|  |  |  | | | | | Maximum PC - All Articles | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Last week, we took a look at Mockingbird--a Chrome application put together specifically for helping web designers to hash out a wireframe mockup of a site that they're working on. While Mockingbird might be perfect for the professional code ninjas that can scrape together sites out of thin air with a bit of mathematics, and some arcane snippets of CSS knowledge, it doesn't do much for folks that want a website to call their own, but don't possess the technical knowledge to build one from scratch. For this larger, latter group, we recommend taking a look at Weebly, our Chrome Web App of the Week.
Weebly is a free, online WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website construction utility that makes putting together a professional looking website a breeze. All of Weebly's design elements are contained in a ribbon at the top of your Chrome browser. Just select an element, drag and drop it into place on your website, and you're in business. 
Weebly makes it easy to build a blog, photo gallery or even an e-commerce site with payments made via PayPal or Google Checkout. Once completed, you can upload your site to web space provided by weebly with the push of a button, use your own personal domain name or register a new domain from right inside of the application. Oh, and if you find that even with Weebly's extensive range of site building tools, you still can produce a decent looking final product, they've even got designers standing buy to give you a helping hand. For a modest fee, of course. Be sure to check back every Monday for another edition of Chrome Web App of the Week. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Remember POD? Remember gaming before MMX? No? Geez, noob brush up on your history a bit - you can start right here by reading our boot interview with Fabrice Valay from back in the day, which in this case means 1996. Hear about blistering fast 30 frames per second, the "French" touch, or reminisce about racing your cars to the safety of the escape ship. Once a huge advantage for gamers, MMX eventually became part of the basic architecture with the MMX code becoming a native "must have" in all x86 CPUs. POD went on to sell 4.5 million copies (and share a name with a neu-metal band), while Valay's quotes from this article ("I'm working hard and I'm playing hard every day." "You can train, but you can never beat me because I'm smarter.") apparently went on to inspire Charlie Sheen's attitude about winning. Reflect on the good ol' days, and tell us what you miss most about POD or pre-MMX gaming in the comments! 
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Usually, if someone went around offering you a new Kindle for $25 under retail, you'd look at them slyly and wonder where they stole it from. But in the case of Target and Best Buy stores, they're going to be selling the cheaper Kindle starting May 3rd because it is ad-supported. On-screen ads may lower the price by $25, but will users accept that?
The device ins question will be the Wi-Fi only model, which retails for $139 right now. So the new ad-supported price will clock in at $114. There are a lot of ways the ads could go terribly wrong, but the description does not make them seen excessively annoying. According to Amazon, users will see, "advertisements on the bottom of the device's home page and on its screen savers." This is a shift in the way consumer electronics are marketed. If successful, this could open the door to all manner of devices being sold with ads at a reduced price. Though, we wish the subsidy was a little bigger. It seems a shame to get so close to that magical $99 price point, and stop short. Would you consider buying an Ad-supported Kindle? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Viacom isn't done ruining everyone's good time. Nope, not by a long shot. The content giant has notified Cablevision that their iPad app, which allows streaming live TV to the device, is not acceptable. The app only works in the customer's home, but Viacom still considers this sort of use to be outside the realm of existing content deals.
Viacom has also been engaged in a legal battle with Time Warner over the same issue. Tim Warner has filed a lawsuit alleging their use of streaming TV on the iPad is appropriate. Viacom sued back, and now Cablevision is likely going to be drawn into the fray. Both companies are talking big, with Viacom claiming that Cablevision has "seized distribution rights that Viacom has not granted." Cablevision disagrees, asserting that the method of delivery does not matter, so long as it is delivered to one home. Adding, "Programmers are paid based on how many homes we securely connect to their content, not how many televisions display it." What do you think? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  According to reports in the Chinese media, Facebook has signed a deal with China's largest search engine, Baidu. The agreement would give rise to a jointly-owned social networking site available in the Chinese mainland. The government would need to approve the deal, which could mean a long wait until we know what the final product would look like. One thing's for sure though, it won't be Facebook.
The Facebook domain has been blocking in China for years, as are other similar sites and services. By creating a site from the ground up with a home-grown company, Facebook may be able to placate the Chinese government. It might be the only way Facebook can get into the booming Chinese market. Facebook has denied that any deal have been signed at this time, but is "currently studying and learning about China". Do you think Zuckerberg is planning to work with Baidu? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  After a series of verbal jabs that ranged from heated and on-point to "he's clearly fled to South America," Sony and notorious PS3 jailbreaker George "Geohot" Hotz have finally patched things up. Or at least, that's what the court document says. The parties involved, however, tell a slightly different story.
One thing's for sure, though: litigations are over. Hotz is now bound by a permanent injunction that forbids him from spreading any technology that "circumvents any of the TPM's in any Sony product." That, of course, includes helping other people achieve a similar goal. Distribution of confidential Sony information is now off the table as well. If Hotz fails to keep his word, he's looking at $10,000 charges per violation and a trial on Sony's preferred turf: California. According to a press release, everyone's kissing and making up like nothing ever happened. There may even be a sleep-over. "Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us," said Riley Russell, general counsel for SCEA. "Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal... We appreciate Mr. Hotz's willingness to address the legal issues involved in this case and work with us to quickly bring this matter to an early resolution." "It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier," Hotz said in the press release. "I'm happy to have the litigation behind me." Which is probably true, but that doesn't mean Hotz is ready to forgive and forget. His latest blog post is short, sweet, and to the point: "As of 4/11/11, I am joining the SONY boycott. I will never purchase another SONY product. I encourage you to do the same. And if you bought something SONY recently, return it. Why would you not boycott a company who feels this way about you?" So, you're probably wondering, who won? Well, Geohot fortunately didn't end up penniless, but Sony still got to trot him out and make an example of him. Jailbreaking, however, is far from dead, seeing as it's difficult to cut off a movement's head if it doesn't have one in the first place. This case, then, is mostly concluded, but it's lightyears away from conclusive. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  You've probably fashioned a makeshift keychain made out of an old processor by drilling a hole through one of the corners, and if you're handy with a dremel, maybe you turned some old hardware into a decorative piece. But have you ever built an entire coffee table out of yesterday's electronics? Designer Benjamin Rollins Caldwell did, and the end result is a truly awesome work of art.
Caldwell built his "Binary Low Table" made from obsolete parts, which now live on as part of his Binary Collection. He says he was inspired by pallets of old electronics sitting around in a local warehouse collecting dust. "The table structure is made from the metal from computer towers that are riveted together and bent to the proper form," Caldwell explains. "The surface is completely covered with a collage of motherboards, computer chips, LED screens, and hard drive disks held pin place by sheet metal screws. The glass from the table was salvaged from an an abandoned warehouse." Consider this inspiration if you're wondering what to do with all the outdated parts you've packed away over the years. Image Credit: BRC Designs | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Can we build an AMD machine—any AMD machine—that can compete with an Intel-powered rig? In the forever war between CPU vendors, AMD and Intel have traded places many times—one leads, then the other. Since the advent of Intel's Core i7, though, AMD hasn't been able to touch the performance of Intel's high end, and Sandy Bridge further increases the gap. But, well, you couldn't buy Sandy Bridge motherboards when I wrote this build-it story in February for the May print issue—something about a bad chipset—and I'd been meaning to build an AMD-powered machine for a while now—with CrossFire, even. Why? Partially because I can, but I also want to witness the performance delta firsthand. Just for kicks, I'm also going to put some effort—and money—into making this system pretty. I'm not going to add lots of flashy lights (though I thought about it); instead, I'm focusing on the case itself and the wiring inside. The result, hopefully, will be a rig I can be proud of, inside and out. Ingredients  Case/PSU NZXT Phantom $140 - PSU Silverstone Strider Gold 750W $190
- PSU Cables Silverstone PP05 short-cable kit $25
- Mobo MSI 890FXA-GD70 $200
- CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz $200
- Cooler Cooler Master Hyper 212+ $30
- RAM Corsair CMP4GX3M2A1600C8 4GB kit DDR3/1600 $70
- Optical Drive Plextor PX-B320SA BD-ROM $100
 - Hard Drive 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT $170
- Solid-State Drive 256GB Samsung 470 Series $500
- GPU Two Asus EAH6870 DirectCU Radeon HD 6870 in CrossFireX $440
- OS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM) $99
- Misc NZXT individually sleeved cables (CB 24P, CB 8P, CB 43SATA, 2x CB 6V, 2x CB 8V) $54
- Zip ties $2
Total for PC: $2,220 Choosing the Hardware Advocates of AMD's Phenom chips cite their low power consumption and high overclocking potential—oh yeah, and you can get a 3.2GHz hexa-core for 200 bucks. Indeed, the cost of the Phenom II X6 1090T that I chose, plus a fancy CrossFireX-enabled MSI 890FXA-GD70 motherboard, was only $400 total. This had the makings of an inexpensive build, until I added two Radeon HD 6870 videocards, a 7,200rpm 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT hard drive, and a $500 256GB Samsung solid-state drive. Why these parts? Thanks to a recent price drop, two 6870s in CrossFireX cost less than a single GTX 580, and they help me maintain the theme of AMD solidarity. I chose the drives with performance in mind, plain and simple. 
Silverstone's PP05 short-cabling kit works with any of its modular PSUs to avoid clutter in smaller cases. Since a clean-looking, aesthetically pleasing build was also part of the plan, I sprang for NZXT's white Phantom chassis, which looks gorgeous on the outside, has plenty of fan mounts, and is roomy enough that, even when loaded with two videocards, my build won't look cramped. To make it look even cleaner, I'm modifying my Silverstone Strider Gold 750W PSU with Silverstone's short-cabling kit and some of NZXT's fancy, individually threaded power-cable extenders. Throw in a Blu-ray drive, 4GB of RAM, a copy of Windows 7, and Cooler Master's famed Hyper 212+ CPU cooler (yes, it works on AM3!) and we're in business. 1. Install CPU, Cooler, and RAM AMD CPUs, unlike their Intel counterparts, still have pins on them, so be careful not to bend them when you place the CPU carefully into its socket. Make sure to align the triangle on the upper left corner of the socket with its counterpart on the CPU, then lower the lever that secures the CPU. Next, remove the motherboard's built-in cooler retention mechanism by unscrewing the four silver Phillips-head screws, and then remove the black plastic structure and its backplate. Most AMD coolers don't require this, but our Hyper does. Align the Hyper 212+ backplate with the four mounting holes, then put the mounting pins through the holes and secure with the hex nuts using the hex bit included with the cooler (below). Apply a small amount of thermal paste to the CPU, then follow the Hyper's instruction manual to secure the heatsink to the mounting pins. Tighten the spring screws until they're no longer easy to tighten. 
At this point you should add the RAM to the two slots closest to the heatsink, then clip the heatsink fan to the RAM side of the heatsink (so it blows through the cooling fins toward the back of the mobo) and plug it into the CPU_FAN header. 2. Prep the Case Remove both side panels from the case, as well as the top and front fascia. Set them aside for now. The NZXT Phantom comes with a rat-ton of hard drive trays. In fact, there's a whole extra bay taking up room at the bottom of the case where we could be fiddling with PSU cables. Let's remove it. Flip the case onto its front so the bottom of the case is visible. Unscrew the four Phillips-head screws at the center of the case's base (below), then flip the case so the rear of the motherboard tray is visible and remove the six screws you see in the center. Then you can remove that whole hard drive bay. 
You should also install the motherboard I/O shield at this point. Be sure to install it from the inside of the case, facing out, and make sure all nine ATX mounting holes in the case have standoffs in them.
3. Install Mobo and GPUs 
With your case lying on its left side, place the motherboard into it. Align the I/O ports with the holes in the I/O shield and the mounting holes with the case's standoffs (above). Install using screws from the Phantom's screws pouch. Now might be a good time to connect the front-panel HD_Audio, USB, and power connectors. 
Remove the first two PCI-E slot covers, as well as the fourth and fifth. Align the first GPU with the first PCI-E x16 slot and lower it into place, pressing down firmly so it engages with the slot (above). Secure it with two thumbscrews. Because of the enormous coolers on Asus's EAH6870 DirectCU videocards, we can't use the second PCI-E x16 slot. Instead, we'll put the second GPU in the third PCI-E slot, using expansion-ports 4 and 5 (below). Once both GPUs are secure, attach the CrossFire connector. 
4. Install Fancy Power Cables 
Before we add the PSU, we're going to prewire our individually threaded power cables so they run behind the motherboard tray. If you're skipping the individually threaded cables and PP05 kit, skip this step. Attach the 24-pin ATX connector to its socket (above), then push the other end through the nearest rubber-grommeted hole in the mobo tray. Attach the 8-pin ATX aux power cable to its socket, then run it up into the hole at the top of the motherboard tray and behind the mobo. Same for the four 6-pin cables for the videocards (below); attach them all first and then route them behind the motherboard. 
5. Mount the Drives 
Now it's time to install the drives. Just slap the optical drive into whichever bay you'd like (we used the bottom-most optical bay) and secure it by clicking the slider on the lock mechanism to the front (above). 
The Phantom's hard drive trays are like nearly every other case's trays—the 3.5-inch drive pops right into its bay, while the 2.5-inch drive needs to be secured with screws (above). Slide the drive trays back into the bay. Connect with the fancy 4-pin-to-3-SATA connector from the NZXT kit; garnish with SATA cables (below). 
6. Install PSU and Connect Cables Because wiring's such a big part of this build, we've saved the PSU for the end. By now, everything should be installed except the PSU, and the motherboard and GPUs should be connected to individually threaded power-cable extenders that are routed behind the motherboard tray. The Strider Gold 750W PSU comes with standard-length modular cables preinstalled; remove those. Install the PSU into the chassis and plug in the short cables from the PPO5 kit (below). You should only need the two ATX power connectors, four 6-pin PCI-E cables, one SATA power connector, and one two-plug Molex power connector. 
Run the two ATX power connectors and four PCI-E power connectors through the giant hole at the bottom of the mobo tray and bring them up to connect to the individually sleeved cables (below). Utilize zip ties and the cable tie-downs available to you. 
Almost done! Be sure to connect 4-pin power connectors to your front-panel fan connectors and 4-pin-to-3-SATA hard drive connectors, and be sure to connect front-panel, SSD, HDD, and Blu-ray SATA cables to the motherboard. Double-check that all your power connectors are in place, as well as your front-panel connectors. Replace the case's right side panel and top and front plastic molding, being sure to remove the optical bezel for the slot the Blu-ray player occupies. Connect your two side-panel fans to their connectors and replace the left side panel. Connect your monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power cable, and you should be ready to install Windows. Glorious. Our AMD Machine Is a Looker 
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ It remains our go-to entry-level cooler, and it's compatible with both AMD and Intel builds.
Fancy Wrapping Individually sleeved cables eliminate visual clutter from the inside of the case. Crossfire GPUs It's usually better to have one high-end GPU than multiple midrange cards, but dual Radeon HD 6870s are powerfully tempting.
Samsung 470 SSD A 256GB SSD might have been overkill. But we've been good lately. The AMD Rig in Action At stock speeds, my AMD-powered rig doesn't do so well compared to Maximum PC's standard zero-point machine. This isn't surprising; the Intel machine has a faster clock speed and more virtual cores (thanks to HyperThreading) than my rig. That gives it the edge in both single-threaded and multithreaded apps. That ain't fair. But I didn't build this rig to run at stock speeds. After a few false starts, I got the 3.2GHz 1090T CPU running at a stable 3.8GHz. This was my second attempt at overclocking this rig; the first resulted in a bad smell and a fried motherboard somewhere around the 4GHz mark. I replaced the motherboard and got a stable 3.8GHz overclock. The extra clocks really helped narrow the gap between this rig and our zero-point: At 3.8GHz, the AMD machine ran Lightroom 12 percent faster than the zero-point, came within 10fps of the zero-point in Far Cry 2, and exceeded it in STALKER. Thanks to multithreading, the zero-point still won in Vegas and ProShow Producer, but the gap was much narrower after our overclock. The 1090T in my rig overclocked impressively (and has potential to go even further), but for multithreaded applications, a quad-core with HyperThreading seems to beat out a higher-clocked six-core without. Alternate Configurations There are several points at which your build can differ from mine. Skip the individually sleeved power cables and the Silverstone PP05 short-cable kit, and you can save almost $80. Dropping the SSD size from 256GB to 64GB puts space at a premium but saves another $370. Swapping the 4GB of DDR3/1600 for 8GB of DDR3/1300 costs only $20 more. And so forth. The goal of this build was to experiment—both with an AMD configuration (which we haven't done in a long time) and with CrossFire, which we also haven't done for a while. With the overclock I achieved, the AMD rig performed soundly. The secondary goal was to build a beautiful rig, and in that sense I definitely succeeded. Just look at that gut shot. Benchmarks | Zero Point | Build-it 3.2GHz | | Vegas Pro 9 (sec) | 3,049 | 4,982 (-39%) | | Lightroom 2.6 (sec) | 356 | 355 (-0%) | | ProShow 4 (sec) | 1,112 | 1,674 (-34%) | | Reference 1.6 (sec) | 2,113 | 2,615 (-19%) | | STALKER: CoP (fps) | 42 | 42.8 | | Far Cry 2 (fps) | 114.4 | 98.8 (-14%) | Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.5GHz, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333 overclocked to 1750MHz, on a Gigabyte X58 motherboard. We are running an ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, a 160GB Intel X25-M SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. Benchmarks | | Zero Point | Build-it 3.8GHz | | Vegas Pro 9 (sec) | 3,049 | 4,246 (-28%) | | Lightroom 2.6 (sec) | 356 | 319 | | ProShow 4 (sec) | 1,112 | 1,493 (-26%) | | Reference 1.6 (sec) | 2,113 | 2,229 (-5%) | | STALKER: CoP (fps) | 42 | 42.9 | | Far Cry 2 (fps) | 114.4 | 105 (-8%) | Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.5GHz, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333 overclocked to 1750MHz, on a Gigabyte X58 motherboard. We are running an ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, a 160GB Intel X25-M SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Intel today announced it's now shipping a new processor designed specifically for tablets and hybrid devices, including those from Evolve III, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Motion Computing, Razer, and Viiv. Intel also said it will give a sneak peak of its next-generation Intel Atom platform codenamed "Cedar Trail" at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Beijing tomorrow.
"The new Intel Atom 'Oak Trail' platform, with 'Cedar Trail' to follow, are examples of our continued commitment to bring amazing personal and mobile experiences to netbook and tablet devices, delivering architectural enhancements for longer battery life and greater performance," said Doug Davis, vice president and general manager of the Netbook and Tablet Group at Intel. "We are accelerating the Intel Atom product line to now move faster than Moore's law, bringing new products to market on three process technologies in the next 3 years." Intel said its new Atom Z670 processor delivers improved video playback, fast Internet browsing, and longer battery life, all without sacrificing performance. Oak Trail includes support for 1080p video decoding, HDMI, and Adobe Flash. Intel is venturing into territory currently dominated by ARM, and to an extent, Nvidia as well. Intel claims its Z670 is power efficient enough to find a home on a number of platforms, including Android, MeeGo, and Windows in the mobile space. Image Credit: Intel | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Go ahead and award yourself 250 geek points if you've heard of Telechips, a Korean fabless semiconductor company working closely with ARM. Telechips has actually been around for a little over a decade and during that time it developed the world's only digital based Caller ID chip, as well as a handful of other market firsts. More recently, Telechips has focused its attention on the emerging tablet market and just extended its license of ARM Mali embedded graphics to include the Mali 400 MP GPU.
ARM's Mali 400 MP is the world's first OpenGL ES 2.0 corformant embedded multi-core GPU. Telechips envisions empowering Android-based tablets with the newly licensed GPU, which provides 2D and 3D acceleration with performance scalability beyond 1080p. While you might not have heard of Telechips, chances are you have heard of Samsung's Galaxy S II, which has been found to be using ARM's Mali 400 chip. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  The decision to rent/lease or buy presents itself at every turn. You'll face this decision when shopping a new car, relocating to a new home or apartment, and even when it comes to picking out movies. But what about software? Part of the reason why open-source programs like GIMP exist is because the average user is either unable or unwilling for fork over several hundred dollars for a legitimate copy of Photoshop. What if you could rent a license instead? That's the question Adobe hopes to answer with the release of its new Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 product line.
"This launch marks a major change to Adobe's product release strategy for Creative Suite, the industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow across print, video, mobile and online media," Adobe said. "Adobe now plans to have milestone Creative Suite product introductions at 24-month intervals and – starting with Creative Suite 5.5 – significant mid-cycle releases designed to keep the worldwide creative community ahead of the latest advances in content authoring." Coinciding with this new release schedule is the introduction of an "affordable and flexible subscription-based pricing plan." The upshot is that the new subscription engine ensures users are armed with the most up-to-date versions of software, and without taking a major upfront hit to their Paypal accounts. "With subscription pricing customers can use flagship products, such as Adobe Photoshop for as little as US$35 per month, Adobe Design Premium CS5.5 for US$95 per month, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection for US$129 per month," Adobe points out. The alternative is to buy the programs outright. The full version of Photoshop runs $999 ($349 upgrade), Adobe Design Premium costs $1,899 ($599 upgrade), and Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection runs $2,599 ($899 upgrade). So what's the verdict, are you down with a subscription model for Adobe software, or is the pricing still too high? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Fallout from the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan continue to rock the tech industry with delays for one reason or another. From damaged facilities to disruptions in power, parts just aren't getting from point A to point B, and who knows how long it will be until things are back to normal. But these aren't the only problems. Now we're hearing that a shortage of industrial gases has forced Sharp to halt production of some LCD panels.
According to PCWorld, Sharp is only able to get its hands on a limited amount of gas, which it will use to maintain production at two factories that make small and medium-size panels for things like cellphones and laptops. At the same time, Sharp made the decision to suspend manufacturing of larger panels used to make televisions. It's unknown which gases are hard to come by, though LCD panels usually utilize industrial gases like argon and nitrogen, as well as nitrogen trifluoride and sulfur hexafluoride. On the bright side, Sharp does have a one-month inventory of panels to play around with, and the company said it will continue to produce flat-screen TVs until those parts are exhausted. Image Credit: Sharp | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter typically hog all the attention, but give social news sites StumbleUpon their due. The discovery engine now serves up 1 billion stumbles per month after closing out its busiest month ever. Making that figure even more impressive is that the fact that just one month ago, StumbleUpon announced 800 million stumbles, so the site was able to add another 200 million in a short period of time.
StumbleUpon's history is an interesting one. Online auction site eBay acquired StumbleUpon back in 2007 for $75 million in cash, a move that many questioned, including eBay itself. StumbleUpon's founders then bought the site back in 2009 for $29 million. A little over a month ago, StumbleUpon announced it completed a $17 million Series B round of financing, which "will be used to continue to invest in the company's core discovery technology, expand to new platforms, and grow the employee base." In short, StumbleUpon's founders cashed out with a tidy sum, bought its baby back for less than half of the sales price, and continues to receive millions of dollars in funding. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  PC purists might contend that the joke's on all iPad owners who bought into iOS and the Apple ecosystem rather than invest in Android or hold out for any number of promising tablets on the horizon, like RIM's PlayBook and HP's TouchPad. But the real joke is on Verizon iPad 2 owners who report problems connecting to Verizon's 3G network, only it's no laughing matter to those affected. After blowing up Apple's support forum, the Cupertino outfit finally acknowledged the problem, but doesn't yet have a solution.
"We are aware that small number of iPad 2 customers have experienced connectivity issues with the Verizon 3G network and we are investigating it," Apple told All Things Digital. There's a thread in Apple's Support Forum where users have come together to complain of their connectivity woes. The 9 page (and growing) thread is filled with Verizon iPad 2 owners saying that they're sometimes unable to receive a 3G signal once its turned off and back on. The only solution so far is to reboot the device. Interestingly enough, the problem only appears to affect Verizon's CDMA iPad 2 and not AT&T's GSM version. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Packard Bell is a name you probably haven't heard in awhile. Now a subsidiary of Acer, Packard Bell was once a major player in the U.S. desktop market, right up until the company packed its bags and left North America back in 2000. The general consensus among power users was 'good riddance,' and if you're still of that opinion, don't worry, Packard Bell isn't making its way back to the States. The company is, however, releasing a tablet in Europe that bears a striking resemblance to Acer's recently announced Iconia Tab A500.
Coincidence? We think not. According to NotebookItalia.it, Packard Bell's Liberty Tab is a 10.1-inch tablet built around Google's Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) platform. It sports a dual-core Tegra 2 processor from Nvidia, 5MP rear-facing camera, 2MP front-facing camera, HDMI, microSD card slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G, 3.5mm headphone jack, around 10 hours of battery life, and comes in Cherry Red or Pearl White. Is it the Iconia Tab A500? We think so, though it does appear Packard Bell altered the casing just a tad. Otherwise, this appears to be the same slate. The Liberty Tab will go on sale in Europe in June 2011, with pricing still to be determined. Image Credit: NotebookItalia.it | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  There has been a sudden spike in rumors of upcoming Alienware notebooks over the past few days. Evidence confirming the existence of the new notebooks has not only appeared in fairly run-of-the-mill forms like leaked docs and premature hints on the vendor's website, but we have also seen a pre-release review of one of the rumored notebooks – the M14x. But if there was still some doubt about the existence of the all new Alienware M14x, the emergence of the user and factory service manuals for the laptop on Dell's support site should be enough to put them to rest.
According to its user manual, the 14-incher features a second generateion Intel Core i5/i7 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT555M graphics up to 3GB dedicated memory, Gigabit Ethernet, SATA 6Gbps, a 2-megapixel, and an 8-cell 63Whr battery. Apparently, buyers will be able to opt for either a 1366 x 768 or 1600x900 display. Image Credit: dell.benyouhui forums | | | | | | | | | |  | |  | |  |
