Archive for June, 2011
From the same developer that brought you LauncherPro comes a new venture: UberMusic. Like the name says, UberMusic aims to be “the” replacement for Android’s stock music player.
As of writing, UberMusic is still in early beta, though already looks as good or better than Android’s own music player already. Some would say it still pulls too much from Windows Phone 7/Zune’s design cues. In that light we can only say that we like the simplicity.
In regards to functionality, the two aren’t too terribly different yet either. With that said, we’d say UberMusic is already pretty useful as is — grab photos of currently playing songs and use them as wallpaper (can be turned off), Last.fm scrobbling, a customizeable music list, ability to disable the lockscreen while listening to music, and a support for themes/skins. Add to that a tiny memory footprint of less than 1 MB of space and you’ve got a winner in the making.
The current beta ends July 15th so you best hop to it if you’d like to get in sooner rather than later.
[UberMusic]
Recently picked up a Gigabyte Z-68 motherboard and looking for an easier way to tweak settings than the older than dirt blue/white BIOS screen we’ve all come to know (and hate)? Gigabyte has a new “Touch Bios” utility now available for download that lets you interact with BIOS settings in a much more modern GUI style.
We’ll quickly note however that there are two big things that sour the experience for us. For starters, there’s nothing “touch” about it. You still have to use a mouse. When we hear “touch bios” we expect to…you know…be able to actually touch it. More worrisome, however, is that this is an in-OS utility meaning corruption and bugs are more likely to happen than if you were working on settings behind the scenes in the actual bios. So while it certainly looks pretty, it’s really no different than Gigabyte’s other utilities they offer on similar platforms.
It looks like ASUS still takes the crown for the best (real) “bios” in 2011 with their UEFI BIOS-replacement.
Video of Gigabyte’s Touch Bios after the break…
If you want to own the competition whilst on the road, Nvidia’s previous high-end GTX 560m was the one to beat. But things have since changed as the previously announced GTX580M is now available for sale.
Packing a stout 384 CUDA cores, 1.24 GHz core clock/1.5 GHz memory clock and 2 GB GDDR5 RAM w/ 256-bit memory bus. This is quite simply the card of all cards if mobile gaming is your top priority. Nvidia claims up to 6x the tessellation performance of AMD’s king pin 6970M mobile GPU.
In a slightly lesser form we have the GTX 570M which cuts things down a big — 336 CUDA cores, 1.15 GHz core clock, 1.5 GB of GDDR5 memory (3 GB option available) and 192-bit memory bus.
As one would expect, the latest generation of Nvidia silicon supports DirectX11, OpenCL, PhysX, CUDA, 3D Vision, Verde drivers, Optimus, SLI, and 3DTV Play technologies as well as a claimed 5 hour battery life in when paired with Nvidia’s Optimus graphics switching technology. But you’re not worried about such things if you’re ordering the card of all cards, are you?
The new GTX 570M and 580M are now available in the Alienware M17x/18x in single and SLI configurations as well as the MSI GT780R and several Clevo laptops.
Nvidia: GTX 570M | GTX 580M
The image before you contains an unnamed, unnannounced Android device that appears tos hare more with a BlackBerry than your typical Android device. Supposedly Android 2.3 and support for Sprint’s WiMAX network are included (as are several grains of salt).
Look like something you’d tote with you to the daily 9-5?
According to a tweet just shot out by Android king pin Andy Rubin, over 500,000 Android devices are activated every day. Considering activations require a Gmail account, Google should have a pretty tight lock on this number — a number that is pretty crazy to think about. In one week alone Android has over 3.5 million new activations. Now stretch that for a year and you can see the steamroller that is Android.
On the topic of mobile operating systems — Which mobile OS do you use?
Popular cross-platform chat app, Kik, is coming to Windows Phone 7!
Being heavy Kik users on Android and iOS ourselves, we’re excited to see our WP7 friends get a legitimate chat service that doesn’t suck. On that note, Kik said to be much faster than IM+ and similar multi-account chat apps on WP7 — just as it is on Android and iOS.
The app is now available in the Marketplace for $0.00. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
Demo video after the break…
More iPhone 5 rumors to start your Tuesday morning — the sign to your right was spotted in an authorized Apple reseller in Dalian City, China. The writing beneath the picture simply reads “accepting pre-orders”. On the other side of the poster (the picture taker was affraid to snap the more blatant image) says “available on September 9th”. With all the commotion around Tim Cook’s recent spotting at China Mobile headquarters, rumors about a 4G phone dropping on said network, and rumors of a mid-August production for the iPhone 5, a September release looks pretty evident.
Further evidence previously leaked includes a message posted to Weibo.com (Chinese version of Twitter) from a China Mobile employee whom also said the iPhone 5 would launch in September. The message has since been deleted.
Looks like we’re going to see a new iPhone at some point in September. Just sayin’…
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