Computers

Tesla Motors has announced a partial recall for some of its Model S vehicles due to a weakened mounting bracket for the left-hand latch of the rear seats. Elon Musk, CEO and Chairman of Tesla Motors, confirmed that a number of cars built between May 10 and June 8 this year could contain the defect. He said the weakened bracket “reduces our confidence” that the back of the left-hand seat would be protected and remain intact if the driver were to be involved in a road accident. It sounds rather ominous, but Musk was keen to emphasize that the mounting bracket is still welded to the car and that the company is not aware of any injuries caused as a result. In addition, there have been no customer complaints filed in relation to the issue. “As designed, the striker bracket is both bonded and welded to the vehicle body, either one of which would be sufficient by itself,” Musk said today in a blog post. “This is consistent with the primary design goal of the Model S, which is first and foremost to maximize safety. However, we discovered that, due to body side alignment adjustments in the factory, the bonded section of the joint was compromised and the welded section of the joint was weakened in some cars.” Tesla Motors will now reinforce the bracket on cars built during the affected period. The company says that this work has already been carried out on cars that were sill in the factory, meaning that the recall only applies to Model S cars delivered between mid-May and early June. The recall is the first of its kind since Tesla Motors launched its new service and warranty program in April this year. There are a number of new perks for car owners, such as the ability to pick up another Model S on loan while their car is in service. Tesla also offers a valet service, which means that someone from the firm will come and pick up the car when it needs to be taken in for repair. The loan vehicle will be dropped off too and when the servicing is done, Tesla will return the original car for free. Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based company that designs and builds premium electric cars. Both the Model S and Model X differ from previous eco-friendly car projects, however, because they both offer competitive performance in an attractive outer chassis. Musk revealed in early May that he had been in talks with Google to develop an ‘autopilot’ function for some of his company’s vehicles. The efforts of the partnership are yet to materialize, but it does suggest that Tesla Motors is looking to innovate in even more unusual ways. Image Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Facebook announced today that it has reached one million active advertisers amid growing adoption among small businesses and as bigger global brands also add Facebook ads to their mix. Facebook director of small business Dan Levy announced the figure in a post, saying he would like to thank “the over one million businesses” who are active advertisers. As of April 1 2013, Facebook has chalked up 1.2 billion connections between people and local businesses in the European Union, with 295 million such connections in the UK. The company said on average there were 270 million views of local business pages in the EU in a week for the month of March, while in the UK there were 55 million such views. Facebook also said 61 percent of its monthly active users in both the EU and the UK are connected to a local business page on the social networking service as of end-March. Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new initiative to greatly simplify its advertising products, which would result in half of its ad units being shuttered by the end of this year. The core of the plan stemmed from feedback Facebook received from marketers, which helped the company realize that its ad products were too complicated and redundant. Facebook also recently released an inside look at its Entity Graph, a complicated data set which maps the social network’s 100+ billion connections between people, places and interests. Image Credit: Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

These adapters are capable of speeds up to 600 Mbps across an electrical network.

Now you don't even have to wake up enough to count your change.

Electric car maker Tesla announced on late Tuesday night that it’s voluntarily recalled about 800 of its Model S cars due to a potentially weak bracket holding the left hand, second row seat. These were cars that were made between May 10, 2013 and June 8, 2013, and the company emphasized in the announcement that there were no customer complaints and no injuries and that no regulatory body had brought the default to Tesla’s attention. Tesla delivered around 7,500 Model S cars to customers in North America for the quarter that ended March 31, 2013, and is on a production schedule of making 400 cars per week. So say Tesla has delivered 12,000 (that’s about 400 a week since March 31) then 800 cars recalled is less than 7 percent of the cars. That’s just my back of the envelope math, but basically the recall was small. Also the faulty part isn’t in a dangerous area like the battery or drivetrain. It’s not unusual for car companies — young and old — to do minor recalls. Tesla will pick up all of the affected cars, provide a loaner car if needed, and bring back the car with the reinforced seat bracket a few hours later, the company says. Tesla’s stock was only down 1.44 percent in after hour trading, but I’ll update this if that changes. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Flash analysis: the Fisker debacle and its implications on investing, innovation, and government incentivesBuilding energy management systems: overview and forecastCleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook

Today, HTC unveiled two new smartphones as it competes with rivals Apple and Samsung: the Desire 200, an inexpensive Android-powered device, and the Butterfly S, a top-tier handset on par with the company’s flagship HTC One. Details regarding the two devices had been widely speculated, and were officially disclosed today at a press conference curiously held in Yilan, a beach town about one hour from Taipei. As reported by Engadget, the Butterfly S device features a 5-inch 1080p display, HTC’s Sense 5 UI, front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers – making this device, along with the HTC One, top quality when it comes to audio. The smartphone runs Android Jelly Bean on a quad-core 1.9GHZ Snapdragon 600, a startlingly long-lasting 3,200mAh battery, quad-band HSPA/WCDMA radio, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It also has an UltraPixel Camera, Zoe software features, as well as a 2.1-megapixel wide-angle camera on the device’s front-facing side. Photos of the phone leaked last week. The BoomSound speakers are quite visible and recall those on the HTC One. The company also unveiled the new low-end Desire 200, the details of which were revealed yesterday. Launched in collaboration with Taiwan carrier Chunghua Telecom, HTC apparently took deliberate measures to keep the launch of the devices as quiet as possible. Access was given almost exclusively to local media outlets, who were bused to the event from the capital. Engadget reports that the Butterfly S phone will retail for NT $22,900 (roughly $766), while the Desire 200 will sell for NT $4990 (roughly $165). There’s no word yet on subsequent launches in Asia or internationally. Despite earning $970 million in revenue in May, its best monthly sales figure in about one year, HTC has lately been struggling financially. In Q4 of 2014 the firm brought in a mere $34 million in net profits, its lowest since 2004, and Q1 of 2013 didn’t fare much better. Sales of HTC one, the company’s flagship smartphone, reached 5 million one month after its launch, while rival Samsung’s  Galaxy S4 reached double that amount within the same time period. Update: HTC just posted a preview for the Butterfly S on YouTube.

Despite opposition, company abandons pay-once, use-forever Creative Suite The Creative Cloud desktops apps Adobe announced at Adobe MAX back in May are now here. With the company halting the development of its Creative Suite applications, the subscription-based Creative Cloud desktop apps will now be the only way for people to access the company’s latest flagship creativity apps. Only available to paying Creative Cloud members, the CC desktop apps, which include Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, Adobe Muse CC, Dreamweaver CC, Edge Animate CC, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC and many more, pack hundreds of new features not found in the CS6 versions and allow you to keep everything “synced and organized across your desktop, website, and mobile device.” Despite Adobe offering a wide range of subscription plans that cater to everyone from individuals interested in single apps to businesses and creative teams with much larger appetites, not everyone is enthused at having a subscription-based model shoved down their throat. While the company is unlikely to go back to the pay-once, use-forever model, it remains open to the idea of making Creative Cloud membership plans a lot more affordable in order to assuage those unhappy with current pricing. For individuals, subscription costs $19.99 per month for a single app and $49.99 per month for the entire suite ($74.99 without annual commitment), with existing Creative Suite (CS3 or later) customers eligible for discounts on both as long as they are willing to make an annual commitment. Likewise, for a limited period only, Adobe is offering the “Complete” plan to student and teachers at discounted prices: $19.99 per month for individual users and $39.99 per month per user for teams. Where teams and businesses are concerned, the Complete plan costs $69.99 per month per user ($39.99/month per user for existing CS users). “We’ve added a ton of new innovation to all our CC desktop apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. These apps include new features that increase productivity, streamline the effort to build mobile content and showcase some stunning new imaging and video science. And in addition to the traditional areas of innovation these apps are now connected to the powerful publishing and community features integral to the Creative Cloud experience,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “And with even more great updates coming to Creative Cloud throughout the year, we can’t wait to see the incredible work our customers are going to deliver.” Those who can do without all the latest features can stick to Creative Suite 6, which the company currently intends to continue selling “indefinitely.” Follow Pulkit on Google+

Our mid-range System Builder Marathon configuration gets a larger budget so that we can fit it into a mini-ITX enclosure. How does it compare with last quarter's less-expensive machine? We run our complete benchmark suite to find out.

In this second part of our Computex round-up, we review our visits to MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock, Trendnet, Roccat, and Intel. Naturally, much of the discussion centers on Haswell, though networking, peripherals, and graphics were also hot topics.

Medan Huawei presenterade Ascend P6 i London var vi inbjudna till den svenska lanseringen i Stockholm. Utöver presentationen fanns det ett par exemplar på plats och vi passade givetvis på att klämma lite för att se om det nya flaggskeppet har något att komma med utöver världens tunnaste profil.