Articles By Alex Angove
HTC One Launch Event
It’s a constant of the tech industry that no matter how many spec sheets, reviews and opinion pieces you read you’ll never really get a proper feel for a device until you hold it in your hands and use its key features. Fortunately for us, HTC held a belated HTC One launch in Sydney last night and we got to do just that.
HTC One Finally Officially Announced
The HTC One, formerly known as the HTC M7, has been officially unveiled at media events in the UK and New York. The powerful new flagship for HTC looks to be a real contender, offering up impressive hardware and some cool-sounding new features. Of course HTC has released great phones before, but has always seemed to be overshadowed by Samsung and Apple. This time round, if the HTC One makes good on its promises it just may find some of that market share that HTC so desperately wants.
Susan Crawford on Internet Inequality
Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age has been making tech headlines recently with her take on the current climate of America’s broadband infrastructure and market. Of particular interest to us are Susan’s comments on a US trend towards cultural inequality, with broadband access becoming a wedge between people of different income levels.
Nokia Obtains Graphene Grant
If you haven’t heard of graphene yet then you’re in for a bit of a surprise. Graphene is a material, first discovered in Manchester in 2004, that is so useful it’s been described as “ubiquitous” in application. Graphene is estimated to be between 100x and 300x the strength of steel, making if the strongest material yet discovered, it is the best transmitter of electricity yet discovered, the best transmitter of heat yet discovered, is transparent, is highly resistive to corrosion and even apparently lets nothing other than pure water molecules pass through it, making it potentially the best and most simple water filter yet discovered.
BlackBerry Q10 Preview
The BlackBerry Q10 comes in alongside, although perhaps will see a bit of a later release than, the touch-centric BlackBerry Z10. The Q10, as one may guess from its moniker, is a the QWERTY flagship for BlackBerry’s new BB10 operating system (OS). BlackBerry/RIM certainly hasn’t forgot its die-hard fans and the reason it saw such success in the business market for so long. BlackBerry devices really do sport some of the best, if not the best hardware keyboards of any smartphone and, while many users shy away from that route these days in favor of a larger screen, hardcore emailers and texters still find hardware QWERTY keyboards very useful.
BlackBerry BB10 Officially Unveiled
First things first: RIM is no more. The iconic creators of the BlackBerry handset line have done away with their traditional title and simply renamed the entire company “BlackBerry”, which makes perfect sense, really. The BlackBerry range of handsets has been RIM’s sole focus for a long time now, so the renaming should not only make things simpler, but also make the brand name seem more accessible to potentially new customers who won’t look silly in assuming that the company is named after the product or vice versa.
BlackBerry Z10 Preview
The BlackBerry Z10 is the first all-touchscreen flagship of the new BB10 OS. Unlike other attempts at touch-centric devices we’ve seen from BlackBerry in the past, the Z10 has solid specs on paper and even sports a modern, sleek design. The new BB10 UI will go far in deciding the popularity to which the Z10 will, or won’t, rise, but the phone itself still deserves attention. Set to be launched in March in the US, this week in the UK and next week in Canada, BB10 and the Z10 are finally within reach of the public.
New Microsoft Office for Rent
The newest version of Microsoft Office has hit the shelves, but this time with a bit of a twist. Office is now available for both outright purchase or for monthly/yearly rental. Buying the personal Home version outright will cost a user $140 which includes all of the usual goodies therein (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote). The full business version will cost $220.
A New(?) iPad Surfaces
A new iPad has arisen, yet this time it seems like only one thing has been changed: storage. What we’ll hopefully end up calling the “iPad 4th Generation, 128GB” comes with, you guessed it, a whopping 128GB of on-board storage. Other than that the only other addition is the new price tag of US$799 for the WiFi-only version and US$929 for the full 4G LTE model. Some readers may recognise how close that price tag is to the US$999 of an 11-inch Macbook Air.
Illegal to Unlock Your Cell Phone
As of this past Saturday the 26th of January it is now illegal for anyone who has bought a device since October 28th 2012 to unlock their device without expressed permission from their carrier. The reason for the odd-sounding timeframe is that after the law was passed in October last year, a 90 day grace-period was allowed. That period has now expired.
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