Formerly, Research in Motion (RIM) had a series of smartphones called BlackBerry. Now, the company has changed their name to BlackBerry, and announced two new devices aimed at bringing the company back to prominence. The Z10 is the leading smartphone, with a 4.2-inch touchscreen (1280×768 resolution at 356 pixels-per-inch), 2GB of RAM, 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, 16GB of storage, NFC, LTE, and WiFi, as well as a microSD card slot, 1080p HD video recording, and a 2MP front-facing camera.
Verizon and AT&T are going sell the Z10 starting in mid-March. Pricing and an exact date isn’t available on AT&T, but Verizon will release their Z10 six weeks after the Superbowl, for $200 on a two-year contract.
Want an iPad with Retina display (fourth-generation, the latest) with more storage? Apple has you covered on the most successful tablet of all time, like it or not. The 128GB of storage is perfectly usable by the user, come February 5th for $799 which gets you the base Wi-Fi version. Want a cellular edition on Verizon or AT&T with 4G LTE, as well as Sprint? Well, that’s the most expensive iPad, at $929. Options is the way the game is played.
Here’s the actual bit of news you need to know: Microsoft Office 2013 is completely revamped and modern, and comes in two versions. First, there’s Office 2013, which is your normal Word, Excel, OneNote and Powerpoint suite for $139. Home and Business adds Outlook for $219, while the top-of-the-line Professional package includes all of the aforementioned Office 2013 apps, along with Access and Publisher for $399.
As Randall Monroe from xkcd so accurately describes and explains using his drawings and tests inside of X-Plane (a flight simulator used by pilots with 20 years of engineering behind it) it’s rather difficult to fly a plane in on a planet with no environment. Not to mention temperature and pressure changes, along with gravitational pull. But the intriguing thing is that on Titan, a moon of Saturn, is better to fly in than on Earth: you could technically use a human glider, except that it’s really cold, at about 72 degrees Kelvin (-330.07 Fahrenheit). That’s really cold.
So this is something that will work for the future, and the present. The constant problem of using HD video streaming on a smartphone is that it always buffers, even on a 4G LTE connection. The solution? Change the video format. So, as cool as that seems, it gets better: the new format is called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), shortened as H.265, and it’s a standard that should make HD video streaming easier and could make even Ultra HD (formerly known as 4K) a possibility on a cellphone.
