With the explosion of smartphones and tablet PCs in the past few years, mobile internet usage has also sky rocketed. Hundreds of new apps are released each and every day and many of them are heavily internet reliant, which means that the current speeds we get over the 3G network (and its variants) are starting to become “too slow” for the day-to-day needs of tablet and smartphone users. It’s no wonder then, that mobile network operators in the UK are trying to push for it’s snappy implementation, but even that doesn’t come without controversy. Everything Everywhere (the outcome of T-Mobile & Orange’s merger) have kickstarted a movement, however competitors are worried that they’re trying to shoe-horn their way in and have ulterior motives after they proclaimed that they wanted to be the first company to be providing the technology in the UK. (more…)

The Earth’s natural resources are running low, a decision has been made to send out space shuttles to mine asteroids for their raw materials and transport these back to Earth. Sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster right? That is exactly what Planetary Resources have planned though, it’s a company with some high profile backers including the Google co-founder, Larry Page & James Cameron (director of Avatar & Titanic) that plan on doing some revolutionary things outside of Earth’s atmosphere; using robotic probes to do some cool things to asteroids! What they intend to do is mine near-Earth asteroids that have high stores of Platinum group metals and water and in turn, have a massive effect on the global economy.

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Meet Pebble, the watch that will change the face of the watches forever! Not only that, it will change it’s own face, whenever you tell it to.

E-paper is nothing new, it has been used in Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader since 2007, mobile phones, USB drives, digital photo frames and even other watches (though the Seiko Spectrum SVRD001 would set you back nearly £2,000!). So, what is it that makes the Pebble revolutionary? There’s a number of things, not least the way they have approached this project. Unable to secure funding through the traditional venture capital route they did what any self-respecting entrepreneur does these days… (more…)

Space at a premium? Trying to look “hip” with one the latest trends coming from notebook and laptop manufacturers? Then an Ultrabook may be what you’re looking for! A whole host of companies have got in on the act and are now producing a range of notebooks under what Intel are calling Ultrabooks. Ultrabooks have been designed with the aim of reducing the size and weight in relation to the regular notebook, whilst extending battery life and still providing great performance for the end user. Obviously, with Ultrabook being the brainchild of Intel’s development crew, the notebooks all contain Intel Core processors in addition to a wide range of other, low power components such as Solid State Drives. These have been brought in in favour of their mechanical cousins for their versatility on the move (own up, who’s dropped their laptop before?) and extremely low power usage, which when you’re trying to get weeks of battery life out of your machine (as Acer are claiming with the specific Ultrabook we’re going to look at today) is extremely helpful.

Let’s start off with letting you know what exactly is inside the incredibly thin Acer Aspire S5 (it’s only 15mm thick at it’s thickest point!) and what will be powering it! (more…)

A team of US engineers working at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have revealed the result of their latest research, a material they claim to be the world’s lightest. (more…)

Yesterday Apple announced the iPhone 4S at a press conference in California which you can view here. A quick breakdown of the new and improved features over the iPhone 4 follows:

• Upgraded CPU – A5 Dual Core CPU, 2x faster processing, 7x faster graphics
• Upgraded Camera – To 8MP from 5MP, increased aperture size, additional lens, improved start-up time, face-recognition & image stabiliser
• Upgraded Video Recording – To 1080P@30FPS from 720P@30FPS
• Added Siri – Voice command system
• Added iCloud – Adds features sharing all media, documents, photos, apps, calendar, mail, contacts between Apple devices, remote backup to iCloud, find friends and locate iDevices remotely and wipe them. (more…)

If you’re new to Chromebooks I’d recommend you start with our Chromebook Preview.

The Samsung Chromebook Series 5 is the first of the Chromebooks to be released, and can be found for £349 at Amazon, but what do you get for your money? Not a whole lot really.

Allow me to elaborate, the Chromebook is a fairly stylish (if somewhat dated Apple-esque looking) 12.1″ netbook running Chrome OS which is essentially a browser based operating system. Now I used the word netbook which certainly isn’t a glowing adjective, but to describe it as much more would be generous. This is an Intel Atom N570 based netbook (note that Intel themselves describe it as a “processor for netbooks”) with 2GB RAM and a 16GB SSD and whilst this low power CPU means that 8-9 hours of battery life is a possibility it also means that (more…)

If you’re a regular reader of Slashdot, El Reg or TechCrunch then you’ll no doubt have heard of Bitcoin, the digital currency that has recently started garnering a lot of attention as the currency is gaining significant value. As of the moment of writing this article there are currently precisely 6,859,400 bitcoins in existence (You can check the current number here). The current market value of these is £8.58 each (taken from Britcoin) valuing the currency at £58.8 million or $95 million, not too significant on a global scale but certainly enough to make people take notice.

How do I get bitcoins?

Well, you can buy them from various exchanges for whatever currency you use, alternatively you can create your own through a process known as “mining” (more…)

With recent announcements by two of the biggest companies, namely Facebook and Google, both offering free to use video chat are these business behemoths going head-to-head in a Haye vs. Klitschko style world video chat unification bout? Well… no actually. Whilst the thought of it is an exciting prospect, much like the boxing match the reality is a much tamer affair.

Facebook have made it clear that group chat is not a priority for their video chat, citing the fact that (more…)

If you haven’t heard of graphene yet prepare to find out about a material that could lead the way in future technologies. Only discovered in 2004 by Dr Konstantin Novoselov and Dr Andre Geim – from the University of Manchester – experimenting with sticky tape and graphite (found in common pencils) they have already been awarded a Nobel Prize for this discovery.

What is graphene?

You may well have heard of it’s little brother, carbon nanotubes which are sheaths of carbon atoms rolled into cylinders with diameters roughly 10,000 times smaller than a (more…)