Remember the 2011 attack that crippled Sony's PlayStation Network, leaked almost a quarter million users' information and generally was a nuisance? It's still cleaning up after that mess. Earlier this year, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) slapped the company's European wing with a £250,000 fine ($377,575), saying it should have been better prepared for the attack -- now Sony's agreed to pay up. The electronics giant still maintains that the charge is without merit, but ceded to the penalty to avoid disclosing details about its security procedures. Apparently, the two months of free PS+ wasn't enough to make everybody forget.

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ZTE U988S outed as the world's first Tegra 4 phone,

China's TENAA certification database is notorious for leaking mobile devices, but this time ZTE's learned that if you can't beat it, then just play along with it. After this U988S was leaked by TENAA recently, ZTE decided to share some product shots on a forum and Sina Weibo ahead of time. What's more, the company confirmed that this red device is actually the China Mobile version of the Geek, but the Intel chip has been replaced by NVIDIA's upcoming Tegra 4. As teased before, this will likely make the new Geek the world's first phone to pack this quad-core chip, which will be clocked at 1.8GHz and will have 2GB of RAM, according to the TENAA filing.

Other changes include the 5-inch LCD upgrade from 1,280 x 720 to 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, plus the front-facing camera is now at 2 megapixels instead of just 1. On the other hand, the old 8-megapixel main camera is here to stay. Sadly, this particular device will only work on China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network, meaning the rest of the world will have to stay tuned for a global version. Let's hope that this wouldn't take too long.

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DNP  Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon review dark and angular meets thin and light

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon is such a beautiful piece of hardware that we're having trouble concentrating. With that carbon fiber chassis, the Ultrabook is thin, light and classily understated. Even packing Ivy Bridge internals, it still managed to crank out five hours of battery life and, aside from its slightly weak display, stands head and shoulders above other skinny carbon laptops we could mention. But what about you high-rollers who splashed out upwards of $1400 on one of these things? Here's the time for you to share your experiences and tell us what you would change.

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Refresh Roundup week of July 8th, 2013

Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!

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The Weekly Roundup for 12032012

You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

DNP Switched On Nook tablet, an epilogue

The recent announcement by Barnes & Noble that it would discontinue its Nook tablets marked the exit of what once promised to be a strong rival to Amazon, at least among bibliophiles. Barnes & Noble's entry into the tablet market took place amidst an annual game of leapfrog with its internet-based rival. Surviving for three iterations, the color Nook devices were products that had a particular focus on media consumption -- especially reading -- and eschewed open access to apps.

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 Apple reportedly hiring new talent to solve iWatch design problems

Rumors, suggestions and trademark applications have been building a case for an wrist-worn Apple product for some time now -- an official iWatch to fulfill the wearable potential of the iPod Nano. Now, the Financial Times says the company is "aggressively" hiring to help it get the product ready for release. According to the usual sources familiar with the matter, the new staff might have been sought out to help Apple wrap its head around wearable computing, moving the project to the next stage of development. The timing of the hires might also imply that the iWatch won't be ready until late next year. Of course, if you can't wait that long, you can always just make your own.

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Keepin' it real fake HTC One finally gets a convincing plastic clone

We hate to say this, but the KIRF market is often a good indicator of how popular certain devices are, hence the plentiful fake iPhones and Galaxy phones in China. (Meanwhile, MediaTek is shamelessly cashing in as it ships its SoCs to those cloning factories.) Now, we're not saying the HTC One doesn't have any clones, but most of those we've seen weren't very convincing -- they were either of different sizes or had very poor build quality. But we eventually stumbled upon a pretty good fake in Huaqiangbei.

The offending device is pictured above on the left. Externally, it bears a disgustingly strong resemblance to the real deal thanks to the same 4.7-inch screen size, the same curved back, the same micro-SIM tray, the same dual-soft-key layout and even the same metallic chamfer on the front. But if you look closer or touch it even, the tell-tale signs start to show up. See for yourself in the gallery below -- the fake One is to the left or on top of the real thing.

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Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week's tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages.

The Aftermath Nokia finally joins PureView and Lumia and a million Pebble apps

Welcome to this week's After Math, with Nokia and T-Mobile both holding New York-based events for their future plans. The US carrier continued to roll out its Magenta-hued LTE service across America, while Nokia finally revealed the long-rumored (and often-leaked) Lumia 1020, which brings its high-megapixel-count sensors to its Lumia line -- a true PureView Windows Phone. All this in numerot (that's Finnish for numbers), right after the break.

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Moto X's Open Mic demoed, enables voice command when screen is off

Just when we're getting bored of all these static Moto X leaks, a couple of new video clips popped up to finally show off some of the software goodies. The first one appears to be a leaked Rogers promotional video (embedded after the break), in which a nice lady introduces us to a new Google Now voice command feature, which can be toggled with a custom phrase even when the screen is off (similar to a feature we've seen promised by a certain Wolfson audio chip). According to another clip uploaded by kronikbudz, said feature is called Open Mic, but there's no indication as to whether this will be exclusive to Motorola devices or whether it'll come with the next Android release.

The Rogers video adds that the Moto X will provide ambient "active updates" notifications on the screen when the phone is locked, and this is pitched as a more sensible replacement for the meaningless blinking light. Later on, the same lady demonstrates how one can activate the phone's camera -- even when locked -- by simply twisting the wrist twice. We're a bit worried that this may allow accidental activations, unless the phone can detect whether it is inside a pocket or bag.

Finally, the lady says the Moto X will be "exclusively" heading to Rogers this August in either black or white, thus confirming the "late Summer" window that we were previously told. Enjoy your very own exclusivity while it lasts, Mr. Schmidt!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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