It's tough being the new kid in town -- ask Voyager Mobile, an up and coming MVNO that had its launch delayed by a "malicious network attack" last week. The tenacious firm may have missed its planned May 15th launch, but managed to pull things together in time for the weekend, piggybacking unlimited talk, text and data off of Sprint's CDMA and WiMAX network for $40 a month. A basic unlimited voice plan is also available to the tune of $20, without data allowances, of course. Phones are available too, albeit without subsidies -- Samsung's Epic 4G Touch or Galaxy S II will each set you back $550, though an assortment of more affordable devices can be had from $120 and up. Tempted to jump ship? Check out the source link below and let all your MVNO dreams come true.

Voyager Mobile shakes off network issues, launches a few days behind schedule originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 16:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Exchange's CEO says design problems created confusion among traders ahead of and during the highly anticipated offering. [Read more]

Phones held up over patent issues with Apple are being released after U.S. Customs inspections, the handset maker says. [Read more]

Still waiting for your HTC handset to make its way through customs? Ratchet your hopes just a smidge higher, because the company says it's making progress. "Some models have gone through inspection and been released to our carriers customers," the firm stated in an investor statement today. HTC explained that each of the contested models needs to be reviewed by officials before release, and assures customers that it is working with customs to speed along the process. Which devices are making it through? "We don't have the status of each specific device at this time," HTC says, "We remain confident that this issue will be resolved soon." Sure, that's not much to go off of, but we'll take what we can get.

Continue reading Customs slowly letting HTC handsets into the US, can't say which ones

Customs slowly letting HTC handsets into the US, can't say which ones originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 16:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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An anonymous reader writes "3 graduate students from University of Tokyo, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Tsukuba have developed a colloidal display — a clear projector screen that can control its transparency. Normally soap film will allow light to pass through, but the colloidal display does not. It mixes colloid into the solution and uses ultra sonic speakers to vibrate the surface of the soap film to achieve this. They have created several prototypes, such as 3D planar screen, to show how this technology can be useful."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Look out, savvy graphics card buyer: just because it's labelled 'GeForce' and starts with a '6' doesn't necessarily mean it benefits from NVIDIA's premium 28nm Kepler architecture. We've already seen rebadged mobile chips with last-gen 40nm silicon, and now entry-level desktop cards are arriving on shelves that will stretch Fermi's expiry date even further. There are no price tags as yet, but according to AnandTech the 'new' GeForce GT 610 is a repackaged GT 520 with 48 CUDA cores and an ever-so-polite 29-watt power draw. The GT 620 is a GT 530 with a 49-watt TDP and twice as many CUDA cores as the 610 -- although a meager 64-bit memory bus will put a cap on any performance gains. Finally, the GT 630 is a 65-watt GT 440 in all but name, with a 128-bit memory bus width allowing its 96 CUDA cores to be fully exploited. This latter card shouldn't be confused with the OEM version of the GT 630, which does actually pack Kepler. Bewildering, right? We've quizzed NVIDIA over its strange rebadging tradition and were told that the company simply numbers its products according to raw performance, rather than freshness or chip type -- which sort of makes sense so long as you don't dwell on it.

NVIDIA outs budget GeForce GT 610, GT 620 and GT 630, no Kepler in any of 'em originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 15:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The companies' chief executives and general counsels will meet as part of a court-ordered settlement conference to try to resolve some of the patent litigation against each other. [Read more]

the agent man writes "The idea of getting kids interested in programming in spite of their common perception of programming to be 'hard and boring' is an ongoing Slashdot discussion. With support of the National Science Foundation, the Scalable Game Design project has explored how to bring computer science education into the curriculum of middle and high schools for some time. The results are overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that game design is highly motivational across gender and ethnicity lines. The project is also finding new ways of tracking programming skills transferring from game design to STEM simulation building. This NPR story highlights an early and unplanned foray into bringing game-design based computer science education even to elementary schools."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anonymous group AntiS3curityOPS says action is in retaliation for alleged police brutality committed during protests against NATO summit. [Read more]

Okian Warrior writes "Various new sources are reporting the results of a recent Labor Party poll, indicating that Julian Assange would be elected to the Australian senate, should he choose to run. From the Sun Daily article: 'Controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stands a real chance of winning an upper house seat in his native Australia if he presses ahead with plans to stand for election, a poll showed Saturday. A survey conducted by the ruling Labor party's internal pollsters UMR Research and published in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper showed 25 percent of those polled would vote for the whistleblowing website chief.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The at times very heated legal battle between Apple and Samsung might be softening just a bit ahead of truce talks on May 21st. Samsung's mobile head JK Shin just left Seoul for the mediated discussions saying there were still "several negotiation options" on tap, including the possibility of cross-licensing patents. He warned that there was still a "big gap" between the two sides, and we'd tend to agree -- neither Apple nor Samsung is exactly backing off just yet. However, it's a definite shift in language from March, when Shin was vowing "no compromise," and it parallels Apple CEO Tim Cook's own disdain for lawsuits. We just wouldn't bet money on the two singing "Kumbaya" this week.

In same breath, Shin added that an ongoing 4G chipset shortage wasn't letting up: he didn't see things getting better until the start of the fourth quarter, or October for us common folk. That's a problem for Samsung's phones and tablets most of all, of course, and in a dire case could see LTE-packing American Galaxy S III variants rely on other vendors' chips to stay on the 4G bandwagon. There's also a chance of a ripple effect on other companies that want Samsung's parts, but short of getting a peek at Samsung's inner workings, we won't know the full impact for awhile yet.

Samsung chief: we're open to a cross-licensing deal with Apple, but 4G chip shortage might last until the fall originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 13:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Software giant's "experiment in open search" is designed to be a research tool in which students share information on a variety of topics of interest. [Read more]

On visiting the Facebook announcement of its CEO's wedding, I was served ads for insurance and heart attack prevention. Slightly inappropriate? [Read more]

Gunkerty Jeb writes "After banning the word 'jailbreak' from its app store and music library, Apple [Friday] reversed course and again permits the term — slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content — to appear on iTunes and its App Store. On Thursday bloggers noticed Apple had censored the word, using the Thin Lizzy album 'Jailbreak' as an example. For awhile, the title was listed as 'J******k' in Apple's music library, at least its U.S. version. In other instances, digital content continued to bear the full name Jailbreak."

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Last summer, try as we might, we couldn't get too much out of Microsoft's creative director for Kinect Games, Kudo Tsunoda, about what's next from the interactive peripheral. More recently, in an interview with Venture Beat, Tsunoda was a little more verbose about what he thinks the next big thing in Kinect is -- and it isn't a Kinect 2. The good news is, he believes that no new hardware will be required, and the innovations will likely come from developers, as they better understand and utilize the capabilities. A combination of voice, tone and facial recognition along with motion detection will likely be the tools that push the experience into the next era -- such as allowing users to participate in a game's story like an actor. Hit the source if you want to read the full interview, but you can be sure we'll be at E3 again this year to beat him, and others, with the question stick once more.

Kudo Tsunoda: 'Waiting for the next big thing isn't about waiting for the Kinect 2' originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 10:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Zoom's H2n Handy Recorder has built-in microphones and records MP3 files and 96-kHz/24-bit high-resolution audio. [Read more]

Diggester writes with this news from the Times of India: "Pakistani authorities on Friday further widened the crackdown on websites with blasphemous contents by restricting access to popular social networking website Twitter. Pakistani users were unable to log into Twitter after internet service providers blocked access to the site." The block was prompted by Twitter's refusal to take down messages promoting a cartoon contest to which the Pakistani government objects for its depictions of Muhammad. This end-run falls right in line with the pessimistic reaction from Reporters Without Borders to the Pakistani court decision calling Internet censorship unconstitutional.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pakistan implemented the ban on concerns about a promotion involving posting photos of the prophet Muhammad. Facebook has complied with the government and taken it down. [Read more]

An anonymous reader writes "The United States has pursued Bradley Manning with full force for his role in supplying classified documents to WikiLeaks, in part because of the substantial difficulty in going after the organization directly. Criminal statutes generally deployed against those who leak classified government documents--such as the Espionage Act of 1917--are ill-equipped to prosecute third-party international distribution organizations like WikiLeaks. One potential tool that could be used to prosecute WikiLeaks is copyright law. The use of copyright law in this context has rarely been mentioned, and when it has, the approach has been largely derided by experts, who decry it as contrary to the purposes of copyright. But a paper just published in the Stanford Journal of International Law describes one novel way the U.S. could use copyright to go after WikiLeaks and similar leaking organizations directly--by bringing suit in foreign jurisdictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Low-power processor maker ARM Holdings is stepping up rhetoric against chip rival Intel, saying it expects to take more of Intel's market share than Intel can take from them. With Intel being the No. 1 supplier of notebook PC processors, and ARM technology almost ubiquitously powering smartphones, the two companies are facing off as they both push into the other's market space. 'It's going to be quite hard for Intel to be much more than just one of several players,' ARMs CEO said of Intel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our hopes of taking the Fisker Atlantic for a spin next year just got dampened considerably: a big document leak has revealed that the more reasonably-priced alternative to the Karma won't be rolling off the production lines en masse until mid-2014, a year later than we'd expected. Thanks in part to a factory overhaul, the only Atlantics rolling on their hybrid-powered wheels in mid-2013 will be prototypes. On the upside, we've learned more about the car itself, including a fairly brisk 0-60 time of 6.5 seconds courtesy of a 300HP-equivalent motor. Green drivers who thought that the promised lower price would put it into entry-level luxury will nonetheless get a reality check with that $50,000 to $60,000 target, even if it's still a big savings over the six-digit Karma. There's still a huge amount of leeway for things to change, but with our compatriots at Autoblog having confirmed that the documents were real and "highly confidential," they may be a sign that the Tesla Model S will have free rein in the green luxury sedan world for a good year or more.

Fisker leak shows Atlantic production delayed to mid-2014, 0-60 in 6.5 seconds originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 09:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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theodp writes "A day after taking Facebook public, CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his Facebook status to 'married' after wedding longtime girlfriend and recent med school grad Priscilla Chan on Saturday. No word if Zuckerberg heeded Donald Trump's prenup advice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Does the word ReRAM ring a bell? No? Well, the key point is that it's much faster than NAND memory, and it's making its way into chips from Elpida, Sharp and Panasonic. Further proof that ReRAM is on the up and up? Researchers at University College London have used this technology to make a chip that operates at 100 times the speed of standard Flash memory. The device is composed completely of silicon oxide, which improves the chip's resistance, and it doesn't require a vacuum to work (which makes it cheaper to produce). But this new chip is more than just a faster alternative to Flash; its ability to move between different states of conductivity means it can be configured as a memristor, or a device that handles both data-processing and storage tasks. In the long term, researchers hope this technology can pave the way for silicon oxide CPUs -- and UCL is already using this design to help develop transparent memory chips for mobile devices. Need to know more? Feast your heart on the gritty details via the link below.

Researchers develop silicon ReRAM chip, send warning shot to Flash memory originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 06:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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An anonymous reader writes "More than 5000 people die each year as a result of being distracted while driving, and a new study indicates that teens and cell phones make for the most volatile combination. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that of all drivers under 20 involved in fatal crashes, 16 percent were distracted — the highest proportion of any age group. 'Shockingly, texting drivers took their eyes off the road for each text an average of 4.6 seconds — which at 55 mph, means they were driving the length of a football field without looking,' said David Hosansky."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As much as we're familiar with mobile device torture tests, they're normally inflicted by us or otherwise not-so-voluntary. Nokia, however, has stepped up to the plate and doled out the abuse to the Lumia 900 itself with a hammer and nail, all based on a wager that the Windows Phone's use of Gorilla Glass would hold up to Sonim-level punishment. The company's Chris Ruble and Mike Meyers (not that Mike Myers) used a Lumia 710 as a dry run before an on-camera demo that not only saw the 900 assaulted with the hammer, but used as a blunt instrument itself -- all without a crack or scratch. We imagine that other toughened-glass phones would survive the hit, and there's every possibility that smacking the polycarbonate plastic would leave more than a scuff mark. Nokia's test still proves that its pride and joy can withstand more than just a casual roughing up, and you can see the slightly cringe-inducing test in the video below.

Continue reading Nokia uses Lumia 900 as a hammer in a torture test, makes us wince (video)

Nokia uses Lumia 900 as a hammer in a torture test, makes us wince (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 04:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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arisvega writes "At a first level (the lowest court level in the Greek judiciary system) an order has been issued (article in Greek, Google translation is fair enough) for a 'plan on behalf of Internet Service Providers regarding he implementation of technological measures to deny access to internet users for webpages through which illegal copies of copyrighted work are being distributed.' The order seems to be general and descriptive, and is a manifestation of the implementation process for an even more general and vague larger-scale EU directive, which is the common source that caused the rulings recently posted on slashdot regarding the UK, the Netherlands and Finland. This appears to be one of the reasons that prompted Anonymous to launch defacing attacks on Greek government websites some three months back."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excited for Nintendo's new tablet-esque controller? So are the kids in TT Games' QA department. An over-excited tester tweeted out an image of a slightly different Wii U slab than the one we laid hands on at E3 2011, teasing "look we what we have at work!" Answering the call does indeed reveal something worth looking at -- a somewhat wider looking Wii U slate featuring two full-sized analog sticks (as opposed to 3DS-like circle pads), a pair of unmarked button-like squares, and a new starboard home for the controller's plus and minus buttons.

The tweet was summarily pulled, of course, but not before our friends at Joystiq nabbed a screenshot. Naturally, the rumor mill started right up, churning out speculation of developer specific slabs, early prototypes and late redesigns. The truth? We'll probably need to wait until E3 to find out, but we reached out to Nintendo for a comment all the same. We'll let you know if we hear anything more than the usual "Nintendo doesn't comment on rumors and speculation" line.

Alternative Wii U controller design makes brief appearance on Twitter, goes into hiding originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 02:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Think the Wii has the market cornered on gaming rehab? Think again -- neuroscientists at New Castle University are developing a series of motion controlled video games to make stroke rehab more fun and accessible. The team's first title, dubbed Circus Challenge, lets patients digitally throw pies, tame lions and juggle to help them build strength and regain motor skills. As players progress, the game ratchets up its difficulty, presumably to match pace with their recovery.

Although Limbs Alive, the game's publisher, has only described their motion controller as "next-generation," it affirms that the game will be playable on PCs, laptops and tablets later this year. In an effort to lower costs and provide at-home therapy, the team hopes to leverage a £1.5 million award from the UK's Health Innovation Challenge Fund to build a system that will allow therapists to monitor patient progress remotely. The whole enchilada still needs some time to bake, but you can hit the break for a video and the full press release.

Continue reading Neuroscientists develop game for stroke rehabilitation, give the Wii a run for its money

Neuroscientists develop game for stroke rehabilitation, give the Wii a run for its money originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 May 2012 00:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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symbolset writes "CNET is reporting that China has approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Previously approved by regulatory authorities in the U.S. and Europe, China was the last holdout. The deal will now reportedly close 'within days.'" I wonder what conditions Google may have faced from the regulators, and whether they include any exceptions to the "don't be evil" guideline.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a report, Apple gets hugely preferential leases just to open its stores in certain cities and locations. Why is anyone surprised? [Read more]