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Smellable VR is coming whether you want it or not
Modern virtual reality is a treat for the senses. Well, two of them at least. "Sight and sound have been the staple of VR environments," Benjy Li, a postdoctoral researcher with Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, told Engadget. Haptic feedback is starting to allow for basic touch, but the next radical evolution in VR could actually come via your nose (and/or mouth).
Security firm discovers Linux botnet that hits with 150 Gbps DDoS attacks
Akamai announced on Tuesday that its Security Intelligence Response Team has discovered a massive Linux-based botnet that's reportedly capable of downing websites under a torrent of DDoS traffic exceeding 150 Gbps. The botnet spreads via a Trojan variant dubbed XOR DDoS. This malware infects Linux systems via embedded devices like network routers then brute forces SSH access. Once the malware has Secure Shell credentials, it secretly downloads and installs the necessary botnet software, then connects the newly-infected computer to the rest of the hive.
Touring the world's first 'Google Shop'
For a while now, Google has been using Currys PC World stores across the UK to promote its latest Chromebooks, Chromecast and Nexus devices. The company normally takes over a small section of the shop with its own decor, demo stations and staff, which naturally attract the attention of curious customers. Google still hasn't built an Apple-style retail store of its own, but this week it moved one step closer with the launch of a new "Google Shop" inside the Currys PC World store on London's Tottenham Court Road. The company says it's the first "Google shop experience" to be opened anywhere in the world and will be joined by two more in Fulham, London and Thurrock, Essex later this year.
The Daily Roundup for 02.07.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Barnes & Noble Nook lands in Currys, PC World and Sainsbury's stores, furthers the UK conquest
Barnes & Noble must want no corner of Britain untouched by Nooks. Following its planned bookstore invasion, the American company is bringing both the Nook Simple Touch and its GlowLight cousin to Sainsbury's and Waitrose supermarkets, as well as Dixons Retail-owned chains Currys and PC World. When the e-readers arrive at the outlets' respective online and retail stores from early October onwards, they'll bring the Nook's reach to nearly 2,000 UK sales points -- not quite ubiquitous coverage, but more than double what we saw in our most recent check. About all that's left is to offer the Android tablets that have been conspicuously missing from Barnes & Noble's initial expansion strategy.
ASUS to sell pink and gold Zenbooks in the UK, where good taste is alive and well
You know what ASUS' Zenbooks needed, right? Like, even more than a cushier keyboard or Ivy Bridge refresh? The Malibu Beach House treatment, obviously. For those of you in dreary 'ol Blighty waiting for an Ultrabook with tropical coloring (but no sequins), take note: ASUS is going to start selling its candy-colored, oh-so classy Zenbooks in the UK. Specifically, that includes the 13-inch UX31 in hot pink, and the 11.6-inch UX21 in Rose Gold. Both will be available by the end of April, with the UX31 available through PC World and Curry's, and the UX21 through Littlewoods and Argos. Find the PR below, and pay no mind to the lady editor behind the curtain doing a facepalm.
Currys launches 'Knowhow Movies' VOD service / money-pit
Today, Dixons Retail plc (Currys, PC World) and Rovi launch a UK-based VOD service under the retail giant's Knowhow paid-support brand (think: Geek Squad with more overcharging). You'll be able to buy and download movies and TV to your Windows PC or stream them to a Mac using Rovi's DivX technology with adaptive streaming. The platform is promised to swell to include smart TVs, Blu-Ray players, tablets, consoles and smartphones through 2012. You'll be able to register up to five devices with the service and switch between them as you wish, as long as everything's connected to the internet. Selected movies are available to rent for around £3 ($5), or can be bought in SD/HD for £13 ($21) / £18 ($29). Just as an FYI for consumers planning on signing up: most of the titles are available to buy on DVD for around two-thirds of that price, if you can bear to wait a couple of days.
Apple threatens defamation lawsuit in Chinese iPad trademark case
Apple and Proview are in a heated legal battle over the ownership of the iPad name in China and now Apple is threatening to sue the Asian company for defamation. Apple is upset with Proview's attempt to reclaim the iPad trademark and use it to ban iPad sales in China. According to PC World, Apple supposedly sent a letter to Proview founder Yang Rongshan which says, "It is inappropriate to release information contrary to the facts to the media, especially when such disclosures have the effect of wrongfully causing damage to Apple's reputation," Apple's letter follows a public press conference by Yang during which he claimed Proview never transferred the trademark to Apple. Yang claims the Taiwan subsidiary did not have the authority to sell the trademark and the main Proview company was not aware of the deal. Apple asserts it owns the trademark and bought it from Proview's Taiwan subsidiary in 2009 with the knowledge and consent of the parent company. Apple supposedly has emails to back up this claim and has already won a case in a Hong Kong court. Undeterred, Proview continues to pursue its legal battle in China and is asking Apple for US$400 million in compensation to settle the case. It's also seeking a ban on the import and export of the iPad into the country and has halted sales of the tablet in select Chinese cities.
Motorola Xoom UK pricing official at £580 for 3G and £480 for WiFi-only
Motorola has now confirmed that the latest round of prices the Carphone Warehouse, PC World and other UK retailers are listing for its Xoom tablet are indeed the officially sanctioned price points for the Honeycomb slate. After being listed at £600 for the 3G model and £500 for the WiFi-only version initially, the 32GB-equipped 10-incher is now mercifully £20 cheaper, at £580 and £480 for each variant. A quick glance at Apple's online store tells us that those levies match up exactly to what a corresponding 32GB version of the iPad 2 will cost you, signaling Motorola's intent to at least be on par in terms of pricing. Stores are still showing the Xoom under a pre-order status for now, but that should be changing swiftly if Motorola wishes to live up to its promise of availability this very week.
Motorola Xoom returns to PC World UK, this time at £500, promises April 9th delivery
Maybe PC World is trying to sneak the bad news in under the cover of the iPad 2 launch, but it's returned Motorola's Xoom tablet to its pre-order systems with a far less pleasing price than before: £500. It was £450 yesterday, but our suspicions were raised by the impossibility of actually pre-ordering one, and sure enough, now that you're able to sign yourself up to be among the first in Europe to own a Xoom, it'll cost you a 50 note more. Launch is scheduled for the first week of April, we're told, and PC World has a tentative April 9th delivery date. Yours, if you want it, at the source link below.
Motorola prices WiFi-only Xoom at £500 in the UK (update: €700 in Germany with 3G)
Finally Motorola gives us a chance to say something positive about its pricing of the 10.1-inch, Tegra 2-powered Xoom tablet. UK electronics retailer PC World has just put up its Xoom pre-order page, which will surprise many waking Brits with an extremely reasonable £450 ($730) asking price. That's £60 less than the direct competitor 32GB WiFi-only iPad -- the Xoom only has one storage option of 32GB and the model listed here comes without 3G -- and perhaps more importantly, is only £10 more than the 16GB version of Apple's tablet. It's common knowledge that to take on the iPad empire you'll have to at the very least match its price, and Moto is doing even better than that in the UK. There's only one worrying sign, we haven't been able to place a Xoom into our shopping basket yet, as the "Pre-order today" button seems to be malfunctioning, but we're guessing that's a temporary glitch that will be fixed without the price shooting up skywards. Update: T-Mobile Germany has also revealed its Xoom pricing, this time for the 3G model: €699.95. Distribution will begin at the end of April and T-Mo will have a three-month exclusive on the tablet in its native land. The pricing positions the Xoom a mere 95 Euro cents above the 32GB-equipped iPad WiFi + 3G, meaning that your choice will truly come down to preference and not economics. See T-Mobile's full press release after the break. Update 2: The PC World price and pre-order have been pulled. Gulp. Let's hope they comes back unchanged. Update 3: The page is back, this time with an April 9th delivery date, but the price has Xoomed up to £500. Oh no. [Thanks, John]
Apple, ASUS top PC World satisfaction survey
Apple has garnered yet another win in a customer satisfaction survey -- this time it's PC World conferring the honors onto Cupertino, as Apple has topped both the laptop and desktop categories for most reliable and well-supported computer products. PC World says that Apple also did well in its smartphone category (with, of course, the iPhone), but that the antenna issues and a few other problems with the iPhone kept it from being listed at the top of the category. Still, PC World has nothing but praise for Apple, which is well-known both for solid, perfectly built hardware and a software experience that rules out as many questions as possible. This, of course, fits everything we've heard anecdotally about Apple in the past -- while there are sometimes issues from computer to computer or in certain experiences at the Apple Store, most of Apple's products are extremely reliable. Even when they're not, 9 times out of 10 we'll hear about Apple just outright replacing them for customers, under warranty or otherwise. ASUS also joined Apple at the top of the survey for both desktops and notebooks, and down at the bottom, PC World says that Dell and HP both show "troubling" figures for customer support. Both of those companies still saw increased earnings this past year, but problems in their customer support departments and cheaply made hardware have earned them reputations for trouble.
PC World stops selling the Toshiba Folio 100, we go hands-on to find out why (video)
£999.99 ($1,612) for a Toshiba Folio 100?! That's a fair bit more expensive than its original $560 price point -- either its Tegra 2 chip's made out of gold (which would explain its rarity) or someone got super bored at that PC World store in the British Midlands. Soon after receiving this photo, we put on our detective hat and headed over to our local branch in London, only to find that it had already stopped selling the offending Android tablet merely ten days after its European launch. We quizzed the staff about the aforementioned £999.99 pricing and then all was clear: apparently this is a standard internal convention to stop its folks from selling certain products, so the price tag and display unit you see above weren't supposed to be there at all. Oopsie! So why is PC World (and the whole DSG International chain) pulling the Folio 100? Turns out this has nothing to do with Toshiba; but it's simply because of a high return rate from disappointed customers. In fact, head over to MoDaCo and you'll see a screenshot of PC World's internal memo that confirms this sad news. We had already given the tablet some decent (and disheartening) hands-on time back at IFA, but since our new friends at the store kindly offered to let us unbox a Folio 100 for a giggle, we decided to give it another go. And boy, it sure was a letdown: you'll see in our hands-on video after the break that the 10.1-inch LCD is haunted by an inferior pixel density plus narrow viewing angles; and the cheap plastic casing doesn't help, either. Most importantly, the official Android Market app was still MIA, which is no doubt the biggest turn-off for the buyers. Too bad, Toshiba, but do come back next year when you have Honeycomb and some decent screens. [Thanks, John L. and Adam C.] Update: Some commenters are pointing out that many software bugs -- especially in the Toshiba Market Place app -- and the lack of pinch-to-zoom in the browser are to be blamed as well. Yikes.%Gallery-107388%
iOS 4.2 to support MIDI
It's come to light that the upcoming release of iOS 4.2 (due in November) will support all-out MIDI. According to Mike Keller, writing for PC World, Core MIDI on iOS 4.2 should work just as Core MIDI does on Mac OS X, meaning that your iDevice running iOS 4.2 will communicate with other MIDI compatible devices and hardware via USB (using the iPad's camera connection kit USB adapter) or WiFi, using Apple's own MIDI APIs. What can we expect to see from MIDI in iOS? Well, until the official release of iOS 4.2, we won't have all the details. But the guys over at Create Digital Music have put an interesting guide together to demonstrate some of the capabilities of what a MIDI-equipped iDevice could look like, using a developers release of iOS 4.2. Up until now, music creation on the iPhone and iPad has been more of a novelty affair rather than a serious contender and choice for pro musicians. Could MIDI support in iOS be the catalyst that changes that? For me, one of the big attractions of MIDI support in iOS would be the ability to use an iPad / iPhone, loaded with high quality samples, as a replacement for the more traditional laptop + MIDI controller (keyboard) setup commonly used in live musical contexts. All we'd need is for some high quality sample manufacturers (Native Instruments, you interested?) to port a version of their software to the App Store. For all the details, and a video preview of the iConnectMID as well as a look at the Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer, click here. [via Engadget]
C-3PO and R2-D2 invade consumer electronics megastore, get blown off by Roomba (video)
What happens when two of Star Wars' finest wander into a Currys & PC World Megastore? Unadulterated hilariousness, that's what. Hit play on the video below to see what happens with C-3PO asks a Roomba for directions, R2-D2 investigates a pop-up DSLR flash and the pair of 'em attempt to escape enemy fire in a related video game. It's worth the watch, we promise. [Thanks, Dave]
Apple will open international Stores early for iPad launch this Friday, iBooks app available now
Apple may be a despot of its own walled garden, but that doesn't mean it's not benevolent. The iPad's international launch on May 28 has prompted the company to open Stores an hour early, at 8AM local time, in order to give its devotees a reprieve from hours of queuing outside. Then again, that little asterisk up there points us to an ominous "while supplies last" note at the bottom, which together with current pre-orders being fulfilled at some unidentified point in June, might force the most impatient to just get to the Store even earlier. UK buyers will get an alternative option thanks to Dixons Group stocking Apple's slate in Currys and PC World outlets, an arrangement that we keep hearing might be exclusive for the first sixty days after launch. Either way, you've been warned, don't be tardy if you wanna be trendy. P.S. The iBooks app has also made its debut outside of the US today, though at present it's limited to just freebie titles, and the iBookstore is still described as "US only." Update: The latest we're hearing is that at least some Apple Premium Resellers will also be getting stock of the iPad in the UK -- worth checking out if other options sell out.
Seven ways PC World is wrong about the iPhone-Android matchup
Android's new features in the upcoming version 2.2 (aka "Froyo," announced this week at Google I/O) are certainly intriguing, but some sections of the press have gone off the deep end in their analysis of what this means for the iPhone and the smartphone market in general. PC World's piece, "7 Ways Android 2.2 Froyo Tops Apple's iPhone," is a perfect example of this phenomenon, and it reads like it was written by someone who's never even held an iPhone. All seven of their points are easily debunked, even leaving aside the fact that they're comparing today's iPhone with the as-yet-unbuyable Froyo phones of tomorrow. Read on to find out why -- and bring marshmallows.
Best Buy opens first UK store in Thurrock, we go hands-on (video)
Ah, there it is, UK's first-ever Best Buy store, officially born at 7am local time yesterday. Naturally, we had to be there to witness such magical moment for Britain's consumer tech market -- the Brits had longed for an injection of energy and professionalism to the seemingly slacking chain stores. Many would agree that DSGi's two main brands -- Currys and PC World -- are on the naughty list, even after their recent relaunch. From what we saw today, it looks like Best Buy's already heading in the right direction. Let's start with the front-line employees. Most of these Blueshirts provided genuine technical answers rather than bluffing their way out, plus we were given product recommendations with no desperate sales pitch as commonly seen in other stores. When we revealed our identity to one of the sales reps, he confirmed that they were trained to not force random products onto customers -- quite the opposite culture to his old days at DSGi (assuming he was telling the truth). We sure did appreciate this new-found shopping freedom in gadget stores, but did the other customers feel the same way? Find out what we heard after the break.%Gallery-92099%
PC World study: AT&T network has undergone "drastic makeover"
According to AT&T's commercials, they provide both "a better 3G experience" as well as "the nation's fastest 3G network." And, based on PC World's latest 3G wireless performance study, they've got more meat and potatoes (as if Luke Wilson wasn't enough) to back up their claims. The study, a collaboration between PC World and wireless analysis firm Novarum, took place from December 2009 to January 2010, and compares the four major U.S. wireless carriers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile) in 13 "broadly representative" cities in the U.S. During the study, 51,000 separate tests were run, in which 850 square miles, and 7 million wireless subscribers, were covered. AT&T showed marked improvements over their figures from a similar study conducted during March and April 2009. Highlights of the most recent study include: Using notebook computers (e.g., with a built-in or external 3G card), AT&T had the fastest download speed in 11 of the 13 cities, and the fastest upload speed in all 13 cities. For smartphones, AT&T had the fastest download speeds in nine of the 13 cities, and the fastest upload speed in all 13 cities. Of the smartphone-carrier-based combinations, the AT&T-iPhone pairing had the fastest download and upload speeds, although its reliability slightly trailed the T-Mobile-G1 combination, which posted the highest figures. Given the nasty back-and-forth between AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which resulted in AT&T taking legal action (which they dropped in December 2009) against Verizon Wireless, the study could serve as a feather in AT&T's cap. Readers, what do you think? Does the study mesh well with your experiences with AT&T Wireless? Let us know in the comments! [Via PC World].
PC World's dashed WWDC expectations
While some people came away from WWDC feeling like it's Christmas in June, it doesn't look like PC World was among them. But after reading their laundry list of unrequited hopes and dreams for WWDC (WWDC No Shows: 10 Things We Wanted From Apple and Didn't Get), it seems like PC World really doesn't seem to get it. Let's walk through these points one by one, shall we? 1. The Apple Tablet We've been hearing rumors about this one since the Newton disappeared. I don't think anyone realistically expected the tablet to come out this year, much less at WWDC. It's getting to the point where every single event has people leaving and saying, "B-b-but where's the tablet?"
