Latest news

HTC has announced that the T-Mobile version of the Sesation 4G is getting Android 4.0 as we speak.

To manually initiate the download, head over to your "Settings" app, press "About Phone" then "HTC Software Updates" and finally follow the instructions to download the update.

T-Mobile will allow you to download via Wi-Fi or 3G/4G.

Full feature update (via AandM):

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
Sense 3.6
System bar enhancements to easily view recent apps.
Re-sizeable widgets
Lock screen actions including pull down notifications and adjust volume while device is locked
Data usage controls
Face Unlock
Home screen folders
Improved battery life

The most anticipated Android device of the year is now available for pre-order, unlocked.

Amazon and Expansys-USA have put the smartphone up for sale, with a range of prices starting at $700 and going up to $850 for some crazier third-party sellers.

The model up for sale is the unlocked international GSM version, meaning it will work on AT&T and T-Mobile USA here in the States, but without LTE for AT&T.

"Pebble Blue" and "Marble White" are available colors from multiple sellers.

Samsung noted earlier this week that the company has seen 9 million pre-orders for the upcoming device from 100 global carriers. The device goes on sale in Germany first on May 29th and then everyone else throughout June.

The flagship phone has a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display, a powerful 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor and an 8MP camera, all of which are high-end. What should differentiate the phone from others in the market is its software, which Samsung has customized and tweaked to the point where it does not feel too much like the stock "vanilla" Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich you may be accustomed to.

According to multiple sources, Google is looking to move the new Motorola Mobility headquarters to Chicago.

The search giant is looking for an office with at least 500,000 square feet in downtown Chicago. The site would need to hold 3000 employees.

Mobility is currently headquartered in Libertyville, Illinois.

Most had anticipated that Google would move the company over to San Francisco, so the reports are surprsing.

Google will officially acquire the company next week after finally gaining approval from Chinese regulators. Google purchased the company for $12.5 billion last year pending approval.

According to reports, Verizon is looking to raise speeds on their FiOS broadband network, but at a price.

The speed bump will hit all four tiers of the service, with the mid-end 25Mbps download tier being bumped to 50Mbps and the 35 Mbps service hopping to 75 Mbps downstream.

On the low end, the 15Mbps service seems to be unchanged, as is the extremely fast 150Mbps high-end tier. If accurate, Verizon is looking to offer a 300 Mbps tier, as well, which would blow away any current competitors.

The reports claims the changes could be coming as soon as June 18th but Verizon has not commented.

Even if the speed increases don't come to fruition, consumers are almost guaranteed to see the price jump: "I think that you'll see us do some price increases here over the next two quarters," says CFO Fran Shammo.

Latest iOS hints that Apple will allow FaceTime over 3G connections.

AppleInsider (pic source) has highlighted than when running the latest version of iOS, 5.1.1, and using FaceTime over Wi-Fi (which is what it is limited to), if you go to Settings and turn off "Enable 3G", you get a message indicating that this action might end FaceTime.

"Disabling 3G may end FaceTime. Are you sure you want to disable 3G?" the OS warns. Disabling 3G doesn't affect FaceTime currently because it is using Wi-Fi anyway, but questions have been raised as to why this warning has been added to iOS when you do try to disable 3G.

FaceTime video chat was brought to the iPhone in 2010 with the launch of the iPhone 4 handset, and has since migrated to Mac and other iOS devices. It is currently limited to use over Wi-Fi only, probably due to demands by carriers concerned about the data use of the feature.

Apple looks for another import ban.

The iPad-maker benefited on Tuesday then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that a judge in a California district court was in error when he ruled that Apple failed to show that it had a case. The appeals court ruled that the case be sent back to the district court for review.

The decision involves a single patent which Apple claims Samsung violated in the design of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Apple has now filed a motion for a new injunction against the tablet, hoping to get it pulled from shelves in U.S. stores. It already forced Samsung to make some design changes to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany, where it sells a "10.1N" revision of the device.

Apple has had some success against the makers of Android smartphones and tablets. It has accused Samsung in particular of "slavishly cloning" the iPhone and iPad in its Galaxy line of smartphones and tablet PCs.

Government websites to miss government deadline.

All UK based websites have been given until May 26 to ensure that their visitors are able to give "informed consent" over cookies. Cookies store information that is required for some website functions, such as keeping you logged in to service.

However, tracking cookies can also be used to retrieve information about a users' web browsing habits. These cookies have been the target of an EU directive that aims to give Internet users more control over how their Internet usage is tracked online.

"As in the private sector, where it is estimated that very few websites will be compliant by the 26th May, so it is true of the government estate," a Cabinet Office spokesman told the BBC. "The majority of department websites will not be compliant with the legislation by that date."

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will not take any action against the websites that fail to comply, as long as they are "showing a commitment" to make the changes eventually.

Titan will dethrone Japan's K Computer.

The U.S. government plans to install 19,000 Tesla K20 modules from Nvidia into its Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Once the machine is upgraded, it will be eight times quicker than it is now, carrying out an estimated 25 quadrillion floating point operations per second (25 petaflops).

GPUs are highly efficient at carrying out parallel processing tasks, where a process can be broken down into many parts and computed simultaneously since the outcome of a single computation does not determine the input of another.

Supercomputers are switching to this hybrid computing system, splitting work up between thousands of CPUs, and thousands of GPUs, depending on which will hand the task in a more efficient manner. The Titan supercomputer is used to help develop more efficient energy systems (such as vehicle engines), to model changes in climate and other complex tasks.

"If you take a look at scientific applications, 99% of the operations can be done in a highly parallel manner, and that can be done much more efficiently by large numbers of very simple GPU processors than on a traditional CPU burning a lot of power trying to make a single thread go fast," Steve Scott, Nvidia's chief technology officer, told the BBC.

Apple commits to green energy tech.

The iPad-maker will build two solar array installations in and around Maiden, North Carolina, near its core data center. It said it wil buy all the equipment it needs for them from SunPower Corp and startup Bloom Energy.

The solar arrays will cover 250 acres and will supply supply 84 million kWh of energy annually to the power-hungry data center.

Later on in the year, Apple said it will build a bio-gas fuel-cell plant too. "I'm not aware of any other company producing energy onsite at this scale," Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told Reuters.

"The plan we are releasing today includes two solar farms and together they will be twice as big as we previously announced, thanks to the purchase of some land very near to the data center in Maiden, which will help us meet this goal."

Energy concerns have been raised as Internet firms continue to build large data centers that eat power. The new facilities are necessary to meet the demands of cloud computing.

EA must defend itself in NCAA conspiracy lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that Electronic Arts (EA) is an active participant in a conspiracy to prevent college athletes from being paid for playing. Former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon is leading plaintiffs in the case against the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its marketing company.

It alleges that the NCAA is violating U.S. antitrust law by forcing college students to sign away their rights to profit commercially from playing college sports, even after they have finished. They also accuse EA of profiting improperly from using their images and likenesses in its games.

The publisher had asked to be dismissed from the case, but a Judge has found that such a dismissal would be improper.

EA's licensing agreements with the NCAA "can fairly be read to evidence a 'meeting of the minds' between EA and the other defendants not to compensate former student-athletes, where such a contract would interfere with the student-athletes' existing agreements with the NCAA," said U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, California.

It's not clear whether Microsoft's European settlement covers tablets.

Mozilla Corp. complained last week that Microsoft is giving its Internet Explorer browser preferential treatment on Windows RT, the ARM version of Windows 8 designed primarily for tablet PCs.

The operating system grants full access only to the Internet Explorer browser, cutting off other browsers from vital functions, according to Mozilla. Google has backed Mozilla's complaint.

While the European Commission (EC) is reminding Microsoft of commitments it made in a 2009 settlement, it is not clear whether those commitments ever extended beyond PCs. At the time, the Redmond-based software giant agreed to push out a Browser Choice screen to Windows users in Europe, after the European Commission found that the bundling of IE with Windows was anti-competitive.

Failing to stick to that settlement could result in a massive fine of 10 percent of the company's revenue.

"The Commission is aware of these allegations and will remain vigilant that Microsoft fully complies with its commitments under the Commission's 2009 decision on browsers," Antoine Colombani, the Commission's spokesman for competition, said yesterday.

Japanese researchers achieve very high speed using terahertz band.

They managed to hit a data rate roughly twenty times higher than the best that can be achieved with Wi-Fi, using the unregulated terahertz (or T-Ray) bands. The band makes use of the 300GHz to about 3THz frequencies.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers, demonstrated 3Gbps transmission at 542GHz using a wireless radio no bigger than a 10-yen coin (about the size of a British penny coin). They suspect that they could push the speed up to about 100Gbps.

The next generation 802.11ac standard, which hasn't been approved yet by IEEE, can offer speeds theoretically as high as 1.3Gbps with three antennas, though the maximum achieved in tests so far was closer to 800Mbps.

The proposed 802.11ad standard (WiGig) could theoretically manage 10Gbps data rates, but generally only within line of sight range.

While the T-Ray bands do offer some promise, they will only be useful over short ranges, which could make them useful for server farms or data centers where they can cut down the amount of wiring.

Electronic Arts had been named as a defendant in a dispute over Call of Duty royalties.

It stems back to the firing of Jason West and Vince Zampella by Actvision. The pair sued Activision, claiming they were owed around $30 million in unpaid royalties. Activision countersued, claiming that Electronic Arts had attempted to sway West and Zampella away with job opportunities.

EA was named as a defendant in the case, but this week the publishers decided to bury the hatchet. "Activision and EA have agreed to put this matter behind them," the publishers said in a joint statement.

This does not, however, settle the case between West/Zampella and Activision. Recently, details came to light that suggested Activision had set out to find any dirt on the two Infinity Ward heads before the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Google must keep Android "open and free" for the next five years in order to gain China's approval for its acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

All major outlets are reporting that Google has agreed to those terms, and the acquisition will close next week.

While it is unclear why this was a necessary requirement, it was likely included to make sure that Google would not give hardware maker Motorola Mobility preferential treatment such as early access to new versions of the operating system.

Google has never indicated it would close off the OS to other hardware makers, but it has been oft-rumored that the search giant is looking to get into the hardware game.

Furthermore, Android is owned, technically, by the Open Handset Alliance, not just Google.

Adds Google: "Our stance since we agreed to acquire Motorola has not changed, and we look forward to closing the deal."

jOBS, the Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher, will begin filming in the original garage Apple was founded in.

Filming begins in June and the scenes in the garage will continue with the "project's commitment to accuracy and authenticity."

Straight from the release, the film is described as an accurate portrayal of Apple founder "Steve Jobs' most defining and personal moments, motivations, and the people that drove him. The film covers Jobs from his early years as an impressionable youth and wayward hippie, through his initial successes and infamous ousting, to his storybook return and ultimate triumphs as a man who set out to change the world and did just that."

Production on the picture began when Jobs retired in August of last year, a few months before his death. The script came after "exhaustive research and interviews with Steve Jobs' friends, colleagues, and mentors to develop the most truthful and gripping picture of Jobs' life."

In total, the movie will cover Job's life from 1971 until 2000, right before the launch of the original iPod.