force

Hands on the rugged Sonim XP3300 Force (video)

Burly and coated in ridged rubber, the forthcoming Sonim XP3300 Force can take its share of abuse.

Rugged phones are sturdy, but certainly not indestructible. That said, this "Force" fared better encased in concrete than Han Solo did in carbonite, and it also passed our dunk test. Several enhancements kick it up a notch from some other Sonim phones. We'll have a more in-depth look in our hands-on review, so stay tuned. In the meantime, see the dust-covered contours of the XP3300 Force filmed just today in our San Francisco headquarters.

Sonim shows its XP3300 Force

BARCELONA, Spain--Sonim added another rugged handset to its burly lineup today when it revealed the Sonim XP3300 at Mobile World Congress.

Like its earlier XP3 and XP1300 Core, the XP3300 is built to withstand just about anything. You can submerge it in 6.5 feet of water and drop it from 6.5 feet onto a concrete floor without a scratch.

The fiberglass body and rubber sidings also protect it from dust, salt, fog, humidity, transport shock, thermal shock, and temperatures ranging from -4 degrees to 131 degrees Fahrenheit. What's more, Corning Gorilla Glass protects the 2-inch display.

Designed … Read more

Air Force OKs biofuel jet fuel mix in aircraft

The Air Force has approved a blend of jet fuel and plant-based fuels to work with an aircraft for first time.

The certification, announced yesterday, covers the C-17 Globemaster III, a transport aircraft made by Boeing and used for moving troops and cargo.

The Air Force tested a blend of up to 50 percent of biofuel, called hydrotreated renewable jet fuel, and JP-8 jet fuel, and found no degradation in performance for pilots.

The biofuel mix will burn cleaner, reducing the amount of sulfur compounds emitted and will further the military's goal of reducing its use of petroleum-based fuels, … Read more

CES: Turtle Beach aims to replace standard Xbox 360 headset

LAS VEGAS--While the Turtle Beach lineup of products at CES was highlighted by the announcement of the PX5, we were surprised to see the company go after Microsoft's standard Xbox 360 chat headset.

Surprisingly enough, the XC1 doesn't seem to offer anything that the current 360 set doesn't already do, though judging from the few photos we've seen of it, we'd imagine it will be more comfortable to wear during those long Black Ops multiplayer sessions. We'll have the final word on that when we get our hands on one this spring for $25. … Read more

Nvidia intros new 500 Series laptop GPUs

LAS VEGAS--Several new laptop graphics cards are joining the Nvidia family today, namely the GeForce GT 555M, GeForce GT 550M, GeForce GT 540M, GeForce GT 525M, and GeForce GT 520M. These new GPUs support all the proprietary technologies that Nvidia uses to set itself apart from the competition, including Optimus, PhysX, and 3D Vision.

Optimus is notable because it allows laptops to include both integrated graphics (typically from Intel) and a discrete Nvidia graphics card, then switch between them automatically as needed. Other graphics-switching technologies typically require users to hit a manual or virtual button, or else have very simple commands, such as switching off the discrete graphics when running on battery power.

All of the new Nvidia 500 Series GPUs support Optimus, while the 550M, 500M, and 540M support 3D Vision, Nvidia's self-contained ecosystem of 3D active-shutter glasses, IR emitters, and compatible monitors and GPUs.

Nvidia is also taking advantage of this launch to lob a few attacks at sometimes partner, sometimes rival Intel. The CPU maker is aiming to reduce the need for discrete graphics cards (Nvidia's main business) with its revamped Sandy Bridge integrated graphics, which aim to be good enough so that most mainstream users (such as World of Warcraft players) won't need a discrete GPU. … Read more

PlayStations power Air Force supercomputer

PlayStations have seen plenty of army action with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops. Now they're doing real-life military duty as part of the Condor Cluster, a U.S. Air Force supercomputer whose off-the-shelf components include more than 1,700 Sony PS3 processors.

The computer--which will undertake a range of tasks including synthetic aperture radar enhancement, image enhancement, and pattern recognition research--also incorporates 168 separate graphical processing units. It's capable of computing about 500 trillion calculations per second, which makes it some 50,000 times faster than the average laptop.

As such, the Condor can read a whopping 20 pages of information per second. Even when 20 percent to 30 percent of the characters on a page are removed, the computer can recover all of the sentences and words with about 99.9 percent accuracy, according to the official Web site of the U.S. Air Force.

Affordability was a key motivator in the decision to use PS3 processors.

"The total cost of the Condor system was approximately $2 million, which is a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability," said Mark Barnell, director of the Air Force Research Laboratory's high-power computing division.

He said the Condor isn't made to compete with the world's largest general-purpose supercomputers, but is meant for highly specific military tasks. "The biggest thing for us was [that] the particular applications and the hardware we chose to build this computer with purposely match those applications well," he said.

Initial projects scheduled for the Department of Defense mega-machine, housed in Rome, N.Y., will include neuromorphic artificial intelligence research, in which programmers will "teach" the computer to read symbols, letters, words, and sentences so it can fill in human gaps and correct human errors. … Read more

Click clack: Mechanical keyboards compared

The first IBM Model M keyboard was made in the 1980s and quickly rose to a cult product with typing purists who prefer its buckling spring keys as opposed to the thin laptop keys we use today.

As a result, manufacturers like Das Keyboard, Matias, and Rosewill are rolling out updated versions of the Model M that bring back the same key switches and the click-clack sound--hence the term "mechanical keyboard."

This guide offers more about mechanical keyboards than even the average geek cares to know, but unfortunately you can't try them out before you buy, so … Read more

Secretive X-37B space plane ends 7-month orbit

The X-37B, an unmanned U.S. Air Force space plane whose mystery mission set off a round of speculation over the spring and summer, returned to Earth early this morning after its maiden flight lasted 220 days in orbit.

The space plane landed at 1:16 a.m. PT today at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, officially making it the U.S.'s first unmanned vehicle to return from space and land on its own, according to Boeing, which designed the craft. Launched in April from Cape Canaveral by an Atlas 5 rocket, the X-37B was designed to stay … Read more

Study: NASA, White House are social-media savvy

NASA and the White House are tops at using social media and the Web compared with a wide range of other public sector groups in the U.S., according to a study out today from the George Washington University School of Business and digital think tank L2.

Authored by George Washington University School of Business dean Doug Guthrie, New York University professor and L2 founder Scott Galloway, and experts from L2, the first annual Digital IQ Index for the Public Sector (PDF) measured the effectiveness of Web sites, digital marketing, social media, and mobile platform support among 100 different public … Read more