Computers

Apple MacBooks and Windows laptops with Intel's new Haswell chips will benefit from a 50 per cent boost in battery life, the company has claimed.The new generation of processors, which will focus on lowering power consumption without compromising on performance, are set to be officially unveiled at next month's Computex show in Taipei. According to Rani Borkar, corporate VP and GM of the Intel Architecture Group, the Haswell processors will offer a huge improvement over the current-gen Ivy Bridge chips when it comes to battery longevity.In a media briefing, reported by ComputerWorld, Borkar said that in standby or idle mode, the chips will be up to 20 times more efficient. Impressive stuff.MacBooks first in line?The improvements are hugely important to Intel's manufacturing partners and consumers who're searching for that holy grail of all-day battery life from a laptop.Apple's MacBook range may be among the first products to benefit from Intel's new chips. Reports earlier this month suggested that new MacBook Pro laptops, featuring Haswell processors would be launched at WWDC on June 10.

The road to 4K gamingWant to justify that £829 graphics card you just bought? Need to figure out how to drive that massive-o-screen that almost melted your credit card? Well, the only realistic answer is either incredibly high-resolution gaming or going for a multi-GPU setup that might melt your PSU, as well as your personal wealth. The thing is, despite the fact that graphical hardware has evolved at an astounding rate over the last few years, panel and game technology hasn't really kept up. Since the last generation consoles came around, most of us have been aiming for 1080p resolutions. At first that was a laudable goal and it felt like an age before it became the standard res. But now it is, with the Steam hardware survey claiming around a third of users have a primary display running at 1,920 x 1,080. At that resolution, even sub-£100 graphics cards are more than capable of running most new titles on relatively high settings, at playable frame rates. To really push your modern midrange/high-end graphics cards you need to up the resolution and, sadly, the 30-inch panels of the last five years - with their 2,560 x 1,600 resolutions - are still at the top of the tech tree, knocking around the £1,000 mark. There are 27-inch screens with the 16:9 res of 2,560 x 1,440, and these are probably your best bet for high-res gaming on a relatively sensible budget. The next step up is to strap a bunch of screens together in some sort of widescreen surround setup. We're talking about resolutions of around 5,880 x 1,080 when you're linking up three 1080p screens in landscape mode with bezel correction. And with those extra pixels filling up your eyes you may actually need a second GPU just to cope with it all. When I started this whole long-winded testing process, I was of the opinion that the square peg of surround screen gaming was struggling to fit into the same round hole as 3D. I thought both were resource-intensive frame rate hogs - limiting the fidelity of your game, without adding much to your experience. And to be honest, that opinion hasn't changed. You need some incredible graphical grunt to get the most out of a triple-screen array, and for the most part that means selling your soul to the dark god of multi-GPU gaming. Beware, though - that way madness lies. The resolutions involved in multi-screen arrays in-game put huge demands on your available GPU power, but as we start to tread the seemingly long dirt track to 4K gaming, maybe this is something that we need to start thinking about seriously. Strapping a few monitors to a couple of GPUs is the only realistic way for us to achieve resolutions above what our blessed 30-inch Dell panel can render, which is the only way to really put the latest and greatest graphics chips through their high-res paces. As an exercise in seeing just how far we can push the modern GPUs of this generation - and seeing how close we are to machines capable of 4K gaming - the high resolutions involved in surround screens setups are useful. But as a gaming experience right now, they're simply an indulgence, with a huge amount of wasted screen real estate and a massive premium placed on frame rates. The whole deal with surround screen gaming is to have a wrap-around view of your game world, with a pair of panels either side of a central screen essentially acting as your peripheral vision. If extra screens were given away - and the frame rate hit wasn't effectively halving performance - then it would be a neat extra to have, adding a little immersion to your experience. But that isn't the way of surround gaming. At best you're looking at screens around the £100 mark, so you're adding another £200 to your gaming setup for a pair of panels that, by definition, you're not actually meant to be looking at. The distorted images stretched out over the peripheral screens aren't pretty, but are there to catch the corner of your eye while you're focusing most of your attention on what's happening right in front

BBC is bringing iPlayer for Android to 10-inch tablets.

It's exciting to see cool new computer stuff coming out at this time, but spare some time to give a broken laptop some attention. Here's a viral short video that does...

The hotly-tipped 'pure Android' incarnation of the HTC One handset will arrive this summer, according to a report on Friday night.CNET claimed to have "confirmed" that the handset, which would dispense with HTC's polarising Sense UI in favour of the stock Android Jelly Bean 4.2 operating system, is definitely on the way. The claim follows reports earlier on Friday claiming that the handset would be launched within two weeks, although CNET's sources only quoted a "summer" release timeframe.The clamour for a HTC One model without the Nexus-style version of Android, follows the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Edition at the company's Google I/O conference last week.U-turn?The launch of a Google-centric HTC One would be somewhat or a surprise given that the company told TechRadar that no such device was in the works.ff Gordon, senior global online communications manager, telling us: "HTC is not currently planning a 'Nexus Edition' of the HTC One".Has something happened to change HTC's mind, or was the company simply playing it cool with its denials?

Apple's iPhone range has long been the standard bearer for smartphone cameras, but it has now been bested by its great rival Samsung, according to new tests.In photo and video tests DxO Labs, the Samsung Galaxy S4 camera performed higher than the Apple iPhone 5 by an overall score of 75 to 72.The Galaxy S4 ousted Apple as well as the Nokia Lumia 920 in most of the main categories for photos and videos and was especially good in bright light, according to the tests.Top of the pile is still the Nokia 808 Pureview handset, although the Symbian OS and the limited availability of the device means its not a mainstream contender.Comfortably aheadIn its report, DxO labs wrote: "Achieving a DxOMark score of 75 overall puts the rear-facing camera module of the Samsung Galaxy S4 comfortably ahead of the pack. That's no mean feat as the bunch includes the handset maker's own Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S3 as well as Apple's iPhone 4s and latest iPhone 5, all achieving a very respectable 72 in our DxOMark scores.The S4 makes good use of its fast efficient AF and robust and reliable auto-exposure systems to maximize image detail from the 13-Mpix sensor and deliver images with fully saturated color.Are you an S4 user? Have you noticed an improvement in the camera tech over the Galaxy S3? Has it really knocked Apple's advanced tech off its perch? Let us know in the comments below.

The nation's largest television broadcasters filed a copyright lawsuit against FilmOn.TV and its Aereokiller service yesterday, alleging that the service retransmits TV programming without authorization or compensating them, according to a story in Variety. Aereokiller is the flippantly-named competitor to Aereo, the company that uses dime-sized antennas to capture over-the-air TV transmissions and then streams them to subscribers by way of the internet. This is part of an escalating fight for control of the country's TV airwaves. - Greg Sandoval, The Verge

Google says "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks."... The Verge understands that Microsoft will have to use publicly available YouTube APIs like the JavaScript and IFrame ones, meaning its upcoming full application will likely lose functionality. These APIs have been available previously, but Microsoft has always complained that Google has prevented it from offering consumers a fully featured YouTube app for Windows Phone....Effectively this means it's back to square one for YouTube on Windows Phone, and it's likely that some of the new full functionality will be removed in the final app that Microsoft is working on. - Tom Warren, The Verge

Enclosed for filing are the original and three copies of Motorola Mobility LLC's Petition for Review of the United State International Trade Commission's Final Determination in Investigation No. 337-TA-745 finding no violation of Section 337 as to U.S. Patent No. 6,246,862. - Motorola Mobility, Investigation No. 337-TA-745

It is a really long weekend here in United States, and what that means is a lot of time to read this weekend. I certainly plan to do that. Here is a short list of my recommendations for the weekend. The story of an eye witness: Jack London, a San Francisco writer, wrote about the 1906 earthquake that almost destroyed the city by the bay. This is amazing writing from an amazing writer whose words make that tragedy come alive, a century later. Rajat Gupta’s lust for zeros: He had the world on a string and then he made bad choices. His worst was picking to fraternize with the wrong kind of guy and he is now paying the price for it. He was indicted in the largest insider trading case in U.S. history. What a fall for a guy who once ran McKinsey & Company. 1977: my own year of living dangerously: My friend Martin Varsavsky goes back in time, to a city he loved and grew up in — Buenos Aires — and tells his story. I have never known Martin like this. Amazing story. Gentrification in Buffalo: Cities and communities are people. And that is why we can reinvent, remix and thrive in them. Can you redesign the razor? Some gentlemen want to know and are talking about it. Counter-terrorisim and the legacy of Philip K. Dick. The New Yorker writer reflects on his piece, Too Much Information, from 2002. It is pretty amazing and far-sighted piece considering it was written over a decade ago. How Facebook and Brooklyn killed America’s obsession with cars. The headline says it all.