BT fibre broadband cable UK rollout accelerated

Telecoms provider BT is accelerating its fibre broadband rollout. It now plans to offer "super-fast" internet speeds to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014. A report found the UK ranks 25th in the world in terms of broadband speed The target is a year ahead of its original plan.  The firm says its main product will offer maximum download speeds about 10 times faster than at present, at 70-100Mbps on average. That will help it compete against Virgin Media's 100Mbps offer. BT says it is employing an additional 520 engineers and bringing forward £300m of investment to achieve the goal. The company says six million...

Read More

Amazon Boosts Kindle Fire Production

By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal Amazon is boosting production of its Kindle Fire tablet, thanks to immense pre-order demand. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said the company is "increasing capacity and building millions more than we'd already planned." The Kindle Fire is Amazon's first Android tablet device; the device launches Nov. 15 and costs $199. It's not the most tricked-out tablet -- it ships with just 8GB of memory (and no expandable memory), no camera, and no 3G, but its sub-$200 price tag and the fact that it runs Android (albeit Android 2.3) appears to be more than enough to get people riled up. Amazon...

Read More

iPad 3's High-Res Display a Technical Challenge

By Ben Camm-Jones, Macworld-U.K. LG Display and Samsung are facing a tough challenge, sources in the manufacturing industry have reported -- making a high-resolution display for the iPad 3. Cnet reports that Apple is aiming for a much higher resolution of 2048-by-1536 pixels on the next-generation iPad, four times the current 1024 x 768 resolution of the first- and second-generation models. This will give the iPad 3 a 264 ppi (pixels per inch) display, close to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S' of 960 by 640, which works out to 326 ppi. However, an insider told Cnet that LG Display and Samsung haven't begun manufacturing the displays...

Read More

A Windows 8 smartphone could be coming next year

by Eric Mack A Chinese company says it will bring the yet-to-be-released Windows 8 to the small screen.  The XPPhone 2 is slated to run Windows 7 and 8. (Credit: ITG) In Technology Group has seemingly dedicated itself to merging the Windows PC experience with the smartphone--something the company has dubbed the "post-smartphone." They started with phones running Windows XP a few years ago, and by earlier this year, ITG's XPPhone was available with Windows 7. Now it says a far slimmer, lighter, and energy efficient XPPhone 2 that will run both Windows 7 and the PC version of Windows 8 (once it's released) is in the works. Though...

Read More

Minecraft awarded GameCity videogame arts prize

By Leo KelionTechnology reporter  Minecraft allows players to manipulate a randomly generated landscape Minecraft is the winner of a new arts award for computer games.The prize was announced at the finale of the GameCity videogame culture festival in Nottingham.The title is the work of an independent Swedish company, Mojang. Players have to build objects out of blocks in an open environment.The game was selected over rivals from big name publishers, including Valve and Electronic Arts' Portal 2 and Microsoft's Ilomilo."It's a great honour to be compared to those games," said Markus Persson, Mojang's founder."Winning this award...

Read More

MHL demo: Samsung Galaxy II turned home-entertainment system

 by Dong Ngo  The MHL standard allows for turning a mobile device into a full-featured home entertainment and presentation system when coupled with an HDTV. (Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET) Around about this time in 2010, I blogged about WHDI and its potential to change the way we entertain ourselves in a big way when this wireless display is implemented in mobile devices. Now a year later, that reality is still in the distant future. Fortunately, there's something else to take its place. It's already here, and chances are your phone and HDTV at home come with it. It does require a wire, however, but that's a good thing. The technology...

Read More

Three Surprising Things About Hard Drive Defragging

By Rick Broida Back in the bad old days of computing, hard-drive defragmentation was a big deal. You needed a quality third-party “defragger,” and you needed to run it regularly—at least once a month—to ensure optimal system performance. Times have changed. Although computer files still get split into fragments and scattered across your hard drive’s platters, the computers and drives themselves are so much faster now that fragmentation isn’t the same performance-wrecking problem it once was. What’s more, if you’re a Windows 7 user, you really shouldn’t have to worry about fragmentation at all. Check out these three...

Read More

Google TV gets major Honeycomb update

by Matthew Moskovciak  (Credit: Google) A year after Google TV first hit the market, Google has announced the first major update to the Google TV platform.The latest update is built on Android's Honeycomb operating system and Google promises a significantly simplified user interface. The update also finally enables Google TV products to access the Android Market and Google says there will be 30 TV-optimized apps at launch. From the released screenshots, the new interface certainly looks to be a big improvement on last year's Google TV experience. There's a new section called TV and Movies, which presents a browsing-friendly...

Read More