Microsoft Xbox one Review & Giveaway

The Xbox One is a bit of a beast.

Once you get used to it, though, it’s not actually that big. It’s taller and fatter than a Blu-ray player or Sky box, but not dissimilar in size to the old Xbox 360 Elite. Once you have it sitting under the TV it’s surprisingly unobtrusive, and the new, squarer Kinect is more compact and more solid on the surface than the first-generation model. The console still needs a separate power brick, which is almost the same size as the one supplied with the Xbox Slim.

Connecting everything up isn’t a challenge. The Kinect plugs into its own dedicated socket, there’s an HDMI out to your TV and an HDMI in for your PVR or set-top-box, two USB ports, an Ethernet socket and an optical out for your soundbar or AV amplifier. The Xbox One doesn’t output much heat, even under load, and it’s very quiet in normal use, with only a small, high-pitched hum to alert you that it’s running. Start playing Ryse: Son of Rome or Forza 5 and the noise levels pick up, but this is Microsoft’s quietest Xbox yet.

The Xbox One is a bit of a beast

Internally, it’s based on an 8-core AMD Jaguar APU which is broadly similar – bar a few customisations – to the one found in the PS4. The big differences are clock speeds, with the Xbox One running at 1.75GHz to the Sony’s 1.6Ghz, and the number of cores in the built-in GPU. The Xbox One has 12 of AMD’s GCN compute units, with a total of 768 shaders. The PS4 has 18, which gives it a total of 1152 shaders. This gives the PS4 a considerable advantage on raw graphics horsepower, and one that the Xbox One’s higher GPU clock speed, at 854Mhz to 800Mhz, won’t compensate for. 

To make things worse for Microsoft, while both consoles have 8GB of RAM, the PS4 comes packing 5500Mhz GDDR5 to the Xbox One’s 2133MHz DDR3. That gives the PS4 a lot more bandwidth between the CPU, GPU and system memory, and while the Xbox One has 32MB of faster embedded SRAM to cache data and reduce any bottlenecks, that still gives the PS4 a powerful theoretical advantage. Finally, while the PS4 can throw most of its resources at games, the Xbox One is holding a proportion back for the operating system and Kinect. 

The first thing to say is that this doesn’t feel like a huge issue at the moment. Xbox One games like Forza 5 and Ryse look fantastic, run smoothly and have all the visual detail, overblown lighting and rich surfacing effects you might expect from a next-generation game. There is an issue with resolution, where key cross-platform titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4 are running at 720p on the Xbox One and at 1080p/900p on PS4, upscaled to 1080p for TV output. If this is the way things go it’s not necessarily a huge disaster, and at normal viewing distances on a below 46-inch TV you may struggle to see what all the fuss is about. 

Yet this might matter in the future. We can’t see a situation happening where big franchises like Call of Duty, FIFA or Assassin’s Creed use noticeably different assets and effects on PS4 and Xbox One, but Sony may pull away when it comes to the exclusives, as it did with Uncharted 3, The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls on the last-generation systems. We can’t predict the future, of course, but unless you’re determined to pixel peep then both consoles deliver a sizeable and appreciable improvement on their predecessor.

Xbox One: Controller

With the best console controller ever made as a foundation, it was unlikely that the Xbox One would run amiss here, but the new Xbox One controller improves on the Xbox 360’s in a number of ways.

In the hand it’s lighter but still very familiar, with a similar layout of sticks and buttons. The thumbsticks have a textured ridge around the pad that adds a little extra grip, and the sticks themselves feel slightly tighter, more precise.

The new Xbox One controller

The triggers curve slightly outwards and the bumpers are larger, with all four fitting more naturally under the fingers. The D-Pad has a lighter, more defined feel, while the Start and Back buttons are now Menu and View, though in games they are still used in much the same way. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine how Microsoft could improve it.

The surprise hit feature, however, is the inclusion of the new ‘impulse trigger’ motors. The Xbox One controller still has rumble feedback in the grips, but the introduction of rumble in the triggers is a brilliant move, best enjoyed in Forza 5 where the rumbling on the accelerator and the brake adds more than you might think to the feeling of immersion. 

How do I win the Xbox One?

You may enter by submitting your name and email address. You’ll receive one entry simply by doing so.

After that, you’ll also be offered various methods to earn additional entries. They range from sharing a link to this giveaway on social networks; to commenting or visiting a specific page. The more you participate, the higher your chances of winning! You will receive 5 additional entries into the giveaway for every successful referral via your shared links.

Enter The Giveaway

Facebook, Google, others issue open letter to Obama for surveillance reforms Reuters, December 09, 2013

Eight U.S. web giants have joined hands to start a public campaign for new limits on how governments collect user information amid concerns of growing online surveillance.

The companies Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc,
 Facebook Inc, Twitter, LinkedIn Corp, YahooInc and AOL Inc issued an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama and Congress to bring in reforms and restrictions on surveillance activities.

Documents leaked by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency had penetrated and perhaps targeted some of the companies, prompting Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to increase the amount of encryption.

(Also see: Barack obama not allowed to have iphone)

The letter said the companies understood that governments need to protect their citizens' safety and security, but they believed the current laws and practices need to be reformed.

The 'Reform Government Surveillance' campaign details five major concerns including limiting governments' authority to collect users' information, transparency about government demands and avoiding conflicts among governments.

Obama said last week he intends to propose NSA reforms to reassure Americans that their privacy is not being violated by the agency.

"The security of users' data is critical, which is why we've invested so much in encryption and fight for transparency around government requests for information," Google CEO Larry Page was quoted on the website.

"This is undermined by the apparent wholesale collection of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world. It's time for reform and we urge the U.S. government to lead the way."

In a step aimed at reassuring nervous users abroad, last week, Microsoft pledged to fight in court any attempt by U.S. intelligence agencies to seize its foreign business customers' data under American surveillance laws.

Why Barack Obama is not allowed to have an iPhone

US President Barack Obama admitted Wednesday he was not allowed to have an iPhone owing to security fears explaining why he is sometimes seen with a bulky super secure Blackberry.

"I'm not allowed for security reasons to have an iPhone," Obama told a group of young people at the White House for an event promoting his health care law.
He added that his daughters Sasha and Malia spend a lot of time on their iPhones.

Blackberry is renowned for its strong security encryption one reason why it is still popular in official Washington, even as the device loses market share to other smart phones including those manufactured by Apple.

The security measures on Obama's specially adapted Blackberry came under new scrutiny this year following claims that US spies had eavesdropped on the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

(Also see: Sony Playstation 4 Giveaway)

Within days of being inaugurated president, Obama won his battle with the Secret Service to hang on to his Blackberry, despite fears that it was vulnerable to being hacked, would give away his whereabouts and amid worries that anything he writes could eventually be grist for congressional investigations.

He has been seen scrolling down his messages in his limousine as he travels around.

The president often privately talks of how frustrated he is about the White House "bubble" which makes it very difficult to communicate with normal people or to get information from the outside world that is not filtered for him by aides or the press. Aides say his Blackberry is a way to escape that confinement.

The White House says the president's personal email address was strictly limited to a small list of senior officials and personal friends, but will not detail the encryption devices that are used to secure his communications.

Glider Gloves (Urban Style) Review and Giveaway

Initial Impressions

My initial impressions of the Glider Gloves are good. It features a combination of clean, elegant design and solid construction quality.

Glider Gloves (Urban Style) design come packaged in a thin, plastic box. There’s a brief text blurb explaining how Glider Gloves offer touch-screen compatibility. Its fabric contains woven copper fibers, allowing its wielder to operate capacitive touchscreens. Capacitive touchscreens, which differ from resistive screens, run a weak electrical current through its surface. Your finger possesses weakly conductive properties, which through touch activates the touchscreen. The conductive fabric emulates this effect.

Upon first inspection, the Glider Gloves come off appearing quite handsome. They feature minimal, horizontal striping throughout the entire glove. The interior hemline of the glove uses bright blue thread. I particularly enjoy the hexagonal rubberized grip, which lines the interior portions of the glove. Overall, its appearance places Glider a touch above of its competitors.

Testing the Glider Gloves Out

To get a benchmark to compare the Glider Gloves with, I picked up a brand Glider claims to outperform: Agloves, available from Amazon at $5-16. Agloves use a silver nylon, instead of the copper fabric used by Glider Gloves, to activate capacitive touchscreens. I evaluated it on the basis of its touchscreen performance, warmth and comfort, and overall functionality.

Touchscreen Performance

Using the Agloves, I found that the overall touchscreen performance was good, although frequent problems showed up. For example, I couldn’t drag down the notifications menu using my second generation Nexus 7 tablet. However, the touch sensitivity worked well enough on all my other Android devices.

Glider Gloves, on the other hand, functioned without issue for activating the notifications menu. Granted, there have been reports of touchscreen issues on the Nexus 7. Unfortunately, I can’t explain why this would fail to work properly with one glove and not with the other. This is particularly confounding, as silver provides superior conductivity, compared to copper. As silver also offers anti-microbial properties, it makes me wonder why Glider Gloves went with copper. Perhaps silver is too conductive?

Glider Gloves did seem to experience some difficulty activating small icons, although it still marginally outperformed the Agloves using the touchscreen keyboard. Using the outstanding SwiftKey (read our review of SwiftKey), I couldn’t tell the difference between either glove. Overall, I prefer the snugger fit of the Glider Gloves over Agloves.

Warmth and Comfort

Glider Gloves provided warmth in 46 degree Fahrenheit weather, with a wind speed of 12 mph while using my bicycle. It’s important to note that the Agloves performed equally as well providing comfort. The difference between the two lies primarily within the texture and snugness of the fit. Glider’s product feels noticeably snugger than Agloves’s. On the other hand (pun intended), Agloves feels softer, providing a pleasant, fuzzy feel. Ultimately, it’s apples and oranges. If you like a softer, fuzzy feel, go with Agloves. If you prefer a snug, smoother sensation, go with Glider.

Functionality

Functionality is where Glider Gloves comes out far ahead. The hexagonal rubber grip on its palms and fingers allow for more active use. While bicycling, I often reach for a metal sports bottle – the Agloves did not provide much of a grip. The soft, fuzzy feel made it difficult keeping hold of slick metal objects.

Glider Gloves, on the other hand, make you feel like Spiderman.

On the Downside

Glider Gloves aren’t perfect. There are some very minor build quality issues as well as special washing instructions.

A few errant strands of thread stuck out from the Glider Gloves, requiring trimming. While these were just minor aesthetic imperfections, I expect a bit more from a $24.99 pair of gloves. However, Agloves featured far worse thread work, including a defective finger. Glider Gloves again come out far ahead of the competition.

Special Washing Requirements

The biggest problem I had with Glider Gloves is that they require hand washing. However, to my knowledge, all touchscreen gloves require special treatment.

How do I win the Glider Gloves?

You may enter by submitting your name and email address. You’ll receive one entry simply by doing so.

After that, you’ll also be offered various methods to earn additional entries. They range from sharing a link to this giveaway on social networks; to commenting or visiting a specific page. The more you participate, the higher your chances of winning! You will receive 5 additional entries into the giveaway for every successful referral via your shared links.

Enter the giveaway

Clean and Maintain Your Mac with MacKeeper [Giveaway]

Features

MacKeeper boasts “16 in 1″ apps which seems like a great deal, but isn’t as impressive as it seems. Some of the features are really useful such as the anti-theft, data encryptor, and file recovery. On the other hand the features like default apps, files finder, login items, and update tracker weren’t all that impressive and certainly not much to boast about. I think the fact that these 16 features all come bundled in one piece of software is surely appealing, but many of the necessary ones such as fast cleanup, smart uninstaller, shredder, and backup can be utilized natively through Mac OS X or have freeware options readily available. In the end, I wasn’t overly impressed with the features contained within MacKeeper, but there were several that stuck out and peaked my interest enough to make it worthwhile.

Design & Interface

The team who designed MacKeeper’s interface clearly knew what they were doing. They were able to capture a sleek and appealing design that is carefully organized and structured. It is not often you find both the level visual appeal and ease of use in a piece of software especially considering it is designed for a Mac. Each tab gives you a breakdown of options and factors within each category in a clear and concise manner. Along with this, each tab will display a bubble next to it with any new notifications or unfinished tasks. 

Performance

Overall, I was fairly happy with the MacKeeper’s performance, but it did not surpass my expectations by any means. First off, I was pleased to see such a feature-packed piece of software be truly lightweight and did not slow down my computer at the slightest. It ran in the background in a stealth manner and only became present when it alerted me of an update or potential threat.

In terms of the functionality of the features, I found the majority of them to be mediocre with just average results. I think the convenience of having all the 16 apps together was nice, but individually each function did not perform nearly as well as a dedicated program would. For example, the “Fast Cleaning” function scanned my computer and found 1,005.9 MB of files that I could “clean up”.

How do I win a copy?

You may enter by submitting your name and email address. You’ll receive one entry simply by doing so.

After that, you’ll also be offered various methods to earn additional entries. They range from sharing a link to this giveaway on social networks; to commenting or visiting a specific page. The more you participate, the higher your chances of winning! You will receive 5 additional entries into the giveaway for every successful referral via your shared links.

Enter the giveaway

Samsung Galaxy Note3 review and giveaway

Samsung's Galaxy Note series has been the most popular BIG phone for a couple of years now.The Galaxy Note 2 made some major improvements over the original in terms of speed and utility, and while the Galaxy Mega was a big step backwards, the Galaxy Note 3 looks to leapfrog them both. And, generally, it does.

WHAT IS IT?

It's a big honkin' phone that runs Android 4.3 with Samsung's TouchWiz skin over the top. It has a 5.7-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display that comes in at 386 pixels per inch. It also has a built-in stylus (oops, sorry, "S Pen"), for all your jotting and scribbling.

WHO'S IT FOR?

Big handed people who never learned QWERTY. People who do a lot of reading on their phones. People who like to doodle.

DESIGN

Ohmygod. Samsung made a phone without a cheap plastic back! The back of the Note 3 is covered in leather. Up front is the big, lovely screen surrounded by a very minimal bezel. It retains Samsung's clickable home button and capacitive keys for Back and Menu. The S Pen tucks neatly into the bottom of the phone is remains unobtrusively there until you pull it out. There is one (easily muffled) speaker at the bottom of the phone. There's a bit of a bump in the back for the 13MP camera.

USING IT

In general, it is plenty fast. Apps open reasonably quickly, but then run very without a hitch. Why only reasonably quick to open? The grumpy gatekeeper. Samsung's TouchWiz software is a heavy burden to carry, and even the mighty quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at 2.3GHz and a hulking 3GB of RAM stumbles from time to time, which is pretty crazy. It's fast, but frankly, it should be faster.

Samsung borrowed a couple ideas from its competitors. My Magazine is essentially HTC's BlinkFeed, but worse. It's an app that tries to lay out your life in a visually appealing way, breaking it into categories like News, Personal, Social, and "Here and now" (local stuff). It looks okay, but it's barely functional most of the time. This app crashed over and over, often freezing and crashing other, completely unrelated apps.

The other thing it borrowed was the Moto X's Touchless Controls. It allows you to wake up your phone and have it do stuff for you without even laying a finger on it. Instead of saying, "Okay Google Now," you say, "Hi Galaxy!" Then, instead of Google Now opening, you get Samsung's S Voice app. This is unfortunate. While S Voice can do virtually everything Google Now can do in theory, it just doesn't work as well. It's clunky, unreliable, and not as smart as Now.

THE BEST PART

S Pen software has gotten much, much better. For starters, its handwriting-to-type engine is greatly improved. It's still not as fast or as accurate as a good touchscreen keyboard, but if you really like scribbling, this is pretty great. It can pull off some slick maneuvers now. For example, if you scribbled a bunch of contact info into a note and you want to dial the phone number, you just circle it, click "Link to action" and it'll put it in the dialer (or a person's contacts, or your text messaging app). It's the kind of usefulness that the Note series has always promised, but it's finally arrived. Even little things like erasing text is easier. It legitimately good stuff.

TRAGIC FLAW

Audio quality is universally bad on this phone, which is a shame because despite being tablet-ish, it's still supposed to be able to make phone calls. Callers had constant issues understanding me and vice versa. Using T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling helped a bit, but not enough. The external speaker is bad, too. Aside from sounding muddy and totally unbalanced, its position at the bottom of the phone makes it extremely easy to muffle.

THIS IS WEIRD...

The back of this phone feels fantastic! That is something we have never, ever said about a Samsung phone, but it's true. The leather looks good, doesn't pick up fingerprints, and provides a really nice amount of traction for your fingers. It won't easily slide off your leg, either. It feels nice and strong, too, and yes, it's still removable so you can get to the battery and SD card slot. We hope Samsung continues in this direction with the Galaxy S5, though we suspect this may just be a play for the attention of business-folk who seem to gravitate toward the Note (it's big and shiny).

(Left-to-right: Galaxy Mega, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 2, Galaxy S4)

TEST NOTES

• Until we all have the same-sized hands, the debate about whether a phone is or isn't too big will never end. It's a highly subjective thing. That said, to me, personally, this phone is too big. I have large hands, but I struggle to use this phone one-handed, and that is a must in my book. Other people have no problem using two hands on a phone. I think this phone more-or-less necessitates the two-handed approach. Above you can see how it stacks up to some other big Samsung phones.
• The 3200mAh battery does pretty well, but all those pixels exact a toll. More often than not, I made it until about 8pm before I needed to reach for a charger. With heavier use it was shorter, and with lighter use I made it well into the night. Your milage will vary, but it's unquestionably not as long-lasting as the Droid Maxx.
• It's presently one of the only devices that works with Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch.
• The 13MP camera is excellent, especially in sunlight. Photos and videos were sharp, had nice color, and a decent amount of depth-of-field. You can see some samples here.

• TouchWiz has been refined somewhat in this implementation, but it still bogs down the phone and is very cumbersome. The Google Edition of the Galaxy S4 (which has stock Android instead of TouchWiz) instantly became one of our favorite ever phones. The presence of the S Pen makes us think we'll never see a Google edition of the Note 3, however.
• Despite the fact that Samsung licenses software from SwiftKey (our favorite third-party keyboard) the built in keyboard is way worse. Text predictions are all over the place and words get broken into fragments a lot.
• The screen is really lovely, especially for viewing photos. It has those perfect blacks we love so much on AMOLED screens, and it's nice and sharp.

SHOULD I BUY IT?

Do you like really big phones? Then yes! This is the best big phone out there. Do you hate big phones? Then no, of course you shouldn't get it because you will drop it on the ground and cry. That's pretty much the long and short of it, at least for now. Oh, except for the price. Depending on the carrier, this puppy will run you $300 to $350 on contract. That's pretty damn steep. But if you've got the coin, you like this size, and you can get over the software annoyances, this is probably the phone you want. Ignore the gravitational pull of the Galaxy Mega. Size aside, this is three times the phone that is.

We still long to see Samsung get it together on the software side. As it is, the software on the Note tends to get in its own way, which has long been a Samsung tradition. If it tried a less-is-more approach we think the phone enthusiasts out there would be doing handsprings

Enter the giveaway