Cisco Systems acted to make its Umi home videoconferencing platform more affordable on Monday, slashing the service cost to US$99 per year and announcing a $399 product for slower Internet connections as well as free Mac and PC clients.

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Mashable – The trend was obvious for quite some time, and now it finally happened: Android is the most popular smartphone platform among U.S. subscribers.

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Investor’s Business Daily – Google’s (NMS:GOOG) Android software platform captured the No. 1 rank among smart-phone platforms in the U.S. for the first time, ComScore said. For the 3-month period ending in Jan., Android had a 31.2% market share, up from 23.5% the prior quarter. Apple’s (NMS:AAPL) iPhone share was flat at 24.7%, while Research In Motion’s (NMS:RIMM) BlackBerry, the longtime leader, skidded to 30.4% from 35.8%. Microsoft garnered an 8% share. Ownership of smart phones climbed 8% from the prior quarter to 65.8 mil, ComScore said.

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AP – The value of the pay package for IBM’s chief executive, Sam Palmisano, rose 19 percent in 2010 from a year earlier to $25.2 million, thanks to a near-doubling of his performance-based bonus as the company surpassed a profit goal it set in 2007, according to an Associated Press review of a securities filing.

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Dell is one of the leading vendors in the PC market to have a play in the SFF HTPC (small form factor home theater PC) space. In 2009, they introduced the first Zino HD HTPC, the Zino 400. It used the AMD's Athlon 64 2650e/2850e / Athlon 64 X2 3250e/6850e on the AMDRS780G chipset with the option of the integrated 3200 GPU or a discrete 4330 mGPU. It received a decent enough response to warrant a refresh of the lineup after a year.

In Q4 2010, the Zino 410 HD HTPC was launched. It made use of the same formula from the previous generation product (usage of CPUs meant for the laptop market, and pairing it with either the integrated GPU or a discrete mGPU). However, Dell learnt some important lessons from the first generation launch, which they have put to good use in the design of the Zino 410 HD HTPC.

We have had the highest end Zino 410 HD HTPC configuration in our labs since October 2010.   Read on for our take on the second generation Zino HD HTPC, and also why it took us so long to publish the review.

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AP – Hackers infiltrated French government computers in search of information about France’s leadership of the Group of 20 leading economies, the country’s budget minister said Monday.

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The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) NAS market is a highly competitive one. A lot of things have changed since the last time we covered this market in a roundup. With storage becoming cheaper by the day, and HD videos (both user generated and commercial content) becoming more and more popular, it is difficult to find a SMB NAS which doesn't cater to the home consumer also. In 2006 (when we did our SMB NAS roundup), Synology was not one of the major players. In the last 4 years, though, they have taken giant strides and earned many plaudits.

We have had the latest 2 bay model from Synology, the DS-211+, in our labs since CES. Read on to find out how it fares in our benchmarks and see if it is a good fit for your usage scenario.

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Mashable – Bizzy, a web and mobile service for personalized local business recommendations, is updating its iPhone and Android apps to introduce a new “Check Out” feature. Users can now check out to leave short, emoticon-style reviews of venues on their way out the door.

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Lenovo on Tuesday announced the ThinkPad X220 laptop, which is one of the early ultraportable laptops running on new processors based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.

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Back at IDF 2010, we wrote about Intel Light Peak nearing its eventual launch in 2011. Back then, the story was a 10 Gbps or faster physical link tunneling virtually every protocol under the sun over optical fiber. Though an optical physical layer provided the speed, in reality the connector and physical layer itself wasn’t as important as the tunneling and signaling going on beneath it. Daisy chain devices together, and connect everything with one unified connector and port. 

That dream lives on today, but sans optical fiber and under a different name. Intel’s codename “Light Peak” is now named Thunderbolt. 

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It's been a long time coming but we finally have Intel's third generation SSD. Codenamed Elmcrest, this is not only the first 6Gbps SSD from Intel but it's also the first Intel drive to use a 3rd party controller. Why would Intel turn elsewhere for a controller design? And more importantly, how does it compare to the 2nd generation SandForce drives like the Vertex 3?

Read on to find out!

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AP – Space shuttle Discovery is on track for a Wednesday landing — its very last one.

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AP – An aide who spent hours on her cellphone the day she left a severely autistic client to die in a hot van was sent to prison Monday for two to five years.

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PC World – Lenovo on Tuesday announced the ThinkPad X220 laptop, which is one of the early ultraportable laptops running on new processors based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.

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A New York manufacturer is suing ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor Infor following a dispute over whether it should have to pay nearly $150,000 in additional license fees.

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As enterprises approach a high level of maturity in their IT governance, risk and compliance (GRC) programs, they face a conundrum: How can they effectively implement and manage policies and their supporting controls to maintain a strong risk posture? To add to the difficulty, the environments they manage are often widely distributed and subject to multiple regulatory requirements and internal audit requirements, and must adapt to changing business needs. GRC tools are designed to help.

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An anonymous reader points out a study by the National Sleep Foundation which looked at the relationship between sleep habits and the use of electronic communications tech in the hour before bedtime. Dr. Michael Grasidar of Flinders University said, “My research compares how technologies that are ‘passively received’ such as TVs and music versus those with ‘interactive’ properties like video games, cell phones and the Internet may affect the brain differently. The hypothesis is that the latter devices are more alerting and disrupt the sleep-onset process.” The study found that people who frequently send text messages or use their laptops before bed were less likely to report getting a good night’s sleep (PDF) than people who don’t. “While these technologies are commonplace, it is clear that we have a lot more to learn about the appropriate use and design of this technology to complement good sleep habits,” said the NSF’s David Cloud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How long does the average CIO stay on the job? Not very long. According to a Gartner Inc. survey of 1,527 CIOs, their average tenure in 2009 was four years and four months, a figure that has changed relatively little over the past several years, according to Mark McDonald, group vice president of Gartner Executive Programs. “It’s been between four years and three months and four years and nine months,” he says.

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jbrodkin writes “If humans can’t beat a computer at ‘Jeopardy!’ why should we trust them to make the right call on fourth down in the Super Bowl? That was the fundamental question asked by some researchers at the recent MITSloan Sports Analytics Conference. With thousands of variables to consider on the basketball court or other fields of play, it only makes sense to let computers handle questions of strategy, says Tarek Kamil, whose company built a chip-containing basketball which takes 6,000 measurements per second. ‘Fifty years from now, we’re going to laugh about how we used to give coaches this much responsibility,’ he says.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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InfoWorld – Facebook and Google are at it again, and application developers are getting caught in the crossfire.

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As expected, Apple today unveiled a range of speed and functionality improvements for its MacBook Pro lineup. The update was unusually quiet for Apple. There was no scheduled press event and nothing more than a press release announcing the specs and availability. Apple retail stores received stock prior to today and began selling product immediately. The Apple online store also has immediate availability.

No mere speed bump, these new MacBooks bring Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors chipsets to the entire line, replacing the previous Arrandale processors and finally retiring the aging Core 2 Duo from service in the 13-inch model.

Contrary to earlier reports, there are no default SSD configurations although the solid state offerings are still optional. The big new feature (outside of Sandy Bridge) is support for the first incarnation of Intel’s Light Peak interface technology, now called Thunderbolt.

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A year has passed without a significant Android competitor to Apple's iPad. Today that all changes as Google and Motorola unveil the world's first Honeycomb tablet: the Xoom. With better hardware than the original iPad, read on as we find out just how well the software stacks up. 

Can Google build a tablet OS that's as appliance-like as iOS but without compromising on its Android roots?

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YouTube has acquired web video production startup Next New Networks to help contributors to YouTube make successful videos.

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Appolicious – Smartphone users have only a slight inkling that their phones are vulnerable to the same security risks from which personal computers can suffer.

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AFP – YouTube announced that it bought Internet television company Next New Networks to improve content for the Google-owned video-sharing website.

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The AMD Radeon HD 6990, otherwise known as Antilles, is a card we have been expecting for some time now. In what’s become a normal AMD fashion, when they first introduced the Radeon HD 6800 series back in October, they also provided a rough timeline for the rest of the high-end members of the family. Barts would be followed by Cayman (6950/6970), which would be followed by the dual-GPU Antilles (6990). Ultimately Cayman ended up being delayed some, and as a result so was Antilles.

So while we’ve had to wait longer than we anticipated for Antilles/6990, the wait has finally come to an end. Today AMD is launching their new flagship card, retiring the now venerable 5970 and replacing it with a new dual-GPU monster powered by AMD’s recently introduced VLIW4 design. Manufactured on the same 40nm process as the GPUs in the 5970, AMD has had to go to some interesting lengths to improve performance here. And as we’ll see, it’s going to be a doozy in more ways than one.

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The tablet market today is a far more interesting place than it was just over a year ago. Since the launch of the iPad, there hasn’t been a real competitor to iOS in the tablet space. We’ve seen customized versions of Android for larger devices like the Galaxy Tab, but they’ve all had their fair share of limitations. In fact, Android releases up to Gingerbread were never really designed to be used on larger screens. But Honeycomb has the potential to change all that and it could be just the catalyst manufacturers need to come up with the next iPad-killer.

It’s been public knowledge that Honeycomb (v3.0) was going to be the next major release of Android after Gingerbread (v2.3). It all started when Andy Rubin showed up at the D: Dive Into Mobile event with a mysterious looking tablet that was later revealed to be the Motorola Xoom running Honeycomb. CES gave us a sneak peek at Xoom and a host of other tablets that would run Honeycomb. At the Honeycomb launch event a few weeks back, Google gave us a full-blown preview of the OS. Now, with the Xoom releasing this month, the time has come for Google's official answer to the iPad.

Honeycomb has been designed ground-up for use on tablets. Google also confirmed that Honeycomb is a tablet-only OS for the time being and that some of the new features would eventually transition over to phone versions of the OS. That’s where the next release of Android codenamed Ice Cream comes into picture; more on that later. Honeycomb represents Google’s first effort to be a serious contender in the tablet market. Make no mistake here Honeycomb is an absolutely massive release with a smorgasbord of new user and developer features; some of which are so well implemented that they could give iOS a run for it’s money. Without further ado, let us dive into the juicy bits.

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I've been working with MSI for nearly as long as AnandTech has been around. So when MSI came to us with a giveaway opportunity we jumped on it. The grand prize? A Sandy Bridge equipped MSI GT680R Notebook. The notebook is powered by a quad-core Core i7-2630QM which runs at 2.0GHz by default but can turbo up to 2.9GHz with only a single core active. 

The GT680R includes three USB 3.0 ports and a pair of 500GB 7200RPM drives in RAID-0. The system will ship with 8GB of DDR3 memory making it a pretty beefy desktop alternative. The integrated GeForce GTX 460M is paired with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory and it drives a high resolution 1920 x 1080 15.6-inch panel.

Read on for the full specs as well as details on how to enter.

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NETGEAR has introduced their latest 4×4 MIMO wireless bridge device designed specifically for video data. This isn't an area where we've focused a lot of time in the past, but let's will see how well the NETGEAR 3DHD stacks up to a couple other wireless bridging solutions. Can you reliably transmit high bitrate data and video over a wireless connection using the equipment?

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Macworld – For most people, Wallaby conjures up images of a kangaroo-like creature. In the halls of Adobe, though, Wallaby has taken on a more technical identity.

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jamie tips a story about MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy, who started a project five years ago, upon bringing his newborn son home from the hospital, to record his family’s movement and speech inside their house. Since then, Roy has used various techniques to analyze and distill the 200 terabytes of raw data into useful and interesting visualizations.
“For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word — like ‘water’ — was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the ‘word birth,’ something remarkable happened. ‘Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.’ In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.”
Roy also compiled videos showing each time his son used certain words over a period of many months, clearly illustrating how those parts of the child’s linguistic capabilities evolved over time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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For the past six months I've been working on research and testing for the next major AnandTech SSD article. I figured I had enough time to line up its release with the first samples of the next-generation of high end SSDs. After all, it seems like everyone was taking longer than expected to bring out their next-generation controllers. I should've known better.

At CES this year we had functional next-generation SSDs based on Marvell and SandForce controllers. The latter was actually performing pretty close to expectations from final hardware. Although I was told that drives wouldn't be shipping until mid-Q2, it was clear that preview hardware was imminent. It was the timing that I couldn't predict.

A week ago, two days before I hopped on a flight to Barcelona for MWC, a package arrived at my door. OCZ had sent me a preproduction version of their first SF-2500 based SSD: the Vertex 3 Pro. The sample was so early that it didn't even have a housing, all I got was a PCB and a note:

Read on for our full, in-depth preview of OCZ's Vertex 3 Pro.

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Remember the good ol’ days after the iPad’s release, when users could sign up for an unlimited 3G data plan at $30 per month with no contract? Well, if you’ve been clutching tight to your unlimited plan ever since AT&T switched to its tiered model, then you’re in luck: AT&T has confirmed that, when the iPad 2 arrives on Friday, the good times can keep on rollin’.

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InfoWorld – Adobe Systems is making available this evening a preview of its Wallaby technology, which enables developers to leverage Flash development skills to build HTML files that can run on systems without the need for the Flash Player, including Apple iOS devices.

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AndyAndyAndyAndy writes “Fortune had an interesting article recently about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans. ‘Under the cell phone industry’s peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.’ A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company a Thursday. The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps. The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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On Day 0 of this year's Mobile World Congress Samsung and NVIDIA announced that the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 will come to market with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 (T20) SoC. At the same time, the two quietly announced they would be working on a new superphone together also based on Tegra 2. At Samsung's press conference however all we saw was the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy S II, the latter using Samsung's own Exynos SoC.

So what happened to the NVIDIA based smartphone and why would Samsung bother with using Tegra if it already had an Exynos based smartphone? To understand why we need to look at the Galaxy S. At its MWC press conference Samsung mentioned that it sold 10 million Galaxy S phones in 2010. The Galaxy S II should sell at least as much, if not more, once it's officially introduced.

Exynos however is a brand new SoC, with a brand new GPU for Samsung. Meeting demand for the Galaxy S II in all markets across the world with an SoC that Samsung has never shipped is risky at best. If you saw our benchmarks yesterday you'll note that NVIDIA's Tegra 2 is a near equivalent in terms of CPU performance and notably better in GPU and Flash performance. In other words, Tegra 2 isn't a bad alternative.

Meet the GT-I9103:

The GT-I9100 is the normal Exynos based Galaxy S II, the I9103 is the Tegra 2 edition. As one of our readers (thanks sarge78), Samsung lists its own dual-core Application Processor in the Galaxy S II as not being used in all regions. It's too early to tell if that means that we'll get Tegra 2 or Exynos depending on physical region.

I suspect Samsung didn't want to confuse users by announcing both a Tegra 2 and an Exynos based superphone at MWC. An unknown user managed to benchmark the GT-I903 at MWC and submitted the data to the GLBenchmark database. The GT-I9103's performance looks comparable to the Atrix 4G, meaning it's going to deliver the same experience we've seen in our Optimus 2X and Atrix 4G articles.

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coondoggie writes “The community and team of scientists that help NASA prioritize space missions has come out with its exploration recommendations for the next decade: get to Mars, explore one of Jupiter’s moons and study Uranus. From the report: ‘The gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have been extensively studied by the Galileo and Cassini missions, respectively. But Uranus and Neptune represent a wholly distinct class of planet. While Jupiter and Saturn are made mostly of hydrogen, Uranus and Neptune have much smaller hydrogen envelopes. The bulk composition of these planets is dominated instead by heavier elements; oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur are the likely candidates. What little we know about the internal structure and composition of these “ice giant” planets comes from the brief flybys of Voyager 2. So the ice giants are one of the great remaining unknowns in the solar system: the only class of planet that has never been explored in detail.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The people at National Geographic have built a house modeled after the one in the movie UP! for a new TV series called How Hard Can It Be?. The house flew for about an hour and reached 10,000 feet. There was no report of anyone spotting The Beast of Paradise Falls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Anyone who has shopped for a power supply lately has likely come to the conclusion that 80 Plus Gold certification is only for expensive PSUs rated at more than 500W. While that is true in the broad sense, there are a few exceptions. SuperFlower for instance has a 350W 80 Plus Gold unit, and FSP Group even has a 250W model. Today, we have an interesting alternative from HuntKey rated at 300W. While the name may not be as familiar to most of our America audience, HuntKey is one of the five largest PSU ODMs in the world, with offices in Europe and Asia. They also have customers like Dell and Lenovo.

With a goal of creating a low-cost, high-efficiency PSU that doesn't sacrifice quality, we may start to hear more about HuntKey. Today we're looking at their Jumper 300W power supply. Read on to find out why HuntKey is more than just a purveyor of cheap products in China.

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We first met LucidLogix (now just Lucid) 2.5 years ago at IDF. The promise was vendor-agnostic multi-GPU setups with perfect performance scaling. The technology was announced at a very important time. Intel and NVIDIA were battling out support for SLI on Nehalem motherboards. NVIDIA didn't want SLI enabled on any non-NVIDIA chipsets, and Intel wasn't about to let NVIDIA build any chipsets for Nehalem. Lucid's Hydra technology seemed to be exactly what we needed to get around the legal holdup that kept Nehalem users from enjoying SLI.

Three things made Lucid's technology less interesting as time went on. Hydra took two years to come to market, NVIDIA enabled SLI on Intel platforms and single GPU performance got really, really good.

What made Lucid's Hydra tech possible was a software layer that intercepted OpenGL and DirectX calls from the CPU and directed them to a GPU of Lucid's choosing. While Hydra saw limited success, parts of the technology had another application.

Read on for our performance preview of Lucid's Virtu for Sandy Bridge platforms.

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