Verizon’s LTE Just Got Three Times Faster in a Bunch of Big Cities

Last year, Verizon bought $3.6 billion worth of spectrum, and now it’s finally making use of it: its LTE coverage just got three times faster in some big cities . Read more…        

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Verizon’s LTE Just Got Three Times Faster in a Bunch of Big Cities

How to Pick Your Next Android Phone: 2013 Edition

Put simply, there are too many Android phones out there. The only way to know which ones are worth your time is to follow tech news every day. For those that have other things to do, here’s what matters when buying a new device. Read more…        

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How to Pick Your Next Android Phone: 2013 Edition

Futuremark Delists Samsung and HTC Android Devices for Cheating 3DMark

MojoKid writes “Benchmarks are serious business. Buying decisions are often made based on how well a product scores, which is why the press and analysts spend so much time putting new gadgets through their paces. However, benchmarks are only meaningful when there’s a level playing field, and when companies try to ‘game’ the business of benchmarking, it’s not only a form of cheating, it also bamboozles potential buyers who (rightfully) assume the numbers are supposed mean something. 3D graphics benchmark software developer Futuremark just ‘delisted’ a bunch of devices from its 3DMark benchmark results database because it suspects foul play is at hand. Of the devices listed, it appears Samsung and HTC in particular are indirectly being accused of cheating 3DMark for mobile devices. Delisted devices are stripped of their rank and scores. Futuremark didn’t elaborate on which specific rule(s) these devices broke, but a look at the company’s benchmarking policies reveals that hardware makers aren’t allowed to make optimizations specific to 3DMark, nor are platforms allowed to detect the launch of the benchmark executable unless it’s needed to enable multi-GPU and/or there’s a known conflict that would prevent it from running.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Futuremark Delists Samsung and HTC Android Devices for Cheating 3DMark

How Many Android OEMs Cheat Benchmark Scores? Pretty Much All of Them

An anonymous reader writes “After Samsung got caught out cheating on benchmarks (Note 3, Galaxy S4) AnandTech has done a detailed analysis of the state of benchmark cheating amongst Android OEMs. With the exception of Motorola, literally every single OEM they’ve looked at ships (or has shipped) at least one device that does benchmark-specific CPU optimizations. AnandTech also thinks it will get worse before it gets better. ‘The hilarious part of all of this is we’re still talking about small gains in performance. The impact on our CPU tests is 0 – 5%, and somewhere south of 10% on our GPU benchmarks as far as we can tell. I can’t stress enough that it would be far less painful for the OEMs to just stop this nonsense and instead demand better performance/power efficiency from their silicon vendors.’ The article notes that Apple doesn’t do any of the frequency gaming stuff.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Many Android OEMs Cheat Benchmark Scores? Pretty Much All of Them

iPhone A7 Chip Benchmarks: Forget the Specs, It Blows Everything Away

We just ran benchmarks on Apple’s new iPhone 5S, revealing that, yup, this is the dopest smartphone silicon ever made. This thing freaking churns, crushing every other smartphone out there on both computational power and graphics. But if you look at common specs like core-count and clock speed for the hardware, you’d never know it. Read more…        

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iPhone A7 Chip Benchmarks: Forget the Specs, It Blows Everything Away

PCWorld Magazine Is No More

harrymcc writes “After slightly more than 30 years, PCWorld — one of the most successful computer magazines of all time — is discontinuing print publication. It was the last general-interest magazine for PC users, so it really is the end of an era. Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category, in part as a former editor at PCWorld, but mostly as a guy who really, really loved to read computer magazines.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PCWorld Magazine Is No More

13 Technologies You Won’t See in 2013

It seems like only yesterday we were planning for the Mayan apocalypse, but like so many other products, the 14th b’ak’tun (next era) has been delayed due to bugs and lack of pre-orders. Yet if you talked to some pundits back in 2011, they’d have told you that the end of days was coming out in Q4 of 2012, along with its competitor, BlackBerry 10. More »

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13 Technologies You Won’t See in 2013

Google App Verification Service Detects Only 15% of Infected Apps

ShipLives writes “Researchers have tested Google’s app verification service (included in Android 4.2 last month), and found that it performed very poorly at identifying malware in apps. Specifically, the app verification service identified only ~15% of known malware in testing — whereas existing third-party security apps identified between 51% and 100% of known malware in testing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google App Verification Service Detects Only 15% of Infected Apps

Google Is Finally Installing Gigabit Fiber In Kansas City Homes

It feels like we’ve been hearing about Google Fiber in Kansas City forever. Though a few people have gotten to use the blazing-fast service, Google has only been accepting applications for the service for most of the city. Well today, the Google Fiber installations begin in earnest . More »

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Google Is Finally Installing Gigabit Fiber In Kansas City Homes