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J.D. Power: Verizon has best call quality nationwide, T-Mobile consistently below average
J.D. Power, that well known arbiter of human opinion in the United States, has just released its latest study on customer satisfaction with wireless carriers. It addresses such things as (the lack of) dropped calls, failures to connect, voice distortion, echoes, static, and late-arriving text messages, and ultimately churns out a rating out of five stars relative to the regional average and other carriers. In testing done between July and December last year, Verizon had the best or tied for the best satisfaction ratings in five of the six studied areas, while AT&T and Sprint traded blows for second and T-Mobile had to admit defeat as the laggard of the top four. US Cellular managed to score highest in the North Central region, but J.D. Power's overall assessment isn't very rosy for any of the carriers -- the stats collector says growing smartphone usage, heavy texting and more indoor calls are collectively causing call quality to stagnate, and even warns that "increased adoption of smartphones and wireless tablets may continue to compromise the quality of network service."
Intel's SSD 510 reviewed, measures up well against Vertex 3
Been wondering how that new 6Gbps SATA interface and Marvell controller have been treating Intel's latest SSDs? The answer, it turns out, is really rather nicely. Faced off with OCZ's awesomely quick Vertex 3 drive, the 250GB SSD 510 from Intel more than holds its own, occasionally flashing ahead and taking the lead. Opting for Marvell's processing chip has improved Intel's sequential performance, but has actually led to it taking a ding on random read speeds -- the latter being arguably more important on a day-to-day basis. Still, this $584 drive is one of the finest the consumer world has yet had to feast upon and should encourage high expectations from Intel's 25nm G3 storage units, which are still to come. As to having the extra Serial ATA bandwidth, we'll leave it to Anand from AnandTech to summarize: "these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it."
Intel Core i7-990X reviewed: best performance ever, but far from best value
As T-Pain once so wisely proclaimed, "it ain't hardcore unless it's hexacore." Intel should have no worries with its Core i7-990X, which has enough processing units to satisfy even the most demanding of hip hop moguls, but it pads out its extreme credentials anyway with an audacious 3.46GHz default speed. That can be Turbo Boosted to 3.73GHz (yes, we are talking about a CPU that can run at 3,730MHz right out of the box) and there's 12MB of L3 cache and three channels for DDR3 memory to justify the $999 price tag. Well, to partially justify it, anyhow. Tech Report and Tom's Hardware both ran this new chip through their benchmarking suites and both concluded it's the fastest consumer processor around, but neither was willing to recommend it as a terribly astute purchase decision. Then again, when has an Extreme Edition of anything ever been a good value proposition?
AMD compares upcoming Llano Fusion APU with Intel Core i7, puts the heat on Sandy Bridge (video)
So far, AMD's new Fusion chips have been all about the low-end, whether you're talking in terms of price, performance or power consumption, but the company has a vision for its future that has these new Accelerated Processing Units dominating every segment of the market. In order to do that, AMD will need to overcome Intel's latest generation of mainstream processors, the Core 2011 family we're more familiar with under the Sandy Bridge codename. Before you rush past the break and watch AMD's own comparison between said Intel hardware and the forthcoming quad-core Llano APU, be aware that processor performance can rarely be generalized from a single test alone and the one we're witnessing is specifically geared to highlight the Fusion chip's strengths. All that said, the workload demonstrated by AMD -- a 3D game, HD video playback (plus post-processing on the Llano rig), Excel calculations, and some 3D modeling, all running simultaneously -- is handled most impressively by the A8-3510MX APU, which even manages to use less power than Intel's 2GHz Core i7-2630QM. See the video after the break. [Thanks, Vygantas]
Ask Massively: Happy "I like you just enough to outweigh the annoyance of breaking up with you" day edition
Valentine's Day was Monday, a celebration for those happy couples incapable of showing mutual affection during the other 364 days of the year. But many people haven't given their hearts to their beloveds so much as they have been in those relationships too long. It's not being in love; it's being unwilling to deal with the irritation that comes with splitting up after the situation has become a comfortable routine. Since I assume that the week basically downgrades from Monday, happy day of things not being bad enough to break up! I may have just wanted to link Dogs Die in Hot Cars. But I'll deny it in further comments. This week's questions cover nothing of a romantic nature. Instead, we're talking about World of Warcraft, or more specifically, how doing well on a boss one week seems to mean doing worse next week. As always, you can leave your questions for the next edition of Ask Massively in the comment field or just send us an email to ask@massively.com.
Sandy Bridge memory performance tested, value of expensive top-shelf memory questioned
Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset hasn't exactly had a flawless launch, but let's move past that and take a look at how well it performs before it starts breaking. One of the improvements here is meant to be better memory performance, and The Tech Report ran a variety of sticks through the gamut to see what the benefits of high-cost, high-speed memory is versus the cheaper stuff. The results showed that, in the vast majority of cases, DDR3-1333MHz memory was barely outclassed by the DDR3-2133MHz stuff, exhibiting only a modest improvement in games, just a couple FPS at most. Lesson learned? Save your pennies -- or go ahead and spend 'em elsewhere, like that new Thermaltake case.
DC Universe Online is SOE's fastest selling game [Updated]
How's DC Universe Online performing after a week or so in the wild? Sony Online Entertainment hasn't released official sales or subscription numbers, but company president John Smedley recently stated that "it's our fastest selling game ever." Smedley delivered the news via his Twitter account, and also revealed that DCUO topped Steam's sales charts last week. The title also seems to be exceeding SOE's expectations given the fact that Smedley alluded to a stock shortage. "Working on out-of-stock problems," he tweeted, adding that more copies of the game should become available early this week. DC Universe Online is currently available for PC and Playstation 3, and you can learn more at the game's official website. [Update: John Smedley updated his Twitter feed in response to questions concerning the PC/PS3 sales numbers. The PS3 is currently leading at 52%.]
Advent Vega's Flash Player yanked due to missing Adobe certification
The Advent Vega was never the most polished Android tablet in the world -- after all, we had to rely on a custom ROM just to get native Android Market access -- but a reasonable price tag and NVIDIA's Tegra 2 has still made it hard to resist. For those who've managed to snag one already, you may have noticed that the Flash playback isn't exactly... awesome. That's probably because the version loaded onto already-shipped versions isn't certified by Adobe, and in order to fend off future complaints, the company's yanking Flash Player entirely from newly-shipping models for the time being. The certification process is apparently underway, and the outfit expects Vega tablets shipped "in the early part of 2011" to have a green-lit build pre-installed; as for everyone else, they'll be provided a gratis update as soon as it can be pushed out onto the interwebs. Head on past the break for the full statement.
Found Footage: Christmas songs played by an iPad band
Not quite in the holiday mood yet? Here's just the thing to get your chestnuts roasting -- on the next page you can watch a video of the North Point Community Church band (a megachurch in Alpharetta, GA) performing some Christmas carols on iPhones and iPads. I heard "Carol of the Bells," "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree," "Feliz Navidad" and a few other classics in there as well. In the YouTube comments, you can see a few of the apps used being called out: iGOG is on drums, Pocket Organ fills in some of the melodies and Guitarist puts in the chords. I can only guess that the auto-tuning on "Feliz Navidad" is done by I Am T-Pain. Very cool, and just the thing to make sure you're ready for the upcoming holiday. Merry Christmas to all! Thanks to everyone who sent this in
Office 2011 puts pedal to the metal with demonstrable speed bumps
As we've been diving into the Microsoft Office 2011 application suite, we've been focusing on the new features going from 2008 to 2011, and the relative value versus alternative tools like Apple's iWork suite. One thing we haven't really nailed down, though, is speed. Although it's easy to see in the first few moments of using it that Office 2011 is bringing a lot of performance optimizations to the table, exactly how much faster is it? Enter our friends over at MacTech magazine, who have polished their stopwatches and lined up a slew of test machines to get at the raw numbers and compare Office 2011 to both Office 2008 and 2004 across the entire suite. The whole article is worth a read, but the gist is that Office 2011 is quite a lot faster everywhere you care about speed: application launches, file open/save (noted as faster with the XML formats than with the legacy .doc, .xls etc. files), key operations, and more. In particular, Excel has gotten a serious turbo injection, with operations like fill range and charting timing out as "orders of magnitude" faster than in the previous version. MacTech suggests that Excel users who lean heavily on the charting capabilities "run, don't walk, to get the upgrade." On the Mac Mojo blog, Microsoft's own Erik Schwiebert posted an interesting look inside the development process and philosophy that drives the speed optimizations seen in Office 2011. From the user perspective, you might not think that squeezing a few milliseconds out of a particular function would lead to worthwhile improvements, but Schwiebert lays it out well and explains the cognitive science behind perceived application performance -- worth a read. His video demo of Excel's launch speed improvements is in the 2nd half of this post.
Geminoid-F takes the stage for Japanese play
Japan's uncannily realistic robots have been creeping us out for years, but one was deemed emotive enough to have a stint on stage -- yesterday evening, Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoid-F made its debut in a Japanese play. It's a fairly small step for robotkind, really, as the android was completely controlled by a real-life human actress from a soundproof room behind the stage, and no attempt was made to pass off the robot as human, as Geminoid portrays a caretaker android assigned to a dying girl. Still, the possibilities must have Hollywood agents agape -- it's only a matter of time before the world's highest paid actors can literally phone in their lines.
Keep your CPU under control with App Tamer
It's been a little while since we've heard from St. Clair Software, makers of the well-known system utility, Default Folder X (which we've covered before). You may recall that we caught up with St. Clair Software developer Jon Gotow at WWDC '09. Well, he's got something new to announce today: App Tamer, a system utility for keeping CPU-intensive applications under control. App Tamer is similar to some other utilities, in that it allows you to "freeze" selected applications so that they use up zero CPU time, leaving more processing power for other applications. What makes App Tamer special is AutoStop, which pauses and unpauses frozen applications when you switch away from or back to them. It also has options for temporarily unfreezing applications at a configurable interval, allowing apps to complete background activities even while frozen. It's quite flexible, but takes very little user knowledge or time to get it up and running.
Darkfall expansion delayed, treasure hunting in the works
Lots of stuff is going on in the world of Agon, and the weekend brought us a double-shot of news updates, one good and one not so good. Aventurine's Tasos Flambouras recently checked in on the official boards to announce a delay on the upcoming expansion. The delay appears to be primarily performance-related. "The expansion is forced back a short while longer, we hope no longer than a couple of weeks, in order to get the performance right, and everything in the expansion working properly and tested thoroughly so there's no repeat of the last setback with the terrain feature," he wrote. Aventurine has also been having trouble with its network service provider, and the post provides a few details along those lines as well. Now for the good news: treasure hunting is coming to Darkfall, courtesy of the aforementioned expansion. Players will be able to acquire map-reading skills from NPCs, make their own shovels to unearth various objects, and use treasure map hints to determine appropriate dig locations. "We are already planning on expanding this system, which means you can expect additional treasure hunt features being added on top of the one we talked about today," writes Aventurine's Laenih on the Darkfall forums.
The Anvil of Crom: Building a Khitai PC
So I've finally started to have technical issues with Age of Conan. Despite being in the original closed beta, the launch weekend headstart, and several bug-ridden months of playtime after that, I've never really been unable to run the game until recently. I'm playing with the same PC I used back when the game debuted in 2008; the only concession to hardware advancements I've made in the past two years is an updated video card. For some reason though, Khitai has become increasingly unplayable on my rig. This is curious because I was in the Godslayer beta with no problems, just like I tooled around in the Gateway zone when the expansion went live with no problems. After the last couple of patches though, I'm unable to play in Hyboria's far east for more than a few minutes before a memory crash takes me back to the desktop. Also, I've had to completely bottom-out my graphical settings to be able to load into the new zones (and even with this concession, it literally takes four to six minutes -- yes I've timed it -- of staring at the loading screen and progress bar). Slog past the cut for more. %Gallery-98996%
Officers' Quarters: Destructive criticism, part 2
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. Last week, I began addressing what is one of the most complex and difficult duties an officer or raid leader must occasionally perform: giving out unsolicited constructive criticism. As the email that sparked this discussion proved, such conversations can be volatile. With the wrong approach, you can destroy friendships and lose guildmates. Let's continue to examine the right approach. To recap, here are the first two steps from part 1: Consider your guild's criticism culture and adapt your approach accordingly. Plant the seed of taking personal initiative to research and improve play. At this point, you have to be a little bit patient. If your guild is on the brink of collapse over performance issues, you can't always afford to let this situation play out. However, the safest bet is to give the underperforming player another week of raids to show an improvement. Keep a close eye on him during this week. Examine his spec and gear to see if he's made any adjustments. Record a combat log to see if he's using the appropriate class abilities. Watch him during boss encounters to see if he is following instructions and executing the fight properly.
Apple shows Nokia's N97 Mini can be force choked, too (video)
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Apple_shows_Nokia_s_N97_Mini_can_be_force_choked_too'; Nokia claims it always prioritizes antenna performance over physical design, and we'll take them at their word, but that apparently didn't exempt one Espoo handset from Apple's grip of doom. Here's the Nokia N97 Mini going down for the count, from a full seven bars to two. Of course, Apple doesn't mention whether calls or data drop when the handset's held this way. Video after the break. [Thanks, Lyndon W.]
iTunes 9.2.1 arrives in Software Update -- many fixes, new features
According to the update, the new version disables older versions of incompatible third-party plugins, addresses minor issues, with dragging and dropping items, addresses a performance issue when doing a first sync to some devices, addresses an issue upgrading to iOS 4 on an iPhone or iPod touch with encrypted backups, and fixes some stability and performance issues. The new features and improvements include syncing with iPhone 4, synchronization and reading books on iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1, organizing and syncing PDF documents as books for reading in iBooks 1.1, organizing apps on your iOS 4 home screens using iTunes, faster backups while syncing iPhone and iPod touch with iOS 4, and album artwork improvements to make artwork appear more quickly when exploring the library. Information about the security aspects of the update can be downloaded from Apple's Support page. Enjoy!
Officers' Quarters: Destructive criticism
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. In the day-to-day duties of an officer and a raid leader, few endeavors are more fraught with the potential for drama than doling out performance advice to your players. Constructive criticism, no matter how well-meaning, can become destructive in the blink of an eye if it's not approached delicately. After scaring off a healer, the officer who wrote this week's email is looking for a better way to deal with these situations. Scott, As an officer in my guild, I take care of several things, but the big three are raid leading our second 10-man group (which is not easy as a healer, by any stretch of the imagination), making sure our priests are doing what they are supposed to be doing both as dps and healers, and any extra healers, making sure they're doing their job right. The first two are interesting enough, especially since there's very little consistency with our group, and our number of priests waxes and wanes with the seasons. But the big problem here is when I have to "fix" a healer. Now, I know no one likes to receive constructive criticism, and officers like even less to give the constructive criticism for fear of running off the guild member. Recently, I've had to talk to two different healers to try to help them out with their healing, one was a holy priest, the other a restoration shaman. Now, I have some pretty hefty experience with both classes as healers (I have two max level priests, and a max level shaman, and I've healed in raids on all of them), so I find myself at least somewhat knowledgeable about the classes, but by no means do I consider myself an expert. I'll leave that to Elitist Jerks. At any rate, the two healers, after speaking with them separately in tells, I found that the priest was more willing to work with the suggestions I'd made, and there was a huge improvement the following night in our raid. The shaman, however, was very adverse to my suggestions. Here's where the meat of the problem comes in.
Nokia: 'we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict'
Nokia's looking to ride the mojo of any negative fallout from today's Apple press conference, slipping out a rather fascinating statement this afternoon. The gist of it is that Espoo's keen on letting everyone know how much blood, sweat, and tears they've poured into perfecting their antenna design strategy over the years, going so far as to say that they "prioritize" it over the physical design of the phone if they need to in order to optimize its call performance -- an opinion moderately different from the "we want to have our cake and eat it too" philosophy espoused by Jobs today. In closing, Nokia acknowledges that a "tight grip" can mess with the performance, though they say they've done a bunch of research on the ways their phones are typically held so that the antennas are placed optimally. Interestingly, there was a stink not long ago about the severe signal degradation some E71 users were seeing when they placed their hands on the lower rear of the phone -- but you can't win 'em all, we suppose. Follow the break for the full statement.
Squeeze keyboardist uses iPad on Fallon appearance
Here's a fun treat for your late night tonight -- one of my favorite bands, Squeeze, made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon's show the other night to play the classic "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)," and the keyboardist was playing both the electronic ivories and an iPad. He even drops a nice solo in right around 2:32. YouTube commenter MooCowMusic says it's his app, Pianist, and it looks about right. At any rate, it sounds terrific, and how awesome is it that Squeeze is rocking the iPad in a live TV performance? I wonder if they're including the instrument in their other live performances -- or maybe even in actual recording. Very excellent.
