Seagate Wireless Plus

It wasn’t long after buying my iPad a couple of years ago that I discovered one of my favorite accessories: Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite drive. It’s a battery-powered hard drive that connects to your device of choice via an ad hoc Wi-Fi network. You can browse whatever’s on it using a simple app. The battery charge lasts about 5 or 6 hours — long enough for a couple of movies, and perfect for a cross-country flight. I have it loaded with a bunch of movie rips, and I take it with me every time I travel. The Satellite has some flaws. It’s only available as a 500GB drive, the battery life could be better, the app is a little clunky and, at $200, it’s more than twice as expensive as...

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Reports of the iPhone 5′s Waning Popularity Are Overstated

Recent reports that Apple is cutting orders for the components needed to assemble its flagship handset likely have more to do with seasonal buying patterns and iPhone production ramp up than iPhone fever fading. The Wall Street Journal, citing sources close to Apple, reported that Apple cut orders for iPhone 5 parts following weaker-than-projected demand. But a bevy of analysts have chimed in since Sunday’s report, suggesting that inventory stockpiling, an aggressive international iPhone rollout and perhaps even the beginning stages of iPhone 5S production could be behind the drop in component orders. Even so, the Cupertino company’s stock slid 3 percent on Monday following the...

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Facebook Is Quietly Making a Killing With Ads That Pursue You

Wall Street wants Facebook to find a new source of aggressive growth, and the social network appears to have done just that — with ads that follow you from site to site and remember you for lengthy periods of time. Facebook publicly launched its Facebook Exchange ad-bidding network less than three months ago and has been testing it only since June. But the system is already shaking up the ad business, say partners who have been on the exchange since the beginning, delivering a huge volume of users with a strong propensity to click on ads and helping advertisers follow those users for longer periods of time than is possible under competing systems. In the process Facebook is giving...

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HTC’s Flagship M7 Smartphone Supposedly Outed, But Where’s The HTC Look?

HTC is the sort of company that’s never had the best luck at keeping new products under wraps, and it seems it won’t be bucking that trend any time soon. Case in point: Evleaks (now at UnwiredView) has recently obtained a what’s said to be a render of the company’s new top-tier M7 Android smartphone, and it’s definitely not what most of us expected to see. Got your grains of salt ready? Good, because you’ll need them. The M7′s rumored specs — 4.7-inch display, 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor — have been making the rounds for weeks now, but this render depicts a device that seems like a marked step back from the company’s current design language. It’s a… weird looking device to be...

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Viber overhauls BlackBerry app to v2.3, promises VoIP calls are coming in April

Doing its best Kate Bush impression, Viber's letting its BlackBerry users know that something good is gonna happen. Specifically, that the company is bringing VoIP calls to the platform, currently pencilled in for arrival in April. It's laid the groundwork for the new feature with version 2.3 of the app for RIM phones, which refreshes the UI and adds support for Arabic and Spanish language users. After the break we've got a short clip of a demonstration of the forthcoming feature, which mercifully cuts out before the feedback loop deafens us all...

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Leap Motion goes retail: motion controller to be sold exclusively at Best Buy

Ever since we first saw Leap Motion's hyper-accurate gesture control system in person, we've been waiting for the time when we can walk into a store and buy one. Sure, devs have been able to buy Leap controllers for some time and it won't be long before Leap's tech is baked into retail laptops, but now the general public's going to get the chance to grab the standalone controller, too. That's right, folks, this spring, the Leap Motion Controller will be available nationwide at any Best Buy store, with pre-orders starting in February. So, it won't be long before you can stroll on down to the nearest big blue box and pick one up -- assuming there's...

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Another Legal Blow For Apple As Dutch Court Concurs With U.K. Ruling That Samsung Galaxy Tablets Do Not Infringe iPad’s Design

Apple’s courtroom skirmishes against its Android OEM enemy number one Samsung have not been going very well of late, despite Cupertino’s big $1bn+ damages win against Samsung last summer. Today another legal blow for Cupertino: a Dutch district court has ruled that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets do not infringe Apple design patents. The latest Apple vs Samsung court ruling concerns the rounded corners of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, Galaxy Tab 8.9 and Galaxy Tab 7.7 tablets — which Apple had argued infringe the design of the iPad. The Dutch court rejected Apple’s argument — saying there is “no question of an infringement” — and citing previous similar decisions in U.K. courts. A notice...

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