We already know Donna and Carla are waiting in the wings, but you’re likely wondering what’s the deal with Belle. And no, that Symbian update isn’t being held captive by a Beast in a lonely French castle, thank you very much. According to a report on All About Symbian, Espoo’s OS refresh — currently shipping on the trio of handsets pictured above — is slated to roll out worldwide for a “range of smartphones such as [the] N8, E7, X7, C6-01, C7, Oro, E6, and Nokia 500″ sometime early next year. Nokia’s confirmed to us that this Q1 2012 timetable is, indeed, very much true. So while many of you are just now getting comfy with Anna, it’ll soon be time to find comfort in the mobile arms of another.
A mysterious startup promising free wireless broadband and voice services to all Americans should rightly prompt a fair bit of skepticism, but FreedomPop isn’t quite your average fly-by-night organization (despite appearances). It’s backed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, and it’s just signed an agreement with LTE wholesaler LightSquared to provide the backbone for the service. Unfortunately, details remain decidedly light otherwise. The company says that the service will launch sometime in 2012 (LightSquared’s network itself is slated to go live in the second half of the year, though it still faces some hurdles), and it will apparently be focused on serving markets most in need of wireless broadband initially, before rolling out across the country. As FierceCable notes, the service brings to mind the many free internet dial-up services of the 1990s, which relied largely on advertising, although it remains to be seen if that’s the route FreedomPop has in mind.
While Apple fans around the globe have had the iPhone 4S for a while now, many of our friends in the Far East haven’t gotten to enjoy the fruits of their countrymen’s labor due to a lack of governmental approval. You see, before a handset makes it onto Chinese networks, it’s got to be approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). The good news is, the 4S has finally been blessed by Beijing and will be brought to the masses by Chinese Unicom sometime soon. That means that China’s home-grown superphone, the Meizu MX, is going to have some Siri-ous competition for Chinese hearts and yuan in 2012.
Not prepared to pony up for the ICS-ready Transformer Prime? No worries, Coby has five alternative flavors, each offering its own helping of Android 4.0. The quintet of tablets bear the same model number format as the outfit’s Kyros tablets, and all share the same 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU. Coby plans to debut the slates at CES 2012, making them available to consumers within the first quarter. The slabs range between seven and ten inches, and will offer up to 1GB of RAM with up to 32GB of expandable memory — WiFi radio and HDMI-out come standard.
Two laptops touting the AMD’s as-yet-unreleased HD7000 series graphics of chips have been listed in sales brochures and driver download sites, according to German website PC Games Hardware.
According to the site, the chips have been listed as part of the specification in the forthcoming ASUS’ X53TK and a new 17inch HP Envy. The ASUS features an HD7670M to supplement its Fusion processor, while the HP has the higher performing Mobility Radeon HD 7690M on board.
Neither company, nor AMD, have commented on the story, and the parts remain officially unannounced. Drivers are available for download from HP’s site, though.
The important thing is that while there’s not a lot to choose between AMD and NVIDIA graphics on the desktop at the moment, when it comes to laptops mid-range Mobility Radeon cards have been performing far better for the price recently – even though they’ve been strangely difficult to find on sale. The X53TX
Sadly, as far as we know, this is unlikely to be the first outing for AMD’s forthcoming GPU architecture that it’s calling Graphics Core Next (GCN – also known as Southern Islands). GCN has a completely new internal design to the one which AMD has used (with modifications) since the launch of DirectX 10. While the entire HD7000 series of GPUs was originally planned to be based on GCN, recently leaked slides suggest that only the top end HD7900s will use it, leaving most of the range as a die shrink to 28nm of the existing designs.
Or could it? There’re plenty of rumours flying around about GCN and its ilk – as well as suggestion of a prelaunch event sometime this week.
At an unusually dreadful videogame awards show last night, EA finally opened the lid on the long teased Command and Conquer: Generals 2. Here’s the news: it’s being developed by a new studio branded “Bioware Victory”, and built using the same tech that powers Battlefield 3. The screens are quite pretty, and posted below. Read more…
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