From DailyTech: Facebook may be the king of the social networking world, but it has a long way to go in the way of mobile devices -- and it shows in the sales of the HTC First.

HTC's "First" smartphone was released as a Facebook-heavy, social smartphone last month. While it runs the Android operating system, a main feature was the integrated Facebook Home software -- which puts Facebook notifications and updates at the forefront.

While the phone has some decent specs, it's not doing too hot in the sales department. Customers don't seem to be interested in the product, and while no official sales figures have been released, the proof is in the price -- AT&T recently cut the price of the HTC First from $99 with a two-year contract to 99 cents, and even dropped the off-contract price from $450 to $350.

Reviews of the HTC First say that Facebook Home is nowhere near finished, and that other specs (like the rear camera) are not too impressive.

The HTC First features a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720p SLCD3 display, a Snapdragon 400 1.5 GHz dual-core processor from Qualcomm, Inc., LTE compatibility, 1 GB memory, a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 1.6 megapixel front camera. It is available in black, white, red and blue and is exclusive to AT&T.

View: Article @ Source Site

From X-bit Labs: A smartphone from Amazon has been under widespread discussion for over one and a half years now, but there are still no signs of it on the market. A fresh portion of rumours about the Kindle smartphone suggest that Amazon’s Lab 126 is actually developing two handsets: one is going to be an average smartphone, whereas the other is claimed to be a premium model with autostereoscopic 3D screen.

The high-end Amazon Kindle smartphone will use retina-tracking technology to form autostereoscopic 3D image (that does not require special glasses to see) and help users navigate the content using only their eyes, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal that cites two sources familiar with the matter. Images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles.

At present it is unclear what kind of advantages do S3D displays have for smartphones. Stereo-3D video content is scarce, not all video games can benefit from S3D, whereas three-dimensional user interfaces are too unfamiliar for the masses.

Being one of the most influential suppliers of media tablets in the U.S., Amazon naturally has ambitions to broaden its hardware offerings in a bid to offset the declining packaged media business. The company’s smartphone has been in development since before the Kindle Fire tablets were launched; in fact, the smartphone missed last year’s holiday season launch window, which indicates that it was not as competitive as the second-gen Kindle Fire slates.

View: Article @ Source Site

From X-bit Labs: A new set of benchmarks of Intel Corp.’s forthcoming Haswell microprocessors has been published. The new test results reveal some expected and some completely unexpected peculiarities of Intel Core i-series 4000-family central processing units (CPUs). The most important factor about the benchmarks is that they were obtained on production versions of chips.

Chinese web-site RedQuasar has published benchmark results of Intel Core i7-4770K and Core i5-4570K microprocessors based on Haswell micro-architecture against Intel Core i7-3770K powered by Ivy Bridge. The testers used 3DMark11, AIDA64, Cinebench 11.5, Fritz Chess Benchmark and Super Pi benchmarks to find out more about the peculiarities of the all-new microprocessor cores. Since the web-site has published images of the processors it tested, the results seem to be more or less credible.

The benchmark results reveal that Haswell has massive advantage over Ivy Bridge in graphics intensive applications thanks to its high-performance Iris HD graphics core (see Cinebench 11.5 OpenGL results). In addition, Haswell chips are slower at reading from memory, but faster at writing to, or copying data in memory, noted CPU World web-site. When it comes to applications like 3DMark 11, SuperPi and Fritz Chess Benchmark, then the two micro-architectures offer similar performance.

Even though Intel Core i-series 4000-family “Haswell” chips do not necessarily shine in all types of tests, this could be attributed to early mainboard/BIOS revisions and/or software and drivers versions. Besides, in new applications tailored for the latest chips, Haswell will offer better results thanks to new AVX2 and FMA3 instructions.

View: Article @ Source Site

From CNET News.com: Sony returned to the black for the first time in five years, thanks largely to one-time gains from the sale of assets rather than its core consumer electronics products.

The Japanese electronics giant on Thursday reported a net profit of $458 million in the 2012 financial year ending March 31 compared with a loss of $5.7 billion the year earlier (PDF). It also recorded an operating profit of $2.45 billion in 2012 compared with a loss of $820 million last year.

The company recorded $72 million in sales, a meager increase of 4.7 percent over the previous year attributable to its takeover of Sony Ericsson, favorable foreign exchange rates, and increased financial services revenue.

The return to profitability came despite continued deterioration in Sony's core electronics business, including falling demand for digital cameras, gaming consoles, and personal computers. Helping the company achieve profitability targets were the sale of assets such as its U.S. headquarters building in New York, Tokyo office buildings, and a portion of its stake in online medical-service provider M3.

Sony expects its recovery to continue, projecting a $505 million profit for the 2013 fiscal year, a 16 percent increase.

View: Article @ Source Site

From DailyTech: Things haven't been going all that well over at Electronic Arts. Despite being one of the biggest companies in the gaming industry, EA has been struggling with profitability. The profitability struggles led the company to shed employees over the last several months.

During its investor call this week, EA confirmed that it let about 900 workers go during its organizational restructuring process. EA also confirmed that the layoffs cost company about $16 million in the short term.

EA's Blake Jorgensen noted during the call that EA had $540 million in operating expenses for the current fiscal quarter. That figure is $15 million higher than the company had expected due to those costs associated with operational expense reducing actions, including layoffs. Some of the extra expense also came from the resignation of EA's CEO John Riccitiello back in March.

Jorgensen also noted that EA's plan for cost reductions would "reduce our overall headcount by approximately 10%." EA previously laid off the entire staff in its Montréal game studio.

EA was also gifted with the worst company award for the second year in a row last month. That award was bestowed on EA from The Consumerist.

Much of the blame for EA winning the dubious distinction of the worst company for the second year in a row was blamed on the online server disaster that happened with the company's popular game SimCity. Gaming servers that were overloaded prevented many people who purchase that game from being able to play, sometimes for days.

View: Article @ Source Site

From DailyTech: Good news has been few and far between for Deutsche Telekom AG's (ETR:DTE) U.S. brand T-Mobile USA, but the company -- America's fourth largest cellular carrier -- received some such news in its Q1 2013 earnings report. The "uncarrier" added 202,000 branded prepaid customers, which offset loss of 199,000 contract customers to make for a net gain of 3,000 branded customers. The branded growth was the first T-Mobile has seen since Q1 2009.

T-Mobile is phasing out contracts and phone subsidies, and moving towards a monthly access charge model using unlocked, unsubsidized handsets. The carrier posted an even bigger gain -- 579,000 customers -- when its other brands, such as the MVNO prepaid service, were factored in. Postpaid (contract) customer churn (customer loss) was at 1.9 percent, the lowest level since Q2 2008. And postpaid customer losses were down 61 percent on a year-to-year basis.

While T-Mobile USA appears to be righting the ship on the subscriber front, revenue wasn't such a pretty picture. Average revenue per user (ARPU) for postpaid declined 6.3 percent. ARPU for prepaid rose 11.3 percent, but was not enough to bridge the gap. Overall T-Mobile's only pulled in a EBITDA (a profitability measure) of $1.2B USD, down 7.5 percent on a year-to-year basis.

T-Mobile USA moved a relatively competitive 500,000 Apple, Inc. (AAPL) iPhone 5s in the first few weeks of availability. Contrast that with rival carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) which sold a mere 1.5 million iPhone 4s, 4Ss, and 5s during three whole months of Q1. T-Mobile USA's iPhone sales rate is behind AT&T, Inc. (T) which sold 4.8 million units in Q1.

T-Mobile USA was recently involved in a rather complex merger deal --approved by U.S. federal regulators in March -- involves MetroPCS splitting its shares, then paying out $1.5B USD to shareholders (roughly half the market cap). This will dilute its stake by taking 74 percent of the resulting shares, while giving the combined company all of T-Mobile shares (meaning Deutsche Telekom AG (ETR:DTE) will no longer directly own T-Mobile USA).

View: Article @ Source Site

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday introduced AMD Radeon RG2133 Gamer-series memory modules as well as Radeon RAMDisk 4.1. The Radeon RG2133 are the only modules on the market with AMP and XMP profiles for enthusiast-class systems based on AMD and Intel microprocessors. The free AMD Radeon RAMDisk 64GB features enhanced load-and-save functionality.

AMD Radeon RG2133 Gamer family memory modules (rated to operate at 2133MHz with CL10 latency at 1.65V voltage) are the only memory sticks on the market that offers both AMP and XMP memory profiles in one package, enabling ultimate ease in overclocking to 2400MHz on both AMD and Intel. AMD Radeon RG2133 Gamer Series Memory will ship with a free AMD Radeon RAMDisk 64GB, which features enhanced load-and-save functionality.

Gamer series memory is part of AMD’s unified gaming strategy initiative that places AMD technology at the heart of digital gaming and plays a critical role that enables top performance, an outstanding experience and maximum value for PC gamers everywhere.

“AMD Radeon RG2133 Gamer Series Memory is armed with features designed to outperform the competition on any task. Designed with multi-platform compatibility in mind, the AMD Radeon RG2133 brings cutting-edge technology, as well as uncompromising quality and compatibility for PC gamers,” said Roman Kyrychynskyi, product director at graphics business unit at AMD.

With Dataram, AMD’s memory manufacturing partner, AMD is proud to introduce Gamer Series to its product line up as well as the improved performance of AMD Radeon RAMDisk that allows gaming enthusiasts to load their favorite games significantly faster, saving time and eliminating frustrations.

“AMD and Dataram have worked together to significantly enhance the dynamic background load-and-save feature in order to create a seamless, non-volatile RAMDisk experience. This underscores AMD and Dataram’s continued dedication to delivering the highest-performing memory products for PC enthusiasts,” said Jason Caulkins, chief technology officer of Dataram.

View: Article @ Source Site

From X-bit Labs: The first photographs of what is claimed to be Nvidia Corp.’s next-generation GeForce GTX 700-series products have hit the web. The new breed of graphics products utilizes cooling solution akin to that of GeForce GTX Titan. Publication of images implies that Nvidia may unleash a new breed of products either this month or early next.

The new graphics boards, in case the images published by Chip Hell web-site actually depict GeForce GTX 700-series products, look similar to Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan unveiled earlier this year and based on the GK110 graphics processing unit (GPU). While not all new GTX 700-series will be powered on the massive GK110 chip, the usage of a similar cooler implies that the new graphics adapters will be whisper quiet, yet capable of further overclocking as the cooling solution is very efficient.

As reported previously, Nvidia GeForce GTX 700 family will initially consist of at least three models: GTX 780, GTX 770 and GTX 760 Ti. The GeForce GTX 780 will be based on GK110 graphics processor with 2496 stream processors as well as 5GB of GDDR5 memory, which will offer about 30% higher performance than the model GTX 680. The GeForce GTX 770 and 760 Ti will be powered by GK104 with different configurations that should offer 20% - 30% performance boost compared to the models GTX 770 and 660 Ti, respectively.

As it appears, the GeForce GTX 780 will be a cut-down version of the GeForce GTX Titan and will utilize GK110 chip that contains 7.1 billion of transistors and is 561mm2 large, whereas models GTX 770 and GTX 760 Ti will resemble GTX 680 and GTX 670 powered by GK104 graphics processing unit.

Usually, pictures are leaked to the web several weeks ahead of an actual product launch; therefore, it makes sense to expect Nvidia to reveal a new family of products either late in May or in early June, just like indicated earlier.

View: Article @ Source Site