For those of you in the market for a new video card, in case April’s round of AMD Radeon price cuts didn’t quite meet your desires, AMD has ordered up another round of price cuts that will be taking effect on Monday.

The Radeon HD 7970, Radeon HD 7950, and Radeon HD 7870 are all getting official price cuts. The 7970 will be dropping from $479 to $429, the 7950 from $399 to $349, and the 7870 from $349 to $299.

With all of that said however, as we’re in the middle of a product cycle with partners shipping custom cards, in practice AMD doesn’t have a great deal of control over final card pricing beyond what they charge partners for parts. So unofficially these prices have been in effect for some time since partners and stores have not been holding to AMD’s MSRPs. Indeed as of Friday evening the cheapest cards on Newegg are already below AMD’s official MSRPs, so today’s announcement mainly serves to bring attention to price movements that have already happened.

On that note, AMD sends word that their free game promotions will continue to be active for some time, including both the HD 7900 Series Three For Free promotion and their HD 7800/7700 series DiRT Showdown promotion (though Newegg seems to have deactivated it as of this writing).

Finally, we’ve been asking AMD about the status of the new 7970 GHz Edition, which has so far been missing in action. After originally being scheduled to have limited availability in late June with wider availability in early July, the 7970GE has slipped by at least a couple of weeks – an unusual thing to happen to what has otherwise been a punctual AMD. At this time AMD is telling us that most of their partners have decided to launch the 7970GE on their customized premium cards, which has resulted in availability being pushed back. If all goes according to plan, AMD is expecting XFX and Sapphire to have cards available early next week. However prices will bear keeping an eye on since it’s unlikely that partners will stick to the $499 MSRP if they’re using the 7970GE for their premium cards.

In what’s already been a bad week for website security breaches, NVIDIA has announced that they have become the latest victim of hackers looking to steal user credentials. After having taken down a couple of their sub-sites earlier this week due to investigate unusual activity, NVIDIA has discovered that both their Developer Zone and their forums were compromised. Altogether NVIDIA is reporting that an unknown number of accounts among the roughly 400K accounts in their system were compromised, which means it’s safest to assume that all 400K accounts were compromised.

The bad news is that the attackers did get the typical information that most forums store, including:

• usernames
• email addresses
• hashed passwords with random salt value
• public-facing "About Me" profile information

The relatively good news is that like most forums NVIDIA only stored hashed & salted passwords, so the passwords themselves haven’t been directly compromised. However in the age of GPU computing a hash is only as good as the password behind it, so in the case of bad/weak passwords the attackers can recover those passwords from the stolen hashes without too much effort.

As is common with these types of breaches, NVIDIA is recommending that all users who used the same password elsewhere change their passwords on those sites & services, and to not use the same password in the future. Furthermore with the attackers being in possession of forum usernames and email addresses, users should be on the lookout for phising attacks utilizing that information.

Source: NVIDIA, CBS

Plextor has updated its SSD lineup with something new: the M5S. It's based on the same Marvell 88SS9174 controller as Plextor's M3 and M3 Pro, which we've been quite pleased with. While the M3 and M3 Pro shared the exactly same hardware, the M5S introduces some changes. Instead of the Toshiba 24nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND we found inside the M3/M3 Pro, the M5S uses Micron's 25nm synchronous MLC NAND. Warranty has also been dropped from 5 years to 3 years, and there is no additional clone/backup utility or 2.5" to 3.5" adapter included. 

Performance is mostly unchanged from the M3. Only the 64GB model has noticeable decreases in performance as the 64GB M3 provided 175MB/s sequentials and 40K random write IOPS. The difference is likely due to the slower NAND interface (166MB/s per Micron device vs. up to 400MB/s for the Toggle 2.0 devices). Bigger capacities have more NAND on the board, lessening the impact on overall performance. 

Availability should be immediate but at least NewEgg and Amazon are not listing the M5S yet. Hence we only have MSRPs to list, but expect the street prices to be slightly lower.

Our M5S review sample should be here any minute (it's scheduled for delivery today) and I'll start working on the review as soon as I get the drive. Stay tuned!

Late last week, Samsung and Verizon drew considerable ire from Android enthusiasts after customers who had preordered their SGS3s and received them early noticed that the device included a locked bootloader. While an exploit was later discovered that worked around this protection for rooting the device and booting unsigned ROMs, the move to a locked bootloader for the Verizon variant alarmed many, as Samsung has previously shipped devices with unlocked bootloaders on all US carriers. 

Today, Samsung announced that it will begin selling an unlocked "developer edition" Galaxy S III for use on Verizon Wireless direct through its own developer portal. The device will run $599, which is essentially standard fare for purchasing a high end smartphone out of contract these days. This is essentially the same route that Motorola was forced to take with the RAZR for Verizon some months ago, and is an obvious parallel. Locked bootloaders are almost always done at the bequest of the carrier, putting handset vendors in a challenging position inbetween the carrier and end users who want full control over devices they've purchased.

As an aside, we'll have our Verizon SGS3 variant in the next couple of days and a piece with battery life testing and any other relevant deltas from the other USA SGS3s we've already reviewed. 

Source: Samsung (Thanks Francois Simond @supercurio)

After jumping the gun the other day, Motorola made the Atrix HD official today, announcing the 4.5" HD LTE device for $99 and available on July 15th at your local AT&T retailer. Like we saw in the leak, the phone has a decidedly RAZR-esque design, complete with the Kevlar back. Internally, though, this is a step away from the RAZR's internals. After singing NVIDIA and TI's praises all last year, Motorola will be humming a Qualcomm tune for a bit. Which one? We're not sure, yet. Nor do we know what this means for Motorola's Wrigley LTE baseband. We do know the phone will run Android 4.0 with the latest version of non-Blur, and come with a micro SD slot, despite its sleem physique. Rest of the specs, PR images and a comparison table are below. 

WD did everyone a favor when they reorganized their products under color-coded branding a few years ago. With the Blue (mainstream), Green (quiet and cool) and Black (performance) lines well laid out, consumers have a much easier time picking out the right drive for their application, rather than poring over spec sheets and complex model numbers. And now there's another line to add to that list: Red. Designed specfically to be used in 1-5 bay NAS devices, the Red line has hardware and software features that make it suited for that particular climate, while delivering impressive performance and reliability. WD has worked with major NAS manufacturer's to ensure compatibility with as many common NAS products as possible, and has a list of the tested devices here.

The secret sauce in these drives is the firmware, or as WD is calling it NASware. NAS devices in the home are often used for bulk storage of media, they may have some shared documents and be used as back-ups, too; but they're most often used to store movies, music and images. ATA streaming command is featured in NASware, to alter the behavior of the drive while streaming media, in an effort to ensure smooth playback, even while serving mutliple streams. They've also included error correction optimizations to prevent a drive from dropping out of a RAID array while it chases down a piece of corrupt data. The downside is that you might see an artifact on the screen briefly while streaming a movie, the upside is that you won't have playback pause for a few seconds, or for good depending on your configuration, while the drive drops off the RAID to fix the error. 

Then there's the matter of performance. With quoted performance of around 150 MB/s these drives are nudging into Black territory. WD's new balance mechanism contributes to this. By actively balancing the drive during use there's no need to slow the drive down to prevent damage, so performance remains high. There's also a reported power savings, which WD says will make up the price delta for these drives over the rest of the line through your power bill. Speaking of price, the MSRP for the 3.5" 1TB, 2TB and 3TB drives are $109, $139 and $189, respectively. And these drives are available at your favorite e-tailer starting today. Ganesh is patiently awaiting our review samples so he can put them through the ringer and see how they do. 

Earlier today Google released the Android 4.1 source code into AOSP (Android Open Source Project), as noted by JBQ in the usual Android Building group. The release is Android 4.1.1, build JRO03C and will no doubt be the version that is pushed later this month over the air to Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 devices as outlined at Google I/O. Other Google Experience devices will get their update push later, including the Xoom and Nexus S. 

Also among the things changed today is renewed AOSP support for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus with CDMA/LTE, codename "toro." Previously AOSP support was limited due to the presence of a proprietary rotation sensor by Invensys and CDMA/LTE binaries for provisioning on Verizon. JBQ notes that Google can now distribute the binaries required for the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus. Note that the Sprint "toroplus" Galaxy Nexus is still not an AOSP-supported device. 

Factory images aren't available yet for the Nexus devices, but will no doubt pop up in the usual place after the OTA push begins later this month. 

Source: Android Building

In a bit of a double-whammy of operating system news today, word comes that Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has gone gold. Apple released the Golden Master (GM) to developers earlier today, and if all goes to plan this is the same version that will be released to retail later this month. The build is 12A269, which is unsurprisingly is only slightly higher than Developer Preview 4, as Apple has quickly wrapped up their work.

For retail users, as per Apple’s earlier announcement the retail release of 10.8 is still expected this month. It will retail for $20.

Source: MacRumors

On the heels of last week’s announcement of Microsoft’s promotional Windows 8 upgrade pricing, Microsoft has announced a tentative delivery schedule for Windows 8 today at their Worldwide Partner Conference

As it currently stands Microsoft is on track to have Windows 8 reach Release To Manufacturing (RTM) in the first week of August. Retail availability will follow in turn in late October, in order to give Microsoft time to certify additional language packs and to give OEMs time to prepare Windows 8 systems. Unsurprisingly this roughly parallels Windows 7’s release schedule, which saw it go RTM in late July and hit retail in late October, which ended up working out rather well for Microsoft and their partners.

As for those of you on the inside track looking to test Windows 8, while Microsoft hasn’t announced the complete release plans for MSDN and TechNet, Enterprise Software Assurance customers are being told that they’ll have access as early as August. MSDN, TechNet, and Software Assurance typically receive software at roughly the same time, and the release of Windows 8 is widely expected to be similar.

Source: Microsoft

Calxeda EnergyCore SoC

Boston has released its Viridis server which uses Calxeda's ARM System-on-Chips (SoCs). Each SoC consists of four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and up to 48 SoCs can be installed into a standard 2U enclosure. The SoCs come on what Boston calls POCket boards. There are four SoCs per board and each board also has four miniDIMM connectors and four SATA ports (one per SoC). The POCket board is a separate PCB which looks a lot like a PCIe card. Every board has a 10Gbps Ethernet link which is the interconnector between the main motherboard and POCket board.

When using a regular 42U rack, Viridis can provide up to 1,008 SoCs with a total of 4,032 cores of processing power. Viridis is also extremely power efficient since each SoC has a TDP of only 5W (for example Intel's low-power Xeon E5 offerings have a TDP of 50W). Hence Viridis is the best suited for environments that have a highly parallel workload that can benefit from the high amount of cores and require extreme power efficiency. 

Using ARM architecture obviously limits software selection (e.g. Windows of any flavor is not supported). Boston is, however, stating that Ubuntu 11.10 is supported, along with popular software such as Perl, Python and MySQL. How well these applications are optimized for the architecture remains to be seen, but any significant ARM threat to the x86 server space is likely to benefit enterprise customers across the board. Competition in high margin businesses is never a bad thing.

Corsair has released a new member of its Force series SSDs called the Force GS. The Force GS is based on SandForce's SF-2200 series controller (most likely SF-2281) and uses Toggle-Mode MLC NAND (24nm Toshiba Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND is the likely candidate). As expected, the Force GS uses a 6Gb/s SATA interface and comes in a 2.5" form factor. Corsair is providing three years of warranty, which is pretty common for consumer SSDs (some OEMs such as Intel, Plextor and OCZ have started offering 5-year warranties as a standard, though). Below is a specification table of the Force GS:

Due to the use of Toggle-Mode NAND, there is a slight increase in write speeds (around 10MB/s in sequential and 5K IOPS in random speeds) compared to SF-2281 SSDs with ONFi 2.x NAND.

The biggest ddifference between the GS and most SF-2281 SSDs is the inclusion of 180GB and 360GB models. There are actually a few other 180GB SandForce SSDs including Intel's 330 and 520, OCZ's Agility 3 and Mushkin's Chronos; but 360GB is a much more uncommon capacity. The only other 360GB 2.5" SSD available at NewEgg is OCZ's Agility 3, although it's out of stock at the moment. Building 180GB and 360GB drives isn't rocket science thanks to the flexibility afforded by SandForce. SF-2200 controllers have a total of eight channels but they can also run in 6-channel mode. To achieve capacities of 180GB and 360GB, you simply run the controller in 6-channel mode and equip the PCB with twelve NAND packages. With twelve dual-die (16GB) NAND packages, the raw NAND capacity is 192GiB. Subtract the space taken by RAISE and over-provisioning and you're left with a usable capacity of 180GB. The 360GB model simply has twice as many NAND die per NAND package, hence doubling the capacity.

Corsair's Force GS is available immediately and at least NewEgg is already listing the drives on their site (check the street price links above). Pricing is quite fair as we are looking at less than $1 per GB at all capacities.

Image courtesy of Droid-Life.

Somewhere a Motorola employee is wishing he'd double-checked that launch date. Splashing into the news after a bit of a hiatus, Motorola briefly revealed the splashpage for the new Atrix HD destined for AT&T this morning. The page has since been pulled, but not before showing off some interesting details. The RAZR-like design isn't terribly surprising, but is a strong departure from the more curvy Atrix design language. The screen has grown to a 1280 x 720 4.5" size with what's being referred to as ColorBoost technology. In order to hit that 8.4 mm thickness, the display is likely of the AMOLED variety, so PenTile will be present. As we've seen, though, it hardly matters at these pixel densities. Motorola, apparently, didn't have to resort to AMOLED, unlike the RAZR before it. This comes from a spec page entry we missed earlier, hence the update. We've seen some thin LCDs before, and we've seen Motorola use PenTile on LCDs before, too; so display judgments will have to wait till we have some hands-on time.

We're left to wonder, though, what chipset powers this third Atrix variant? For the RAZR, Motorola opted for the TI OMAP 4 solution, and their own Wrigley LTE baseband. These days, Qualcomm Snapdragon has been taking most of the design wins for LTE devices because of its power sipping habits. So, could the Atrix HD be revisiting the OMAP 4 well, or has it moved on to faster moving water? We'll wait and see. 

NVIDIA has posted a new beta driver from their 304 family of drivers, version number 304.79.

The biggest change with 304.79 is that NVIDIA has officially unified their Windows 8 and Win7/Vista drivers into a single driver, which means Windows 8 is now on the same driver update schedule as the rest of the Windows 6.x family. This driver also enables official support for NVIDIA's new TXAA anti-aliasing mode (though no games currently support it), and fixes several issues including a hardware cursor issue that was prevelent in several MMOs.

New in 304.79 Drivers:

• Adds support for NVIDIA TXAA
  • NVIDIA TXAA is new film-style anti-aliasing technique designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering in motion) through a combination of hardware AA, custom CG film style AA resolve, and a temporal filter.
  • The Secret World is the first game to support TXAA (support will be enabled in an upcoming patch)..
  • TXAA is supported on GeForce GTX 600-series Kepler-based GPUs.
  • Learn more about TXAA on GeForce.com.

New SLI Support

• The Secret World - added
• End of Nations - added
• Nexuiz (also provided earlier via NVIDIA Update)
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier (also provided earlier via NVIDIA Update)
• Tornado Force - added
• Tribes: Ascend - updated

Key Fixes

• Fixed a compatibility issue with Civilization V and GeForce 400/500 series GPUs
• Fixed instances of flickering or missing mouse cursor when hardware cursor is enabled (reported with Aion, World of Warcraft, Eve Online and others).
• Fixed instances of very low frame rates in Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX11).
• Fixed an issue that caused a PC reboot instead of a PC shut down.
• Fixed an issue that led to a black screen after driver installation.
• Power management mode settings now persist across driver overinstalls.

As always, you can grab the drivers straight from NVIDIA.

Source: NVIDIA

And then there were 5.

For the better part of a year now the DRAM industry has been in a lurch due to low prices. As a result of soft demand exacerbated by the hard drive shortage and a corresponding glut in supply, DRAM prices have become severely depressed, to the point where even 16GB of PC DRAM can regularly be found for under $90 and 8GB of RAM for as little as $40. And though Moore’s Law puts constant downward pressure on DRAM prices, on a historical basis healthy DRAM pricing shouldn’t drop this quickly this fast.

Because of this extremely weak pricing all of the major players in the DRAM industry have been struggling to stay afloat – just breaking even is a big deal – which has led to a series of cutbacks and delays in future build outs. However even that hasn’t been quite enough, and as we’ve seen time and time again in during major slumps in commodity technology industry, the rising tide of red ink has come to claim another.

The victim this time is Elpida, one of the smaller DRAM manufacturers. After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year the company has finally accepted a buy-out offer from Micron, who has been looking to take advantage of this slump to purchase more capacity and increase their competitiveness with the other major players in the DRAM market. As a result of the deal Micron will pay Elpida shareholders a total of nearly 2.5 billion dollars, paid out as $750M upfront and then annual installments through 2019. In turn Micron will acquire Elpida and its assets, allowing the company to expand their DRAM production by nearly 50% for a fraction of the price of building new facilities of their own.

This acquisition is primarily about jockeying for position among the remaining DRAM manufacturers – Samsung, Micron, Hynix, Winbond, and Nanya – ahead of a cyclical recovery in the highly volatile DRAM market. The acquisition will boost Micron to the 2^nd largest DRAM manufacturer (between Samsung and Hynix), while putting Winbond and Nanya in competition for 4^th and 5^th place. At the same time Elpida has a strong presence in the mobile DRAM market with memory types such as LPDDR2 and DDR3L, which in turn will give Micron a much stronger position in those markets as opposed to the more cutthroat PC DRAM market.

Ultimately major slumps in the DRAM market are usually followed by major booms, and this should be no different. A typical recovery pattern means that once demand recovers the current lack of investment in new facilities will bottleneck supply, which is where these acquisitions typically pay for themselves. At the same time five players is still a larger number than what we see in most other commodity component industries (e.g. hard drives), so there’s no guarantee that the next slump won’t also consume a DRAM manufacturer.

Source: Associated Press

Update: In our attempt to count the remaining DRAM manufacturers we forgot about Nanya. Sorry about that, guys.

It's a move that the team from Cupertino has been using for the last several years, and it looks like Microsoft is going to give it a shot. In a post on The Windows Blog (not to be confused with the Building Windows 8 blog), Brandon LeBlanc announces that Microsoft will be doing a Windows 8 upgrade promotion, where upgrades from Windows XP, Vista and 7 to Windows 8 Pro will cost just $39.99.

This reflects a similar move Microsoft made in 2009, where they offered Windows 7 pre-orders at a significant discount.  At the time those upgrades were $50 for Home Premium, $100 for Pro, and $150 for the Home Premium Family pack (3 licenses), meaning Windows 8 pre-order upgrade pricing is significantly better than Windows 7 pre-order upgrade pricing, with Windows 8 Pro going for less than half the price of its predecessor. And while there isn’t a family pack (so far), 3 Pro licenses are still cheaper than the Windows 7 family pack. The catch of course is that just like last time this is a limited time offer; while Microsoft is running this promotion for far longer than the 2 weeks Windows 7's promotion ran for, this one is only going until January 31, 2013. 

Microsoft has also offered a few technical details on the upgrade process. Microsoft will be selling upgrades both in physical packages and digitally from their store, with the latter being the cheaper price. For electronic copies the upgrade process will be done through the use of the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant, an installation app that streamlines the download and allows users to customize what they want to retain from their earlier installation. HTPC users will also want to take note that because this upgrade path leads to Windows 8 Pro, and as part of the promotion buyers will have access to Windows Media Center as a free downloadable feature; this allays concerns from the HTPC community that they would need to upgrade to a significantly more expensive version of Windows 7 Pro to access the feature.

On that note, for those of you still on Windows XP, the fact that Microsoft is offering Windows 8 Pro as opposed to Windows 8 (consumer) should be of particular interest. Windows 8 Pro comes with downgrade rights, which allow the owner to legally install older versions of Windows. So for those of you needing to upgrade from XP but still wanting to hang back with Windows 7, this is a de-facto $40 Windows 7 Professional upgrade too.

Now there's no obvious reason why they've made this pricing move. Perhaps it's a move to quell the outcry from users dissatisfied with the UI changes. Perhaps it's a change in pricing philosophy that treats delta updates as lower cost than a complete license; and if that's the case, could we see annual $40 upgrades a la OS X? What is certain, is that once you make this move, it's difficult to move back to a model where loyal customers have to shell out $150 to use your latest software. With any luck, this new frugalness will reach their other high cost moneymaker: Office.

We saw it first at CTIA, one of the few devices launched there, and after a long wait it's here; the Droid Incredible 4G LTE by HTC will be arriving at Verizon Wireless stores July 5th and available for $149 on-contract, after a $50 mail-in rebate. Our review sample hit the door this morning, and we're fast at work getting our review done. In the meanwhile we have some glamour shots and a little family portrait. 

For those that don't recall, the DINC 4G (as we'll colloquially refer to it) is an off-shoot of the HTC ONE S, and features Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 dual-core SoC, the ubiquitous MSM8960, though here clocked at 1.2GHz. The Droid Incredible aesthetic has never been one of litheness, and that persists here. The body is 11.7 mm at its thickest, and the screen is a compact 4.0 inches, though the benefit in pixel density is perceptible. The super LCD qHD screen is actually quite impressive, with subjectively good color representation and incredible viewing angles. And, of course, our trusty Snapdragon S4 comes with an LTE radio on its cool running and compact die. With a smaller screen, lower core clock and fairly beefy 1700 mAh battery, this could be a compact all-day data hog. We'll let you know when our full review goes up. 

Closing out the month of June, AMD has posted two new Catalyst driver builds.

The first is Catalyst 12.6, the WHQL’d final version of the 12.6 beta at the start of the month. So this is virtually identical to the betas, save a few quick fixes. These are the first release drivers that only support AMD’s DX11 GPUs – since 12.5 was canceled, the latest driver for DX10 card owners continues be 12.4.

The second is Catalyst 12.7 beta, which we first saw with the launch of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition earlier this month. Catalyst 12.7 introduces performance updates for several games and MSAA/SSAA support for Diablo 3, which comes as a bit of a surprise since it doesn’t appear to be part of a new driver branch.

AMD has a blog post up on their site covering both of these drivers, including a more complete lists of improvements.

Source: AMD

Since posting the Nexus 7 mini review, I've gotten a lot of emails asking about whether USB-OTG for storage was currently supported or would be supported in the shipping software load. I've done some asking around and believe I have the final word now. 

Earlier today, Google announced Chrome for iOS (iPhone and iPad), and thanks to Richard Gaywood finding a direct link to the App Store, I got the chance to play around with it in-between a busy schedule of sessions and meetings at I/O 2012. Chrome on iOS weighs in at 12.8 MB and is version 19.0.1084.60. 

Earlier I had a glimmer of hope that Apple had relaxed the App Store rules to allow Chrome as a real native application on iOS, complete with its V8 JavaScript engine and newer version of WebKit (535.19). Unfortunately, as suspected, Chrome on iOS uses iOS' UIWebView, which means the same rendering engine as mobilesafari. On my iPhone 4S running iOS 6 B2, you can see the same user agent string (with the Chrome OS version tacked in between some other things) shared between mobilesafari and Chrome.

In addition, like other apps leveraging UIWebView, there's no access to mobilesafari's Nitro JavaScript engine which has JIT and other optimizations that make it run much faster. That means JavaScript execution is significantly slower inside Chrome on iOS than it is in mobilesafari.

On the positive side, the Chrome interface is pretty much exactly how it appears on Android, including the nice tabbed card switcher complete with the ability to close and switch tabs by swiping off the edge of the screen. Scrolling around inside webpages is also nice and speedy on Chrome for iOS, which isn't a  surprise since, again, it's using UIWebView. The real feature in Chrome for iOS sadly isn't a superior browsing engine, but rather the ability to sync your tabs, pages, and back history across the desktop and more mobile platforms. 

Update: As NobleKain points out in the comments, there's a discrepancy between WebKit versions between iOS 6 B1 and B2. B2 is now running 536.13, but WebView remains 534.46. Either way for users running iOS 5.1.1, these should be the same, I just unfortunately only have a device on me running the beta, hence the discrepancy.

Google has just announced that Chrome is coming to the iOS App Store later today for iPad and iPhone at Google I/O 2012. Chrome on iOS looks superficially identical to the Chrome we've seen on Android for some time now, this is very exciting news for those wishing for an alternative to Safari and a way to get Chrome sync working across iOS devices as well. I'm unclear if this is using something other than mobilesafari internally for rendering or Chrome's V8 for JavaScript. 

We hope to play around with this later today when it goes live on the App Store.