SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son wants Sprint, and he’s willing to make some significant concessions to get hold of it, like letting the US government choose one of the 10 directors to its board. The Wall Street Journal reported the news today, writing that the director in question will be in charge...
Dish on PR offensive as shareholder vote nears
After being made aware of a large and potentially costly privacy breach exposing more than 170,000 records containing Social Security numbers and financial information, the two companies responsible for the blunder are threatening legal action...
AMD boasted that its Z-60 Hondo chip would bring Call of Duty to thin tablets, and its boasts were for naught, but it looks like the company's latest processor core is going to see a lot of use in the next generation of cheap laptops. Today, AMD has revealed its basic performance claims for its Jaguar core, the same one that's reportedly built into the chips in both the Xbox One and PlayStation...
It's hard to say if there's a market yet for an all-in-one touchscreen PC that you can just pick up and carry around, but it seems that no Windows PC maker wants to be left out. Hot on the heels of Dell's XPS 18, Sony's VAIO Tap 20, and the Asus Transformer AIO, Hewlett-Packard has announced the Envy Rove 20. It's a tabletop PC with a 20-inch touchscreen, a four-hour battery, and a spring-loaded kickstand that folds flat into the frame.
We got to check out the Rove 20 briefly at an HP event in San Francisco late last month, and we're not yet sure what to think. The 10-point capacitive touchscreen felt responsive, and the kickstand has a very satisfying action (you squeeze a button around back to release the lever as you set it down) but the machine still felt fairly thick and heavy for a machine designed to be carried around. It's...
Big screen portable machine
As the Xbox 360 aged, rumors swirled around Microsoft’s next-generation console. Would we see an Xbox 720? An Xbox Infinity? A Nextbox? All those rumors turned out to be wrong: in Redmond today, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, set for release by the end of 2013. While the name was kept strictly under wraps, the Xbox One announcement confirmed many of the rumors we’d been hearing for months...
Here's your cheat sheet for all of the Xbox One news
I attended the first Bitcoin World Conference and Expo, held in a second-floor meeting room in a midtown Manhattan hotel, on a Saturday in August 2011. The virtual currency was powering an alternative economy worth around $81 million USD. Roughly 75 attendees, mostly long-haired programmers and pasty cypherpunks, came from as far as Switzerland. After the talks, we took a group photo.
The...
Samsung has announced the Galaxy S4 has reached 10 million global channel sales less than a month after its commercial launch. The figure sets a new record for Samsung's line of smartphones; the Galaxy S III took a full 50 days to reach the same figure, while the S II took five months. The Galaxy S4 officially launched on April 27th, and as of right now Samsung says it is selling four S4 smartphones every second. Along with the figure, Samsung also announced it would be adding several new colors to the lineup this summer, with names like "Purple Mirage" and "Brown Autumn."
The news doesn't...
The sci-fi films of the 1980s and '90s have been ripe for remakes lately — and the latest project that could be reinvented is none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme's time-travel action flick Timecop. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal Pictures is putting a reboot into development, with Tom McNulty and Marc Shmuger (We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks) producing. The original 1994 film was based upon a story published by Dark Horse Comics, and featured Van Damme as a time-travelling police officer tracking down a corrupt politician played by Ron Silver. The film resulted in a direct-to-video sequel and a brief television...
NASA has been on a roll with Google+ lately, hosting several video Hangouts with astronauts live from outer space. But tomorrow, things will be coming back down to Earth for a change, and The Verge will be in attendance. Join us here Thursday starting just before 3 PM Eastern for a special Google+ Hangout with recently returned space station Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, and NASA astronauts Kevin Ford and Tom...
Space oddity, indeed
After Microsoft's big reveal, we've finally had time to get a closer look at the new Xbox One, the Kinect 2, and the new controller for the new console. For the most part, they're more tweaks on the existing devices than huge changes to what already exists – the console is a big, wide, flat...
Harrowing. Teary. Chronologies. Happily. Tucking. Compromises. Hungrily. Toeing. Communiqués. Heating. Trained. Crystals.
A massive plan is underway to upgrade aging road signs in the US. The goal is to make them more reflective at night, and easier for drivers to see. But the main government instruction manual for doing so, the longtime bible of roadside signage and...
A 33-year-old Polish man whose face was brutally maimed during a workplace accident has become the first patient in the world to undergo a life-saving face transplant procedure. Surgeons today announced the successful results of the emergency undertaking, which occurred a mere...
Tesla Motors has repaid a $465 million loan to the Department of Energy nine years ahead of schedule, becoming the first of several car companies to repay its share of a multibillion-dollar program meant to spur electric vehicle development. The company announced today that it had made a final...
Dr. Terrence Early, a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara, CA, is convinced he's found the holy grail of care for severely depressed patients — those who've tried a litany of antidepressants, and even electroconvulsive therapy, to no avail. "These are the very sickest patients," Early, who estimates that he's treated 80 people over 500 sessions with the method, says. "And the results have been dumbfounding."
We're just a few days away from the long-awaited fourth season of Arrested Development, one of the most high-profile Netflix original series to be released. Ted Sarandos, the man behind the company's ever-burgeoning original content strategy, just...
General Motors has shown off prototypes of its in-car app platform for months, but today the automaker has finally committed turning its tech demos into a reality. In an interview with CNET, March Chan, the president of GM's global connected consumer division, said the company plans to have apps...
We've seen the reveal trailer, and now the team behind Call of Duty: Ghosts is pulling back the curtain and providing a look at the game's robust...
Microsoft is updating its Windows Phone YouTube app today. In a statement to The Verge, the company says it's making some changes to address concerns from Google. "Microsoft updated the Windows...
We've seen the rapid voice search advancements Google has made in Chrome for the desktop, but since Siri is currently the sole method of entering voice queries on the iOS version, iPhone and iPad...
It's no secret that major US companies have been victims of a growing number of hacks from overseas in recent years, allegedly by attackers looking to steal corporate information and intellectual...
It's been a heck of a couple weeks since we last broadcasted: BlackBerry Live, Google I/O, and CTIA all happened. Needless to say, we've got quite a bit to talk about — and you didn't hear it...
Twitter has announced that it is finally rolling out two-step authentication for accounts, a much-needed security feature that comes after several...
For the first time, US Attorney General Eric Holder has admitted that four American citizens have been killed in extrajudicial strikes by unmanned aircraft. The New York Times has obtained a letter sent to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, disclosing details about the Obama Administration's drone program. In it, Holder gave the names of the four citizens...
Google Glass isn’t ready for prime time. Even Google knows this, which is why it hasn't shipped to the masses yet. Instead, Google floated a few units to “Explorers,” glorified guinea pigs who can enjoy the joys and trials of this cuttingest edge of cutting edge technologies. But nascent or...
