It looks like both Sprint and Virgin Mobile are about to get a new budget Android smartphone on their networks in the US, the LG Optimus Elite, which you can see in the photos below.
According to the guys over at PocketNow, the LG Optimus Elite will come with a 3.2 inch HVGA display and a 5 megapixel camera with a built in flash.
Processing will be provided by an 800MHz processor, unfortunately that is all we know so far, and both devices are expected to retail for under $100 on both networks.
It has been discovered by researchers at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, that credit card data on older Xbox 360 systems that have been traded in or sold on. may be vulnerable to being hacked fro the previous owners credit card information. The team has discovered that even restoring your console to factory settings won’t remove some of the data stored on the Xbox 360.
Using just a handful of common tools, almost any hacker or modders can remove the Xbox’s hard drive and recover credit card data or other personal information, which has been entered by previous owners. Speaking to gaming website Kotaku, researcher Ashley Podhradsky explained:
“Microsoft is doing a “disservice” to its customers by not doing a better job of keeping personal data protected. Microsoft does a great job of protecting their proprietary information. But they don’t do a great job of protecting the user’s data.”
Read the full article over on the Kotaku website.
Nintendo has announced that it will partner with development company Green Hills Software to create and implement a development solution for its coming Wii U game console. The company will provide its MULTI integrated development environment to help third parties more easily and efficiently write code for the impending system. It will hopefully help third-party game makers to come on board and support Nintendo in the next generation.
“We selected the Green Hills Software solution because it generates highly optimized code, and Green Hills provides excellent global support,” Nintendo senior managing director of integrated research and design Genyo Takeda said. Nintendo has a great, storied history and of course has moments of industry innovation and record sales. But despite all that, it doesn’t have a super great record of developer relations.
A Nintendo console needs only a Mario game, a Pokemon game, and a Zelda game to be profitable. There are no other franchises in the entire industry like that. But it doesn’t mean Nintendo can not care about third-party developers. The Wii is a case study in the direction that a console takes when it isn’t receiving huge amounts of envelope-pushing support from other players in the industry. Hopefully this partnership with Green Hills Software is a point in the right direction.
LivingSocial has abandoned its location-based “Instant” deals service before it ever made its mark. In addition, company co-founder and former president Eddie Frederick has left the site, and it’s assumed that his departure was not by choice. Frederick likely had an active hand in developing the Instant platform, which has been described as essentially being dead on arrival. Internet success isn’t as easy as it looks.
LivingSocial is the #2 deal website, behind Groupon, but it hasn’t managed to successfully turn itself into anything other than “another Groupon.” The Instant site was supposed to be something that could differentiate itself in the marketplace. However, while Groupon is an Internet success story on the scale of Facebook and YouTube, LivingSocial is just keeping its head above water for now.
In fact, last year it ended up with a $558 million net loss, with only $245 million actually collected in revenue. But there’s a lot of faith that the site can transform into something bigger. It has received more than $800 million in venture capital funding. Part of that was based on presentations LivingSocial made about Instant. These location-based deal services are all over the Web but few of them have become success stories. Now, LivingSocial Instant will be transformed into a local food and delivery service, another muddled market. We’ll see how that goes.
It looks like Microsoft has acquired two new domains names which are related to its Xbox console, the domain names are XboxFL.com and XboxFL.ent, and were discovered by the guys over at Fusible.
There are no details as yet on what Microsoft has planned for the two domains names, and they are currently being redirected to Microsoft’s Bing.
It could possibly be some sort of new service from Microsoft, or maybe even the name of their next Xbox console although many of us are expecting it to be called the Xbox 720, which certainly sounds a lot better than Xbox FL.
Earlier today we head RIM’s latest financial results, where the company had made made a loss of $125m for their last financial quarter, And RIM’s CEO Thorsten Heins said that they would be concentrating on their core market of business customers.
This led to speculation that RIM would be abandoning the consumer market for BlackBerry devices, and now RIM has confirmed that they will continue to develop blackberry devices for consumers.
RIM’s MD of global sales and regional marketing, Patrick Spence said that ”We remain committed to all of our Customers (consumer & enterprise) and are enhancing our support/solutions for enterprise” and “[our] goal is to help our enterprise customers capitalise [sic] on the opportunities presented by consumerization while minimizing risks.”
It will be interesting to see what RIM has planned and whether they are able to turn their fortunes around.
We finally have some information on the launch date of the HTC One X here in the UK, the device will be available from the 5th of April, and retailers will start shipping the handsets out to customers who have pre-ordered on the 4th of April.
The guys over at Unlocked Mobiles just sent us these photos of the HTC One X, and the handset will be available for £497.98 SIM free including taxes.
As a reminder the HTC One X features a quad core 1.5GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and it features a 4.6 inch HD Super LCD 2 touchscreen display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels.
You can find out more information about the SIM free HTC One X over at Unlocked Mobiles.
