mLearnCon News and Updates

Can storage ever be sexy? Well, slap on Wi-Fi capabilities and a wireless media server to an external hard drive and it can start to look rather attractive.

That’s what Hitachi has done with its G-Connect 500Gb external drive launched today - the Wi-Fi lets the drive act as a local mini-cloud for serving movies, music and photos to iPads and other devices that lack its huge capacity to store media.

The concept may sound familiar – we wrote about Seagate’s 500Gb GoFlex Satellitedrive last month introducing the same capabilities.

And with Kingston’s Wi-Drive and AirStash’s wireless flash drive also emerging (albeit in smaller 32GB sizes), there is a definite trend being catered to here.

People are finding a 16Gb iPad 2 does not hold that much stuff when you add up all the apps, movies and music, plus photos and videos being taken. Its memory can’t be expanded and those who realise they need more before buying have to pay an extra $100 for a 32Gb model or $200 for the 64Gb one.

Read more here from FT Tech Hub. 

That’s a Micro USB-to-USB female adapter, which is required if you want to utilize Honeycomb’s new USB hosting feature on the Xoom. It’s obscure enough that your local Best Buy probably won’t carry it, but I managed to swing one on Amazon for less than the cost of shipping.

I whole-heartily recommend Motorola Xoom owners pick one up, because USB hosting is one of the main features Honeycomb has over Apple and iOS. Honeycomb 3.1 users can now plug in and use external mice, trackballs, keyboards, and game controllers – really, any USB-powered peripheral. And it works really well.

As I mentioned in my ASUS Eee Pad Transformer review, I'm no fan of navigating Honeycomb via cursor, but the update does well enough to make it an intuitive experience (mouse clicks take the place of finger taps) that I can understand its appeal. Also, it will work very well when used with remotedesktop apps like LogMeIn Ignition. The same goes for keyboards. There is now no need to invest in a Bluetooth keyboard (which Honeycomb 3.1 also supports); any old USB keyboard will now work.

Gamepad support portends good things for Android as a gaming platform. We’ve said it time and again on TabletPCReview that great gaming requires buttons. I easily connected my XBOX 360 controller to the Xoom, and Google claims it will work with others, like PS3 controllers and generic PC gamepads.

This far into the release, most games I tested, including Gun Bros and Dungeon Defenders aren’t properly mapped to an external controller, but the one that was, Cordy, played like a new game. When I first reviewed the Xoom, I dismissed Cordy because the touch-based control scheme was far too clunk for the platform puzzler, but with the XBOX controller, I actually enjoyed the freebie app.

Read more from TabletPCReview.com here

Faced with one of the biggest challenges in its 43-year history, Intel is accelerating its efforts to produce chips for the mobile phones, tablets, netbooks and ultra-thin laptops.

In an exclusive interview before his keynote speech at the Computex exhibition in Taiwan, Intel's executive vice-president Sean Maloneyexplained how the company was changing to compete with mobile chips based on rival ARM designs.

While Intel has dominated the market for the processors used in personal computers, ARM-based chips are used in almost allsmartphones and most of today's tablets, including Apple's popular iPhone and iPad.

ARM is now moving up to compete for Intel's customers, and during ARM's press conference at Computex, Tudor Brown, president of the UK-based company, said: "By 2015, we expect that to be over 50% of the mobile PC market." However, Intel is still trying to invade ARM's territory by producing faster chips that use less power, which are needed for smaller devices.

In his keynote, Maloney touted an "emerging new breed" of ultra-thin portable PCs for which Intel has trademarked the term Ultrabook, with one of the first examples being the Asus UX21. So how will Ultrabooks differ from current models such as Apple's MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9?

To find out, read on at The Guardian here.

The first thing the name NVIDIA suggests to computer enthusiasts is graphic cards. Now, at Computex 2011, NVIDIA is showing off the successor to its successful mobile Tegra processor, the Tegra 3 (codenamed Kal-El). The processor is a 1.5GHz Quad core processor and boasts of better graphical capabilities.

NVIDIA's senior vice president, Dan Vivoli demoed the next gen mobile hardware but failed to mention a launch period where we can see the first Tegra 3 device hit store shelves. So far we have only heard rumours that Asus and Amazon will launch tablets powered by the Tegra 3 processor.

NVIDIA's graphic cards and physics gaming engines have always had a strong reputation among gamers - a reputation that was further strengthened with the launch of the Tegra 2 processor which powers virtually every Honeycomb tablet available in the market today.

Also new from the NVIDIA stable is the GeForce GTX 560M. This graphics card is targeted at gamer laptops and netbooks and aims to hit the sweet spot between battery life and performance of portable gaming notebooks.

Until we get some concrete information about the launch of Kal-El, here a quick demo of what the hardware can accomplish.

Read more from here from NDTV Gadgets

We love both Android and iOS, but the open nature of Android just means it can do things others just can't. Here are our favorite Android apps and features that you won't find on its Apple-clad brethren.

We didn't hold anything back in this list: rooting, jailbreaking, editing system files are all fair game. If there was some way to do it on the iPhone, we left it out. So, while there are a lot of great things about Android that don't come out of the box on the iPhone—like free turn-by-turn navigation or pull-down notifications—there are still ways to get those features on the iPhone. So here's our list of the ten features you just can't get, no way, no how, on a jailbroken or non-jailbroken device.

10. Alternate Keyboards

From text predictors like Swiftkey to theinnovative like Swype and the downright adventurous like 8pen, you have a lot of different keyboard choices on Android. Typing on a tiny phone keyboard isn't anyone's idea of fun, so it's great that Android provides so many options to make it as painless for people as possible, and super easy to install. The iPhone has other keyboards, but they're usually separate apps that require you to import text to another program—it's just the kind of system-level functionality that's hard to get around.

9. Automation

One of the most powerful, useful Android apps around is Tasker, the automation program that lets you turn your phone into a superphone. You can turn settings on and off for certain applications, by location, time of day, and pretty much any other condition you can think of. With the right commands in place, Tasker can access the deepest and darkest settings on your phone, which is something you just can't do on other platforms. Be sure to also check out our second list of Tasker setups, three handy Tasker profiles from our readers, and how to roll your own "Find my iPhone" for Android. Similar apps like the battery-saving JuiceDefender would also fall into this category.

Get more tips from the LifeHacker full article here.