Rumor: Thunderbolt to arrive in PCs around April 2012
A report at Digitimes claims Intel may have plans to expand its Thunderbolt technology to the PC industry. Intel has apparently notified their partners that the company intends is to “fully release” a motherboard equipped with Thunderbolt around April of 2012. This opens the doors of opportunity for other companies such as HP and Dell to begin selling their notebooks and desktops with the technology.
Intel and Apple formed a partnership that helped push Thunderbolt to become the standard across Apple’s Macbooks, iMac, and Mac mini. Digitimes speculates the cost of Thunderbolt technology could eventually drop in the second half quarter of 2012, thus allowing more widespread adoption to other PC vendors.
Companies such as Sony and Asus have voiced their interest in adopting that technology into their products. It seems the success Apple has enjoyed with its Thunderbolt products “has strongly boosted demand” for that technology among Intel’s other business partners, according to the report.
Via [Digitimes (article is members only)]
What would New Year’s be without the traditional Times Square party? People in New York City have been watching the ball drop at midnight for more than a hundred years, and millions from all over the U.S. have been glued to their TV screens for decades to catch a glimpse of the action.
100 Rogues ($0.99, Universal) is a role-playing game that challenges the bond between a player and their character, which is normally a valued relationship in RPGs. How does it do that? By killing your chosen character, over and over, again and again.
When you’re not in panic mode searching for fresh food, the randomly generated levels and over sixty different monster types will certainly keep you on your toes. Your character also earns experience which you can spend on skills, and the world is littered with treasure and merchants that will sell you items, including food, for a price. When you start a new game, you can choose between a Human Crusader, a Fairy Wizard, or one of seven different classes available via in-app purchase.
Sunday mornings are usually pretty sleepy in terms of business news, but March 20th, 2011 was an exception. That’s when AT&T announced its plan to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG for a whopping $39 billion. A deal that huge naturally catches the attention of everyone: The media, consumer groups, industry competitors, and perhaps most importantly, federal regulators. After nearly nine months of back-and-forth about the legality of the merger that came to be known as AT&T-Mo, the deal fell apart: On December 19, AT&T ended its bid to buy T-Mobile as its CEO Randall Stephenson pledged to “continue to be aggressive in leading the mobile Internet revolution.”
In June, Google launched Google+, its newest answer to the social networking space that in recent years has been dominated by Facebook. That move seemed to spark renewed vigor from Facebook to maintain its social edge and the next week at a quickly-assembled press event for a new in-Facebook video chat app powered by Skype, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off what he called his company’s “Launching Season 2011.” This season also seemingly culminated with the September debut of Timeline, a dramatically different new Facebook user interface. Google, meanwhile, directed increasing amounts of its attention on trying to make Google+ a success.
Spotify, the popular Europe-based on-demand music streaming service, finally made its highly anticipated debut in the United States in mid-July. A couple months later, the service got an extra boost with a deep integration with Facebook that let users easily listen to songs on Spotify and share them with friends through the social networking service.
received a $535 million loan from the U.S. government.
In August, Hewlett-Packard raised eyebrows when it announced plans to spend $10 billion in cash to acquire Autonomy, a UK-based software and services company and said it would look into selling off its $40 billion-a-year PC business. Investors and the industry at large were stunned by both moves which, apparently, were the last straw for HP’s board as well. A month later, HP fired Leo Apotheker, the CEO who brokered the deal and set the PC change in motion, and brought in former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman as his replacement.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ death on October 5 was a big story for the world even beyond the tech community. Although his passing was not completely unexpected — Jobs had suffered from pancreatic cancer and related complications for some time, and had stepped down from the CEO role at Apple in August because of his health — his death deeply affected many people. Jobs was hugely influential through his work at Apple and as a tech industry figure in general.
Apple has an immensely successful self-run retail arm, but it wasn’t always that way. Once, it depended heavily on the kindness of strangers, and those same strangers (third-party resellers) are now bristling at what they see as unfair business practices. The latest example is a new suit by eBizcuss, Apple’s largest reseller in France, which accuses its partner of favoring its own stores with inventory shipments and undercutting its ability to compete for small business customers.
FaceTime. This was the first app I tried out and it worked perfectly on the first attempt. The Bluetooth headset is treaded similar to AirPlay devices, in the sources list. The only issue is that I noticed that I could not do was answer and hang up the call with the controls on the headset.
Skype. With Skype, the Bluetooth headset once connected will be enabled by default. Call quality was good on both ends in test calls. The added advantage of using Skype over FaceTime is that you have access to all of your Skype contacts, and you can place traditional ‘land line’ calls to any plain old telephone number if you have a paid account.
Google Voice (via Talkatone). With Talkatone, you can make calls using your Google Voice account and the Bluetooth headset worked like a charm.You can also use Google Voice to place calls to any traditional phone number. The difference here is that you can’t make video calls.
