According to ASUS UK, the company’s upcoming Eee PC 1201N complete with NVIDIA Ion graphics will be arriving in stores come December. Speaking to Electricpig, the company confirmed that the 12-inch Ion machine was imminent, but are yet to define the actual specifications. Meanwhile, ASUS’ first Smartbook has apparently been delayed according to a market specialist at the company, and is now not expected until Q2 2010.
Verizon’s BlackBerry Curve 8530 isn’t quite on sale yet – you’ll have to wait until November 20th for that – but Sprint would like you to know that they’ll also be offering the QWERTY smartphone. The Sprint BlackBerry Curve 8530 gets the same WiFi, GPS, 2-megapixel camera and EVDO Rev.A connectivity, which means the only thing really lacking right now is a price and a release date.
The Large Hadron Collider experienced overheating problems this week after – and we’re not making this up – a bird dropped a piece of bread onto part of the machinery. According to LHC Machine Coordinator Dr Mike Lamont, “a bit of baguette on the busbars” caused temperatures in portions of the system to rise from their regular 1.9 Kelvin to almost 8 Kelvin; the LHC is not currently operational, after previous – more serious – overheating issues back in September, but scientists working on the project claim it would have merely automatically shut down had the bird bombing occurred during actual testing.
NVIDIA’s Tegra may not have grabbed as much attention as its Ion sibling – the latter’s ability to grant the humble netbook with 1080p capabilities is certainly an eye-catcher – but the compact chipset is certainly doing impressive things inside the Zune HD and is poised to capitalize on Smartbooks too, so it comes as little surprise to hear that the company is readying its successor. The NVIDIA Tegra 2 – not yet officially named – is expected to drop in 2010, claim Fudzilla’s “high ranking industry sources”, with twice the computational and graphics power of the first-gen chipset.
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Having heard earlier this week that Apple had blocked Atom processor support in their latest build of OS X 10.6.2, we're now being told that the low-power Intel CPU has once again been welcomed back into the Mac fold. A newer 10.6.2 build, 10C535, has restored Atom support, meaning owners of netbook-turned-Hackint0sh machines may not be left without the latest software in their DIY Apple ultraportables.
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Last month it was two billion downloads; this month it's over 100,000 applications available: is the Apple App Store really just a headline generator? No, obviously not, it's a software marketplace for the iPhone and iPod touch, but as the figures show it's certainly the most popular mobile apps store out there right now.
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We suppose we can't really fault Verizon too much for wanting customers to honor their contracts rather than paying an early termination fee (ETF) of around half the phone's value and then selling the handset for a profit on eBay, but our natural dislike of ETFs is perking up this morning. According to a leaked slide that found its way to the BGR, Verizon are now planning to charge up to $350 in termination fees on "Advanced Devices" - we're guessing they mean smartphones or high-end featurephones - whose owners don't complete the full term of the agreement.
No great surprise here – after all, HTC CEO Peter Chou already exclusively confirmed it to us back in October – but HTC have officially announced that the HTC HD2 Windows Phone will be headed to the US in early 2010. According to a new press release today, the HD2 “will be available with a major carrier in the US in early 2010″; previous leaks have suggested T-Mobile will be the lucky network to offer the smartphone.
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While the competition for iPhone carriers is hotting up in Europe, the smartphone has only just gone on sale in China. Unfortunately, sales success hasn't followed the Apple device over to China Unicom's new 3G network; only 5,000 iPhone handsets were sold in China over the first weekend, according to the carrier, despite over a million new subscribers to that network in the same period.
iPhone 3.1.2 unlock tool blacksn0w has been released, a day ahead of the promised schedule. Available as a free download from blackra1n.com, the software allows the latest version of Apple’s iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS firmware to be carrier-unlocked, freeing you from the tyranny of whichever network you bought it from. According to creator George Hotz, the unlock is also faster than before, by around 15 seconds in fact.
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