Thread: Anandtech News

Sprint will be joining AT&T and Verizon in carrying Apple's next iPhone, reports the Wall Street Journal citing "people familiar with the matter." This would make Sprint the third major US carrier to sell the iPhone, leaving T-Mobile (a potential AT&T acquisition target) as the last carrier without the device.
This move would certainly make sense for Apple, who has been offering the iPhone through more carriers both domestically and internationally after a few years of carrier exclusivity agreements, and since Sprint uses the same CDMA network as Verizon, Apple wouldn't need to make new hardware to make this happen.
Likewise, Sprint would much benefit from having the iPhone on its store shelves, and it might help to stop or slow the loss of its subscribers to other carriers, though on the flip side, a more competitive Sprint could help the AT&T-T-Mobile deal get past federal regulators.
Apple's next iPhone has yet to be officially named or revealed, but the best available data points to a reveal in September and a release in September or October.
Source: Wall Street Journal


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Nokia has revealed three new smartphones today: Nokia 700, Nokia 701 and Nokia 600.

	Nokia 600	Nokia 700	Nokia 701
Screen Size	3.2"	3.2"	3.5"
Resolution	640x360	640x360	640x360
Display Type	N/A	AMOLED	IPS
NAND	2GB + microSD	2GB + microSD	8GB + microSD
CPU	1GHz	1GHz	1GHz
Camera	5MP with LED Flash	5MP with LED Flash	8MP with LED Flash
Battery	1200mAh	1080mAh	1300mAh
Dimensions (HxWxD)	111mm x 53mm x 13-14.25mm	110mm x 50mm x 9.7mm	117.2mm x 56.8mm x 11mm
Weight	100g	96g	131g

According to FoneHome.co.uk, these phones will be available next month and will priced around 180€ ($260), 270€ ($390) and 290€ ($420) respectively. Unfortunately, there are no specific details of the CPU, GPU and RAM as of today.
All three are powered by Symbian's new version called "Belle". The biggest upgrades in Symbian include support for up to six home screens, notification menu (similar to Android and iOS 5) and enchanted widgets (support for live chat for instance).
Nokia brings NFC to all three phones too. NFC is a technology that allows connections to be enabled via touch. For example, you can touch another phone and they will create an NFC connection between each other. Nokia has also announced three accessories which support NFC: A speaker, handsfree and headphones. Some other phones support NFC too, such as Samsung Galaxy S II (not all for some reason though) and Google Nexus S.
All in all, these phones look like solid Nokia quality but the Symbian-bugbear is still there. Since Nokia's Windows Phone 7 phones are pretty much just around the corner, the market for Symbian based phones doesn't look too great. Investing on Symbian at the moment seems like beating a dead horse. Once Nokia's WP7 phones are out, that is where Nokia will be concentrating. That means at least less, if any, love for Symbian.
Source: Nokia


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The trickle of Windows 8 news continues ahead of next month's BUILD conference: today on the Building Windows 8 Blog, Microsoft's Alex Simons detailed several improvements to the way file copy operations will work in the new OS. These improvements aim to make copying simpler for users, while also giving them more control over copy operations.
In Windows 7, triggering multiple file copy operations will cause several status windows to pop up, and these can be difficult to keep track of once you've got more than two or three going at once. Windows 8 puts all file copy operations into a single window - this is visually similar to the way that OS X handles file copying, but the new Windows copy dialog also gives you the option to pause copy operations that are in progress.
Expanding the new file copy dialog will also display detailed information, including estimated time remaining, the number and size of files remaining, and the current transfer speed, along with a graph. Aside from the graph, none of this is information that isn't available in the current file copy dialog, but it's nice to have everything gathered together in one place.

Lastly, the new file copy dialog gives you more information when two files conflict, in an attempt to make file conflicts less confusing.

Those are the highlights, but you can always read the post on the Building Windows 8 blog if you want to get into the details. Our next major look at Windows 8 will likely be at Microsoft's BUILD conference, which runs from September 13-16, but until then you can keep an eye on the blog and on our news feed for more information about new features.
Source: Building Windows 8 Blog


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As of this evening, Steve Jobs has resigned his post as CEO of Apple, naming Tim Cook as his successor. This news follows an extended health-related leave of absence that began this past January. Jobs will stay on at Apple as Chairman of the Board.
In a press release, Jobs cited his inability to "meet [his] duties and expectations as Apple's CEO" as the reason for his resignation, but didn't go into any further detail.
As for Tim Cook, he's been running the show since Jobs took his leave of absence, and so the transition should be relatively smooth. Time will tell whether Jobs' final departure will effect the company's long-term health and growth as investors have sometimes feared that it would.
Source: Reuters


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PC gamers hoping to snag a free OnLive copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution with their boxed copy should steer clear of GameStop. The retailing giant recently instructed its employees to remove coupons for a free OnLive version of Deus Ex from all of their stock.

In an effort to combat the negative publicity being generated by a leaked internal memo (seen above via OnLive Spot), GameSpot issued a statement on its Facebook page: “GameStop’s policy is that we do not promote competitive services without a formal partnership. Square Enix packed a competitor’s coupon within the PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution without our prior knowledge and we did pull these coupons.”

“Formal partnership” or no, GameStop simply may not be comfortable promoting an online competitor, especially after GameStop’s move into digital distribution with its purchase of Impulse and Spawn Labs this past March.
OnLive also told Joystiq that this pack-in offer isn’t perfect (it doesn’t support cloud saving between PC and OnLive) and won’t be the last of its kind. “You can think of this as cloud game meets physical media 1.0," said CEO Steve Perlman. “This first version doesn't have cross-pollination between your local PC and the cloud."
Unfortunately for OnLive, there may not be another version if they can’t convince large chains like GameStop to climb aboard their cloud gaming bandwagon.
Source: Facebook



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Just over ten months ago, we had a chance to take a look at a very big, reasonably impressive mobile workstation: HP's EliteBook 8740w. It sported HP's DreamColor IPS screen at a glorious 1920x1200 resolution and had fairly beefy hardware under the hood, including the at-the-time fastest mobile workstation GPU, the NVIDIA Quadro 5000M. But since HP unveiled the dramatic redesign of their enterprise notebooks earlier this year, we've been anxiously anticipating the 8740w's refresh. Today we have it, specced to kill with a shiny new DreamColor IPS screen, Sandy Bridge quad-core processor, and an even faster NVIDIA Quadro GPU.

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Sonnet has today announced a Thunderbolt to ExpressCard/34 adapter. The exact name of the product is Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter and it is simply a box with ExpressCard/34 slot and Thunderbolt output. It appears to be the first of its kind, although Sonnet has revealed a Thunderbolt to PCIe adapter previously. Sonnet is expecting late October availability. The adapter is compatible with any computer with Thunderbolt, which right now means any current generation Mac (excluding Mac Pro).
Sonnet claims speeds of up to 5Gb/s, which is on par with the ExpressCard 2.0 spec. However, since ExpressCard 2.0 is based on PCIe 2.x, there is 20% overhead due to 8b/10b encoding, so real world performance will be around 4Gb/s (500MB/s). For most users, this should be plenty - but for some power users, it might be a small shortage in case you have two USB 3.0 RAID 5 enclosures for instance. There appears to be only one Thunderbolt port too, hence this adapter does not support daisy-chaining (although it can be the last device of the chain).
While the bandwidth won't be an issue, the price might. This adapter will be priced at $150. You will also need a Thunderbolt cable which is $50, and an ExpressCard card. Sonnet offers a 2-port eSATA card for as low as $50, but it's limited to 125MB/s (most likely due to the SATA chipset). A USB 3.0 card goes for $70. That means the adapter, cable and card will set you back by at least $250. Obviously, there are non-Sonnet cards as well that may be cheaper but we are still looking at +$200. Due to the price, it can be hard to justify this adapter unless you really need the top-speed storage. Even then, it might be worth it to wait for some Thunderbolt enclosures (at least LaCie and OWC are working on them).
Source: Sonnet


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AMD has finally chosen a new CEO: Rory Read has been selected to fill the position that Dirk Meyer vacated in January. Read was previously President and COO of Lenovo, where he has overseen a period of solid growth in worldwide market share. Before that, Read was an executive at IBM; he moved to Lenovo when it acquired IBM's PC business in 2004.
Read will have challenges at AMD, but two stick out in my mind: the first is that they should be thinking seriously about chips for smartphones and tablets (something cited when Meyer was removed from the position), and the second is that he'll need to improve the CPU division's timeliness. Their products, while often competitive in budget and mainstream PCs, have had trouble challenging Intel's, and new CPU designs from the company often ship late.
Source: Marketwire


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Earlier this week HighPoint introduced its first 4-port USB 3.0 HBA for Apple's Mac Pro. The RocketU Quad USB 3.0 features four independent USB 3.0 controllers, allowing each port to receive a full 5Gbps of bandwidth. The four controllers route into a PLX PCIe switch, which then fans out to a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface guaranteeing nearly full bandwidth to the host.
The RocketU Quad USB 3.0 also supports RAID 0/1/5/10 and JBOD across its USB ports for those users looking to build a low cost, high speed external storage array. No word on what the drivers or associated UI looks like under OS X.
HighPoint claims immediate availability at a price of $125 for the card. Native USB 3.0 support has been absent from all Macs. With its update to Ivy Bridge based platforms in 2012 it's likely that Apple will finally add official support at that point given that it'll be built into Intel's 7-series chipsets.


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NVIDIA has talked in the past about its Tegra Zone marketplace, which is home to Tegra-optimized games. Well, today they've announced availability of a game which caught our eye called Sprinkle by a developer named Mediocre. While the developer might be named Mediocre, the game is actually anything but. Sprinkle does an impressive job simulating water physics and using it as a game mechanic to solve a variety of puzzles. The objective is to put out the fires (caused by falling meteorites) fast enough by using a user-controlled firehose. Fail to do so with limited water and time, and things don't go so well for the inhabitants.

While the game is actually very enjoyable on Android 3.x (I flew through the demo levels on a Galaxy Tab 10.1), the real news is that Mediocre is in the process of developing an even more enhanced version of Sprinkle geared towards NVIDIA's Kal-El SoC. No doubt this Kal-El version will support additional water physics elements and possibly even more compelling shader effects on water. As a reminder, Kal-El is NVIDIA's upcoming quad-core Cortex-A9 (with MPE) SoC, paired with a more powerful GeForce GPU.
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Source: NVIDIA


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