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Friday Grab Bag: YourSport-The Facebook for Sports? Kindle 4G Gets OK

October 12, 2012 by

YourSports: The Facebook for sports?
A new online sports publication is coming into being called YourSports and it is a customizable sports page that is designed to enable fans to get the sports news that they want, including local sports that might be missed by the larger rivals.

While currently in beta it is open to all for the first time to take a look, it claims that it will fill in sports that is not currently handled by its rivals such as ESPN, BleacherReport and others by using social media to help fill in what is not available on broadcast sports while also providing news feeds on your favorite teams.


Amazon gets FCC approval for 4G Kindle
While Amazon announced its 4G Kindle Fire HD tablet last week it was only this month that the company obtained permission from the US Federal Communications Commission to actual sell the high end Kindle Fire HD that has the ability to connect to high speed 4G cellular networks.

The FCC approval is required for any device that has wireless communications to ensure that it does not create interference with other wireless devices. The product has been on preorder and is expected to ship Nov. 20.

Microsoft accuses Motorola of map stealing
As if Apple’s map problems are not enough now Microsoft is claiming that the Android phones from Motorola that use Google Maps, infringe on a mapping patent that Microsoft owns. The patent in question covers a method of obtaining the map from one database, resource information such as Starbucks locations from a second database, and overlaying the two sets of data.

The lawsuit is just one of several that Microsoft has filed in Germany regarding patent issues with the Google-owned Motorola Mobility as Microsoft increases the pressure to get Android phone makers to pay it royalties, according to Computerworld.

The Hank Aaron Award

Time to vote for the Hank Aaron award
While League MVP, Cy Young and other awards seem to always dominate the off season, the Hank Aaron award, for each league’s best all around offensive player, is one award that fans can have an impact in by voting.

The fans, along with an all-star panel that includes Aaron, ony Gwynn, Paul Molitor, Joe Morgan, and Robin Yount will vote on which of a slate of players is the best in each league. Voting closes Oct 16.

Lenovo now top PC maker
Market research firm Gartner has found that Hewlett-Packard has been unseated as top PC seller worldwide by Lenovo. HP, the top gun in this space for the past six years owned a 15.5% share of the market while Lenovo grew to 15.7% of the market.

This comes at a time when overall PC sales are declining. Gartner reported that in the third quarter of this year sales fell 8%, but it looks like some of that decline is simply buyers waiting for the Windows 8 release later this month. Dell, Acer and Asus make up the top 5 PC makers.

HTC departs US tablet market
While there is a growing rumble about a host of new tablets expected to be announced in conjunction with the Windows 8 rollout by Microsoft later this month, HTC is jumping off the bandwagon just as others are jumping onto it.

The company has announced that it is dropping its HTC Flyer and other tablet products from the US market. It said that the products were at the end of their lifecycle and the company has said it will watch the tablet space but does not want to have an offering that is a “me too” offering.

RoboCup Soccer gets champion robot
Don’t know what RoboCup Soccer is? Well join the club but an interesting piece in Gizmag talks about the state of modern robotics and how a league of five teams competed in the league that uses what it calls TeenSize robots, ones that are three to four feet tall.

They use an open source platform and cost roughly $26,000 apiece. The leagues goal is to develop a team that can beat the human champions, by 2050 that is.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Amazon, Android, Asus, Dell, Facebook, HTC, Lawsuit, Lenovo, Major League Baseball, Microsoft, Motorola, Tablets, YourSports Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Advanced Micro Devices Jumps into Tablet Space with Z-60

October 11, 2012 by

Advanced Micro Devices is staking its ground in the tablet space with the introduction earlier this week of the Z-60 Tablet chip as it seeks to become a player in this market as some of its traditional spaces such as desktop PCs continue to shrink.

The chip, also called Hondo, is the company’s latest attempt to establish itself in a market where devices either use a variant of an ARM chip such as the processors from Broadcom, Nvidia or Texas Instruments, develop their own processor like Apple and Samsung, or in growing numbers use Intel’s Atom processor family.

The Hondo chip is a low powered, 4.5 watt, dual core processor running at 1GGhz and the company has packed it with 80 integrated Radeon graphics processor cores, which will give tablets high-definition video and gaming capabilities. It will include support for DirectX 11 has the horsepower for high-definition 1080p displays.

The processor is expected to available later this month when Microsoft formally unveils its Windows 8 operating system for tablets and a host of hardware developers, including Microsoft, start selling or at least formally showing their tablets. Systems using these chips will only be able to run Windows 8 or Linux

Intel appears to have a lead in this race since its OEMs have already started showing finished products with Intel chips, however some of the documentation on developers sites does seem to indicate that they might also use AMD chips as well.

The competition should be good for customers since it could help drive the prices down on chips and that should lower overall systems prices. We can at least always hope.

Filed Under: Apple, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Surface, Tablets, Windows 8 Tagged With: , , , , ,

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: New Tablets from Google, Acer

October 8, 2012 by

The latest rumor, about Google anyway, is that it is preparing to release another member of its Nexus 7 tablet family. The latest is expected to have 32GB of storage, a big leap up from the 16GB that is the current maximum storage available for users. For those looking to mark their calendar the rumor mill says it will be Oct. 24.

AT&T is planning on selling Windows 8 tablets
AT&T has announced that it will be offering a pair of tablets that will be running on the soon to be announced Windows 8 operating system. The company will offer the Asus VivoTab RT, a tablet that will be able to handle 4G LTE cellular communications. The second tablet will be the Samsung ATIV SmartPC, a system that has a removable keyboard and can be configured as either a clamshell notebook or a tablet.

AT&T is also venturing into selling antivirus by offering an app and a service that will work to keep smartphones free from infection. While AT&T Mobile Security is now only offered to businesses it has plans for a consumers offering as well.

Motorola wins one in Germany against Microsoft
The Mannheim Regional Court has ruled that Motorola Mobility did not violate a Microsoft patent on a “method and radio interface layer comprising a set of application programming interfaces (APIs).” The court gave no reason for its ruling and Microsoft is expected to appeal. This is only one of the issues that the two are fighting about in court.

Oracle readies for next round in fight with Google
Oracle has appealed the Google case, the one where the jury found that code in the Android operating system was not stolen, as Oracle had claimed. The case dealt with both patent and copyright infringement and while the jury found very minor infractions the court did not award anything to Oracle.

Acer’s Iconia W700 Tablet to cost $799
We have been a bit lax on reporting on the upcoming AcerW700 Iconia tablet so here is a quick snapshot. The Tablet will be released on Oct. 26 as part of Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch. With an expected $799 price tag it will feature an 11.6-inch display with 1920 x 1080 resolution. The tablet will include a Bluetooth keyboard, a choice of Intel processors including a Core i5 chip and will have 64GB or 128 GB of solid state storage.

Alcatel joins tablet space
Speaking of tablets it looks like communications player Alcatel has developed a 7-inch tablet that will compete with the likes of Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire families. The One Touch T10 Android tablet looks like it is designed for budget users and will include a 800 x 480 display and 4GB of flash storage.

MobileCon 2012 is this week
For the mobile minded the show formerly known as Fall CTIA has been renamed to MobileCon 2012 and will start Oct. 9 and run until Oct. 12 in San Diego. It should be good for some interesting handset offerings as well as most likely a host of product leaks.

One reason there might not be quite as many new products as expected is because just a short time later, on Oct. 29 to be exact, Microsoft will be officially launching its Windows 8 phone platform, a few days after it introduces Windows 8 for tablets.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Amazon, Android, Asus, AT&T, Google, Lawsuit, Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle, Windows 8 Tagged With: , , , , ,

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Cheap Google Tablet? Apple Map ills

October 1, 2012 by

The latest rumor on new tablets comes from the partnership of Google and Asus, which just recently introduced the popular Nexus 7 tablet. Now it is being reported by Digitimes that the t

wo may be looking to break new price point barriers with a $100 offering.

With new Nooks from Barnes & Noble, Kindles from Amazon and systems pending from a host of other OEMs over the next few weeks the competition is getting much stiffer as customers are now being presented with more viable options to Apple’s iPad. It will be interesting to see if this pans out. Others are already claiming that the rumor is false.

Fallout from Apple Maps continues
Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly apologized to customers about the poor shape that Apple’s maps is in. The app, which replaced the popular Google Maps, has some glaring flaws like eliminating landmarks and moving roads.

Cook said that the company was very sorry for the frustration that it caused its customers and he even went so far as to recommend 5 apps that might do as a replacement to Apple’s offering. Speaking of Apple the iPad 3 (not iPad Mini) rumors have started- stay tuned for a growing wave of them as others launch their latest tablets.

Google loses appeal on patent enforcement
Google has been barred from enforcing a German court ruling against Microsoft that would have led to the banning of select Microsoft products on Germany. The ruling came from the US Court of Appeals and it upheld a lower court decision that prevented Motorola from enforcing the ban.

Foss Patents appears to see this as a positive move in getting Google to start licensing its patents on a FRAND basis.

FCC OKs wireless auction
There may soon be more bandwidth available for wireless use as the Federal Communications Commission has given approval to the auction by television broadcasters of bandwidth that they no longer need.

The expected bidders will use the bandwidth to meet expanding cellular and wireless Internet usage. The FCC is still working out the details of the auctions, according to the New York Times.

Nokia signs mapping deal with Oracle
Nokia will now be providing mapping software to Oracle, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The deal is expected to be announced today at OracleWorld and will allow Oracle’s application users to integrate mapping capabilities.

Android and iOS market shares grow
Android and iOS grew market share during the summer according to a report from market analytics firm comScore. The study, which tracked the operating systems from May to July show that Android represents 52.2% of the US market while Apple’s iOS is now 33.4% of the market. It looks like the Apple win over Samsung might have had an impact as Samsung had stagnant growth, losing 0.3% of its hardware sales.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Asus, Barnes & Noble, Google, iOS, Kindle, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Nook, Oracle, Samsung, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Intel and Allies Show Windows 8 Tablets

September 28, 2012 by

Intel has been talking since at least CES at the beginning of this year about the huge number of tablets that its OEMs are preparing for later this year and now we have gotten a sneak peak at what they are planning at an event the company held in San

Francisco this week.

The hardware products which included both tablets and hybrid/convertible systems were powered by an Intel processor called the Atom Z2760, formerly codenamed Clover Trail, a processor that the company is positioning against ARM-based processors from rivals such as Broadcom and Texas Instruments.

There are a number of Windows 8 products based on the Atom Z2760 processor that were unveiled and we will just give the names of the announced systems, for full details head over to Intel. Acer’s Iconia W510, Asus VivoTab, Dell Latitude 10, Fujitsu Stylistic Q702, HP Envy x2, Lenovo ThinkPad 2, Samsung Smart PC, and the ZTE V98.

Dell Latitude 10

Some, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad 2 have been talked about a good deal already while this marks the return of Hewlett-Packard and Dell to the tablet space. Since Intel has said that there are 20 tablet designs in the works expect more at the Windows 8 official announcement.

Intel also brings a huge software development effort to the mobile app space, something that is often overlooked by outsiders. It also has a Software Partners program with 7,000 members and along with its Software Network helps developers optimize for Intel platforms.

In addition Intel will be delivering a range of technologies in the chips that are seen in its much higher end offerings including technology designed for servers where security is a major issue. The company sees this as helping provide assurances to corporations looking to purchase tablets but concerned about their ability to provide a robust, secure computing environment.

Included is technology from its Core vPro processors that offers hardware-assisted security, manageability and virtualization capabilities for business computing. Among the features are Enhanced Intel Anti-Theft Technology, Intel Secure Key, Intel OS Guard, Enhanced Intel Identity Protection Technology, and Intel Trusted Execution Technology.

While in the past consumers have been the primary target for tablets the inclusion of the Intel security and other technology coupled with Microsoft’s similar offerings from its end could make the tablets much more appealing to the business space as well. While the BYOD (bring your own device) crowd has had success in allowing users to bring their own devices into work, IT departments dislike this and when the system refresh comes in many offices these technologies should make tablets a much more acceptable alternative to notebooks to the IT department.

Filed Under: Apps, Asus, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Tablets, Windows 8 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Barnes & Noble Expected to Offer Nook Video Services

September 25, 2012 by

Barnes & Noble is planning on offering a video streaming and downloading service later in the fall as it faces increased competition not just from Amazon but also from the expected Apple iPad Mini and the upcoming Windows 8 tablets from Microsoft and its OEMs.

The company, which has been pondering the fate of its Nook e-reader for some time despite its popularity when released, said that the service will enable Nook users to buy movies and television shows from Time Warner’s HBO; Viacom; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment; and Walt Disney Studios. It said that it is planning to add additional media content in the future.

It is commonly viewed that Amazon’s Kindle platform is the primary rival to the Nook and recently Amazon provided a huge upgrade to that platform in terms of quality of tablets and added a new larger model.

However the physical tablets are only part of the equation as Amazon offers both a streaming video service via its Prime offerings, but users get two day shipping on many items purchased using Amazon. Amazon has added a huge new library of videos via a deal with Epix as it seeks to also steal customers from Netflix as to help differentiate its offerings.

Aside from the Amazon threat is the looming issue of just additional competition in the overall tablet space. Intel has said that there are almost two dozen new tablets pending using its processors that will be running one of the versions of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system.

Microsoft will also be entering the space with its own tablet, called the Surface. Google’s Nexus 7 was released just a few months ago to very favorable reviews and looks to be a long term contender. Then Apple, the overall market leader in the tablet space, is expected to enter the smaller form factor sector next month with a 7-inch iPad.

Barnes & Noble has not yet provided a pricing structure for the video service. Amazon offers its streaming video by the year while Netflix has a per month charge.

Filed Under: Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, Intel, iPad, Microsoft, Nook, Surface, Tablets, Windows 8 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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