Sony Xperia Tablet Z available for preorder with an introductory offer

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z which features a ‘Full HD Reality Display’, is available for pre-order. The incredibly thin, IR-sporting 10.1-inch device provides us with a 1920×1080 WUXGA (full HD) screen.

This Jelly Bean running tablet consists of 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor with 2GB RAM, a 2MP camera up front, and an 8MP camera in the rear.

To help up-sell these $499.99 16GB black model, Sony is throwing in a free cradle accessory to customers that pre-order a $599.99 32GB model in white. Pre-orders must be done by May 24 to be eligible for a free cradle.

 

Source: https://blog.sony.com/2013/04/xperia-tablet-z-preorder/

Corsair involved in talks with Francisco Partners for a possible buyout

A recently submitted regulatory filing suggests that Francisco Partners are currently in talks with Corsair about a possible buyout. This scenario comes after Corsair indefinitely postponed an IPO after the flop of the Facebook IPO. At the same time they have said that they would

relaunch when equity conditions are more favorable.

Now it appears that they are possibly choosing a buyout over an IPO. Corsair could be heavily affected by the current downturn in the PC market, resulting in the need for a new way of cash infusion. Francisco Partners was part of the Blackstone Group who decided to not make a formal buyout offer for Dell.

It is possible that nothing could come of these talks. On the other hand, Corsair could end up being sold out, which will result in changes within the company or in the products they currently sell.

 

Source: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/26/corsair-opts-for-sale-over-ipo/

Google Glass CPU and RAM specifications detailed – somewhat similar to Galaxy Nexus

Not too long ago, when some part of Google Glass spaces leaked out there, two critical parts were missing, CPU and RAM.But thanks to Jay Lee, a hacker who got his hands on a pair of Google Glass, managed to get those critical information. He has connected his Glass up to Google’s ADB software and analyzed the debug data to find out the operating system and hardware was powering the Google Glass.

As It can be seen here, in the ADB printout, Google Glass Explorer is running Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich. CPU is OMAP 4430 – a dual-core from the same family of processor used in the Galaxy Nexus smartphone. The ADB printout returned that the system has 682MB of RAM, but most likely it is 1GB of RAM and the system is reserving some part of it.

You can see the details from Lee’s Google drive.

 

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5995441/these-are-google-glasss-cpu-and-ram-specs

Steam introduces subscription based gaming

In a press release earlier today, Valve have just created a feature of subscription-based games. The first game on the subscription side is called Darkfall Unholy Wars.For those who are don’t have information abou the game, it is a PvP focused MMO from Aventurine.

Gamers can now subscribe to MMOs games on Steam and manage recurring payments to those games using the Steam itself. The press release says:

With Subscription Plans, Steam offers gamers the ability to sign up and manage payments for subscription-based games on Steam. […] Steam customers may now sign-up for, manage, cancel or renew game Subscription Plans at any time, online directly through Steam.

Valve have also promised that more and more subscription-based games will be coming up in near future.

 

Source: http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/04/25/darkfall-unholy-wars-hits-steam-as-valve-introduces-new-subscrip/

Announcement official link: http://store.steampowered.com/news/10463/

Samsung expected to ship 10M Galaxy S4 in the first month

Samsung is expecting to ship 10M Galaxy S 4 phones in the first month of its sale, reports DigiTimes. The Supply chain sources familiar with the component orders of Samsung, it is also redicted that Samsung plans to ship as many as 30 million Galaxy S4 smartphones in the Q2, 2013.

The company has lined up launching program in 50 countries and more than 300 carriers. It will without any doubt boost its initial sales numbers. The Galaxy S4 is not expected to see any delays in shipping like the pccurences in HTC’s One and Apple’s iPhone 5 mainly
because of Samsung’s in-house manufacturering of most of the components.

Source: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20130418PD210.html

Palit and PC Partner overtake ASUS to the graphics card pole position

According to ‘industry sources’ in Taiwan speaking to DigiTimes Palit Microsystems of Taiwan, and PC Partner of Hong Kong have overtaken the Taiwan-based company, ASUS into the number one position.

PC Partner sells AMD platform graphics cards under the brand name Sapphire and sells Nvidia platform GPUs under the brand name of Zotac.

The sources indicated that:

Asustek used to be the largest or second largest vendor of graphics cards, but has become the third largest, followed by Micro-Star International (MSI) and Gigabyte Technology, the sources noted.

DigiTimes also reported that they own “Galaxy, Yuan, Gainward, Vvikoo, XpertVision and Daytona”.

Source: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20130416PD210.html?mod=2

Foxconn predicts 19% sales drop due to declining iPhone demand

According to a report in Reuters Hon Hai Precision Technology -mainly known as Foxconn to general users, have seen a 19% drop in sales during the first quarter of 2013. Top analysts are attributing the demand for the Apple iPhone as the main reason.

The data says that Foxconn sales dipped to $26.96 billion in the first quarter, down from nearly $33 billion in Q4 of 2012, and $33.3 billion in the same quarter the previous year.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-chi Kuo says that the decline is not surprising as Q1 reports conventionally always look worse than Q4 reports that have holiday sales included. He also told the real telling figure is that Foxconn’s year to year revenue is in the decline and that

shows that Hon Hai’s revenue depends too much on Apple, and iPhone orders corrected more than expected.

Apple shareholders do not appear to seem to be very concerned with this news. This is reflected from their stock, which remained flat after the Foxconn report was released.

 

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/10/us-honhai-sales-idUSBRE9390B020130410

Google Play Music extendes – seven new countries added

Google have just announced the inclusion of seven new countries in Google Play Music. After this announcement, Google Play Music has officially extended to: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Portugal.

This move will allow users to buy music through the Google Play Store on both web or their Android device and the cloud associated with their Google account which have the capability to hold 20,000 songs per user.

The streaming service will be available to 10 devices at a time. The default settings are contomized to allow a user to tune the authorization and deauthorization of devices.

Official Link: https://play.google.com/store/music

Source: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-play-music-now-available-australia
Source-2: http://google-au.blogspot.com.au/

Facebook adds new emotion selection tool in status update

This morning Facebook have announced that it is rolling out a new emotion selection feature on its status box for the users. Now users can select from a full list of emotions or share what they are watching, listening to, reading, drinking or eating.

See that? That’s a new feature on Facebook’s status box.

At this moment, this new tool is only available in the US and according to the officials, the complete roll-out is expected to take some days. Facebook says that it wants to funnel conversations a bit to better convey what every user is doing, thinking or feeling.

 

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/09/facebook-emotion-selection-tool/

PS4’s few feature – 8GB RAM was kept secret from third-party developers, but not anymore

It was not before the unveiling of Sony’s PlayStation 4 that third-party developers discovered that there is 8GB of GDDR5 RAM inside of the machine. Previously they were told that the PS4 would come out with 4GB of GDDR5 when they received development kits long before the unveiling.

Just Add Water’s CEO Stewart Gilray, who is developing a title for PlayStation 4, revealed that the third-parties were initially told that the console would feature only 4GB of RAM, and were happily shocked to see the console’s specs discussed on stage. He told:

We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally. And we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event’s stage, ‘And it has 8GB of memory.’ We’d had kits at that point for a good while.

He suspects that a few of the bigger, first-party developers knew the correct specification of PS4 before the PS4 unveiling. He continues:

It’s a fantastic amount of memory. especially DDR5 memory, because it’s so fast you don’t have to have everything there at once. You can swap it in and out instantly, effectively. But when they said 8GB it was like, ‘Ooookay.

 

Source: http://www.videogamer.com/news/ps4s_8gb_ram_was_kept_secret_from_third-party_devs_until_console_reveal.html