In a blog post today, Twitter announced that they're "experimenting with new ways of targeting ads," which is their way of saying they're planning to track you around the web—even when you leave Twitter—and relay that information to advertisers to craft better ads. Here's how to opt out.
    
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Our recent trip to NASA's Mission Control Center to find out how NASA steers the ISS around space junk yielded more than an awesome interview—it also gave me the opportunity to snap some excellent pictures of the rest of the goings-on in the flight control room. We weren't allowed down on the floor to take close-up pictures, but rest assured, that's definitely on my list. However, until I get that organized and cleared, here are some images of the flight controllers who keep manned space flight running!
Lee Hutchinson
The main display at the front of the control room shows the International Space Station's position over the Earth and its orbital track, as well as the ground stations currently within radio range.
15 more images in gallery
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The NY Times has a good piece on the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, which was put into place following the post-9/11 anthrax mailings. It quite literally scans every envelope, post card, and piece of junk mail — some 160 billion pieces of mail a year. These scanners probably know more about the mail you receive than you do.
The Mail Isolation program is really just a super-beefed-up version of the USPS “mail covers” program that has been around for about a century, explains the Times. Mail covers are warrantless requests for photos of the outside of specific recipients’ mail.
Basically, a law enforcement agency fills out the request, and for 30 days (extendable to 120 days), it receives scans of all mail related to the subject of the request. Only the outside of the mail is provided, as opening mail would require a warrant. Authorities maintain that no warrant is needed for information on the outside of a piece of mail, as there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy. The USPS can deny a mail covers request, but rarely does.
Postal Service sources tell the Times it gets around 15,000 to 20,000 mail covers requests a year related to suspected criminal activity. There are also requests related to national security concerns, but no numerical data is available on those.
That sounds an awful lot like the not-very-transparent transparency reports issued by companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook in the wake of the NSA revelations. Those companies released statistical data on requests for customer information related to law enforcement, but were not permitted from revealing information about classified requests from federal agencies.
A former FBI agent explains to the Times the benefits and potential concerns about the mail-scanning program.
Calling it “a treasure trove of information,” he explains that you can glean a lot of details just from sifting through a person’s mailbox. “I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”
However, he cautions that a virtually unregulated system like this “can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”
Cheap and effective, just how we like it.
Many of us can’t even pass by a glass of water or toilet without our phones leaping straight into them, causing often irreparable damage and a whole lot of irritation. So the beach, with its crashing waves and insidious sand, is a veritable wet and gritty pit of despair, waiting to claim your electronics. You can find plenty of waterproof special bags on the market, but a regular sliding bag will do the trick, too.
Our stalwart colleagues at Consumer Reports are all about testing out the best options there are. As such, they stacked up specialty bags offering maximum protection for your electronics against a Hefty Slider bag, and found that the grocery store staple did just as well as its pricier pals.
The Hefty Slider bag ($0.10 to $0.13 depending on size) was pitted against the DryCase, and larger DryCase Tablet ($29 and $38, respectively); the TrendyDigital WaterGuard Waterproof Case ($16); the Seattle Sports Dry Doc Waterproof e-Tablet Case ($16); and the Lavod LMB-011 Waterproof Bag ($19).
All of the special bags stayed nice and dry inside after a quick dunk in the water, as well as keeping sand from infiltrating the electronics’ special bits. But then again, so did the Hefty bag.
Each of the bags allowed users to swipe and press screens, as well as control volume and brightness controls. They even let testers take photos through the bags — although that’s only good if you don’t mind your photos coming out a bit cloudy.
A nice tight vacuum seal worked best for actually using the devices, some of which come with a hand pump to get the air out. Even with a normal plastic bag it’s possible to close the bag most of the way and then push the rest of the air out before closing it completely.
Bag it up if you’re going to the beach or the neighborhood pool — but remember to wipe off any sand or water clinging to the outside of the bags before taking your devices out again at home.
Protect your gadgets from sand, water, and other potential hazards [Consumer Reports]
A record of what time you were in your car and how fast you were going could be bad in the wrong hands or if you’re an irresponsible driver, but in the case of this dad, it saved him from fifteen years to life in prison.
He came home from a late-night shift as a nursing aide to find the infant in her swing, not breathing. Her mother was asleep. He rushed the infant to the hospital, and mistakenly told authorities that he had found her in her car seat, instead of seated in the swing. Changing his story brought suspicion on him.
There were two theories regarding how the seven-month-old suffocated: a pathologist testified that she could have fallen asleep in her swing and suffocated as she slumped down, since babies aren’t really equipped to sleep sitting up. The prosecution accused the father of holding the baby’s nose to make her cry and wake her mother. (Why do that? He wanted sex, but the mother wouldn’t be very happy to see him if he woke her up.)
Data from the Snapshot device showed that the car was turned off, then turned on again only three minutes later: just enough time to discover that the baby wasn’t breathing, wake her mother, and rush the infant out to the car. The jury only deliberated for an hour, and the father was cleared of all charges.
This was the first use of a Snapshot device in any kind of criminal trial.
With help from Snapshot insurance device, Parma Heights man is cleared of murdering his 7-month-old daughter [Cleveland Plain Dealer]
On the Xbox 360, your Xbox Live reputation is a simple five-star rating that is often ignored by the community at large. On the Xbox One, though, the reputation system will get a complete overhaul that will use more detailed monitoring and reporting tools to separate antisocial players from the rest of the community.
Xbox Community Manager Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb first mentioned the reputation system overhaul during last month's E3. He discussed how players would be grouped into broad categories of "Good Player," "Need Improvement," or "Avoid Me" based on feedback from fellow players and from automated logging of things like "block" or "mute" actions. In a new interview with the UK's Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft Senior Product Manager Mike Lavin discussed the system in a little more detail.
Players who prefer to stick with a party of known people in their friends lists won't be affected by the reputation system changes, Lavin said. Those playing with random, anonymous strangers, though, will quickly find that they are matched up with people who have similar reputation scores.
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Linux 3.10 was released by Linus Torvalds last night, bringing with it a new method of SSD caching and some upgrades to the Radeon graphics driver. "This release has been pretty typical and not particularly prone to problems," Torvalds wrote in his e-mail announcing the release. "No major new subsystems this time around, although there are individual new features."
As you may recall, Linux 3.9 (released in April) included an experimental feature called dm-cache that allows SSDs to act as caches for other storage devices. An additional SSD caching technology known as Bcache was also in the works for more than a year and has now merged into the Linux kernel with the newly released 3.10.
"Linux 3.10 will include the 'block-layer cache' Bcache, which can be used to configure one disk as a cache for another disk; a fast SSD, for example, could be used as a cache for a slower hard drive with more capacity," H-Online editor Thorsten Leemhuis wrote in his thorough roundup of the new kernel version."This kind of SSD cache can speed up access to frequently read data and take on write requests until a quieter moment when they can be written to the slower disk."
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Over the weekend, the intrepid software tinkerers over at Android Police picked apart last week's Android 4.3 leak. The screenshots were initially published on SamMobile without much context, but Android Police has managed to identify some of the expected new features.
Android 4.3 is only a minor update, but it may make a big difference for end users. As we picked out from the leaked screenshots last week, Google has included a new Wi-Fi power setting that leaves the Wi-Fi on all the time. As Android Police explains:
…at least partially on, all the time. Now I know you might immediately scream "MY BATTERY LIFES!!" but this will probably save battery. Google wants you to leave Wi-Fi on so that apps can get your location, but consider that the other option for location is firing up the GPS chip, which is a battery's worst enemy.
The important thing to keep in mind if you hate this, you can turn it off. The option is just buried under an "advanced" menu. Turning off "Scanning always available" will make "off" for Wi-Fi really be "off."
There is also plenty of evidence pointing to a newly revamped Camera application, which has shipped with the most recent Google Play Editions of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and HTC One. Bluetooth LE will be a part of the update as well, and this should help make the technology less of a battery sucker. Overall, the leaks associated with Android 4.3 demonstrate a theme—a desire to make the OS a bit more energy-efficient.
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A campaign that forces sites running the Apache Web server to install highly malicious software on visitor's PCs has compromised more than 40,000 Web addresses in the past nine months, 15,000 of them in the month of May alone.
The figures, published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset, are the latest indication that an attack on websites running the Internet's most popular Web server continues to build steam. Known as Darkleech, the rogue Apache module gets installed on compromised servers and turns legitimate websites into online mine fields that expose unsuspecting visitors to a host of dangerous exploits. More than 40,000 domains and website IPs have been commandeered since October, 15,000 of which were active at the same time in May, 2013 alone. In the last week alone, Eset has detected at least 270 different websites exposing users to attacks.
Sites that come under the spell of Darkleech redirect certain visitors to malicious websites that host attack code spawned by the notorious Blackhole exploit kit. The fee-based package available in underground forums makes it easy for novices to exploit vulnerabilities in browsers and browser plug-ins. Web visitors who haven't installed updates patching those flaws get silently infected with a variety of dangerous malware titles. Among the malware that Darkleech pushes is a "Nymaim," piece of ransomware that demands a $300 payment to unlock encrypted files from a victim's machine. Other malware titles that get installed include Pony Loader and Sirefef.
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I've talked some about the sweet support for node and PHP in Azure. You can also File | New | Node.js express application in WebMatrix, or run WordPress and get intellisense as well.
"I installed windows just so i can use PTVS" - Comment on Hacker News
But I'm consistently shocked that folks forget about Python at Microsoft. I am a C# person, myself, but the Developer Division at Microsoft loves their languages. C++, VB, C#, F#, etc and they aren't messing about when they get serious about a language.
One of the least-known and most-kick-butt free products we have is PTVS - Python Tools for Visual Studio. Whether you're just interested in learning Python or you're a hardcore PhD who wants mixed-language Python and C++ debugging or somewhere in between, you gotta check this out. (Seriously, the mixed-mode debugging thing can't be overstressed...)
Here's my VS2013 after installing PyTools (PTVS). I've got IronPython which is Python running under the .NET CLR, but I've also got Django apps as well as a regular CPython or making a new project from existing code.
You can see that PTVS knows what Python engines I have installed, and I can easily switch between them. Here you can see that VS is refreshing the auto-completion (intellisense) databases for each version.
There's also a complete REPL inside Visual Studio for each:
Maybe you're a Django (one of Python's Web Frameworks) web developer, you can use VS to develop your app.
Go File New | Django App, then make a new Python Virtual Environment from the Solution Explorer, and watch Visual Studio freaking installed pip for you (the Python package manager). It's very seamless.
Which gives me this:
Then I right click on "dev" and just like NuGet (except this is Python, so pip) I install django:
Django is massive, so this took a while, but still! And.....I've accomplished Hello World in Django. Well, Hello Django, at least, launched from Visual Studio.
You should feel free to go and run through the whole Django Tutorial if you like and even deploy your app to Azure! You can host Django on a regular Azure Web Site, or a Virtual Machine if you want more control.
You can even interactively debug Python running in Azure on Linux from your Visual Studio instance! Check out Steve do just that at PyCon in this YouTube video.
There's a bunch of great educational and quick start Tutorials on the Python Tools YouTube Channel, they are a great resource to bookmark.
You can attach to remote Python processes over SSL and debug if you like.
Let's get real here for a second. Lots of projects plug stuff into Visual Studio. You may have made it this far into the post and be saying "oh, wah wah, this thing sets up some batch files and some syntax highlighting and calls itself a full-featured Python IDE."
Um, no. This is the best of VS and the best of Python and I'm blown away. Check this out. PTVS knows that I'm doing unit testing here and they've integrated Python Unit Testing with the VS Unit Testing UI.
This is debugging, remote debugging, cross language debugging, tool tips, watches, locals, call stacks, unit testing, full REPL with inline graphics, profiling, cloud publish, best of class CPython support, and so much more.
If you're into Python or knows someone who is, for reals, drink it in and get on board at https://pytools.codeplex.com. Check out their samples. They've got Python talking to Kinect, Python talking to Excel and more. Their PTVS Documentation is really good as well.
Just getting started? Well, go Learn Python The Hard Way.
Here's the complete install instrucitons. You need VS, the PTVS, and some Python.
Finally, explore the Resources and Docs for Python Tools for Visual Studio, including, but not limited to Editing, Refactoring, Unit Tests, Django, IPython notebook and Azure cloud computing, Kinect for Python and Pyvot - an Excel to Python bridge.
Does the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota need to get bigger? It’s only the biggest mall in the country, so of course it does! The mall just broke ground on a $250 million addition that adds 50 stores, an atrium, an office tower, a luxury hotel, and a massive and fancy “food hall” to replace the current food court. The owners ultimately plan $2.5 billion in additions in the coming decade, adding one new thing per year.
Once the planned expansions are done, the mall will also have 300 more shops, an ice rink, a water park (not to be confused with the amusement park it already has) office space, medical office space, and more underground parking.
By doubling in space, the Mall of America might be able to take the top spot for largest mall in the world. The current title holder is the New South China Mall in Dongguan, China. It has 5 million square feet of space for stores, more than twice as much as the Mall of America, but is almost entirely empty. People really only visit its IMAX theater and fast-food restaurants.
The Mall of America certainly doesn’t have that problem. It brings 42 million visitors per year, many of whom are tourists from other countries. But they have to keep it fresh. “The overarching goal is to always keep the attraction fresh and continue to enhance it,” a mall exec told Pioneer Press. “That’s what Disney and all the great attractions do. You never keep it the same.”
I have never been to the Mall of America, so all of my impressions of it come from John Hodgman’s story about it for the radio program “This American Life” eight years ago, which has almost nothing to do with the Mall of America whatsoever. You should listen to it anyway.
Mall of America set for super-sizing [Pioneer Press]
First the good news about the upcoming Xbox 360 version of GTA V (or Grand Theft Auto 5, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) — even though it’s shipping on two discs, you’ll be able to play the whole game without swapping discs in and out. The bad news, especially for those with smaller or full-up hard drives — GTA V will require that you install the entire 8 GB of the first disc, whether you want to or not.
While this is not a huge problem for users with ample hard drive space, people with the 4 GB versions of the console will need to add a USB drive to their Xbox just to play the game.
The 4 GB Xbox is still available for sale and, with a price tag of only $199, is a popular choice for casual gamers. As of today, it’s the top-selling version of the console available on Amazon. The Xbox 360 initially required the purchase of proprietary hard drives for people looking to store downloaded content, but Microsoft later eased that requirement to allow USB flash drives.
“In order to provide the best possible experience for such a massive and detailed world, the game will have installation requirements on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation®3 systems,” writes publisher Rockstar games in a Q&A on the game. “For Xbox 360, Grand Theft Auto V will ship on two discs; Disc 1 will be used for a one-time mandatory install and Disc 2 will be used to play the game…
“This initial install will require an Xbox 360 Hard Drive or an external 16GB USB flash drive with at least 8 GB of free space. If using a USB flash drive it must be at least USB 2.0 with a minimum 15mb/s read speed and formatted for Xbox 360 use. A new USB flash drive is recommended to ensure optimum performance.”
So by adding this install requirement into the game, Rockstar is effectively increasing the price for users who have to go out and purchase an adequate USB flash drive to store this game.
The PS3 version of the game, which only requires one disc, will auto-install on the console before it can be played. PS3 users without sufficient hard drive space will need to make room if they want to play GTA V.
Rockstar confirms Grand Theft Auto 5 comes on two Xbox 360 discs, has mandatory install, more [Eurogamer via TheVerge]
As the summer days drone on, Motorola leaks more and more information about its forthcoming Android handset. The "superphone" was merely teased at last months' AllThingsDigital D11 conference, but it looks like Motorola has gone ahead and flipped the switch on its advertising campaign for the Moto X.
Ad Age posts that Motorola is heavily playing up the fact that the handset was designed and assembled in the US, with a photo of a happy couple enjoying typical American summer fun. You can check out the advertisement in its entirety up above, but it will also be published in tomorrow's editions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal to coincide with the upcoming Independence Day holiday. Nothing says patriotism like an Android handset made in America.
In the ad you can see the company's new logo, which is a bit more colorful than its predecessor. Motorola also refers to itself as "A Google company," which should help establish the brand with consumers who may have missed the change in ownership.
Read on Ars Technica | Comments
The UK's biggest hotel chain is set to open a new line of budget city hotels that provide app-based check-ins and improved connectivity for people who pride location and design over space. Whitbread will open its first Premier Inn 'hub' in Covent Garden, London in the fall of 2014, compacting a bed, bathroom, and work space into a room measuring just 123 square-feet.
The Pebble smartwatch's claim to fame is its record-breaking Kickstarter campaign — 85,000 units sold and over $10 million collected — but the device is also known for being incredibly difficult to purchase thanks to months-long pre-order lists and missed ship dates. That's about to change, however: the company is ready to start selling watches directly through traditional retail channels now that most Pebbles have shipped to backers. Starting today, Best Buy will start selling Pebble smartwatches online for $149.99, and they'll be available in stores starting Sunday, July 7th thanks to an "exclusive retail launch partnership."
By offering the watches through retail before fulfilling all Kickstarter orders, Pebble may face the wrath...
Though the HTC One S is still a young phone at just over a year old, its update cycle has come to an end. HTC tells us that the One S will no longer be receiving updates, keeping it on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean and Sense 4+ at the latest. The phone's 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM should have made it powerful enough to handle any Android releases coming down the pipeline right now, but the lack of continued updates for an Android device remains — unfortunately — unsurprising.
The brevity of support reiterates what's still one of the biggest issues for Android devices. Outside of Google's official Nexus line, prolonged support has been all but impossible to come by. But the story is different elsewhere in the smartphone market: Apple...
Smart TV providers who wish to use HTML5 for their streaming ecosystems have been running into a wall with YouTube, according to Korea's ETNews. It said Google has insisted TV makers place the app on their systems' main page and pass a Smart TV "browser conformity test" at its US headquarters, too. As a result, companies like Samsung have had to wait up to three months for YouTube certification. A key part of this allegation is that that TV makers who opted for Mountain View's Android-based Google TV instead of HTML5 wouldn't face such problems, but meanwhile, we've contacted Google for its take on the matter.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Google
Source: ETNews
Chris BenardReally cool.
MENLO PARK, CA—Building 17 of Facebook's headquarters sits on what was once a Sun Microsystems campus known fondly as "Sun Quentin." It now houses a team of Facebook engineers in the company's electrical lab. Everyday, they push forward the company vision of how data center hardware should be built. These engineers constantly bench-test designs for their built-in-house server hardware—essentially putting an end to server hardware as we know it.
Ars recently visited Facebook's campus to get a tour of the server lab from Senior Manager of Hardware Engineering Matt Corddry, leader of Facebook's server hardware design team. What's happening at Facebook's lab isn't just affecting the company's data centers, it's part of Facebook's contribution to the Open Compute Project (OCP), an effort that hopes to bring open-source design to data center server and storage hardware, infrastructure, and management interfaces across the world.
Facebook, Amazon, and Google are all very picky about their server hardware, and these tech giants mostly build it themselves from commodity components. Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, was instrumental in launching the Open Compute Project because he saw the waste in big cloud players reinventing things they could share. Frankovsky felt that bringing the open-source approach Facebook has followed for software to the hardware side could save the company and others millions—both in direct hardware costs and in maintenance and power costs.
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After the verdicts were read, the San Diego City Attorney’s office criticized the defendant, saying it had offered him options that would have allowed everyone to avoid a trial.
One such offer required the defendant to perform 32 hours of community service, attend an 8-hour seminar by the “Corrective Behavior Institute,” pay Bank of America $6,299, and surrender his driver’s license for three year period.”
Shortly before the trial began, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith tried to sweeten the deal, allowing him to plead guilty to one vandalism charge, serve three years probation, pay an undetermined amount of restitution, spend 24 hours cleaning up graffiti, and surrender his driver’s license for two years.
“I didn’t see how that was fair,” the acquitted chalker told the San Diego Reader. “Why should I have to give up my license for two years and serve three year’s probation just for exercising my First Amendment rights?”
The judge in the case came under scrutiny when he ruled that the defendant and his lawyer could not even attempt to argue that the defendant was exercising his First Amendment rights in protesting the oft-maligned bank. The judge said that these were allegations of vandalism, and that the laws on vandalism don’t include any exemptions for protest.
Others had claimed that the City Attorney’s office was targeting this particular protestor because he’d targeted Bank of America, but Goldsmith denies any such motivation.
“We prosecute vandalism and theft cases regardless of who the perpetrator or victim might be,” Goldsmith explained. “We don’t decide, for example, based upon whether we like or dislike banks. That would be wrong under the law.”
San Diego’s mayor was also caught up in the hubbub surrounding the case, making public statements in defense of the accused, saying he’d done no damage and had used water-soluble chalk for his drawings.
Just how fair were those plea offers in the case of the anti-big-bank protester? [San Diego Reader]
San Diego jury finds protester not guilty in chalk-vandalism case [L.A. Times]
In February, we got our first look at Mozilla's Firefox OS, a smartphone operating system built on the open web. On the first two phones, the ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch, it was a laggy, terrible experience. We'd hoped that Mozilla would improve that by launch, but apparently not: though the ZTE Open will go on sale in Spain tomorrow, we found the phone as unimpressive as ever at today's Mozilla event.
It goes by the name of Hashima, or Gunkanjima ("Battleship Island"), or even "The Dead Island", since it inspired the water-locked cyberterrorist HQ in Skyfall. As you can see for yourself, courtesy of the new Google Street View (and official "making of" video) embedded after the break, it's a very a real place off the coast of Japan's Nagasaki Peninsula, and it's even lonelier than its fictional counterpart in the Bond film (which wasn't actually filmed there). There are no tourist offices or giant Oedipus Complexes, as far as we can see, just long stretches of overgrown roads and collapsing apartment blocks that once housed 5,000 people, before they abandoned the island in 1974 following the demise of its coal industry. It took a Google employee two hours to map the place and preserve its crumbling visage for posterity using a special backpack, but don't be surprised if you want to leave it after just a few minutes.
Filed under: GPS, Internet, Google
Source: Google's Japanese Blog
Things break down when people start to analyze these slides. A few news sources have zeroed in on the claim on that last slide that there are 117,675 "records" in PRISM as of April 5th. But, there's some disagreement about what the hell that means. The Washington Post says that these are "active surveillance targets" but it's unclear how they know that. It's possible that there's other, as yet unrevealed info that would support that, but even then there's confusion. How "active" is active? And, what constitutes a "record" anyway? No one seems to be providing any answers. 
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In an interview Sunday with the Associated Press, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said that until NSA leaker Edward Snowden finds himself at an Ecuadorean embassy or sets foot in the South American state, his asylum petition cannot be processed. Further, Correa suggested that Russian authorities—who have essentially played dumb, saying that they have no jurisdiction over an international transit zone in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport—seem to be stymying Ecuador’s every effort to get Snowden out.
"This is the decision of Russian authorities," Correa told the AP. "[Snowden] doesn't have a passport. I don't know the Russian laws, I don't know if he can leave the airport, but I understand that he can't. At this moment he's under the care of the Russian authorities. If he arrives at an Ecuadorean Embassy, we'll analyze his request for asylum."
Apparently, Ecuador had requested that the Kremlin allow Snowden to fly commercially to Vietnam or Singapore, where Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino had been travelling. Presumably, had the leaker been able to meet Patino, Snowden could have been escorted to the nearest embassy and have his asylum application processed more quickly.
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A UK court has ruled that Microsoft's SkyDrive product infringes on a trademark owned by the British Sky Broadcasting Group, which operates under the name Sky. The ruling is valid across the entire European Union and could force Microsoft to pay for use of the SkyDrive name, or in a worst-case scenario, to rebrand the service throughout most of Europe. In part, the ease of confusion between SkyDrive's cloud services and Sky's broadband services led the England and Wales High Court to rule in favor of Sky, which holds the the "Sky" trademark for matters of software and digital communications within the EU.
A few weeks ago we reviewed Hisense’s Sero 7 Lite, a new budget Android tablet that isn’t very good until you consider that it costs $99. The tablet that Hisense really wants you to see, though, is the $149 Sero 7 Pro. This tablet runs a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC, has a 1280×800 7-inch screen, 1GB of RAM, and runs Android 4.2. If these specs sound familiar to you, it’s probably because they’re identical to those of the Nexus 7 tablet that Google and Asus will sell you for $199.
Using the Sero 7 Pro is very similar to using the Nexus 7 with Android 4.2 installed, so for this review we’ll be focusing on a side-by-side comparison with the tablet that Google has been selling for about a year now. If you’re buying a 7-inch Android tablet today, should you stick with the Nexus or save yourself the $50?
| Specs at a glance: Hisense Sero 7 Pro | |
|---|---|
| Screen | 1280×800 7" (216 ppi) IPS touchscreen |
| OS | Android 4.2.1 "Jelly Bean" |
| CPU | 1.2GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 (1.3GHz in single-core mode) |
| RAM | 1GB |
| GPU | Nvidia Tegra 3 |
| Storage | 8GB NAND flash (expandable via microSD) |
| Networking | 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC, GPS |
| Ports | Micro USB, mini HDMI, headphones, microSD card |
| Size | 7.87" × 4.95" × 0.43" (199.9 x 125.7 x 10.9 mm) |
| Weight | 0.79 lbs (358 g) |
| Battery | 4000 mAh |
| Starting price | $149 |
| Other perks | 2MP front camera, 5MP rear camera, power adapter |
The screen, the SoC, and the RAM are probably the three biggest hardware components that will affect your tablet experience, and the Nexus 7 and the Sero 7 Pro share them all: a five-point 1280×800 IPS touchscreen, a quad-core Tegra 3 SoC that can run at up to 1.3GHz, and 1GB of RAM. The Sero 7 also includes the same 8GB of internal storage as the original entry-level Nexus 7, but Google's more recent $199 model has since been bumped to 16GB of storage.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has signed a deal with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to build chips for its mobile devices. TSMC will begin producing chips for Apple starting in 2014, but Apple will continue to rely on Samsung as the primary supplier for its mobile processors through next year. According to the Journal's sources, the transition has been slow-going because of glitches at TSMC that have prevented its output from meeting Apple's power and speed standards.
The transition comes as Apple is trying to rely less and less upon competitor Samsung as a component supplier. Cupertino has already stopped buying iPhone screens from Samsung and has pulled back on displays for the iPad as well. Back in 2012 reports...
