Latest Gadgets, Tablets and Smartphones
The Hackberry A10 developer board is a similar idea to the Raspberry Pi. The main difference is that it is more powerful and is loaded up with a bit more RAM, has built in storage as well as a WiFi connection.
The device can be used for a number of applications such as bring connected up to your TV (via HDMI) and used as a media center as well as on to other applications such as robotics, automation tasks, smart homes etc…
When Sense 4 was launched there was some noticeable lag when transitioning between screens, pulling down the notifications window amongst other things. A leaked version of Sense 4.1 has made its way on to the internet and it appears that all the laggy issues have been resolved.
Google Now recently launched although it had one rather big restriction… it only works on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean devices. At the moment there are not too many devices that run 4.1 Jelly Bean which makes the app out of reach for many users of the Android platform.
Users over at XDA-Developers have been working on porting the app to older versions of Android though. At the moment they now have it working on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Although the team managed to port it quite quickly the voice features were not working. Good news is that the voice features are now working and Google Now fully works on Android Ice Cream Sandwich devices.
Angry Birds Space will be getting an update soon which will bring the birds to the Red Planet. The Red Planet update is launching to coincide with the landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover (landed within the last hour or so).
Not much is known about the update although I think it’s fairly obvious what it will be about considering we’ve already had the Space version of Angry Birds since earlier this year.
Rumours about a smaller iPad are still continuing ahead of a supposed launch. Over the weekend some shots of the casing for the iPad mini were uploaded on to the internet. The image below shows the rear casing and what we might expect if the rumours of an iPad mini are true.
eBay has launched a new same-day delivery service. The trial is running in San Francisco area and allows buyers of items from certain eBay stores to have those items delivered same-day for just $5.
The tests are being done in an exclusive-beta that anybody can apply to. If accepted you get emailed a link to join up. To benefit from same-day delivery, you need to spend over $25 in selected stores.
Google has released an update for its Gmail app on the iPhone and iPod touch. The new version of the app brings smoother animations as well as smoother scrolling. As well as it running better, Google also now allows image attachments to be saved to your photo library.
Although Dropbox wasn’t hacked as such, hacks of other websites in recent weeks have allowed some users accounts to be accessed as they were using the same usernames and passwords on Dropbox as they were on other services that were hacked. One of these users was a Dropbox employee where someone logged in and took a project file containing email addresses of some users.
In order to protect the password part of the problem, all those users who were affected have received emails with details on how to change their password.
Raspberry Pi users will soon be able to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on their mini computer. At the moment it has hardware accelerated graphics and video, both of which run smoothly.
