The system Mattrick spoke of at the event right from the beginning of an All-in-one system that works with Games, TV, and entertainment and is what Microsoft intends to be “Simple, Instant, and Complete.” A reveal trailer was played on the big screen showing the device – and its peripherals – as quick as it was named: this is the Xbox One.

This device has a slot-loading full-sized disk drive – DVDs and Blu-Ray, that is, and has two peripherals right in the box. This device works with a full-sized controller that’s extremely similar to the controller from the 360, with a bit of bulk shaved off it’s back.

This controller has been shown to be completely wireless from the start, and will be working in collaboration with the system’s Kinect system. This sensor sits separate from the Xbox One console as it has in previous editions, and all pieces here appear much more square than in past editions as well.

This system will work with voice recognition and voice control, will be connected to the cloud for gaming, and you’ll be working with a user interface that’s extremely similar to what we’ve seen recently from Windows 8. This system’s release details will be shared a bit later today – stay tuned through our brand new Xbox One tag portal for more!

As Olsson made clear, this device was created as one of the very first iterations of what’s been reduced to a simple skeleton frame and single, removable computer element. What you’re seeing here is a set of development boards attached to two full-eye glass lenses, white plastic, tape, exposed cords and all.

Isabelle Olsson: When the team started working on this, it was very clear that we’re not taking something that already existed and making incremental improvements to it. The team wanted to create something that’s much more intuitive, immediate, and intimate. But to create a new kind of wearable technology, that’s so ambitious, and very messy at points.

In addition to showing how this pair of glasses worked with folding sides and a real, working set of innards (if you can call them innards, of course), Olsson showed one of the prototype pairs of prescription Glass glasses as well. These are seen in the box below, and their design was seen on Google employees here and there during the week as well, live and active.

Olsson: I will never forget the first day on the team and when I walked into a room wearing these CRAZY things on their heads. I brought the prototype so you could see what I walked in to. It comes in a fancy bag…

Olsson: I think like the colors of the board, maybe, fits my hair color, but I don’t know. It’s kind of heavy, though. I think I’m going to take it off now. So – but – how do you go from something like this to what we’re all wearing today?

Olsson: We took a reductionist approach. We removed everything that wasn’t absolutely essential. And then in addition to that, I formed three principals to guide the team through this ambitious, messy process. Those are:

• Lightness
• Simplicity
• Scalability

You’ll find this particular chat split up across three different features, each surrounding Olsson’s fireside chat contributions. The one you’re in now of course stays within the bounds of the prototype you’re seeing above and below. There are also posts on color choices for Glass, a bit about Modular Fashion, and another expanding on the design of the final product.

Olsson: When I joined the project, we thought we needed 50 different adjustment mechanisms, but that wouldn’t make a good user experience. So we scaled it down to this one adjustment mechanism.

This prototype works with the Glass projection unit nearly the same as what we see in the Explorer Edition of Glass. It’s attached to one of two computer boards, the one on the right temple – here also working with a camera, even in this early state.

This first development board is also connected to the second board, the second presumably reserved for storage space connections and a battery. While tape holds this unit together along with soldered bits and pieces along the board as well as glue, here and there, they do work.

There’s a single button above the camera lens that activates the camera – there’s a similar button (a hidden button) in this area on the Explorer Edition of Glass as well. This original prototype works with essentially every element available in the final release – here it’s just a bit larger, and not really made to look too fashionable for the uninitiated.

Google I/O 2013 also played host to a chat we had with Sergey Brin – co-founder of Google and currently Director of Special Projects for the company. He also gave some insight into the way Glass was first tested, noting that while there were some non-functional bricks used to test form for Glass, it certainly all started with function:

Sergey Brin: We did have some non-functional models, but mostly we had functional, uglier, heavier models. Very early on we realized that comfort was so important, and that [led to] the decision to make them monocular.

We also made the decision not to have it occlude your vision, because we tried. We tried different configurations, because [it's] something you’re going [need] to be comfortable. Hopefully you’re comfortable wearing it all day? [That's] something that’s hard to make. You’re going to have to make a lot of other trade-offs.

Have a peek at the photos in a larger sense in the gallery below and let us know if you see anything you recognize – it’s all there, piece by piece.

It’s not a matter of being able to create the device and distribute it fast enough: Google has been clear that they’re perfectly able to create devices en masse and send them to customers at speed. The company now creates and distributes several hardware bits and pieces: the Chromebook Pixel, Nexus 4 smartphone, and Nexus 7 tablet to name a few. Instead, it would seem, the team of creators here only wish it were the future, past the steps they must take between here while the device is still in its developer infancy and the point at which Glass is ready for anyone to buy.

Product Director for Google Glass Steve Lee spoke to this point at length, noting the place where the project was today and where it’ll be going in the very near future.

Steve Lee: With the Explorer Program, where we’re at right now, is were now getting it in to the hands of thousands of other people to see what exciting things they can do with Glass. The first group of people that we’re getting it in the hands of are developers. We know that to fully realize the potential of Glass, we need your help. We need innovators to develop on the platform. 

The next group of people that will become Explorers are those that signed up for #ifihadglass. And there were 8,000 people selected from over 100,000 people who applied. And we will soon be rolling out invites to those folks to pick up Glass. 

What’s exciting about that group of people – they’re not developers – but it’s a nice cross-section of people. We have folks who are educators, teachers, we have athletes. We have DJs, dentists, hair stylists. All kinds of different people. 

And so we’re really excited to see a diverse set of folks – what are they going to do with glass?

Also commenting on the situation with where Glass is today and how long it will be before the product is delivered in a final consumer form was Senior Developer Advocate at Google for Project Glass Timothy Jordan. Also acting as moderator for this fireside chat, Jordan made sure to let the audience know that it’s not that Google wants to hold the device back for no good reason.

Timothy Jordan: We don’t have an updated timeline for Glass release. Where we’re at right now, is… lemme say this: I’ve had a number of people come up to me at Google I/O and be like: ‘I want Google Glass, and I have this amazing idea.’ And my first reaction is: ‘I want you to have Glass!’ 

Right now we’re selling Glass to the Explorers who signed up at Google I/O last year. Next it’s the “If I had Glass” people. Next, it could be you.

SlashGear will be continuing to explore the Google Glass environment with our own up-close look at the Developer Edition of the device at updates, during pointed moments of opportunity, and at moments when brilliance strikes from here until that day when Google decides to move forward with a general edition. Until then: courage.

At the moment it’s unclear what sort of price structure will be in place or how the device will be distributed to the public once the time is ripe. It’s likely they’ll be picked up in bags like the one you see here held by Glass lead industrial designer Isabelle Olsson – this bag contained an original prototype, just so you know.

Google Glass is at such a point in its infancy that the company could be making major changes to every piece of the project – software and hardware included. Software updates will be pushed out to developers from this point forward on a monthly bases with changes coming based on suggestions from the public. Suggestions made by developers and the public are also being taken under advisement by the team for hardware as well as software.

This goes so far as Jordan literally writing down a Pantone color code suggested by a developer for the next wave of Glass hardware during this extended chat. This team appears serious about making a device that’s both by and for its future wearers.

It was in chats like these – and in breakout sessions more like lessons for developer attendees of the conference – that the Glass team used to represent itself in California during I/O 2013. Glass may not have been discussed at length in the opening keynote on day 1, but it certainly had its fair share of attention during the week. Expect this chatter to get extra vibrant once the consumer edition arrives.

This so-called Xbox 720 is ready to jump off the blocks with abilities inclusive of its predecessors. You’ll still be able to play games on it, of course, but you’ll also be able to use the Xbox 720 as your one-stop shop for home entertainment. The Xbox TV will be part of this equation.

Microsoft will need to keep the power of the Xbox 720 as a gaming console intact in order to continue to compete with Sony, of course. As the PlayStation 4 was revealed only in a very basic way, it’s expected that Microsoft will use the opportunity to come in with a bit more solid force.

Essentially: “hey Sony, that’s a nice wireless controller you’ve got there – we’ve got an actual machine to show the public.”

That said, it won’t be long before Sony shows their PlayStation 4 console hardware off to the public, either. Have a peek here at the first E3 teaser video released earlier today, straight from the source.

So it’s a black box with sharp edges – exciting! Will Microsoft come back at Sony with a white box with rounded edges? We shall see!

The abilities of the Xbox 720 will likely spread their way across your living room and enter your smartphone and tablet as well. As Microsoft already uses a system called Xbox Smartglass to allow owners of iPhones, iPads, Android and Windows Phone devices, and likely more platforms to control the Xbox remotely. With the Xbox 720, Microsoft will likely expand how this system works, allowing users to control their Xbox system in ways not yet available: game control, for instance.

As the Xbox becomes more a part of the living room entertainment system family, so too must it work at all times. It’s been suggested that the Xbox 720 will be placed between your cable or TV box and your television screen itself. As you watch the content you love each day, you’ll also have Xbox notifications on-screen for for your convenience.

Of course if you like to change inputs on your TV like you’ve always done, it’s up to you.

Microsoft will certainly expand the Xbox’s ability to work with the web, likely making a point to show the machine’s ability to game in the cloud right out of the box – if they do anything more with the cloud at all, that is.

Kinect will very likely be getting an upgrade, and its expected that the Xbox 720 will be sold initially as a Kinect-included system only when it first goes on sale. Tips of IllumiRoom being integrated into the system when it launches have been shut down by Microsoft earlier this year – the same is likely true with any other 3D augmented reality integration – at least at the start of this release.

The Xbox 720 – rumored to be called simply “Xbox” from this point forward – will be shown off on Tuesday, May 21st with few, if any, game titles attached to it. The reason for this is the imminent approach of the E3 gaming convention where Microsoft has promised waves of games being announced in a fantastic display.

The actual release of this system has also been rumored – of course – this time being suggested for a November release. If that were true, Microsoft would likely beat Sony to the punch or have a hammer-drop at nearly the same time as the PlayStation 4.

We began our journey in a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour of the Moscone Center in San Francisco to see what Google had in store. It appeared that the setup was rather similar to what we’d seen the year before – save the massive models hovering above the third floor.

While on the third floor we literally saw the word ANDROID dominating the floor aside Chrome, the second floor retained a set of services for multiple platforms. The second floor also had Google Glass holding its own unique space on the level’s far side. Below you’ll see an on-site preview of the first of three floors through Glass – aka #throughglass – this method of collection acting as a teaser for what would become the dominant subject of the conference – whether Google intended it to or not.

It was announced by Google that they’d at this point counted 900 million Android activations across the planet. This number jumped from just 400 million activations in 2012 and 100 million activations in 2011 – that’s four times the number from one year to the next, then nearly double that number again between last year and here.

Just this past month, Android activations were marked at 1.35 million per day on average back on the 13th of March according to Google – at 750 million activations back then and 900 million now, the company could be seeing over 1.5 billion Android activations by the end of the year.

Devices

Google showed of a single new device – a new “Google Edition” or “Nexus Edition” of the Samsung GALAXY S 4. This device would be sold straight from Google the way a Nexus smartphone or tablet would, but would retain the Samsung GALAXY S 4 brand name. While device announcements such as this are normally joined by a giveaway for attendees of the conference, here it was joined by a price tag and availability date: June 25th for a healthy $649 unlocked and without contractual obligations.

We had our own up-close look at this GALAXY S 4 courtesy of Hugo Barra. Google’s Vice President of Android Product Management showed this device as exactly what you’d expect it would be – at least as swift as the Samsung-skinned original and ready to act as a non-Nexus alternative for those wishing to pick up Jelly Bean straight from the source.

NVIDIA came in to take a bit of the hype and excitement of the week with a double-down announcement of their SHIELD device becoming available for pre-sale. NVIDIA’s SHIELD was both announced for pre-sale for early adopters and had its normal retailer pre-sale bumped up due to an apparent rush of requests from normal consumers.

Google Glass was, of course, on a much larger percentage of the center’s population than anywhere else in the world at any time up until this point, with the one possible exception being inside Google and Google X itself. Google Glass runs on its own unique version of Android, the device itself able to be hacked at this point to run Ubuntu (this also proven at a I/O breakout session just this week). Though it wasn’t mentioned but in passing during I/O’s keynote session, Glass and development surrounding it ended up being the star of the week.

Sliding in on the wearable wave as well was a device announced this week by Recon – the Recon Je. This pair of glasses works with a miniature computer that runs Android as well. We had a quick peek at this device here in its near-complete state as well – it’ll be released by the end of the year, well ahead of Google’s own Glass consumer push.

Services

The system known as Google Play game services was launched to tie together gamers on not only Android, but iOS and in-browser as well for desktop machines. This system will allow game saves to the cloud so that users can sign in with their game profile from any device and pick up their game where they left off. It will also support easier connections for multi-player games between users playing on different platforms.

Groups such as Glu Mobile and Gameloft have already begun integrating Google Play game services connectivity and functionality into their games. Developers at Vector Unit announced and demonstrated the ability to connect over the web with speed with their upcoming title Riptide GP 2 – a game also demonstrated this week on NVIDIA SHIELD out on the main floor at Google I/O.

Development

As this is a developers convention, Google chose it for the announcement point of the system that the company says could end Android fragmentation woes forever. This system is called Android Studio and will act as Google’s first all-inclusive developer tool they’ve ever offered – an IDE (integrated developer environment) that offers features such as virtual multi-device display testing and real-time views of multiple language translations in-app.

Android Studio works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at the moment. In speaking with multiple developers throughout the week, we found the fact that these three platforms were chosen first to be a common notion. Why give developers a Chromebook Pixel with an operating system based on the web and announce an Android developer system that’s not entirely web-based?

On that note, Google also let it be known that the Chrome OS experience was coming to its Android web browser with several account-sync abilities. One of the more interesting of these was form autocomplete, this allowing users to store their credit card information and contact information as they normally would on the desktop version of the browser and pull it up automatically from the mobile web.

Apps

Announced as an upgrade to the buy-and-own system already in place, Google Play Music All Access was revealed as a real competitor to streaming music services like Spotify and Rdio. This system is able to stream music both in a web browser and in-app, costing the user $9.99 a month for access – if they don’t get in on the deal early, that is.

This system is based on a choose-your-own-playlist system that also offers up smart selections from Google’s robots – at the moment, it’s both in-web and on Android, but not ready for iOS. This system is ready to roll for both mobile and in-browser users of Google Music.

Perhaps the most important app announced this week was the cross-platform chat platform expanding what was originally reserved for Google+ in video chat. Here we saw Google+ Hangouts for Android, iOS, in-browser inside Google+, and as a OS X app. Users sign in with their Google+ account and use contacts through Circles to connect.

Google+ Hangouts are able to work with text, stickers and icons, video and photo sharing, and video chat. This system will be expanding to include new types of sharing in the future as Google+ as a social network leads the way. This system is now live in effect for all platforms announced, desktop, Android, and iOS included.

Wrap-up

Android has been presented this week as one of several central systems part of the greater ecosystem that is Google, a company that aims to get technology “out of your way”. Google’s CEO Larry Page stepped on stage at the start of this conference to express his wish for an ideal future: “technology should do the hard work, so you can get on and live your life.”

In the end, Android became a power here that was assumed while Google’s ecosystem grew around it. It’s here that Google makes it clear: Android itself doesn’t need to be updated every time the company has a big event. It’s the year of the Context Ecosystem, and Google’s presentation of Android at Google I/O 2013 has once again proven it.

Google’s developer conference is home to more than just developers, of course: press, analysts, students, and Google lovers from all angles are invited, but this year the company had a more focused approach in mind. While the conference retained its three-day allotment of breakout sessions and fireside chats with Google’s own for developers of all types, the company’s initial keynote was limited to one day instead of two.

This single keynote was also toned down – significantly – especially compared to last year’s explosion of content: new devices, a new version of Android, and a skydive drop live with what was then called Project Glass. Larry Page stepped on stage to make an address to the developers and the public, taking part in an extended question-and-answer session as well, showing some extreme boldness answering whatever random queries attendees might have.

Because of these elements in the keynote – the most public and direct bit of the convention from Google, to be sure, the entire set of events was given what we suggested to Hugo Barra had given it all a more “human” vibe to I/O. This, he said was “exactly what we were aiming for.”

Google’s top guns stepped into the fray as well, with Googlers like Barra and Sergey Brin appearing for drinks and a chat with the press late on Day 1. There it was abundantly clear that this event was not simply made for developer training, but for person-to-person connectivity: another pillar the event was originally built on.

Our own Chris Davies lent some insight on this subject, his column “Google I/O and the year of the Context Ecosystem” speaking volumes about Google’s aim here in 2013.

“All of Google’s services are gradually interweaving. Google I/O 2013 is an ecosystem play, and it’s one of the biggest – and arguably ambitious – we’ve ever seen. It’ll drag Google+ with it along the way, and it might even kickstart the “internet of things” when we start to see some legitimate advantages of having every device a web-connected node.

Google didn’t give us a new phone for our pocket or a new tablet for our coffee table; instead, it gave us so much more.” – Chris Davies

What did you think of Google I/O 2013 from a consumer perspective? If you don’t consider yourself a consumer in this case – how did you take it all from whatever position you’re in?

The device formerly known as Project SHIELD will be coming from the same set of retail partners as it was when its first availability was announced before Google I/O. This change of heart affects each of the set: NVIDIA’s pre-order page, Newegg, and Gamestop in the USA and Canada Computer in the Great White North. It’s just Micro Center that’s not got a pre-order page prepared at the moment – they’ll be going live inside the next few days.

SHIELD retains its specifications outlined in detail earlier this week, it being an NVIDIA Tegra 4 quad-core processor-powered gaming Android clamshell-style gaming handheld device made for both local and streaming game content. Utilizing the Tegra 4′s 72 GPU cores for graphics prowess, this machine is being marketed as both the highest-powered Android gaming device on the market while it brings streaming PC gaming at the same time.

It’s important to note, mind you, that the PC gaming streaming abilities SHIELD employs will not be launched in their full, finalized form when the device ships. Instead, NVIDIA suggests that this part of the equation will remain in Beta for an unspecified amount of time – but not so long that we imagine users will be freaking out.

Have a peek at the PC streaming abilities of this device as well as some Android gaming above in a couple of SlashGear’s several hands-on demos with this device as it inches closer to a final release. Expect shipping to take place sooner than later.

Olsson showed a rather bulky and – according to her – rather heavy piece of hardware that was a mix of geeky massive and hipster odd. Speaking about the experience, walking into the room at Google on the first day that prototypes had been mocked up, Olsson described it as a rather exciting – if not scary – experience. One of the first changes the team had to make, she said, was in the unit’s ability to adjust.

“When I joined the project, we thought we needed 50 different adjustment mechanisms, but that wouldn’t make a good user experience. So we scaled it down to this one adjustment mechanism.” – Isabelle Olsson, Google Glass Lead Industrial Designer

Olsson also showed off Glass’ ability to be taken apart and moved. There’s one piece that acts as the most basic frame and the other – the computer – that can be attached to many different bits and pieces being built today.

“We make Glass modular. In this stage, this means you’re able to remove the board from the main frame. This is pretty cool. This opens up a lot of possibilities. It opens up possibilities for not only functionality but also scalability.” – Isabelle Olsson, Google Glass Lead Industrial Designer

Glass is still at a place where this team cannot tell the public when they will be ready to sell to consumers – the same goes for the future of Glass. Noting that they wouldn’t be able to comment on the future of Glass very much at this point. This was called into question by a boisterous audience member who yelled:

Why not?!

To which the host of this chat, Senior Developer Advocate at Google for Project Glass, Timothy Jordan, replied: “because it’s Google’s policy not to comment on future unannounced products. And because I follow rules.” To which the same audience member replied, pathetically hilariously:

Ok.

This attitude reflected the thoughts and wishes of the entire audience – or at least those without the device on their temples. With more than 30 members of the audience wearing the developer “Explorer Edition” in full effect, we were in rare company without a doubt.

Recon Jet is not in a place where it’s able to be sold at the moment – the version we’re having a peek at here at the Google developer event is a pre-production item – but once it’s ready, it’ll be largely the same as what we’re seeing on the inside. Inside this device works with a dual-core mobile processor (the name of which we’re not allowed to speak of quite yet) powering Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with a custom Recon-made user interface over the top.

You’ll control this machine with a miniature touch-sensitive optical pad that sits on the side of the device near the display. Touching this pad as well as swiping left and right, up and down will allow you access to the device’s abilities and settings.

Inside you’ll be working with GPS, wi-fi connectivity for web, Bluetooth 4.0, and ANT+. With ANT+ you’ll be able to connect to a variety of other sports sensors – this device is, after all, made for hardcore sporting enthusiasts, after all. All of this connects to an HD camera the megapixels of which are not yet available as well.

You’ll be working with “gaze detection” for instant access to the machine’s abilities, its display turning off and on when you want or do not want to work with it. Your eyes will decide.

Have a peek at our brief adventure with this device and note that the main aim of revealing this device this week is to find developers that want to work with the SDK for the device in advance of its final release. This machine will be released to the public before the end of the year – we’ve confirmed this specifically once again in-person with Recon – making its appearance fall well before Google Glass hits the streets in a consumer edition. Pricing and release dates will be coming soon.

This device has been suggested to be tagged also with the name Nexus 5 – that implying that it’d take the place of the current LG-made Nexus 4 device on the market right this minute. One rather important point against this possibility is the slightly larger photo of the device that’s been leaked with an LG logo at the bottom of it. If this device were, in fact, headed for a Google release, it’d have no branding up front at all.

This device has also been tipped – and seems to check out – with a 5.5-inch display with 1080p resolution. This device could very well be a new variant or an upgrade of the LG Optimus G Pro, that coming forth with a very similar display up front but a bit thicker body behind.

Because the LG Optimus G Pro is sill relatively new, on the other hand, it does make the most sense that this would be the long-awaited follow-up to the original Optimus G. This upgrade would place its screen between the original Optimus G and the Optimus G Pro and would upgrade processor power to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, just like what’s found in the Optimus G Pro, HTC One, and Samsung GALAXY S 4.

This device, while suggested to be coming with a Google push for their developer conference next week at Google I/O 2013, will much more likely be appearing the week after, at its earliest. There LG can avoid any entanglements in news blasts for the week from the conferences goings-on.

Meanwhile the LG Optimus G Pro launches on AT&T in the United States today – we’ve got our LG Optimus G Pro review ready for you to have a gander at if you feel so inclined as well. This device should very well lead the way to the Optimus G2 which may be coming presently.

SOURCE: Evleaks

Project Mighty

With Adobe’s push for the cloud in a big way this week with a convergence of Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop CC, so too did they decide to remind the world that their creative software environment is made to work hand-in-hand with the hardware you’ll be using on a daily basis. Project Mighty is an embodiment of that initiative, being displayed this week as a bit of an experiment – it’s not yet clear whether or not Adobe will be releasing this stylus as an actual for-sale item in stores.

This experiment does exist in some physical sense, however, as the company shows it to be working with Bluetooth LE for wireless connectivity, on-board memory, and pressure sensitivity for advanced illustration. With “your creative cloud” inside this device, you’ll be connecting to not just the machine you’re directly interfacing with, but your online presence as well.

This stylus device works with a rechargeable battery inside and a Pen Tip charger up on its nose. The build shown this week is a triangular shape that curves in an ever-so-slight spiral from the tip up to the bunt of the device.

Project Napoleon

The device known as Project Napoleon is, at the moment, a rather new concept in the world of wireless connectivity for illustration. This is Adobe’s “Digital Ruler”. You’ll be tapping one of six different modes of execution in this machine, this then wirelessly indicating on the machine you’re working with – be it your tablet, your touchscreen monitor, or your Project Mighty pen – that you want to create in one of several ways.

Tapping the circle option allows you to create a smooth circle shape. Tapping the straight line allows you to draw smoothly in a straight line. It’s not clear at the moment how this device will be interacting with devices across the board, but we can assume it’ll be in collaboration with Adobe CC applications exclusively.

Both of these devices have been shown in extreme brief this week and we can expect additional information in the near future from Adobe on their availability. As Adobe leaves physical stores behind with boxed software, so too does it stay!

[via Adobe]

The first update to the iPad mini will likely come right before the Fall school season begins, this lodging the tablet directly into the minds of those prospective users looking to maximize the excellence of their backpack setup. This machine falls in line with users hoping to own their own piece of Apple equipment without going full-sized with the standard iPad. The main line iPad will have reached its 5th generation, more than likely, by the end of this year.

NOTE: This analysis suggests that the report from April 29th from KGI Securities was only referring to the 3rd-generation iPad mini. We shall see!

The iPad mini will be seeing a push to a new display technology, it’s also said, including a possible inclusion of LTPS, the same technology used in the iPhone 5. LPTS is also known as low-temperature polysilicon, and it’ll be sharpening up the iPad mini significantly. The first run of iPad mini units used the same number of pixels as the original iPad, allowing it to be a bit more dense than that first-gen tablet, but still falling well below the current-gen iPad with so-called “retina” display.

This set of predictions has the iPad mini with Retina display and higher-powered processor set for the first quarter of 2014 while the end of summer will be a likely plant-point for the iPad mini with just a bit of a display boost on its own. Meanwhile it’s expected that a new low-cost iPhone may be appearing before the end of the year alongside a specifications-boosted iPhone 5S. Of course this is all speculation as Apple keeps its real plans under notoriously tight wraps.

[via CNET]

While each of the units being presented in the HP ProBook 400 notebook PC series is a significant amount thinner than its predecessor, the line also brings up to 18% lighter weight points as well. Like HP is want to do with their notebook lineup across the board, the company is pushing a “115,000 hours of reliability testing” point here with the 400 series. They’ve also suggested that this line has gone through “extensive platform qualification” as well.

The HP ProBook 430 G1 will be released alongside the HP ProBook 440 G0 while the HP ProBook 445 G1 will be offered along side the ProBook 455 G1 and the ProBook 470 G0 as well, all of them starting to hit shelves this month starting at $499 USD. You’ll be able to have a peek at this lineup this month right alongside the HP 200 Series Notebook as well, this lineup made for small businesses from start to finish.

With the HP 200 Series Notebook, HP has created a business machine made for content creation and consumption in a rather stock-ready sense. Both the HP ProBook 400 notebook PC line and the HP 200 Series Notebook line work with HP 3D DriveGuard for hardware protection of your data – that’s for real bumps and sudden movements making with the otherwise deadly crashes on your machine.

NOTE: While it’s mentioned here that the HP 200 Series Notebook will be aiming to take on the rising Chromebook market, it will not be working with Google’s Chrome operating system. Instead users will be working with Microsoft’s Windows OS.

The HP 200 Series Notebook line works with a durable casing that comes in any color just so long as it’s black, and you’ll have the choice of picking this machine up in two iterations. There’s the HP 250 Notebook and the HP 255 Notebook, the line starting at $249 USD, looking ready to take on the inexpensive Chromebook segment head-on.

The HTC One is a device that’s gotten reviews that are quite scarcely negative, mostly aiming for a place that’s not just good for the phone itself, but for HTC as well. With news that HTC wasn’t doing especially well in the market over the past several quarters, many writers appeared to have favored the HTC One doubly so, just to see HTC continue to make devices due to the successful build on this one.

So what would we have in an HTC One tablet? A response not only to the massive success Google has seen in the Nexus 7, but to the multi-tiered attack plan pushed by Samsung with their Galaxy Note series. While Samsung continues to reveal Galaxy Tab devices – including the Galaxy Tab 3 as recently as today – it should be clear that the slight boost in features the Galaxy Note offers is what Samsung is pushing as the setup they want consumers to choose.

So an HTC One tablet device might find success in a premium build – that’s what the HTC One handset is, after all. HTC is so confident in their design and marketing of the HTC One that the CEO of the company Peter Chou has bet his job on a successful season. Would he do it again if the HTC One handset were a success and the company brought a tablet with the same design sensibilities?

At the moment there really isn’t a wide variety of builds in the Android tablet market, and HTC hasn’t come forth with a design since the relative biffs that were the HTC Flyer and HTC Jetstream. They’ve made it clear that they’re not in the tablet business at the moment, but, even back when they made that note in October of 2012, their global online communications manager Jeff Gordon made note that they’d be “watching that market very, very closely.”

The time may be ripe later this year – stay tuned to see how the HTC One sells to decide for yourself if it’s time for a second dip.

In an effort to keep their ATIV devices unique in the PC environment, Samsung also mentioned they’ll be bringing a feature forward that’ll keep users in sync with their smartphones and tablets as well. This so-called “SideSync” feature will be embedded in all future ATIV PCs and will, as they say, make moving files, working, and communicating, seamless between devices.

SideSync will work with ATIV PC users and their smartphones to text, view maps, edit bits and pieces of their phone, and move multimedia. At the moment it seems that SideSync will only be working with Samsung ATIV PCs using Windows 8 and Samsung Android-based devices.

This renaming structure and push for further connectivity between mobile and desktop computers, Samsung has revealed a couple new notebooks, both of them coming with names that reflect Samsung’s new bid for simplicity. The Samsung ATIV Book 5 will bring Ultrabook power with 24GB of ExpressCache and a 14-inch touchscreen and 4.19 pounds of weight. The Samsung ATIV Book 6 brings an Intel Core i7 processor with a 15.6-inch full HD touchscreen and Samsung’s RAMAccelerator technology for accelerating its 8GB of RAM.

The Samsung ATIV Book 5 will be coming with an Intel Core i5 processor and is available today starting at $899.99 while the ATIV Book 6 will be bringing a 1TB HDD in its most basic form, starting at $1199.99 USD. The name-changes to Samsung’s lines such as Chronos, Ultra, Smart PC, and Series 9 will be henceforth re-named ATIV, a full chart showing their new names appearing below.

Sound like a nice set of naming changes to you? Will you be able to live with your Samsung Series 9 machine now tht it’s called an ATIV Book 9, or will you have to re-think your plans based on the name? Let us know!

When that particular developer board first turned up in 2011, it sold for $90 and had a 720 MHz processor. The new version gets updated specifications and a lower price tag. The new BeagleBone Black has a 1 GHz Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor from Texas Instruments.

The price for the new version of the developer board is $45 and it has an open hardware design. That means all of the chips and the design of the board are openly and freely available to the public allowing anyone with the capability to make their own version. The processor used on the BeagleBone Black also allows the board to run Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux.

When it comes to I/O capability, the BeagleBone Black falls somewhere between the Arduino Uno and Due. That is to say it has more I/O capability than the Uno, but not as much is the Due. BeagleBone currently has over 30 plug-in boards are compatible with the new Black version. Those plug-in boards allow the connection of all sorts of accessories and other components to the developer board including 3-D printers, lighting controllers, LCD touchscreens, and a lot more. Another nice feature of the new Black edition is a microHDMI port and it comes preinstalled with Linux.

[via ArsTechnica]

It’s a rather unique concept – when folded, the device looks and functions like your average everyday tablet running Windows 8. It is portable, and can be used with a stylus, for example. There are bound to be times, however, when you need to do something more hardware-intensive than a tablet can handle. Instead of switching to a laptop or desktop, the Inhon Tablet has a built in sort of Turboboost mode.

On the half of the tablet/laptop hybrid that doesn’t hold the screen, there’s said to be USB 3.0 and Mini DisplayPorts, as well as a cooling fan that is exposed when the device is opened up. As such, the increased cooling is used in conjunction with a TurboBoost of the processor (overclocking?) that gives users a big jump in processing power.

Because it can no longer be used as a tablet once it is unfolded, the Inhon Tablet can be used with an optional accessory that looks very similar to a Touch Cover, functioning as both a trackpad and a keyboard. When it hits shelves, the quasi-tablet will be priced between NT $29,999 and NT $39,999, which is roughly $1000 to $1300 USD.

[via Engadget]

This particular SoC is notable because Allwinner says that is the world’s first dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 SoC. The SoC features a dual-core core Cortex-A7 CPU along with a dual-core Mali400MP2 GPU. The SoC supports H.264 2160p video playback and 1080p video playback at 30 frames per second. It also supports 720p 60 frame per second video capture.

The A20 also features an integrated HDMI transmitter, LVDS interface, and integrated TV decoder. It supports dual camera sensors and is Google CTS approved and GMS ready. The SoC supports Android 4.2.2. The manufacturer says that the architecture promises five times the energy efficiency and 50% greater performance than previous generation Cortex-A8 architecture SoCs.

This processor is also likely that land in some existing products as an upgrade. The A20 is pin to pin compatible with Allwinners A10 chipset. The company doesn’t offer any details on specific products coming to market using the new SoC, but this will likely be a very popular product with Chinese gadget makers.

[via Allwinner]

Hardware

Lenovo has these built out with a 23-inch display at 1920 x 1080, running Windows 8 and powered by an Intel Pentium G2020 processor. The model we tested had the processor clocked at 2.9GHz and with Intel HD Graphics 2500, 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. Hardware specs aside, the system itself has a decent overall look, albeit with a bezel that is a bit on the shiny side. Basically, that is just to say that you can expect to see dust, fingerprints and other smudges. Certainly not a deal breaker, but something to be aware of.

The setup itself is straight forward and easy. Aside from the 23-inch display, the C540 has a webcam sitting front and center on the top along with the power button towards the bottom on the left side of the system. In total there are six USB 2.0 ports — four on the back and two on the left hand side of the system. Also on the left side (above the power button) you will find the headphone and microphone jacks as well as a memory card reader. Rounding out the ports on the back and you have the power jack, HDMI and Ethernet. The system also has Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n connectivity.

Basically, just what you need and all in easy to access locations. The system itself is on the thin side and looking from the front, would appear to be nothing more than a regular monitor. The good part here is that as the C540 is an all-in-one — there is no tower needed. Another item worth noting is a DVD drive which can be found on the right-hand side. Otherwise, Lenovo ships the C540 with a USB keyboard and mouse and has the system sitting on a stand that swivels allowing you to adjust the viewing angle a bit.

Software

The Lenovo C540 is running a 64-bit edition of Windows 8, which means it will bring an experience that will be familiar to many. The basics are all included which means when you first get up and running you will find tiles for goodies such as your mail and calendar as well as people, photos and more. There is also a live tile for the weather as well as tiles for SkyDrive, Games, Camera, Music and Video.

Aside from the basics that you will find on just about an Windows 8 system, Lenovo has also added a few goodies of their own. We will leave the bloatware argument aside and instead simply note how these include some Lenovo specifics such as PowerDVD 10 and the slightly more important items such as the Lenovo System Recovery. Rounding out the software are some third party apps such as an Amazon app as well as a Kindle, Evernote and cloud storage app. The cloud storage app is SugarSync and it gets you started with 5GB for free.

Performance

Speaking in terms of performance, the system was able to handle our day to day needs with ease. Granted, quite a bit of that involved little more than a web browser, text editor and some basic image work. Of course, the key here is who the Lenovo C540 is aimed at — the average home user. In that respect, we have to say the C540 should be able to live up to your needs.

Taking this a step further and the play time experience was just as solid. That is to say we found no issues with some light gaming along with music and video streaming. Shifting over to the technical side, lets get into what the benchmarks look like for the Lenovo C540. These were done using Geekbench and the results are sitting below.

Wrap-Up

Bottom line here, the Lenovo C540 all-in-one seems to be well suited for the intended audience. That is to say the average home user that wants something powerful enough for day to day use. Of course, the good looks and relatively slim design only go to further that thought. The model as configured is priced from $500 and can be found with a variety of online retailers with prices through the $500 range. Also, as one would expect with desktop computers there is always the option to upgrade. In this case, Lenovo has options for faster processors, more RAM and even additional storage. Needless to say, based on what we have tested — we think this ‘as tested’ model will be just fine for the majority of users.

The drive is available in 120GB, 240Gb, 480GB, and 960GB capacities, with their respective prices (listed in order) being $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99. The SSD uses 20nm MLC NAND Micron flash and a SATA 6GB/s controller, as well as custom firmware, all of this combining to offer an IOPS (input/oupt operations per second) of up to 80,000.

To keep data safe, there’s on-board hardware level encryption said to meet both IEEE 1667 and TCG Opal 2.0 standards, depending on software. In addition, the M500 also utilizes thermal management technology and offers power-loss protection. There are advanced recovery features against errors, and a device sleep option for improving battery life, which is reported as offering a 93-percent power improvement over the last Crucial line of SSDs.

Crucial’s Senior Worldwide Product Manager Robert Wheadon had this to say: “We designed the Crucial M500 to meet the reliability and performance expectations of today’s systems, and are thrilled to offer the first terabyte-class. SSD for under $600. The Crucial M500 is equipped with an impressive new set of features, making it a multifaceted solution for today and tomorrow.”

The M500 drives are available now.

[via Global Newswire]

That feature makes it easy to transfer, edit, and distribute content in a digital workflow environment in a more efficient nature. In addition to the G-Dock ev with Thunderbolt, the Evolution Series also includes the G-Drive EV Plus external hard drive modules using USB 3.0. The removable and interchangeable storage modules are designed to be taken into the field and used as standalone external drives for the storage of raw content.

The storage devices support JBOD, RAID 1, and RAID 0 configurations. The individual storage modules are offered in two capacities allowing users to expand their storage space as needed. The G-Dock ev is available with with a pair of 1 TB modules installed. The G-Dock ev including to 1 TB modules will be available in May for $749.95. Additional 500 GB modules will cost $149.95 with additional 1 TB modules costing $199.95. The G-Drive ev Plus modules will also be available this summer for $349.95.

The other new storage solution company has unveiled is the G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt. That particular storage solution promises hard drive capacity with SSD-like performance. The manufacturer says that using the Thunderbolt interface the external storage solution is able to deliver sustained data transfer rates of up to 480 MB/s. The drive features dual Thunderbolt ports for storage expansion and the ability to daisy chain with other Thunderbolt devices. The drive will be available in a 4 TB version for $849.95 and a 2 TB version for $699.95 this summer.

[via G-Technology and G-Technology]

With the reveal of Facebook Home, we’re seeing an experience existing within Android, on top of it – not taking it over entirely. Even when you put your hands on the HTC first, the very first Facebook Home device right out of the box, you’ll be able to turn Facebook Home off if you like. But what of advertisements? And what of the idea that Facebook Home commands the entire user interface you’re working with on your phone?

See our full Facebook Home and HTC first hands-on experience now!

Such things seem to not have struck investors as concerns as the stock hasn’t dropped since before the event began. Now we’ll see if this first smartphone to run the device does well – at $99 USD from AT&T with a 2-year contract, it just might. And we’ll see if Facebook Home is a software experience that people will want to try – or maybe even use regularly.

Have a peek at the timeline below to see the many angles at which Facebook Home has been covered by SlashGear today, and don’t forget to stick to the Android Hub for more on the insides. Also let us know if you’re all about the Facebook Home smartphone experience, if you’ll wait for the tablet edition, or if you’ll be skipping it altogether!

The HTC first is the first Facebook Phone right out of the box, it working with the new Facebook Home Android app experience. This software creates a full Facebook experience for anyone using it as their homescreen launcher, decidedly separate from Android’s core. With this app you’ll be getting Facebook Home updates on the 12th of every month (according to Facebook) and you’ll have full access to your Facebook content.

UPDATE: See our HTC first hands-on here and now!

You’ll be seeing the following unique bits and pieces coming from this EE release of the HTC first as well:

• EE Film – the only service in the UK which combines 2 for 1 cinema ticketing, listings, trailers and digital film downloads in one place
• A discount of £5 per month on EE superfast Fibre Broadband – so they can get blistering speeds at home and on the move
• Fast track customer service by dialing ‘33’ from their handset
• Clone Phone Lite – giving people free storage to back up the content that matters most

Have a peek at the timeline below for more information on the HTC first as well as our Android Hub for more Android excellence through the future! In our brand new Facebook Home tag portal you’ll find all you need to know about this new experience and about the future of Facebook on your smartphone!

With the HTC first you’ll be rolling out with a 4.3-inch LCD display with no less than 720p resolution for your everyday sharp Facebook interactions. This device will be rolling out with a lovely Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core processor, this being the same SoC that you’ll find on the Samsung Galaxy S III and the DROID RAZR HD. On the back of the HTC first you’ll find a 5-megapixel camera while the front works with a 1.6-megapixel camera for Facebook video chat and messages.

UPDATE: This device is NOT using the Snapdragon S4 as previously noted – instead it is one of the first devices on the market to be using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400. This smartphone will also be coming with 3G/4G “multimode” LTE and will be available on the 12th of April for $99 USD attached to a 2-year contract.

You’ll be knocking out the apps with 1GB of RAM and a brand new user interface that’s based loosely on HTC’s own Sense 4.5. You’ll of course have wi-fi, 4G LTE from AT&T (at first, additional carriers on the way we must expect), and Android 4.1.2 right out of the box. We’ll be presenting some fabulous hands-on action with this device soon – there we’ll have additional insight in to how this device functions and if it’ll be the smartphone you’ve just got to have in 2013.

Have a peek at our Android Hub as well for more information on the Android universe at large! We’ll be bringing you more Android and Facebook Phone (and regular old Facebook) action all day – stick around and check the timeline below for updates, too!

Hardware

The Tiki case is one that those unfamiliar with the intricacies of custom-made computers will easily overlook. It’s certainly not the flashy rainbow LED light show that some gaming PCs opt for – it’s almost as if the Tiki dares those that look at it to ask what the big deal is. Up close and personal, you’ll find that the Tiki boasts a fabulously simple set of aesthetics, a subtly lit Falcon Northwest logo up front, and a granite base.

The granite base we’ve got here is what the company calls “Absolute Black”. While you’ve got more than one color choice if you’d like to explore several shades, we’d certainly recommend the black if you’re working with the straight-up black case – together they’re quite classy. The whole unit is light enough that you’ll be able to transport it to and from LAN parties with ease (if that’s your sort of thing) and is perfectly well balanced due in a large part to the granite – it does its job well.

Getting inside the Tiki is just about as simple as it gets without working with magnets – here you’ll be undoing two thumbscrews and pushing one side off – you’ll want to be careful doing so only because the 120MM Asetek liquid cooler (550LC) is attached to it, tubes running from the casing to the main hunk of the unit. This setup works awesome for getting down into the guts of the machine as quick as possible – the fewer screws we’ve got to deal with for customization, the better.

Inside this setup you’ll find an ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe mini ITX motherboard shining out in all its bluey glory amid the massive monsters that are the high-end components that this amalgamation is made of. We’re working with a 256GB SSD SATA3 (Crucial M4 with M500 available soon from Falcon Northwest – check on that when you’re picking up your own) as well as a 3TB WD “Caviar Green” SATA3 hard drive for all the data storage you could ask for.

Getting inside to remove / replace / give big kisses to your favorite components is only a few screw turns away. While there are wires here or there glued down for the trip between Falcon Northwest’s test shop and your home, they’re easily popped off and apart when you decide you want to move forward with any new components.

The two big monsters inside this build are the 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 processor (overclocked to 4.5GHz), and the 6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card. When you’re picking up the TITAN, you’re not looking for a budget setup. You’ve got a beast right out of the box. Again, this isn’t the last time we’ll be working with NVIDIA’s TITAN GPU for video game reviews and cloud gaming action – stick around our NVIDIA tag portal as well as our NVIDIA Tegra hub for the full fireworks through the future.

Once you’re done rummaging around the insides, you’ll find more inputs and outputs than you’ll ever have a need for. The build we’ve got here works with a Sony Optiarc slot load DVD+-RW on top near a a headphone jack, microphone jack, and set of two USB 3.0 ports. You’ll also see a symmetrical set of vents that, when you peek through, you’ll be able to see the side of the TITAN: “GEFORCE GTX” in bright NVIDIA green lights just below the surface – only visible up close.

The back of this machine has its IO panel labels set in upside-down for easy reading whilst looking down over the top – as you’re prone to do with such a desktop. That massive set of connections includes two eSATA ports, four USB 3.0 ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. You’ll also find GigE, ASUS Wifi connections (you’ll get two external antenna in your package from Falcon Northwest), and standard optical and analog audio jacks. Ethernet and processor-powered display outputs DVI, HDMI, and Display Port are also down there if you want to make use of them.

Nearer the top you’ve got two DL-DVI ports as well as HDMI and DisplayPort outputs bringing the heat via your GeForce TITAN GPU. Your power supply (Silverstone ST-45B 450W) sits nearest the bottom on the back. On either side of the case you’ll more airflow action allowing this Tiki setup to remain impressively cool no matter what we throw at it. With that you’ll still be hearing next no noise – you’ll certainly not be having to dismiss a “hum” while you’re enjoying the greatness of the highest powered games on the market – those being the games you’re essentially obligated to test out and work with when you’re rolling with Tiki.

Software and Performance

Under the hood out of the box we’re working with 64bit Windows 8 Professional, and though it’s still a little odd working with this operating system without a touchscreen interface, it’s certainly starting to feel more natural than it did when Microsoft first pushed the system to consumers. That said, the real power here comes from the software we’re using outside the standard Microsoft experience: games, games, and more games. And with a system this size, big-time possibilities!

Steam Big Picture Mode

The size of this system suggests some rather unique use-cases, even before we consider the fact that NVIDIA has some big plans for GeForce and cloud computing in the home this year. The Tiki case isn’t much larger than the average major-label gaming console today, and even compared to what’s coming out later this year (more than likely), you can be confident you’ll have a size-to-power ratio that blows any gaming console out of the water. And unless the Xbox 720 or PlayStation 4 pull some real magic out of their sleeves with regards to digital game distribution soon, Valve’s Steam will continue to be the premiere destination for the universe’s greatest downloadable games.

NVIDIA GeForce Experience

NVIDIA has made some rather interesting strides recently in making sure the average citizen is able to have a top-notch gaming experience. Just this year the GeForce Experience was released – an NVIDIA-powered app interface where a collection of the world’s most fabulous games can have their settings optimized for your unique gaming hardware setup instantly and automatically. NVIDIA has released a new GeForce driver software update for esentially every major game delivered in the first quarter of 2013, each of them able to be accessed via this GeForce Experience with a single button click, a unique game settings interface appearing for you then if you’ve got said game on your computer.

With the automatic settings optimization feature, your games will become as excellent as they possibly can be – both aesthetically and performance-wise. With the Tiki rolling with a GeForce GTX TITAN under the hood and NVIDIA optimizing settings game-to-game, we’ve had nothing but the best gaming experiences we’ve ever seen on a gaming computer.

Right this minute we’ve done just our standard fare as far as benchmarks go, Geekbench showing this build to be amongst the most powerful gaming PCs we’ve reviewed. Also be sure to check out similar results on much larger machines, too: AVADirect Quiet Gaming PC and NEEDLETAIL SX – and have a peek at a couple relatively small machines so you know what the Tiki is up against physical size-wise: MainGear Potenza and iBuyPower Revolt.

Whilst playing Batman: Arkham City, we’ve experienced a been a bit of a re-birth of interest with the much higher-definition display than we used when originally reviewing the game, not to mention a system that’s on a whole different level than the Alienware notebook (pre 3rd-gen Intel Core processors and so-forth). While it’s not that working with a beast like the MX-17 from a couple years ago is a bad thing (it’s actually still quite amazing), there’s just no comparing to the smoothness and detail we’re getting here.

In Hawken the only thing that stops one from having the miraculous non-stop smoothness we’re seeing in Arkham City is the fact that part of our experience is based online. If we’d be working with the connections our friends in Japan have with wires so thick you could drive a truck through them, we’d be golden – here we’ll have to settle for just “destroys all gaming experiences we’ve had before this year.” Have a peek at our first look at Hawken while you’re at it.

Even Star Wars: The Old Republic looks great. As it’s included in NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience list of games that can be optimized for greatness automatically, we certainly had to give it a go. As it turns out, the difference between what you get in this game on a basic level and what NVIDIA can give you is immense. While the gameplay remains the same – you’re still firing blasters at your opponents and rolling in the Force like mad – you can take part in the deepest visual details the developers intended you to see. Just look at that water ripple!

We’ll be continuing to benchmark the build we’ve got here through the future, so be sure to ask if you’ve got any tests you’d like us to run. We’ll be putting this setup through the punches in any and all ways you desire!

Wrap-Up

The Falcon Northwest Tiki is not a machine made for penny-pinchers. If you’re planning on working with any gaming PC packing an NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN GPU, you’re going to be paying quite a chunk of change – this isn’t the sort of situation where you’re paying just a little bit of cash for a just-good-enough helping of performance. Instead you’re going to want to save up for a couple months – the build we’ve gotten from Falcon Northwest here will cost you more than $3k.

You can make your Tiki cost quite a bit less if you don’t want to pack it full of the top-of-the-line components we’ve got here – and you’ll still have an amazing build – but that’s not what NVIDIA’s TITAN brand is about. With the Falcon Northwest Tiki packing NVIDIA’s TITAN, you’ve got a gaming masterpiece, plain and simple.

At the moment you’ll find that though there are no Raspberry Pi units left for sale in the $25 category, the slightly higher-powered $35 USD edition can still be picked up for its normal price. According to the Allied Electronics sales page for the $25 edition:

“Due to limited supply of the Raspberry Pi Model A, we are not offering preorders or backorders on the product at this time. The Raspberry Pi Model A will only be available for purchase when we have inventory on hand to fill the order. We regret this inconvenience and sincerely thank you for your patience.” – Allied Electronics

If you’ve been looking for this device over the past few weeks, you’ll know all to well that it’s been for sale in both Europe and Asia for some time, the most recent release happening here in the USA with about as much fervor surrounding it as any far more expensive PC. When you’ve got the ability to compute on a device that’s the size of a credit card that also costs less than a night on the town, units are bound to move!

You’ll be interested to know that the $35 Raspberry Pi remains available at many retailers throughout the USA. Stake your claim right this minute!

Have a peek at the timeline below to see more information on the Raspberry Pi miniature computer (and its many offshoots) and be sure to head to the Raspberry Pi tag portal for more sweet berry action through the future. Would you purchase one of these little firecrackers if you had the chance?

The model A the device features 256 MB of RAM while the newer model B features 512 MB. The little developer board also has a single USB 2.0 port and more. The problem some geeks who want to integrate the Pi into their projects run into is a lack of features to do the job they want.

The Raspberry Pi can be fitted with a wide array of new features via the RasPiComm extension board. The extension board adds additional ports, a real-time clock, and a five-way joystick input device. The new ports include a RS-485 port allowing for control of stepper motors and other objects. The extension board also has an RS-232 port as well as a real-time clock with a battery backup.

Other features of the board include a direct I2C connector allowing the user to directly connect a display or sensors. The five-way joystick input makes it easier to control the Raspberry Pi. All of those features are packed into a very small piggyback board requiring no additional cables. The extension board also has full API support including drivers for an OLED display, advanced stepper motor control, and a daemon mode allowing you to control the extension board via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. The extension board is available now for €43.69.

[via Amescon]

The new integrated circuit has an I2C interface and supports USB OTG. Texas Instruments promises that its new integrated circuit not only delivers faster charging, but delivers cooler charging to a wide range of products including power banks and packs, 4G LTE routers, Wi-Fi speakers, portable medical devices, smartphones, tablets, and more. TI says that its new integrated circuit will reduce charge time by 50% for smartphones and tablets compared to other charging solutions.

The new integrated circuit has a 4.5-amp output and a 20-volt input. The integrated circuit has a unique battery pack with impedance compensation that enables significantly reduced charging time. The solution also achieves 92% efficiency at 2 A and up to 90% efficiency at four amps output current.

The new integrated circuit also has a programmable thermal regulation temperature allowing designers to improve their system-level design. The circuit also promises the industry’s lowest on-resistance of 12 milliohms to extend the battery runtime. The circuit is also designed to prevent overcharging and it’s very small with TI saying it is the smallest and most integrated battery charging solution available with its feature set measuring 4 mm x 4 mm. There’s no indication of when products using this new integrated circuit will come to market.

[via TI]

The company posted the image you see above on its G+ and said, “Hum… What is that? Get creative! No tips this time. We’ll reveal tomorrow what this new +ASUS device is. So will you or your friends find the answer by then? GO! ;-)” Not surprisingly, a lot of the responses are about some type of laptop or netbook, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

A quick glance tells you the square’s dimensions are wrong for a laptop of any type, and there are what appear to be two small black rubber feet on the bottom of the device. Of course, there are a million other guesses as well ranging from set-top box to robotic vacuum to the tongue-in-cheek, “It’s a metal box.”

What we do know is that it is metallic, and it sits upright on small feet. It has a centered logo, and could be any size because the image doesn’t give us any sort of reference to judge how big it is. As the folks over at Engadget point out, it certainly looks similar to the VariDrive, which you can check out here.

[via Google+]

With the Hailstorm II you’ll have space for four radiators, four GPU units, and two CPUs. That’s one massive amount of space on its own – then you consider how it’ll all be blasting forth with the components Digital Storm is quoting here as out-of-box builds, you’ll find your fingers sweating. With the Hailstorm II, you’ve got the first appearance of the Corsair Obsidian Series 900D, a monstrous black tower with a big window on the side so you can view this futuristic wallet-crushing collection for yourself.

Inside you’ve got a liquid cooling system with three front intake fans and a lovely large rear exhaust fan to keep the air running through. If you’d like, this build allows you to ad an absurd 15 fans in total – so much freaking airflow you’ll have to wear a jacket.

Up front you’ll find a lovely brushed aluminum front panel that’ll open up to show you a vast number of expansion slots – ten expansion slots in all, with room for up to nine hard drives or SSD with three hot-swappable mounts, four 5.25-inch optical drive bays, and more! You’ll have two USB 3.0 ports for super quick transfer, four USB 2.0 ports for all your peripherals, and, just incase you’re an over-the-top expander, the ability to work with two power supplies on the back.

If that weren’t enough, you’ll find that each unit has gone through a 72-hour stress-test by Digital Storm, this including industry standard testing of the hardware and software as well as a proprietary testing process in place to detect any and all components that show the potential to fail in the future – you’ll be set!

The system builds you’ll be working with are as you see above, each of the prices reflective of the beastly innards they contain. You’ll find that each of these systems uses fabulous Intel CPU power with the Core i7 across the board as well as NVIDIA GPUs. As noted, this is one of the first systems to work with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN GPU, and you’ll be able to knock it up to 3x SLI NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN at 6GB – intense!

From start to finish, this presentation by Samsung is at once a now-classic “Unpacked” presentation of company wares and an utterly fanciful mishmash of dance moves and singing. WIth the Samsung GALAXY S 4 the company has presented a set of four everyday life enhancing pillars that we’ve also outlined for you in four distinct articles. Peruse those beasts in the timeline below while you hear the New York-style wildness here and now.

The Samsung GALAXY S 4 has taken the company to a place where they’ve decided to rely on a winning hardware design while moving forward with software features galore. If you’re familiar with the Samsung Galaxy S III, you know that the nature-inspired hardware has been appearing in Galaxy devices across the board ever since the smartphone launched last year. In the success of that device and subsequent Note devices, Samsung has stayed strong with brand-specific software connections such as Group Share and S-Beam, not to mention ChatON and note-taking apps galore.

That little weird kid was there too – don’t forget him! After you’ve seen the video, have a peek at the timeline below for all the information and hands-on action you could possibly handle from the Samsung GALAXY S 4 – and get pumped up for the full review coming on sooner than later!

Both devices work with Android Jelly Bean, though the HTC One’s update to 4.2 is coming soon (perhaps by launch time) while the GALAXY S 4 has its 4.2 version of the software ready on the device right here this week as it’s revealed. The HTC device has a user interface that’s extremely different from what they’ve offered before with a whole new app drawer for Android and a feature called BlinkFeed – learn more about HTC’s approach in our full HTC One review.

The Samsung GALAXY S 4, on the other hand, adds a collection of apps and features to its user interface with TouchWiz, leaving the UI in a more grand way pretty much the same as it’s been on the newest updates to both the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II. Have a peek at some specification comparisons here to see how the hardware differs, too:

Samsung GALAXY S 4
Display: 5-inch Full HD Super AMOLED 1920 x 1080 pixel display at 441 PPI
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.9 GHz Quad-Core Processor / Samsung Exynos 1.6 GHz Octa-Core Processor – depending on market
Cameras: 2 megapixel front-facing, 13 megapixel back-facing
Dimensions: 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm, 130g
Storage: 16 / 32 / 64 GB internal storage, 64GB expansion microSD slot
Battery: 2600 mAh

HTC One
Display: 4.7-inch Full HD Super LCD3 1920 x 1080 pixel display at 469 PPI
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 1.7 GHz Quad-Core Processor
Cameras: 2.1 megapixel front-facing, 4 megapixel back-facing (Ultrapixels in both cases)
Dimensions: 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3mm, 143g
Storage: 32 / 64 GB internal storage
Battery: 2300 mAh

The Samsung GALAXY S 4 has been pushed with a set of four pillars of user experience excellence while the HTC One was given a similar push with more feature upgrades than you can shake a stick at. In the timeline below you’ll be given a tour of our hands-on experiences with the HTC One and its features as well as a tour of the GALAXY S 4′s four pillars. You’ll find both approaches to be rather interesting if not utterly confusing until you actually have the hardware in your hands.

And here’s one of the biggest key differentiators between the two of these devices: the Samsung GALAXY S 4 has a removable, replaceable battery as well as a microSD expansion slot. The HTC One has neither.

If one thing is true about both of these devices, its that their makers aren’t holding back when it comes to putting features in full-force. Now we’ve got to see if the public will accept a whirlwind of software and hardware upgrades at once, or if they’ll opt to stick with the simpler approaches on the market that are already available.

The manufacturer says that audiophiles have preferred high impedance 32 to 600 ohms headphones for a long time. The company says that higher impedance allows more coil turning in the transducer producing a finer analog resolution and higher fidelity sound. Headphones with higher impedance also draw less current from the amplifier, meaning less distortion.

Key features of the CX3000 include a 106 dB SNR Class H Headphone Driver. The amplifier has an integrated impedance measurement allowing it to throttle different output levels and a noise gate that removes idle channel noise. The amplifier is designed to extend battery life needing less than 4uA for standby power.

Conexant also integrates short-circuit protection with auto recovery, compression to avoid hard clipping at full-scale, and special technology to reduce pops and clicks during playback. The amplifier is also physically small measuring 1.61 mm x 1.61 mm and uses a WLCSP package. The amplifier costs $.50 each in quantities of 50,000. There is no indication of when products using this new amplifier might turn up on the market.

[via Conexant]

The first mistake several commenters have made already this morning is to decide that the little half-circle tab in the lower left-hand corner of several of the following screenshots is a multi-screen feature in the Galaxy S IV. In fact it’s a tab existing inside the Quick System Info PRO app itself, appearing in any device you open it up with. It does look extremely similar to the tab that appears in the Galaxy Note 2 enabling multiscreen functionality.

The information these screenshots provide for us includes a set of specifications that we’ve come across before for this handset as tipped and “leaked” in the past more than once. They are as follows:

• 5-inch Display
• Resolution 1080 x 1920 pixels, 480PPI
• Quad-core processor, ARMv7 1.7Ghz
• 13-megapixel camera (4128 x 3096 pixels, 4:3 aspect ratio)

You’ll also see a couple of “Smart screen” additions like Smart stay, Smart rotation, Smart pause, and Smart scroll. These are outlined again in our post about Smart additions to Samsung’s Jelly Bean.

If you have a peek at the actual image file of any of the screenshots provided by the source, GSM Israel, you’ll find that the height and width are not 1080 x 1920 – they are, however, a height and width ratio that’s able to be scaled up to that size, meaning whoever uploaded the photos likely simply scaled them down to fit the blog space.

So what we’ve got is a Samsung Galaxy S4 with a few new “smart” features and a top-tier set of specifications in its screen and its processor. It’s still quite likely that we’ll be seeing a Samsung Exynos processor in this device as it appears abroad and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor inside the USA as we did with the Galaxy S III. On the other hand, the Galaxy Note II did come with the same SoC no matter where it was launched – so we’ll see!

have a peek at the timeline below for more information on the Samsung Galaxy S4 and stick with SlashGear for the March 14th event – join us at 6PM EST (or a little earlier if you want to pick your seat) for the whole show!

A SSHD is a solid-state hybrid drive that combines the speed of an SSD with the storage capacity of a hard drive. Seagate says that these SSHDs are up to five times faster than a standard 5400 RPM notebook hard drives. The drives are able to boot a laptop in under 10 seconds.

Seagate offers laptop versions of the SSHD with up to 1 TB of storage capacity and a 500 GB version that is only 7 mm high called the Laptop Thin SSHD. That drive is appropriate for the most ultra thin and sleek laptops available. Seagate is also rolling out a Desktop SSHD with up to 2 TB of storage combined with 8 GB of NAND Flash.

The Desktop SSHD allows a desktop computer to boot up in seconds and run the user’s favorite applications much faster than a traditional hard drive. Seagate claims that the Desktop SSHD will perform up to four times faster than a typical hard drive based storage device. These drives overcome the problem of high cost for a pure SSD and low capacity compared to a traditional hard drive. Seagate offers no indication of when products using these new SSHDs will hit the market.

[via Seagate]

By using the PCI Express slot rather than the normal SATA port, Fusion-io is able to achieve significantly better performance. The company has announced this week that it has achieved a very impressive performance milestone. Using a single 365 GB MLC Fusion ioDrive 2 the company was able to achieve 9.608 million IOPS.

The company says that this speed record was possible by using its APIs integrating flash storage into host systems. The APIs the company took advantage of allows it to bypass the normal bottlenecks in a computer operating system. Fusion-io says that these APIs are being used by dozens of the industry-leading software companies on the market today.

The performance breakthrough was accomplished using Auto-Commit Memory, which maintains the persistence of flash at performance levels in the nanosecond range. The company also says that the performance numbers were achieved using a single threaded, single queue depth 64-byte write to the Auto-Commit Memory log.

[via Fusion-io]

MotoCzysz has tasked itself to prepare for this year’s electric motorcycle racing season, and in doing so the company’s workers are spending ample time designing in Solidworks, its software of choice. To give the designers the power they needed to perform their jobs well, the company utilized NVIDIA’s Tesla K20 GPU and Quadro K5000 GPU.

As a result of this, the company says that it experienced a huge productivity boost in the design department. Because of the hardware, the designers were able to use SolidWorks for looking at the bike’s details in-depth without fighting against computer lag and other issues that commonly result from such hardware-intensive tasks. Finally, by combining the Tesla GPU with Bunkspeed Pro for ray-tracing, both rendering and simulations could be performed in the background.

MotoCzysz senior engineer Nick Schoeps had this to say: “The reason why the NVIDIA Quadro K5000 makes sense for us is because we can create fully rendered images of a bike before we actually build it. A major manufacturer might make several passes, create a physical clay model, and then make further refinements to the design. With our small staff and budget we need to do it all in one pass.”

[via NVIDIA]

The sad news is that these are truly limited edition. The company announced that they’re only making 1,000 Blue Raspberry Pi boards, and they actually won’t be up for sale. Instead, they’ll be given to various charity organizations, and a few will be given away to some lucky winners, and one of them could be you. The company is simply asking to tweet at @RSElectronics with the hashtag “#bluepi”, and mention a suggestion for uses for a Blue Pi board.

Every week, the top ten entries will be selected by RS Electronics and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and those ten winners will be sent a Blue Pi. Easy! However, if you don’t win the first time, RS Electronics will be conducting giveaways and other events until June. If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on a Raspberry Pi, here’s your chance.

In the package, you’ll get a Raspberry Pi system made with a blue circuit board, a blue-tinted case to put your Raspberry Pi in for protection, a certificate of authenticity, and a nice blue box that everything will come in. It’s too bad you won’t be able to buy one for yourself, but even if you could, expect to have paid more than just $35.

In addition to the lower resolution than they were supposed to get, the folks over at Panic also noticed poor video output quality, with noticeable artifacts around text. Neither the low resolution nor the artifact problem were present when using the old AV adapter, however, adding to the mystery, and so they began to speculate about what could be different between the two.

They developed the theory that the Lightning Digital AV Adapter was actually functioning as something akin to an AirPlay receiver, rather than directly sending a nice clean HDMI signal to the output display. This seemed unlikely, however, not only because of the strangeness of it, but also because of the small size of the device. And so they did what any reasonable people would do – they got a hacksaw and gutted it.

As it turned out, their guess was (possibly) right. Inside the adapter, they discovered a whole lot of tiny components, as well as an ARM chip with the part number H9TKNNN2GD with 256MB of RAM. There’s a good chance, then, that some type of streaming is going on rather than plain ol’ HDMI-out. The obvious question now is “why?” No one knows. The only thing that is certain is that you shouldn’t expect good quality video output.

[via Panic Blog]

The result of all this will be an overall better experience for consumers, who will enjoy simpler operation, as well as a better security, more functionality, and longer battery life. Channels can now be encrypted between multiple devices, signal acquisition and data transport speeds have both been improved. Both event buffering and event filtering have resulted in overall reduced system power.

As part of the ANT+ “experience,” several improvements have been implemented, such as a quicker connection to computers and mobile devices. The power used between displays and sensors has been polished to provide better balance and less power usage, resulting in longer battery life. Downloads and data access are both hailed as thrice faster than previously, eliminating wait time.

According to ANT’s President Rod Morris, “Our fundamental goal is to always deliver ANT products that are forward-focused and future proof so that manufacturers can continually build upon what they do. “Because we deliver technology that works easily, consumers receive the very best available devices and can draw from an incredibly diverse and established ecosystem.”

[via This is ANT]