ZTE’s Quartz smartwatch is the Chinese phone maker’s first attempt at breaching what’s quickly becoming a saturated U.S. smartwatch market. Two of the watch’s most promising features are its ability to be used without a phone and its affordability. But how do these promises stand up to the test? I tried it out for myself. …
As IT rises up the list of business priorities, CEOs are more likely to read about new technologies than they are to ask their CIOs for information. That’s one of the findings in a new survey by Gartner, in which 31 percent of business leaders questioned put IT among their top three priorities. It’s the…
AMD’s new Radeon Pro Duo graphics packs two of the company’s fastest GPUs, but surprisingly, is slower than its 2016 predecessor. The Pro Duo, announced on Monday, is based on the Polaris architecture. It provides 11.45 teraflops of single-precision performance, which is a downgrade from the 16 teraflops of performance offered by last year’s Pro…
Soon Gmail accounts will no longer be second-class citizens in Windows 10. Microsoft announced late last week that some of the company’s top features for Outlook.com and other Microsoft-hosted email are coming to Gmail accounts. The changes will be available via the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar app, meaning Gmail users won’t see them outside…
Millions of people around the world are enjoying their first days with the Galaxy S8, marveling over the screen and rocking out with the new AKG-tuned earbuds. But not everyone is singing a happy tune. For some users, the infinity display isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, with some S8 screens showing a distinct…
A 32-year-old Russian hacker was sentenced to 27 years in prison in the U.S. for stealing millions of payment card details from businesses by infecting their point-of-sale systems with malware. The sentence is the longest ever handed out in the U.S. for computer crimes, surpassing the 20-year jail term imposed on American hacker and former…
Has your computer been infected with a suspected NSA spying implant? A security researcher has come up with a free tool that can tell. Luke Jennings of security firm Countercept wrote a script in response to last week’s high-profile leak of cyberweapons that some researchers believe are from the U.S. National Security Agency. It’s designed…
Driving long distances (or using New York City’s subway system) used to be a much more complicated affair, generally requiring maps, a sense of direction, some luck and the occasional stop to ask questions of strangers. Turn-by-turn navigation apps have changed all that: You may still take a wrong turn along the way, but the…
Apple has a new high-flying project in the works. According to Bloomberg, Apple is getting involved in launching satellites that would beam down broadband Internet access. Recently, Apple poached two Google satellite executives to form a new hardware team within the company. John Fenwick led Google’s spacecraft operations and Michael Trela was head of satellite…
WebAssembly, the portable binary format for improving web application performance, is being tweaked by Microsoft for its Edge browser. With the browser featured in the recent Windows 10 Creators Update, the Chakra JavaScript engine defers parsing WebAssembly functions until called; other engines parse functions at start time. [ Use JavaScript in your dev shop? InfoWorld…