Showing 1 - 4 of 4
4K may save the day for Blu-ray
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/08/2016
» As I predicted a number of years back Blu-ray discs never really made it into the market in the same way that DVDs did. With the advent of 4K that may change, or at least the Blu-ray industry is hoping that it will. It turns out that 288,000 4K Ultra Blu-ray discs were sold in the first half of 2016. The 4K discs were only released last year and they are only worth it if you have a 4K Blu-ray player and a TV to match. According to the British trade association BA, a third were sold between October and Dec as gifts so looking for a trend at this point is hardly conclusive. Since to take advantage of the technology means replacing major components in your home entertainment system, then I expect it will be as slow as the original Blu-ray to be adopted. Given the TV world is not transmitting in 4K this may provide some temporary boost but I don't see it being a major one. Also to keep you confused most "4K" TVs sold are actually Ultra HD (3840x2160) and not 4K (4096x2160).
Let it all go with Pokémon
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2016
» The Pokémon Go game is taking the smartphone world by storm. Like Ingress before it, it is a real world location based game so you physically have to get out of the house to play it. Unlike Ingress, it has a cartoon character so kids love it but mums and dads don't so much because they have to drive their kids around to out of the way places to get the next Pokémon. This is another game by Niantic, a group within Google and the ones who built Ingress. The game was also quite insecure on iOS phones but that was apparently fixed with a patch. There have been no issues reported by Android phone users.
Is your phone spying on you?
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/05/2013
» I've long been a fan of Firefox, but I somehow missed the announcement of its new OS coming out for mobile phones. Geeksphone, a Spanish start-up, sold out of the first devices with the new OS within a matter of hours and had to shut down its online store as demand unexpectedly exceeded supply. The new units were meant for developers only because the new Firefox OS is still in a very early stage of its evolution. Application development for the new OS is based on HTML5, JavaScript and Open Web standards. The official OS launch will be some time later this year and Google is working with ZTE in China on the project. The first commercial units will be manufactured in Brazil so this is a truly international effort and may be one to watch in the future.
Companies play the upgrade waiting game, MS massages its stats
Database, James Hein, Published on 17/03/2010
» Microsoft recently made the claim that they had sold 90 million copies of Windows 7 since it reached the manufacturers in July last year. What actually happened then was that OEMs were told to put Win 7 on new machines by default. So the word "sold" is a little misleading here.