Huawei Ascend Mate Selling for China’s Equivalent of $575

Huawei Ascend Mate

The monstrous 6.1 inch Huawei Ascend Mate was showcased at CES earlier this year along with a little bit of information on the product. However, now we seem to have a price tag to pin on the big product.

The new Huawei Ascend Mate will be on retail for around 3500 Chinese Yuan, the equivalent to $575 US dollars. For the price, the Huawei Mate doesn’t seem half bad, however, there still hasn’t been any news on the Ascend Mate reaching the United States, or anywhere else other than China.

The 6.1 inch screen on the Ascend Mate is a LCD IPS display with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels, or around 241 pixels-per-inch, certainly not super-HD, but for the size and the prize it’s more than reasonable.

Huawei’s new phablet also comes with an expected 1.5GHz own-brand quad-core KV32 processor, and a solid 2GB RAM.

Do you think Huawei has pushed the boundaries too far with the Ascend Mate’s huge 6.1” screen, or would you love to get your hands on a phone this size?

[Source]



Source : mobilemag[dot]com

Wine developer demos Windows software running on Android

We’ve already seen applications that let you run Android apps on Windows. But now it looks like the opposite is possible too thanks to an ARM-friendly version of Wine, the popular 'compatibility layer' used to run Windows software on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Mac OSX and BSD.

Alexandre Julliard, the developer behind Wine, showed off an early build at the 2013 Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. The demo ran very, very slow. Linux centric website Phoronix said performance was "horrendously slow," but noted this was at least partly because Julliard was using an emulated version of Android on a laptop rather than an actual Android phone or tablet.

From the looks of things it could be a while before the project sees the light of day -- if it is released at all. This Wine port for Android is an active work-in-progress but apparently it hasn't received much attention yet.

Running Windows applications on an Android smartphone will have little to no practical use for most people, but it might make more sense for tablets. CodeWeavers, Julliard’s employer and developer of Wine-based CrossOver believes so, and though the prospect of Wine on ARM is appealing they’re also hopeful for the success of x86 chips on Android tablets to raise developer interest in running Windows apps on the platform.

The name Wine initially was an acronym for WINdows Emulator but later changed it’s significance to “Wine is not an emulator” to better illustrate how the software works. That is, duplicating functions of Windows by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, rather than virtualizing the hardware in which the operating system runs. In practical terms this means you don’t need a virtual machine running Windows itself and thus a Windows license in order to run applications using Wine.


Source : techspot[dot]com

Nokia CEO gives notice Windows tablets could be in pipeline

Nokia CEO gives notice Windows tablets could be in pipeline

Elop is talking, but whether we see any tabs remains to be seen

Finnish smartphone maker Nokia is firmly committed to Windows Phone, but recent comments made by its CEO suggest that tablets also powered by Microsoft's OS could be another point of interest for the company.

Australian Financial Review reported Monday that Nokia might be poised to enter the increasingly crowded tablet market, judging from comments made by company chief Stephen Elop while speaking to reporters in Sydney.

While making it clear that Nokia has yet to make any formal decision let alone announce or launch a tablet, Elop did refer to such devices as complementary to its current Windows Phone products.

"We haven't announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely," the CEO said. "We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time."

Learning from Microsoft

Elop made it clear his company favors partnering with Microsoft, though a public relations executive reminded him that, again, nothing formal has been decided.

"We would consider any option [Android or Windows]… It is important to note that the opportunity for companionship is something that any user is looking for," the CEO said.

Android may not be a serious contender for Nokia, as the CEO appears to have no regrets 2 years after hitching his wagon to Microsoft - the company where Elop previously headed up the Office business division.

"Our first focus on what we look at is clearly in the Microsoft side," Elop explained, noting that Nokia is watching and waiting to see what lessons might be learned from Microsoft's own Surface tablets.

"When you think about the Lumia 920 running on Windows Phone, having a Windows tablet or PC or Xbox is something that will give us the opportunity to have a pretty integrated experience," the executive concluded.


Source : techradar[dot]com

Nokia CEO hints Windows tablets could be in pipeline

Nokia CEO hints Windows tablets could be in pipeline

Nokia eyeing future tablet like Microsoft Surface

Finnish smartphone maker Nokia is firmly committed to Windows Phone, but recent comments made by its CEO suggest that tablets also powered by Microsoft could also be of interest to the company.

Australian Financial Review reported Monday that Nokia could be poised to enter the increasingly crowded tablet market, judging from comments made by CEO Stephen Elop during an interview in Sydney.

While making it clear that Nokia has yet to make any formal decision let alone announce or launch a tablet, Elop did refer such devices as complementary to its current Windows Phone products.

"We would consider any option [Android or Windows]… It is important to note that the opportunity for companionship is something that any user is looking for," the CEO said.

Learning from Microsoft

Android may not be a serious contender for Nokia, whose CEO appears to have no regrets two years after hitching his wagon to Microsoft - the company where Elop previously headed up the Office business division.

"Our first focus on what we look at is clearly in the Microsoft side," Elop explained, noting that Nokia is watching and waiting to see what lessons might be learned from Microsoft's own Surface tablets.

"When you think about the Lumia 920 running on Windows Phone, having a Windows tablet or PC or Xbox is something that will give us the opportunity to have a pretty integrated experience," the executive concluded.


Source : techradar[dot]com

Want to know why we haven’t seen Psychonauts 2 yet? There are 18 million reasons

Minecraft creator Markus Persson was a likely investor for Psychonauts 2 in 2012 but development costs were too high. How high? The developer shed light on the necessary budget to make a sequel for Double Fine’s telepathic platformer.

Video games are nearing a point where it becomes prohibitively expensive for all but the major studios to develop AAA titles. Making a console game is an astronomically costly business, far more so today than even just ten years ago. That’s often why sequels to critically acclaimed games don’t always get made. A good example of this is the long rumored, much asked for Psychonauts 2 from Double Fine and Tim Schafer, which has yet to materialize because it would cost around $18 million to make.

That figure comes from Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson. In 2012, Persson made a casual offer to fund the development of Psychonauts 2 in February 2012, after Tim Schafer said that he’d had trouble generating publisher interest in the project. “Tim and Markus are talking,” Double Fine confirmed later on, “Who knows what might happen?”

The answer to that question is: not much. Persson backed away from the game just one week later, claiming that the necessary budget for Psychonauts 2 is “three times higher than my initial impression.”

On Saturday, Notch gave a more specific number while doing a question and answer session on Reddit. “I somewhat naively thought ‘a couple of million’ was $2 million,” said Persson, “I had no doubt in my mind that a Psychonauts 2 would earn that money back easily. Turns out they wanted $18 million. I don’t have the time at the moment to make an $18 million deal. I’ve made one private investment into a game so far at $100,000, and it’s frankly a lot more work than I thought.”

Even at $18 million, Psychonauts 2 would be on the lower end of console game development cost. To put console game budgets in perspective, it cost approximately $800,000 to $1.7 million to develop a game for the PlayStation in the mid-‘90s. During the PlayStation 2 era, development costs ballooned to between $5 and $10 million. In 2008 as development was ramping up for the PlayStation 3, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that the average game for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC cost between $18.8 million and $28.2 million to create.

Perhaps this will change in the future. Tim Schafer implied in December that Double Fine may give up on the console business in the near future, developing PC-only titles. Perhaps that would lower the cost on Psychonauts 2.


Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

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