News

Archos announced they will release a 7-inch Android tablet made primarily for gamers. Lately a lot of high quality Android games have come out and Archos hopes that this will be a trigger for their success. We also talked few days ago about the new console OUYA, that will be Android based, so it looks like the Android gaming market is starting to grow rapidly. Many would describe the Archos GamePad as like an XL PS Vita and we can agree that they have some similarities but let’s not mix apples and pears. The Archos GamePad will run on Ice Cream Sandwich, so we can expect it to be able to handle all of the latest games for Android. At launch it will run on Jelly Bean and will not get the upgrade until more games become compatible with it.

After we announced few days ago that Nokia will be launching its Apollo series, featuring “Arrow”, “Phi” and “Atlas” models, today we have the first leaked photos of Arrow. The Nokia Lumia 820, should be a mid-range device that will run Windows Phone 8 as we can see in the pictures. These pictures show a fairly slim device with a white casing, one led on the back (probably a flash), and of course there is also a fairly big camera lens. We can also see in the pictures that it has some basic Microsoft software like Internet explorer, Microsoft Office and the Xbox software.

There is nothing like finding a new bug in a patch that is meant to fix another one. This appears to be something that Oracle has done though. After releasing a rushed security patch for a rather serious vulnerability in Java the same company that found the first flaw, Security Explorations, has found another one. The first flaw affected any web browser that had the Java plug-in running and extended across multiple operating systems as well. It was the sort of flaw that everyone remembers when the security of someone’s products is brought up. Having a single major vulnerability in your software (and with malware that uses it in the wild) is bad enough, but to find another one in your most recent version is just bad news.

Another day, another Windows 8 misconception to kill. This time we are hearing from obviously uninformed journalists that Windows 8 is bringing the age of the Hybrid touch/keyboard PC to the world. The problem with this statement is that they are about 6 years too late. The hybrid PC has been around in quantity since at least 2006 and in limited existence going even farther back than that. Microsoft originally sought to build a “tablet” empire based on notebooks with touch screens and full keyboards. To accomplish this they enlisted the help of the usual suspects (Lenovo, HP, etc.) and tried to push them onto the market; unfortunately the concept did not take off that well.