Santa Clara
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FCC rejects cities' extension request for comments on net neutrality rollback
The FCC has refused to grant an extension for comments on its plans for net neutrality rollback.
Apple building third campus in Santa Clara
Apple is expanding by leaps and bounds and is outgrowing its current Cupertino campus. To handle the overflow, Apple is beginning construction on a new two-building campus in Santa Clara, California. According to a report in the Mercury News, the new six-story office buildings will be located right outside Cupertino city limits. Apple is allegedly leasing the space from developer Peery Arrillaga in a deal that requires the demolition of existing buildings and the construction of new ones built to Apple's specifications. Apple supposedly signed a 7- to 10-year lease agreement for the site, which suggests this is a long-term solution and not just a temporary measure to hold employees while Apple finishes its new Cupertino campus. The first Santa Clara building is now under construction and will be completed by mid-2014. The timeline for the other building is not known.
Is Motorola announcing an Intel Medfield-powered phone on September 18th?
Our calendar in September is starting to fill up rather rapidly, with Motorola asking us to come to its second announcement in a month on September 18th. Intel's co-signed the ticket, with the partnership offering to "take us to the edge" for an exciting announcement from the pair. We're kinda assuming it's got something to do with Santa Clara's mobile chip offerings, since the companies teamed up for a "multi-year, multi-device" partnership in January that promised fresh hardware from the pair arrive in the second half of 2012.
MechWarrior Online to hold community day in sunny Santa Clara
Do you love beer and pizza? Do you love MechWarrior Online? Do you love it enough to write up to 100 words about how much you love the game and deserve to attend a special event celebrating MWO? You do? That's so weirdly convenient because on July 27th, Nvidia will be hosting an invite-only MWO Community Day, and the only way to to score an invitation is to write 100 words or less about why you are so very special and should totally be part of this event. Each entrant has to be at least 21 years old, available on the July 27th, and able to travel to and stay in Santa Clara, California, on his or her own dime. If you fit those qualifications and are selected to be an attendee, you'll enjoy a chance to meet with the development staff, view demos, learn more about the tech behind the mechs, fight in-game for a chance for prizes, eat pizza, drink beer, and be merry. Interested? Check out the official forum thread for full details on the community day and contest.
Orange San Diego review: Intel does phones, finally
The first generation of Intel-powered Android phones has arrived, and while the chip maker doesn't appear to be claiming that its initial efforts are world-beaters, we've been promised a chipset that prioritizes what people want most: capable web browsing, strong camera performance and robust battery life. Although we've sampled plenty of incremental versions of this Medfield tech, Orange UK's San Diego is the first finished device to land for review. Priced at £200 ($308) it joins a large spread of wallet-friendly, entry-level smartphones in Orange's lineup. With a (1024 x 600) 4-inch LCD, 8-megapixel camera with flash, micro-HDMI port and 1GB of RAM, it looks to be a respectable, if middle-of-the-road, Android device. But the focus here lays with the 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 CPU and whether it delivers on those performance and battery life promises. Does Intel have a handle on mobile processors? Is the San Diego, near-identical to Intel's own reference model, going to be attractive enough for buyers? You'll find our verdict after the break.%Gallery-158096%
Orange San Diego Medfield phone: a closer look at Computex 2012 (update: video)
Well what do we have here? Yes, it's the Orange San Diego we first saw at Mobile World Congress and it's going on sale in the UK today for £200. This isn't just yet another Android smartphone, but one of the first Medfield-based handsets on the market. We caught this pre-production unit chilling out at the Intel booth here at Computex 2012 and decided to go up close and personal. First impressions? It's thin, light and feels great in the hand thanks to a pleasant soft-touch back. The Gigabyte-made device packs a 4-inch glass-capacitive 1024x600-pixel LCD (that's 300dpi), an 8-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 CPU, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of built-in storage. While the screen looks decent enough, it falls somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of viewing angles. The phone features Android 2.3.7 (Gingerbread) and runs most apps from the Google Play store directly via an emulation layer. Performance matched prior benchmarks and was on-par with current mid-range ARM-based Android handsets -- the experience was mostly smooth, but we noticed some lag when scrolling and zooming pages in the web browser. Battery life remains the major outstanding question when it comes to Medfield handsets, so expect more details once we have our very own review unit. In the meantime, check out the gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video.%Gallery-157275%
Orange's Santa Clara Medfield phone gets benchmarked, well, the browser does
Wondering how those Medfield handsets stack up to their ARM-powered competition? Well, we can't promise a full suite of benchmarks just yet, but we do have a peek at a pair of browser-centric tests. The German Caschys Blog managed to get a hold of Orange's upcoming Santa Clara device at CeBit and ran Qualcomm's Vellamo and Rightware's BrowserMark on the Atom handset. In both metrics the Z2460 more than holds its own, scoring an 89,180 on the web-based BrowserMark -- putting it just ahead of the iPhone 4S which clocks in at 87,801, but well behind the Galaxy Nexus' 98,272. Things look just as promising on the slightly more hardware-intensive Vellamo where it trounced the latest Nexus and was hot on the heels of the Xiaomi Mi-One Plus and Transformer Prime. Of course, neither of these tests really tax the CPU or measure 3D graphics performance. We're not even sure what the clock speed on chip inside the handset is. We were originally led to believe 1.6GHz, though, Caschy is reporting the model he manhandled was running at just 1.4GHz. Then, there's perhaps the biggest question of all -- battery life. For that, we'll just have to wait and see.
California crooks nab 100,000 microchips
Proving that Malaysian industrial complexes aren't the only venues where shoddy security can facilitate the theft of thousands of PC components, a pair of crooks in California turned a minor fender bender into a successful heist of some 100,000 microchips on Tuesday afternoon. Police suspect that the men had been planning the crime for some time, as the victim's Fremont-bound Mazda MPV had just left a warehouse with $190,000 worth of chips when the robbers rear-ended it with their white van; rather than using weapons to subdue the driver, however, the two thieves simply waited until he exited the vehicle to discuss the accident, when one of them proceeded to slip into the minivan and drive away. The driver of the van followed suit, leaving the victim standing on the side of the road, no doubt confused and worried that his employer would chew him out for being so careless with the precious cargo. Although the brand of chip has not been revealed, since this all went down in Santa Clara, it's not too difficult to figure out whose products got pinched. So far authorities have no leads as to the whereabouts of the chips or the two robbers, but if someone in an MPV with license plate 4NKV115 tries to sell you a CPU for a buck and some change, do the right thing and notify law enforcement officials after you've purchased enough silicon to meet your needs. And if you're driving back home with your cheap booty when someone happens to ram your car, for heaven's sake, don't leave the keys in the ignition when you get out to exchange insurance info.[Via Boing Boing]
