It’s a massive undertaking to get a rover to the surface of Mars, so NASA designs its robots to last for at least a couple of months. Luckily, most of them operate for much longer. Opportunity was recently declared lost after 15 years on the red planet. Curiosity is still going strong after more than six years, but there was a bit of a scare earlier this month. NASA says it has verified the rover is fully operational, and it’s . landed on Mars in 2012 and began exploring Gale crater. By 2014, it was climbing the slopes of Mount Sharp to get a better idea of the planet’s geological history.
Cloud gaming services offer a theoretically attractive value proposition. Instead of paying a significant amount of money for a local PC, why not pay less money (amounts vary depending on the service) and theoretically stream titles you want to play to a smaller living room box or via an app or service? We’ve seen a number of takes on this concept from various companies. The Blade Shadow Ghost game-streaming box is a follow-up to the Blade Shadow gaming service. This $140 box connects you to a cloud PC, where you have access to eight threads. The exact CPU in use is not clear; Techcrunch a Xeon E5-2620, which is a Sandy Bridge CPU.
With the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti now in stores, Nvidia’s attention will turn to revamping the bottom of its product line. There are reports of both a GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1650 headed to market. The GTX 1660 is expected to drop in March, with the GTX 1650 supposedly debuting in April. That’s the rumor from DigiTimes, which claims the new GPUs will debut on March 15 (GTX 1660) and April 30 (GTX 1650), at prices of $229 and $179 respectively. We don’t know much about the GTX 1650 yet, beyond that it’s rumored to be a 4GB GPU with a 128-bit memory bus.
Google is exploring a new method of improving site performance in Google Chrome, this time by adding a new back-caching feature that would keep certain data in memory, even after you’ve left a site. The company writes: A back/forward cache (bfcache) caches whole pages (including the JavaScript heap) when navigating away from a page, so that the full state of the page can be restored when the user navigates back. Think of it as pausing a page when you leave it and playing it when you return. The company that this feature could improve performance by up to 19 percent in mobile Chrome, and by 10 percent on desktop PC based on the number of site interactions that represent a back/forward usage pattern.
Nokia unveiled its latest flagship smartphone at Mobile World Congress this week, and it’s already scheduled for a US release. The Nokia 9 PureView will hit store shelves on March 3, and there will be a special promotion to celebrate. For the first week, the Nokia 9 PureView will be $599.99 — that’s . The sale price is $200 lower than the Pixel 3 and $300 less than the Galaxy S10. A few years back, it looked like we may never see another Nokia phone after Microsoft’s disastrous Windows Phone-fuelled acquisition of the company. However, the remainder of the newly formed HMD bought back the rights to the Nokia name in 2016 so it could produce Android-powered devices like the Nokia 6, Nokia 8, and now the Nokia 9 PureView.
In was just a decade ago when we all lived in the golden age of the QWERTY keyboard smartphone. Devices like the Palm Pre and Motorola Droid seemed like viable alternatives to the iPhone largely because they had all those tactile keys for inputting text. Smartphones with physical keyboards are all but extinct now, but F(x)tec is trying to bring them back . It faces a tough uphill climb, though. F(x)tec has been carrying the torch for QWERTY sliders for some time now. The company initially came together as a project to build a keyboard Mod for Motorola’s Moto Z line of modular phones.
What seemed like plenty of storage space a few years ago is never enough in the here and now. That’s why the companies making computers, phones, and other gadgets are always rushing to pack in more and more bytes. Now, you can add an unprecedented amount of storage to your devices, provided there’s a microSD card slot. Both SanDisk and Micron have unveiled 1TB microSD cards at Mobile World Congress. If you’ve spent any amount of time perusing gadget spec sheets, you’ve probably noticed talk about adding “up to 2TB” of storage with the microSDXC standard. This is technically correct, but it ignores that cards have never been that large.
Need a new computer? Right now, Dell is offering up huge discounts on the six-core Dell XPS 8930 desktop and the 15.6-inch Vostro 15 5000 laptop. Plus, we’ve also rounded up great deals on iPads, 4K monitors, wireless routers, and more. Courtesy of our partners at … Featured Deals Intel Core i7-8700 6-core Tower Desktop with 16GB RAM for $699.99 at Dell (Coupon code: AFF300XPS – List price: $999.99). Intel Core i5-7200U 15.6-inch 1080p Laptop with 256GB SSD for $479 at Dell (Coupon code: VOSTRO479 – List price: $1098.57). 9.7-inch Retina Wi-Fi Tablet (2018 Model) for $249.99 at Amazon (List price: $329).
Last week, Microsoft employees sent a letter of protest to their own company, claiming that Microsoft had engaged in war profiteering when it signed a deal with the US military to provide HoloLens technology to soldiers in the field. While close cooperation between the US military and Microsoft is nothing new, HoloLens will be directly incorporated and used in combat scenarios. When the US military announced the deal, it stated the device was intended to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy.” The Army calls this system IVAS, for Integrated Visual Augmentation System.
