NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

Can the world's top Android OEM arrest its profit decline before it ends up like HTC?



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For one day only, Toshiba is offering a bonus $50 coupon on one of their already low priced laptops. Thanks to that, you can now pick up a quad-core beauty loaded with big specs for just $400, a sweet savings of 33%. The Toshiba L50D-BST2NX1 features a new A4-6210 quad-core processor, which has plenty of power for typical office and web browsing needs, plus integrated AMD Radeon R3 graphics for casual gaming. Perhaps the most notable specs here is the generous 8GB RAM and 1TB hard drive, providing a volume of memory for multitasking and storage that you almost never see at this price point.



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Today, Sony plans to roll out the PlayStation Now public beta for PS4 owners. Over 100 PS3 games will be made available for rental in the US and Canada, but more platforms, regions, and titles are on their way. After months of waiting, now we finally get to see if Sony can deliver on the promise of game streaming from the cloud. Will it be everything we hoped for?



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Echolocation has worked helped bats navigate for millions of years, and now Berkeley researchers think your laptop could do it too.



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Security researchers have found a fundamental flaw that affects almost every USB device. This flaw is so serious that, now that it has been revealed, you probably shouldn't plug a USB device into your computer ever again. There are no known effective defenses against this variety of USB attack. The USB IF itself notes that your only defense against this new attack vector is to only use USB devices that you 100% trust -- but even then, as we'll outline below, this won't always protect you.



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The world's most successful data transfer protocol could underlie the next generation chat client: Bleep will provide totally secure, totally peer-to-peer chatting from BitTorrent.



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A research group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), which was the first to break the one-terabit barrier in 2009, has today managed to squeeze 43 terabits per second over a single optical fiber with just one laser transmitter. In a more user-friendly unit, 43Tbps is equivalent to a transfer rate of around 5.4 terabytes per second -- or 5,375 gigabytes to be exact.



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AMD is launching a group of new SKUs for its Kaveri lineup and the new chips substantially improve on the value proposition of the product line.



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Dusseldorf Airport in Germany is trying out a new robot parking system that uses self-driving forklifts to increase parking efficiency by up to 60%.



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We've been hard at work hunting down the best deals anywhere in tech and gadgets, and today our haul is highlighted by a $385 17-inch AMD laptop from HP, which is one of the cheapest quad-core laptops this size on the market right now. A couple of our other favorites include a 51% savings on a huge 3TB USB 3.0 Seagate hard drive, and an amazingly slick 55-inch Sony Bravia 4K 3D smart TV bundled with a mount for $1849.



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A new technology from UC Berkeley could make your glasses obsolete by correcting images on a screen so they appear clear to your busted eyes.



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A long, long time ago -- well, the middle of the 1800s to be exact -- electricity was an intriguing but mostly useless thing. Some factories and residences toyed with early electric lights and motors powered by on-site generators, but most of the world used piped steam and natural gas to heat their homes and drive their machines for decades after electrification began. That would all change, however, with Nikola Tesla's invention of three-phase high-voltage power distribution at the end of the 1800s and the creation of the world's first synchronized national electricity grid in Great Britain in 1938.



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Though it takes Microsoft a while to jump in on an emerging trend, the company does tend to throw its hat into the ring eventually. Despite releasing satisfactory hardware, the company was late to both the modern-day smartphone and tablet scene, hindering its success. This time around -- likely thanks to the success of the Raspberry Pi -- Microsoft is targeting the mini PC market with the announcement of Sharks Cove.



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Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven't read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they'll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.



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EA, in one fell swoop, has changed the entire landscape of gaming and made it much more feasible to buy an Xbox One instead of a PS4. Starting today, beta testers will be able to subscribe to EA Access ($5 per month or $30 annually), giving them unlimited access to some of EA's biggest games Considering these top-tier games usually cost $70 each, gaining access to all (or most) of EA's games for just $30 per year is an incredibly good deal -- so good that, if you're into EA games, the Xbox One actually starts to make a lot more sense than the PS4. This is crazy, crazy stuff from EA -- really, what is the company thinking?



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At long last, Apple has finally gotten around to updating its line of Retina MacBook Pros. Hardware bumps and price dips are certainly welcome, but how long are we going to have to wait around for Apple to release iMacs and MacBook Airs with Retina displays?



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This model of the Lenovo Z50 packs a Core i7-4510U CPU, a power sipping processor that still delivers some serious performance. It also sports a 15.6-inch 1920x1080 high-def anti-glare display, making it a great choice for watching movies or even playing games. There's no discrete graphics for playing more intensive titles, but the Core i7 and integrated Intel HD 4400 graphics has plenty of power to handle HD movies and moderate gaming.



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This compact SUV has adaptive cruise control, torque vectoring and three rows of seats. It still feels like a last-generation car but the pricing is competitive and the tech is OK. This isn't a bad car, but there are better compact SUVs on the market right now.



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Needles made of lasers are being used at the University of Cambridge to assemble nanoparticles into larger segments that could one day be used to make an honest-to-goodness cloaking device.



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NASA's Opportunity rover, Curiosity's diminutive forebear that has been trundling across Mars for over 10 years, has finally broken the world record for the longest distance driven on another planet. Since landing on the Red Planet in January 2004, Opportunity has now driven a grand total of 25 miles (40 kilometers), breaking the previous off-Earth distance record of 24.2 miles, which was held by the Russian lunar rover Lunokhod 2.



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Since 2001, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia has been picking up mysterious, unidentified bursts of energy that astronomers have since dubbed 'fast radio bursts.' At first, because no other telescope in the world had ever seen these bursts, it was assumed that these FRBs were probably just glitches in the telescope's electronics -- but now, 13 years later, a telescope on the other side of the planet in Puerto Rico has detected an FRB. No one knows what's causing these FRBs, but it's almost certainly something very exotic, like an intelligent alien civilization.



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Intel has finally shared some details on how it's customizing chips for companies like Oracle. It turns out that these current parts go through extra validation steps and can adjust their core counts, frequencies on the fly.



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A new report suggests American's are burning a lot less power than three years ago -- but can the trend hold up?



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I don't know about you, but ever since I started covering the Large Hadron Collider and other large-scale particle accelerators for ExtremeTech, I've always morbidly wondered: What would happen if a scientist was accidentally hit by the main particle beam? Would the scientist explode in the style of beam weapons in Star Trek? Would the beam bore a hole clean through the scientist's chest? Or maybe the beam would do nothing at all and pass through the scientist harmlessly? Well, fortunately (unfortunately?) we don't have to guess, as this exact scenario actually happened to Anatoli Bugorski, a Russian scientist, way back in 1978.



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Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be using one of the universe's most energetic fundamental particles to image the destruction inside Fukushima's reactor core.



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Nvidia researchers have used a fantastically straightforward approach to quadruple the effective resolution and double the refresh rate of cheap, off-the-shelf LCD panels: Stacking them on top of each other. This technique, which Nvidia calls cascaded displays, could be key to developing cheap, ultra-high-resolution screens that are needed for consumer-oriented head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift. Nvidia has already built a prototype cascaded display device -- using a 3D printer no less -- that closely resembles the Oculus Rift, and the results are surprisingly good.



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They've done it again: The battery barons of Stanford, led by Yi Cui, have created what those in the industry call the 'Holy Grail' of lithium-ion battery design. In specific, they've finally worked out how to create a rugged lithium electrode that can increase the capacity of a lithium-ion battery by three to four times -- as in, this lithium electrode, on its own, could increase the battery life of your smartphone by three times, or significantly reduce the size and cost of an electric car's battery pack.



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A few days ago, the Destiny beta finally made its way to the Xbox One and Xbox 360. It launched on the PS4 and PS3 earlier in the month, but now we can get a good look at the beta running on both of the current generation consoles. It's no surprise that the last-gen versions are noticeably uglier, but how does the 900p Xbox One version stack up to the beta running at 1080p on the PS4?



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Is that ringing ears bad enough that you would implant a simulator in your neck just to be free of it? For thousands of Americans, the answer seems to be yes. A series of clinical trials for an implant made by company called Microtransponder has demonstrated that their new nerve cuff electrode device is up to the job. The question that remains is how does it work, exactly?



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This morning I found myself pondering a particularly interesting question: Where are all the nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes? Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuel power, it generates more power than fossil power (i.e. it goes faster) while weighing significantly less, and you can go years without ever having to refuel a nuclear vehicle. Imagine if you could buy a nuclear-powered Tesla Model S or Ford Escape, and never had to refuel it for the entirety of its operational life. So, where are all the nuclear vehicles? Were they kiboshed by the ecologists? Is it yet another conspiracy hatched by Big Oil to maintain their juicy fossil fuel profits?



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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has announced that he wants to triple the size of the Japanese robotics industry. Is this how you prepare for an uncertain future?



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Apple is gearing up for the launch of the iPhone 6 in September, and has reportedly placed a massive order of between 70 and 80 million units -- far more than any previous iPhone launch. As we've previously reported, the iPhone 6 will step up to a much larger 4.7-inch screen with a sapphire front panel -- but curiously, there's now a very solid rumor that there will also be an iPhone 6 with a 5.5-inch screen. At first blush, a 5.5-inch iPhone 6 sounds utterly crazy, but it makes a little more sense following Apple's earnings call on Tuesday: Last quarter, Apple's tablet sales dropped a massive 19% sequentially and 9% year-over-year. Perhaps fading iPad sales are the reason Apple is finally looking at large-screen phones?



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Eight long months after the launch of the Xbox One and PS4, both Microsoft and Sony have finally announced support for playback of 3D Blu-rays. I'm certainly not going to turn my nose up at the addition of new features, but it does make me wonder what took so long for these updates to surface. The PS3 has had 3D Blu-ray support since 2010, and it works perfectly fine on that aging hardware. So, what's the hold-up on the current generation?



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Both the ENVY 15t and ENVY 17t pack the new Core i7-4710HQ quad-core processor, delivering top-notch performance that will be up to just about any task you put it to. They also share a standard 1TB hard drive, giving you plenty of space to store all your media and files. Despite the 17t being bigger, you'll find the same array of ports on both laptops, which includes three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, ethernet, a DVD-RW, and a multi-card reader. Even before we get to any differences, both of these laptops have a lot to offer.



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New research on nanoparticles shows that they could be used to encode information when suspended in a liquid. This could one day allow us to store vast amounts of data in a very small volume of "digital colloid."



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You know how wearable computers have always sounded cool, but in practice strapping a big computer to your face always seemed a little bit impractical? Well, here's a slightly more sensible alternative that you can wear without fear of reprisal or feeling self-conscious: The smartshoe. Developed by Ducere Technologies, and available for just $100-150, the Lechal smartshoe is surprisingly comparable to Google Glass -- though, of course, it's not quite as good as capturing point-of-view videos of your loved ones or extreme sports.



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Researchers in the US, funded by the US military and the National Science Foundation, have managed to turn air into an "optical fiber." This breakthrough allows the scientists to turn thin air into an optical waveguide, allowing for much better transmission of lasers through free space -- much in the same way that glass and plastic waveguides allow for efficient transmission of laser light over long stretches of optical fiber. As you might have guessed from the US military's involvement, this could be big news for laser weapons -- but there are repercussions for laser-based communications and scientific research as well.



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While you didn't see it, feel it, or even read about it in the newspapers, Earth was almost knocked back to the Stone Age on July 23, 2012. It wasn't some crazed dictator with his finger on the thermonuclear button or a giant asteroid that came close to wiping out civilization as we know it, though -- no, what nearly ended us was a massive solar storm. 'If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,' says Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive solar storm.



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Early last month, we got our very first peek at OS X Yosemite at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Just eight weeks later, Apple is now preparing to roll out public access to the latest beta of OS X 10.10. Are you interested in trying out Apple's latest and greatest operating system for yourself? Well, you're in luck because it's incredibly easy to sign up for the beta, and it won't cost you a dime.



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Engineers at the University of Michigan and Intel have succeeded in creating the first practical, room-temperature polariton laser. The polariton laser is of extreme interest because it requires just 0.004% of the current required by normal lasers, making it a prime candidate for use with on-chip optical interconnects. It is also believed that the polariton laser is the first new practical method of producing coherent laser light since the laser diode debuted more than 50 years ago in 1962.



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Following the tenth launch of a Falcon 9 rocket last week, SpaceX is reporting that the rocket's first stage carried out a perfect soft landing back here on Earth. This is the second time that SpaceX has successfully soft-landed a Falcon 9 rocket launch, and now Musk's commercial space exploration company is confident enough that it can take the next, most important step: soft landing the Falcon 9 on a solid surface, so that it can be reused in future launches, instantly cutting down the cost of a space launch by tens of millions of dollars. If all goes to plan, SpaceX will attempt a soft landing on a solid surface in October, and then again in December.



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This morning, ahead of its July 24 release date, the internet was flooded with Amazon Fire Phone reviews -- and, rather unfortunately, they almost universally pan the smartphone for being gimmicky, ugly, sluggish, and low on battery life. A fair number of reviews go as far as calling the Fire Phone more of a prototype, and that you'd be better off waiting for the sequel. As expected, too, the fact that dozens of key apps are missing from the Amazon App Store makes the Fire Phone much less useful than an iPhone or Android smartphone.



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Microsoft's Satya Nadella has confirmed that the next version of Windows, probably Windows 9, will unify the Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox operating systems into 'one single converged operating system.' Microsoft had previously made some moves towards unification with Universal Windows Apps that run across all three platforms, but this new version of Windows will go a lot further: 'This means [we'll have] one operating system that covers all screen sizes.'



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A grocery store in the UK will become the world's first to be powered entirely by its own food waste. At the end of the day, any leftover food -- after the good stuff has been given to charity -- will be transported to a nearby anaerobic digester, where it will be turned into electricity and sent back to the store via a privately owned one-mile-long power line. When the anaerobic digester is turned on, the grocery store will sever all connections to the national power grid and rely purely on the electricity generated by bacteria feasting on rotten food. Cool.



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MIT is reporting that it has created a new, cheap material -- using a microwave, no less -- that converts sunlight into steam with an amazing 85% efficiency. This could have major repercussions in the realms of desalination and sterilization, and perhaps for concentrated solar thermal power generation as well.



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Can using a VPN improve your streaming video performance, even if you aren't on Verizon? We investigate.



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Nvidia's new Shield is dropping today and the updated tablet packs a number of high-end features. Will gamers bite, considering the increased price tag but better use cases?



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Behold, the future of personal mobility devices: The Honda Uni-Cub. The Uni-Cub, which is self-balancing and has zero turning radius, is essentially a sit-on Segway without any handlebars. Most importantly, the Uni-Cub is much smaller and easier to maneuver than the Segway, allowing for Uni-Cub users to ride alongside or even within a pack of pedestrians. The main usage scenario for the Uni-Cub is moving around internal spaces, such as offices and museums: Not only is it easier and faster than walking, but compared to other personal mobility devices it also leaves your hands free to operate a smartphone or some other implement of your choosing.



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The Y40 packs a powerhouse combination of a Core i7-4510U processor and 2GB AMD Radeon R9 M275 GPU, which provide plenty of power to keep your frame rates up with current games. This laptop also sports a 1080p anti-glare display, and all those extra pixels serve not just to give you a crisp picture, but also a handy advantage over any 720p laptop gamers out there who have to work with less real estate.



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Air Force One -- the US President's flying fortress -- which has been using the same clunky handsets since the Reagan administration in the '80s, has finally received some slick new phones that are much more in keeping with Obama's 21st century aesthetic. These new phones -- customized versions of the the Airborne Executive Phone (AEP) -- are provided by military contractor L-3 Communications, and they probably cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In what must surely be some of the best news the President has received in the last couple of years, while the old system consisted of two different phones -- one for secure communications, the other for non-secure -- each AEP is capable of making calls in either mode from a single handset.



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