The glassmaker revealed Gorilla Glass SR+, a new super scratch-resistant material made specially for smartwatches.
Source: CNet

Servers used to process payments at the boutique hotel chain’s properties are infected with malware designed to steal customer card numbers, names and expiration dates.
Source: CNet

Join CNET editors on a tour of all the gadgets catching our eye at the IFA 2016 tech show in Berlin.
Source: CNet

Technically Incorrect: This is how you get 110,000 people to instantly like a tweet. You stand up for something.
Source: CNet

Technically Incorrect: The launch ad for the Gear S3 smartwatch feels very much like an old-fashioned watch ad. A men’s watch ad. Is this the way to differentiate yourself from Apple watch?
Source: CNet

A hack from 2012 reportedly resulted in the breach of far more user information than previously believed.
Source: CNet

Netflix has renewed the ’80s-inspired horror series. Read our theories on Eleven’s fate, those creepy pollywogs and Chief Hopper’s new gig.
Source: CNet

If there was a fashion competition for laptops, the Getac S410 wouldn’t win it. And that’s fine, because this chunky system is a semi-rugged model designed to be used by field operatives based out in the great outdoors who need a device that’s reliable, solid and won’t weigh them down. Too much, anyway.

People who might use one include the police, professional services, vehicle operators and professionals who work in public safety and manufacturing. Where rugged tablets like the Panasonic CF-20 make more sense when portability is paramount and the device has to be held with one hand, the S410 offers a more traditional laptop experience with a full-sized keyboard and 14-inch display.

In terms of design, the S410 resembles a laptop you might have bought in 2002. To call it chunky would be something of an understatement, its thickness wading in at a substantial 1.4 inches (around 35mm). Still, that’s an improvement on the previous model, the Getac S400, which measured 1.93 inches (around 48mm) thick – so Getac is moving things in the right direction with this brand-new design.

All of that chunk lends the S410 a reassuringly solid feel in the hand. It’s near impossible to detect any flex in the device’s body, except for the keyboard part – and even then you have to press down really hard to get the plastic to bend. The solid chassis is what sets the S410 apart from regular laptops and quite literally forms the bulk of the laptop’s basic cost. It starts at £1,149 (around US$1,518 or AUS$1,990) and rises north of that sharply as the specs increase.

Compared to other rugged devices like the aforementioned Panasonic ToughBook CF-20. the Getac’s display is a let down. It’s 14-inches in size, but the pixel-resolution is a meager 1,366 x 768. Forgetting sharpness for a second, this provides a distinct lack of screen real-estate and pinning two apps side-by-side is a compromised experience. There’s no issue with using one app at a time in full-screen, but multi-tasking is frustrating at best.

The display is also difficult to see outdoors due to lackluster brightness. The S410 can be configured with Getac’s 1000-nits Lumibond display with sunlight readable technology, but we can only assume that it was missing on our review sample as it barely looked like it was reaching 400 nits to our eyes. Colours appear washed out and lifeless, and viewing angles are poor due to the TFT panel used.

The S410’s keyboard posses no challenges to typing, with decent sized keys – even if they’re not particularly satisfying to type on and sound cheap under the fingers. Getac has done a better job with the trackpad and its accompanying buttons, which despite being small are responsive. Unfortunately there’s no touch operation here, so forget using a digitizer or your fingers.

You can, of course, hook up a mouse to the machine into one of the ports. Connectivity options include four USB ports, Wi-Fi (802.11c), audio, VGA, HDMI and an SD-Slot.

Getac has outfitted the S410 with Intel’s ultra-low voltage Core i5-6200U processor clocked at 2.3GHz (Turbo Boost to 2.4GHz), backed up by an insubstantial 4GB of main memory. There was no dedicated graphics option to speak of in our review sample, with the processor’s integrated HD Graphics 520 taking on graphics duties alone.

Benchmarks

• Cinebench R15: OpenGL: 28.38 fps; CPU: 284 points
• Geekbench (Single-Core): 2,691 points; (Multi-Core) 5,732 points
• Battery test (1080p looped video streamed over Wi-Fi in Edge, 50% brightness): 5 hours 24 minutes

The S410 produced fairly low benchmark results, and while the system was nippy enough most of the time with apps loading instantly, it did produce occasional moments of lag when performing tasks such as opening the Settings or Action Center panel. You won’t have any problem running legacy apps on this machine, but the S410 would struggle under more CPU-intensive scenarios.

Even battery life isn’t particularly up to scratch, despite the low-resolution display, with the S410 reaching a barely acceptable 5 hours and 24 minutes away from the plug socket. That’s fine for, say, an Asus UX305 ultrabook, but the Getac is designed to be used away from a plug socket for hours on end.

Also, the test was conducted with the screen’s brightness set to 50%, which rendered it nearly impossible to see outdoors in bright sunlight. Even though you would eke out a few more hours of battery, it would be at the expense of actually being able to do any work on the display.

Early verdict

It feels like the entry-level version of the Getac S410 has potential, but the unit we received to test was way too compromised to recommend. Its design, although chunky, is a clear improvement on the S400 and houses a comfortable keyboard, practical carry handle and a healthy selection of ports. However, the machine’s display, average-strength processor and low amount of main memory render it unsuitable for working out in the field. When that’s the primary objective of the device, that’s not particularly heartening.

Source: Tech Radar

Purported photos of the packaging for Apple’s newest iPhone appear to show headphones will plug into the device’s charging port.
Source: CNet

Actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman appear to be in a brooding mood in the latest image released for the upcoming season.
Source: CNet

The recently released phone needs more testing, the company said. Could it be due to exploding batteries?
Source: CNet

If you need a lesson in why you should never give up, take it from this western desert tarantula escaping from the mouth of a hungry toad.
Source: CNet

After sticking with the same design for two years, Lenovo is giving the Yoga 900 a dramatic makeover and it’s fair to say the Yoga 910 is completely different 2-in-1 laptop. Lenovo has tweaked or completely changed every element of its flagship convertible with everything including a slimmer chassis, larger 13.9-inch UHD screen, smaller bezels, revamped keyboard layout and the Intel 7th generation processors.

However, all these little improvements have made the Lenovo Yoga 910 a slightly more expensive device starting at $1,299. But even with the higher price tag, this still feels like the best hybrid machine on the market.

Design

Lenovo claims the Yoga 910 the world’s thinnest Intel Core i7 powered convertible measuring in at just 14.3mm thick (0.56 inches) – 0.6mm (0.02 inches) thinner than the Yoga 900. Along with dropping some extra bulk, this new hybrid has a new sleeker and sharper styling rather than the slightly curvy frame of yesteryear.

The Lenovo Yoga 910 follows a starkly modern design with straight lines forming sharp angles including places you wouldn’t expect such embellishment. For example, the top and bottom half of the notebook meet to a slightly indented V-shape and an even more prominent gap near the watchband hinge.

The modern touches are a welcome change after seeing practically the same design for the last two years, but at the same time it feels like Lenovo went too far in certain respects. The leatherette interior was one of the most comfortable aspects of the Yoga 900 and now it has been replaced with cold aluminum sheet.

Thanks to the slimmer design, you also lose Lenovo’s full-sized USB-A charging port in exchange for the new USB-C standard. That said, there are plenty of new elements to enjoy here including the a newly added fingerprint reader and one of the most impressive screens ever seen on a 13-inch.

Larger screen with none of the bulk

The Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 blew us away by packing full-size screen into smaller chassis, and now Lenovo is trying to capture the same magic with the Yoga 910.

The display panel size has been bumped up to 13.9-inches and a new 4K resolution without drastically increasing the size of the chassis. In fact, this laptop features some of the thinnest bezels we’ve ever seen on a Lenovo device.

This is thanks to slimming down the bezels along the top and sides while moving the webcam to the sizable chin beneath the screen. It effectively uses the same Infinity Screen layout first introduced by Dell and the only real discernable differences is Lenovo has placed the webcam in the center of the screen rather than off to the left.

That said, the Yoga 910 uses its clever convertible abilities to avoid displaying a worm’s-eye view during video calls. Users can simply switch the laptop into tent mode and have it sit on its front edges to have a video camera that meets them at eye-level.

One downside to this new design is the bottom bezel is nearly two inches tall and largely featureless. Thanks to the webcam’s positioning, Lenovo had to leave out a Windows button soft key, which would have added some much needed some flair to hybrid’s extra-large chin.

Everything is new

Lenovo introduced plenty of other little tweaks here and there to make the Yoga 910 an even better laptop-tablet.

The keyboard, for example, no longer has any of those annoying right-handed shortcut keys to get in the way of you hitting the enter key. Meanwhile, the trackpad is appreciably larger and there’s even a newly added fingerprint reader to help get you signed through Windows Hello with a simple finger press.

The Lenovo Yoga 910 features some bumped up specs including Intel’s freshly announced Intel 7th generation processors with up to 1TB of PCIe SSD storage and 16GB of memory. Battery life has also seen a significant bump to 10.5 hours on UHD model and 15.5 hours with Full HD variants – but those are only estimates we plan to take to task.

Early verdict

The Lenovo Yoga 900 perfected the 2-in-1 laptop formula and now the Yoga 910 seeks to elevate the series to all new heights. There are plenty of welcome elements here including the larger screen, edgier design and revamped inputs. However, some of the changes aren’t sitting well with us including the marginally higher price and the new bare metal keyboard deck.

In the past the Yoga 900 series has blended a good mix of affordability with performance, but this latest iteration may skew things too far into the luxury category. We’ll have to see how the other configurations stack up as well as how this machine performs before we can deliver our final verdict, but we’re optimistic that Lenovo has knocked it out of the park once again.

Source: Tech Radar

If Apple, Microsoft and their lot are the Thomas Edisons of the computing industry, then Lenovo has become the Nikola Tesla. Whereas the de facto founders of Silicon Valley established (and consistently update) the status quo for computing, Lenovo has constantly questioned and toyed with just what computing is since it bought IBM’s ThinkPad business.

Lenovo’s latest wild experiment? The company that pioneered the convertible hybrid laptop design has taken that concept to what might be its logical conclusion: the Yoga Book.

Why make such strong allusions? Because, like so many of Tesla’s works, the Yoga Book really could either be the cool, ingenious, tablet-driven future of laptops that just makes sense. Or, it could be a flop to be forever remembered by diehard fans and hipsters.

Keyboard, begone!

This is because the Yoga Book, a 10.1-inch laptop-tablet hybrid that comes with either Android Marshmallow or Windows 10, has no keyboard. Rather, its "bottom" half, attached via a variation on Lenovo’s signature 360-degree watchband hinge, is a capacitive touch surface.

This magnesium-aluminum alloy surface (found across the tablet), called a Create Pad by Lenovo, can conjure a touch-based keyboard for you instantly. The Create Pad also features haptic feedback – and, living up to its name, can double as a veritable Wacom digitizer replacement with Lenovo’s Real Pen stylus.

Just sit on that for a moment. A computing device that can operate as a laptop, a full blown tablet and a digital art tool without so much as a button press between them. It sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true scenarios, doesn’t it?

Having played with the Yoga Book for a few minutes during a briefing recently, we can say that is not necessarily the case here. We’ll be upfront in saying that typing on a Yoga Book involves a rather steep learning curve.

We’re all used to typing on screens because they’re in the front of our faces – we can always see in plain sight where our fingers are. That’s not the case with a laptop. In fact, some might say the mark of a skilled typist is that she doesn’t have to look at the keyboard at all.

Upon first trying to type on the Yoga Book, your eyes will probably struggle to stop from involuntarily looking at the keyboard. The haptic feedback helps fill in for the physical touch and force of plastic keys, but we’re hesitant to say whether it’s a worthy replacement.

At the very least, it is incredibly close.

Typing on the device admittedly feels a bit strange and discouraging for someone that prides himself on his typing accuracy. But, coupled with practice and some awfully strong auto-correction software, you might not be missing your laptop before long. (I certainly wasn’t.)

However, with this comes a conundrum facing the Yoga Book: at least from when we last tried out the device, it’s clear that either Lenovo or Microsoft has to work on the Yoga Book with Windows 10’s auto-correction software. Frankly, it’s far less advanced than Google’s.

We had noticeably more trouble typing out sentences on the Windows 10 model than the Android one during our time with both, which is a shame considering Microsoft’s superior position in pen recognition and general productivity. Hopefully, these discrepancies will be fully resolved before the devices’ launch this October.

Death (or rebirth) to the pen

The typing experience only covers one half of the Yoga Book’s incredibly unique selling proposition. The device can double as a drawing tool with the included Real Pen. The palm rejection is on point, as is the pressure sensitivity – all 2,048 levels of it.

But, what if you like good old pen and paper? Lenovo’s thought of that, too. Using the firm’s Book Pad, really just a yellow note pad with a magnetic strip to hold on with, you can instantly back up your handwritten, analog notes into digital representations.

This is accomplished through what is known as electromagnetic response (EMR) technology. Basically, the pen – which can swap between real ink and plastic tips – generates electromagnetic electricity that the tablet’s Create Pad picks up and translates into legible characters, words and sentences.

The technology in action was a bit mind blowing to see for the first time, to be honest. Being able to interact with a single device in this many ways, and effectively, is nothing short of amazing.

The best of the rest

Lenovo powers this futuristic experience with a quad-core Intel Atom x-series processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM and 64GB of flash storage – all behind an FHD (1,920 x 1,200) IPS display. And, that’s on both Windows 10 and Android.

An 8,500 mAh battery said to last up to 15 hours of general usage keeps the 0.38-inch-thin (9.6mm), 1.52-pound (690g) slate running. (Of course, we couldn’t test this during a hands on review.)

The Windows 10 version of the Yoga Book comes solely in all Carbon Black, while the Android version offers Gunmetal Gray and Champagne Gold.

Early verdict

Honestly, this thing could come in purple and this editor would still buy in. (Actually, that would look pretty cool.) That’s partly because, for the tablet, a Real Pen, ink cartridge refills and screen tips, and the Book Pad, Lenovo wants just $499 (about £391, AU$664) for the Android version and $549 (about £419, AU$731) for the Windows variety to start.

Sure, this is a low-powered device no doubt, but nothing that you couldn’t complete basic productivity tasks with, like what some of us at TechRadar use a Surface Pro 4 every day for.

Ultimately, to focus on things like specs and power is to completely miss the point of the Yoga Book. The point is to show us a different way of computing that has been a long time coming, the first truly exciting and genuinely interesting attempt to push the laptop into the next phase of its storied life.

And, it actually works.

Source: Tech Radar

Source: Security

Microsoft has released Build 14915, its latest Windows 10 ‘Redstone 2’ test build to PC and phone testers.
Source: Microsoft

Teased earlier this year by the CEO of CBS, the higher-priced tier still includes ads on its live TV stream.
Source: CNet

Also new for this year is a wealth of tech updates, including Virtual Cockpit, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
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In a sneak peek from Marvel, fans get a glimpse of three characters: Karl Mordo, the Ancient One and Kaecilius, the movie’s villain.
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Samsung is still working on getting the Gear S2 to work with Apple’s mobile software, but there isn’t a timeline yet.
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Wildlife expert Coyote Peterson searches for the largest slug in the world, the giant Black Sea Hare, along the coast of California.
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“Stranger Things” fans, prepare for goosebumps: Netflix has officially renewed the hit paranormal thriller with a YouTube video set to the show’s retro theme music.
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The new Pawbo+ video calls your pets and dispenses treats even when you’re out of the house.
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Acer’s shiny new Swift 7 laptop has one-upped Apple’s MacBook. The first Ultrabook to measure under 1cm thick (at the chunkier end, obviously), it’s deliciously sleek and a real tempting option if you’re looking for an ultraportable to take on the move.

In other words, it measures 9.98mm at the rear end, which features a black-and-gold design that contrasts brilliantly. It has a real touch of premium about it and reminds us of HP’s equally sleek HP Spectre.

Thickness aside, the 14-inch 1080p display is the real standout here. It may only be Full HD, but it’s a brilliant IPS panel that, as such, gives off excellent horizontal and vertical viewing angles.

The screen’s color saturation is impressive, with bold and vibrant colors complemented with deep and powerful blacks. It’s Corning’s Gorilla Glass, too, so it should stand up well to drops, knocks and scrapes.

The display’s bezel is a little chunkier than what we’ve been spoiled with by devices like Dell’s XPS 13 and the Spectre 13, but that’s a minor gripe.

Weighing just 1.1kg, this is a pleasingly light device that you can easily pick up and wave about in one hand. Despite its lightweight nature and thin design, it packs in a solid, chiclet-spaced keyboard that’s paired with an incredibly roomy trackpad that makes executing Windows 10‘s gesture commands a breeze.

Intel has slipped its 7th-generation Core i-series processors under the hood, and it claims that there’s enough internal juice for you to play Overwatch at Full HD with fluid frame rates without the need for a discrete graphics chip.

Acer says that the Swift 7 will start at $999 or €1,299 (around £1,100) in Europe, when it’s due to arrive in October.

Source: Tech Radar