes it a credible alternative to today’s hybrid and all-electric cars, despite using petrol or diesel powerplants. Too good to be true, and will the CX-5′s aggressive styling grow on us? We put on our finest leatherette driving gloves to find out.
SpaceX's Dragon capsule revealed its secrets to the crew of the International Space Station earlier today, a cache of food, equipment and "new car smell" as astronauts opened the hatch for the first time. After successfully docking with the ISS yesterday - and setting a new record in the process, as the first private craft to link with the station - after a 3.5 day trip through space, Dragon's more than 1,000 pounds of cargo will be unloaded over the next four days, before the shelves are packed up again for the return trip.
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The most recent season premiere for the AMC series Mad Men brought in a whopping 3.5 million viewers. That's not too shabby for a basic cable show, especially when you compare it to last year's season opener. That episode pulled in around 2.3 million viewers. So what's the reason behind that explosive growth? If you believe Ted Sarandos, then it's almost exclusively thanks to Netflix.
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The folks at ViewSonic have sent out their invites for the 2012 Computex conference complete with a couple of choice tips for mobile fans - including a bit about a 22-inch Android 4.0 ICS tablet. This Ice Cream Sandwich tablet is dubbed a "smart business tablet monitor" at the moment and we can't help but recall just hours ago when it was made clear what Steve Ballmer from Microsoft was using in his office - pretty much the same thing. Will you be able to resist such a magnetic piece of hardware?
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Over the next week we’ll be reviewing Diablo III in a series of posts which explore the basics of the game from an outsider’s perspective. This first review shows what its like to play Diablo III from the beginning having only a rudimentary knowledge of what Diablo I and II were like and how the crossover hit World of Warcraft works in practice. Our first run begins with the character class “Monk” and takes on this world of demon fighting in a mostly visual sense.
There are a lot of companies out there that will build you the gaming desktop of your dreams for a pretty penny. You could go pedestrian and buy from Alienware, or perhaps a little more custom and try iBuyPower. But one competitor has an edge that they hope will put them in a performance class above the rest. DV Nation specializes in blazing fast storage and memory, and puts every ounce of their experience into their RAMRod line of gaming PCs. The company was kind enough to let us try out the Powerbox, its compact model, to see the best in gaming excess.
Samsung has announced that it will be launching new Samsung Mobile PIN pop-up stores. The stores will be one of the first European locations selling the Galaxy S III. The pop-up store locations will first be available in London starting on May 29. The Mobile PIN will be the first premium pop-up experience showing off the new S III.
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Nokia has big plans for PureView, including thinner handsets and Windows Phone support, though there’s more than just branding that’s getting in the way of slimming the smartphone camera tech. We grabbed some hands-on playtime with the Nokia 808 PureView in Germany this week, at the headquarters of long-time photography partner Carl Zeiss, where we not only discovered just what the camera is capable of, but some of the decisions – technical, product and otherwise – behind the PureView concept. And make no mistake: if any one thing signifies Nokia’s potential salvation in the mobile industry, PureView is it.
Welcome to our third and final reminder that the first anniversary of the NVIDIA TegraZone is this month! NVIDIA is showing off their wares this month with a big display of games and a release of a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog episode as well. Have a peek at our review of the latest NVIDIA Tegra 3 tablet to hit our review bench, the ASUS Transformer Pad TF300, and head below to continue on with the fun!
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Sony pushed the Xperia S out of the door back in March, but the Xperia P and Xperia U have lagged behind a little in making it to market. Both of those devices are finally with us, and just like HTC, Sony seems to be banking on three phones hitting different price brackets to try and jump start its smartphone career. The Xperia U may be the cheapest in the NXT line, but it does have some solid specs: a dual-core 1Ghz processor, 854×480 3.5-inch screen, and five megapixel camera. How does it hold up? Find out after the jump.
This week we got to sit down with the Visual Effects Supervisors from Sony Pictures Imageworks behind Men in Black 3, premiering in the USA tonight. As any Men in Black fanatic knows, the two main characters, J and K, have their single-letter names taken from their original civilian titles – oddly enough, the two men we interviewed this week go by the names Ken Ralston and Jay Redd – working equivalents of those two protectors of the universe working here to bridge the gap between reality and utterly insane fiction in the Men in Black world. What we found was that not only was this film captured with several different types of cameras and techniques, it was done in a specific Men in Black style, with time travel, fully digital copies of Will Smith and Josh Brolin, and none other than a completely re-imagined Cape Canaveral, not to mention New York city itself.
