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The fine folks at GPS review have gotten their hands on the new TomTom GO 930, a followup to the GO 720 — TomTom’s previous flagship device. As far as looks go, the 930 is pretty much a 720 in shiny black clothing, so the review concentrates on the new features included like Active Lane Guidance, static intersection images and IQ routes. Nothing’s going to blow you away if you already have a 720, but the lane guidance should help with that all-important “which lane should I get in?” conundrum, while IQ routes has significantly improved route time estimations. Intersection images were too few and far between to be much help, but overall this is a decent improvement to an already impressively-reviewed device.
source:engadget

You may still not be able to get an iPhone in Canada (at least officially), but you can now at least grab a spiffy new 16GB Samsung YP-P2, which is a whole 8GB bigger than the model currently available in the US. From the looks of it, Best Buy Canada is the among the first to offer the beefed-up, Bluetooth-packin’ PMP, with it currently demanding $330 Canadian (a $40 discount off the $370 list price) on the retailer’s website. Apart from the bump in storage, however, there doesn’t look to be any other changes to the player, with it boasting the same 3-inch touchscreen, Bluetooth 2.0 support, and H.264, OGG, and WMV playback as before. Of course, it’s not very likely this’ll be a Canadian exclusive for long, though we’ve still yet to hear anything official on that from Samsung.
source:engadget

Although both Microsoft and Intel’s R&D departments have been responsible for some nifty futuristic tech, the two companies got together last week and announced a $20M grant to two universities to “start over” and develop next-gen computing systems based around parallel processing. The grant will fund Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers at UC -Berkeley, which is kicking in another $7M, and the University of Illinois at Champaign / Urbana, which is donating $8M of its own. According to Mark Snir, head of the UIUC lab, the goal is to find a way to make “parallelism so easy to use that parallel programming becomes synonymous with programming” — an increasingly important priority as current multi-core processors aren’t necessarily being fully utilized, and 100-core processors aren’t far off. That leads us to wonder: what to do with all that newly-unlocked processing power? Virtual-reality Facebook? Real-time visual augmentation? Finally being able to run Crysis? We know you’ve got ideas — sound off in comments!

source:engadget

You know, we’ll actually be a little sad when the endless legal battle between Nokia and Qualcomm actually comes to an end — but until then, we’re going to revel in all the dirt that comes out of having over a dozen simultaneous lawsuits going worldwide. Nokia now says that it owes Qualcomm nothing for its “early” CDMA patents, because it’s dropped a cool billion dollars into license payments for them over the past 15 years and those deals have expired, so it’s in the clear now. As you might expect, Qualcomm disagrees, and says that if Nokia wants to keep using its tech, it’s got to pay up — that’s on top of the estimated $500 million a year Nokia’s already paying Qualcomm for other patents. Guys, guys, why fight like this? What’s a couple billion a year between friends? Video summary of the entire dispute after the break.

source:engadget.com