Paul Dempsey

View frowm Washington [News Briefing]

IT appears to be doing a good job in West Africa, but is only as good as the investment in its infrastructure.

VR in... Gaming

Virtual reality has been prolific in the gaming industry since the 1980s, when Segas Master System 3D glasses promised to take you inside a virtual world. The best, however, is yet to come. The pressing question facing VR gaming concerns how high a price it can sustain. Yet in the longer term its all about Moores Law economics, content - and whether another currently absent tech titan will finally join the fray.

The Teardown: Steam Controller

The Steam Controller is a key part of Valves attempt to extend its cloud-based PC gaming business to the TV screen, more directly challenging platforms such as the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii. Licensed versions of Valves Steam Machine PC gaming platform already feature HDMI output, and the operating system includes a Big Picture mode that optimises the experience for your television. After some delay, the controller joins this line-up, primarily as a wireless replacement for the keyboard and mouse. It is all about the ergonomics of dropping yourself comfortably on the couch and getting at least as good a gaming experience as you would in front of a PC workstation-based set-up. To that end, the Steam Controller incorporates two highly sensitive and responsive haptic pads that are intended to do much of what a mouse has traditionally accomplished, as well as a single joystick and series of programmable buttons. Front-mounted dual triggers also feature.

The teardown [Reviews Consumer Technology]

Samsungs response in the S5 has been to deploy the 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, a quad-core design that compares against a 2.3GHz clock on the preceding generation (in some markets, an alternative Exynos processor may be used). It runs against 2GB of RAM packaged on top.

The teardown Samsung Galaxy S5 [Teardown Galaxy s5]

Samsungs response in the S5 has been to deploy the 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, a quad-core design that compares against a 2.3GHz clock on the preceding generation (in some markets, an alternative Exynos processor may be used). It runs against 2GB of RAM packaged on top.

The rules of attention

The paper states that with China offering lucrative incentives to engineering graduates, what can the United States of America do to keep the worlds top talent focused on Silicon Valley?

Vita's inner curriculum

Sonys PlayStation successor has been designed to be more than a games console. The company has aspirations for it to find a place as a high-end processing workhorse that can support more business-oriented applications. The company aim to give its next-generation Vita gaming console a 10-year shelf-life. This target longevity is a simple question of economics - primarily the inflationary economics of electronics system design.

A plan, some fabs and a ban

There is a theory that Intel is more a manufacturing than a semiconductor company. As others have outsourced, Intel has continued to build new fabs and invest in the latest processes for its own devices. It may now be doing some foundry work - it will build FPGAs at 22nm for startup Achronix Semiconductor, for example - but it sees as more important the controls over pricing and technology that comes from owning your own factories.

Consumer electronics comes bouncing back

US Christmas holiday spending is set for a modest rebound but electronics will take a disproportionately large share, according to the latest data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Total holiday-related spending is expected to reach

Goodbye celluloid hello data overload

1,412 (£888) per person, 3 per cent ahead of the 2009 number (