HTC ONE MAX REVIEW

                 HTC ONE MAX

DESIGN AND BUILD 

And this time the brushed aluminium back comes off. Still feeling solid as a whole, a small toggle on the left-hand side allows the back to be peeled off. Inside, goodies include a micro SIM slot and micro SD card slot but that 3,300mAh battery is sealed in tight.     

FINGERPRINT SCANNER

HTC's big gamble with the One Max, which in all other respects is a blown-up HTC One, is the fingerprint reader beneath the rear camera lens. Swiping your finger down the blank grey-black square on the back can be used to unlock your One Max without a PIN and launch specific apps. Up to three digits can be scanned in, which makes sense considering your thumb and little finger should be grasping your slab of a phone as if their very existence depends upon not dropping it.

SCREEN - AS HUGE AND STUNNING AS EXPECTED

Any gripes you have with One Max's build or fingerprint tech instantly disappear as soon as you load up a good looking movie or luscious game on the 5.9in Full HD screen. It's a great size to watch movies on. Sense is now more spaced out,too, and there are rows five-apps wide instead of four on the home screens. Viewing webpages the supreme contrast and clear resolution make for that appear lovely and smooth.
          
HTC One Max Tech Specs

Operating System: Android 4.3 with Sense 5.5
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, 1.7GHZ quad-core.
RAM: 2GB
Screen: 5.9in Full HD 1080p
Camera: unspecified UltraPixel camera, BSI with 1080p video, front:2.1 MP
Storage: 16/32GB + micro SD up to 64GB
Data: 3G/4G LTE
Battery: 3300mAh
Dimensions: 164.5 x 82.5 x 10.29mm
Weight: 217g
Connections: Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX, NFC, IR blaster, microUSB 2.0 with MHL.
  
CAMERA

If you're happy to buy a phone this big, perhaps camera quality isn't your biggest concern, the Max's rear cam is reliable enough. Sticking with the One's UltraPixel system of larger pixels we think 4MP but HTC hasn't specified plus a f/2.0 aperture and BSI sensor, results are unsurprisingly similar to its smaller comrade. 

HUAWEI MOBILE WIFI E5220

The Huawei Mobile WiFi E5220 is a pocket-sized wireless router that lets you share a mobile broadband connection with up to 10 Wi-Fi devices,but only supports 3G, not 4G. Huawei claims it has a maximum download speed of 21.6 Mbps and an upload speed of 5.8 Mbps, but real-world speeds depend on your location and which network you're on.
When copying files between two computers on the E5220's local wireless network, we got 16.9Mbps at a distance of one metre, 18Mbps at 10m and 3.7Mbps at 20m. These are fast speeds for a portable router.
We found it tricky to price off the router's back panel, but once it's open, the battery and SIM card are east to install. You should also make a note of the default wireless network name and password (on a label next to the SIM slot), which you'll need to connect to the router. With a password already set, your wireless network is secure as soon as you start using it, rather than after you've spent time configuring the wireless security set-up. 

The simple web interface shows you the router's connection status to your mobile network, as well as which PC's are connected and how much data you've used, which is essential if you're on a capped plan.

The E5220 is a good portable router let down only by the lack of 4G support and a fiddly battery cover.

SPECIFICATION

802.11n, 3G modem, no Ethernet ports, 30g, 68x71x26mm(HxWxD), One-year warranty, Part Code E5220s-2.

PRICE
$77.57

LIFE IS LIKE A BOOK

LIFE is like a book

Some chapters are sad,

Some happy and some very exciting.

But if you never turn the page, 

you will never know 

what the next chapter holds. 

BOSE NEW SPEAKERS SOUNDLINK MINI TOTALLY AWESOME

DESIGN

It has a flat metal grill and a solid aluminium shell, the SoundLink Mini evokes the image of a radio from the 1960s, yet sleeker and more updated for today. It measures just 2 by 7.1 by 2.3 inches (HWD), and its satisfyingly sturdy-feeling 1.5pound heft and aluminium casing give an impression of solidity. The controls are arranged neatly in a row of rubber buttons on the top of the speaker, with raised Volume Up/ Down buttons franked by Power and Mute buttons on the left and Bluetooth and Auxiliary input buttons on the right. 

The right side of the speaker holds a power connector and a 3.5mm audio input. The back is covered by a metallic grille just like the front's, nut without a Bose logo painted on it, showing the passive radiator built into the speaker. A large rectangular foot on the bottom of the speaker keeps it in place and covers the rechargeable battery, along with contact points for the included charging cradle and a micro USB port.

CHARGING

Unlike many other Bluetooth speakers, the SoundLink Mini doesn't charge through its micro USB port; that's only for servicing the speaker and upgrading the firmware. According to Bose, the speaker's battery can last 7 hours on a charge.

PERFORMANCE

For its small size, the SoundLink Mini puts out some impressive sound. It has more directional sound, but it also put more power and sounded just as good placed against a wall and facing entire room. Although the bass made the speaker itself shake, its small size limited its ability to deliver real wall-shaking bass, though the reverb and harsh riffs of Daft Punk's "Robot Rock" created a suitably large-sounding soundscape. The SoundLink Mini's solid high-mid performance gave it a slight edge over the Logitech UE Boom, which can sound slightly tinny in comparison.

The BoseLink Mini is a little powerhouse that produces clear, solid sound, but for its size and price its performance is impressive.

PRICE - $199.95

3D STORAGE DRIVES WITH 100TB+ CAPACITY TO COME IN FUTURE

As long as engineers at Florida International University have found a way of breaking the 2D limitation of magnetic hard drive storage. By moving to three dimensions, the researchers have massively increased areal density, with the possibility of 100-terabyte (and larger) hard drives now firmly on the horizon.

While we've covered a lot of magnetic storage breakthroughs, they have all been fundamentally 2D in their implementation, and thus are ultimately restricted by superparamagnetic limits (magnetic bits can only be so small, before neighboring bits/changes in temperature can randomly after the magnetism). Heat-assisted magnetic recording(HAMR), for example, can allow for magnetic grains that are just a few nanometres across an areal densities in the terabits-per-square-inch domain - but even then, we're still looking at a hard cap of around 60 terabytes per hard drive.

To move beyond the limits imposed by superparamagnetism, the only solution is move beyond simple 2D improvements - making magnetic
grains smaller - and instead move into the third dimension. 

At Florida International University, the researchers have created a new hard drive platter that allows for the writing and reading of 3D magnetic data. In essence, instead of having just one magnetic layer, the new platter has three magnetic layers, with isolation (insulation) layers sandwiched in between. On a conventional hard drive platter, a magnetic site stores just a single bit - here, a triple stack of magnetic layers, each magnetic site can store up to eight bits of data (north/north/north, south/south/south, N/N/S, N/S/S, etc.)

To read data, a weakly magnetic head is used to measure the vector sum of three magnetic fields. To write data, each layer of the recording medium has slightly different properties, so that they can only be written by a specific type and strength of magnetic field, which is output by a special recording head.

How data is stored on multilayer 3D (ML-3D) recording medium

For now, FIU's new magnetic recording medium is an in-the-lab tech demo. Where conventional hard drive platters are mass-produced using a simple process (magnetron sputtering), FIU's platter is more like a small disc of silicon that goes through dozens of painstaking process, including e-beam lithographic patterning. This isn't to say that multilayer 3D (ML-3D) recording won't become a reality, but alternatives such as HAMR are much closer to commercial adoption. That ML-3D might be used to create 100-terabyte (or larger) hard drives in the future, though, still exciting news - and, interestingly, perhaps the technology that will finally kill off magnetic tape, which is still hanging in there as the preferred bulk offline storage medium.

GOOGLE NEXUS 7 REWIEW

GOOGLE NEXUS 7

PHYSICAL FEATURES AND NETWORKING

The new Nexus 7 is slimmer, lighter, and more comfortable to hold than the original, which was already more comfortable to hold than Apple's oddly wide iPad mini. This model is 4.5 by 7.9 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and 10.2 ounces, with tampered sides and a soft-touch back that somehow feels classier than the original Nexus 7's faux leather.
There are very few ports here just micro USB, headphone, and microphone and marginally narrower side bezels framing the sharp 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS LCD panel, which is a big advance from the original's 1,280-by-800 screen. At 323ppi, it's almost exactly the same density as the Apple iPhone 5's Retina display and higher than any iPad's. It's bright enough for most circumstances, colors are very true, and viewing angles are good. But the screen is small enough to not totally kill battery life. We got 7 hours 37 minutes of video playback on maximum brightness. That's shorter than the 10 hours commanded by last year's Nexus 7, which sported a less-dense screen, but it's still quite a respectable.
The Nexus 7 comes in three models. The first two are Wi-Fi only, with support for 802.11a/b/g/n on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands(the latter another upgrade from last year). The third unit works on Verizon's LTE network and AT& T's and T-Mobile's LTE and 3G networks.
All of the models have GPS, which makes this tablet a killer in-car navigation system. The GPS on my test model locked in very quickly. The tablet also has Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC, although surprisingly there's no support for Google Wallet.

PERFORMANCE, OS, AND APPS

The Nexus 7 is the first Android tablet, running a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. Think of this tablet as about two-thirds of the way up the current performance ladder, with the Samsung Galaxy S4 phone at the top. It almost doubled the performance of last year's Nvidia Tegra3 - based Nexus 7 on pure processor and graphic banchmarks and positively crushed the iPad mini on the Geekbench system benchmark: The mini scored only 748; this guy 2,643. Using the chrome browser, the Nexus 7 beat the iPad mini on the SunSpider browser benchmark by about 30 percent.
Real-world performance isn't solely dependent on processor speed: How many pixels you'are pushing, the OS, and third-party apps are also important. That's where the Nexus 7 ran into a bit of trouble. Some of test apps either didn't show up in the market or got buggy.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted, for instance, displayed weird graphics artifacts. Netflix's UI was sluggish, although videos played just fine. 
Asphalt 7: Heat, one of my standard test games, didn't even show up on a search. Sometimes when searching Google's own Play store, animations would get jittery or the text box would loose focus.



The popular video player MX player quit on launch. I suspect a lot of these problems are Android 4.3 issues that will get solved quickly as the app creators update their work.

MULTIMEDIA: VIEWING AND CAPTURING 

With no memory card slot, I suggest buying the 32GB Nexus 7 (with 26GB available) over the $229 16GB unit. The new Nexus 7 adds a 5 megapixel rear camera to the tablet, keeping the 1 megapixel front camera as well.
The new Android 4.3 camera app's UI is extremely simple, although you still get some options like capture size,a countdown timer, a few scene modes, panarama, and Photo Sphere. Photos taken with the main camera were clear enough in good light, although bright areas were washed out and there was some visible color noise. In low light, the noise really ramped up. Front camera images tended to be very soft, even smeary(but not blurry)in low light. The main camera captured 1080p video at 30 frames per second (fps) indoors and out; the front camera captured 720p at 30 fps. There's no image stabilization, but there is a time-lapse mode.
The front camera is fine for video chatting, and the main camera will suffice for augmented-reality apps, bar code scanners, language translators, and all the things you really should be using a tablet camera for (not snapshots). 

Asus amped up the stereo speakers here, and they're now quite loud, although they're still tinny. Fraunhofer surround sound gives some real stereo separation material coded for it, such as Google Play movies. Still, the only way you're going to get bass in with headphones.
The Nexus 7 had no problem playing MPEG-4 and H.264 videos in resolution up to 10809, as well as streaming Netflix and Google Play movies.There's no DivX or Xvid support by default.
The Nexus 7 doesn't have any wired way to output video to a TV, but it works with Google's Chromecast to play some streaming(not local)  media on TVs. 

Small tablets are most often used for some media, some gaming, some Web browsing, and some ebook reading. Provided third-party developers update their apps for Android 4.3 and I think they will, soon - the new Nexus is best because of its sharp screen, comfortable ergonomics, and solid performance at an ideal price.

MOUSE CUM SCANNER

THIS double-duty device can both navigate your computer and scan by mousing over your documents, recipes, and receipts. The software automatically pieces together the image on your screen in high resolution (320dpi) and lets you adjust contrast, re-size, zoom, and crop. Its optical character recognition(OCR) technology converts scanned text for editing in Microsoft Word and other word processing programs.

PRICE 
$59.99

NEW COMPACT CHARGER FOR APPLE PRODUCTS

Forget the clumsy cable unraveling  out of your bag. Kii is a compact charger that slips onto your keychain so you can charge or sync your device from any computer. One end of the Kii is a USB port; the other end connects to your iOS device. The Kii is available in both Lightning and 30-pin versions to work with whatever Apple devices you may own.

PRICE
$39.95 for Lightning connector , $19.95 for 30-pin connector

NVIDIA 64-BIT TEGRA 6 MIGHT POWER FIRST 64-BIT ANDROID DEVICES IN 2014

Apple was accused of employing a marketing gimmick recently when it announced a new 64-bit processing core for the A7 ARM chip, which powers the new iphone 5S. The benefits of moving to 64-bit processing o mobile devices aren't yet clear, but that hasn't stopped other ARM chip makers from lining up to mention their own 64-bit plans. Nvidia announced several years ago that it had licenced ARMv8 technology to build its own 64-bit core, and the time draws near when that endeavor will come to fruition. Tegra could finally be ahead of the pack.

All of Nvidia's current and past ARM chips have used CPU designs licenced directly from ARM Holdings, which are then paired with Nvidia's custom ultra low-power GeForce GPU. Together these components make up the Tegra system-on-a-chip (SoC). Tegra 4 uses the fastest ARM-designed cores currently available - the Cortex-A15 - but even with these top-of-the-line cores Nvidia is at a disadvantage thanks to custom mobile CPUs.

                                         Snapdragon SoC
  
Apple and Qualcomm both design their own CPU cores based on ARM instruction set, which they pay a pretty penny to licence. Apple stepped it up to the ARMv8 set with the Cyclone CPU core in the A7, while Qualcomm is still focussing on ARMv7 with the Krait 400 core (but it is expected to announce an ARMv8 based core soon). It's a lot of work to design a CPU core rather than just licence one directly from ARM, but 64-bit is only the most recent example of how a custom core can help a company iterate and add new features. For example, Qualcomm's custom chips can dynamically change clock speed on each core based on system load. Nvidia had to jury rig an extra companion core in Tegra to handle low-power tasks.

It's believed that Nvidia started work on ARMv8 back in late 2010 or early 2011. If true, the company could possibly have a samples so called "Project Denver" 64-bit processing core ready in early 2014 as part of the Parker SoC. This is actually two generations past current ARM chips. Tegra 5 (code name Logan) is expected to hit devices in early 2014, position to move quickly toward this SoC and cut Tegra 5's run a bit short. Although, Parker was slated for a 2015 release the last time Nvidia spoke about it.

     No one can deny that Tegra 4 is a much more competitive chip than the Tegra 3 was last year, but Qualcomm's custom Krait cores design iteration have allowed it to nearly take over the Android device ecosystem. There are only a handful of devices announced with Tegra 4 chips, one of them is Nvidia's own Shield console. Meanwhile Snapdragon 600 and 800 power almost every high-end smartphone and tablet from 2013.
  
Over the last few years, Nvidia has no doubt poured many millions into Project Denver and Parker SoC. Qualcomm is surely working toward a64-bit chip down the road, but the company has been tight-lipped about future plans. The last thing Nvidia wants is for the market leader to beat it to ARMv8 with 64-bit. Whether or not 64-bit has real utility on mobile devices running 32-bit software, getting this right could set up Tegra for undeniable success, a distinction that has so far eluded it. 

NEW ALFA ROMEO 4C

Alfa Romeo has just taken the wraps off its latest entry into the world of supercars, the Alfa Romeo 4C Launch Edition. With a brand new all aluminium direct injection 240 HP petrol engine the 4C will be arriving in Europe to go head-to-head with the Porsche Cayman.

 Featuring bleeding edge technology the 4C uses an ultra-lightweight carbon fibre monocoque chassis weighting just 65kg whilst the low-density high-strength body panels are then painstakingly fitted on afterwards.

Thanks to incredibly lightweight design 4C features a 1750 240HP all-aluminium petrol engine which can rocket the car from 0-60 in just 4.5 seconds slower than the new Aston Martin Vanquish.

One of the most talked about features through is the DNA selector which currently features on Alfa's other road cars. Whilst cars like the MiTo Quadrifoglio Verde feature three options 'Dynamic', 'Natural' and 'All Weather' the 4C Launch Edition now has a fourth 'Race'.

 When set in 'Race' mode the instrument panel will change color showing only race-relevant information whilst both the stability control and anti-slip are deactivated.

Finally the 4C will feature Alfa's next-generation TCT twin dry clutch transmission using 'shift paddle's. Alfa already uses a similar system on the Giulietta and MiTo but where the 4C is different is it's 'Launch Control' function which optimises all the cars systems to provide the quickest acceleration possible.

Of course it wouldn't be next-generation if that's all it did, by sharing the same software with the DNA system the shift sequences are directly affected by which DNA mode you've selected.

The 4C Launch Edition is truly for the elite with only 400 being made in Europe and costing $71047.