Apple has offered to refund Australian customers who felt misled about the 4G capabilities of the new iPad, which can access the ultra-fast wireless network only in North America
ComputerWeekly: IT hardware
Nobody dislikes a sale, and that goes double for mobile phone users! Between talk plans, text plans, data plans and tariffs, a mobile phone bill can jump very high very quickly unless you can find the best smartphone deals you possibly can! To help you find some great, cheap mobile phone plans, we scanned the site of one of the top UK mobile phone providers and found some terrific deals for you to consider.
O2 Contract Deals
O2 is running a brilliant January sales series. Whether for business use or personal use, take a quick look at what they’re offering.
Blackberry Bold 9900: You get a free smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, 600 total talk minutes, 500 O2-to-O2 minutes, unlimited texts and 500 MB data, all for only £32 per month – a great mobile phone deal!
Samsung Galaxy S II, the industry sales leader: You get a FREE mobile phone with touchscreen, 300 minutes, unlimited texts and 500 MB of data for only £27 per month! That’s a brilliant deal!
Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S: This plan includes 300 minutes, unlimited texts and 500 MB of data for just £27 as well. Cool deal!
HTC Sensation XL with Beats Audio: Free under contract as well; you get 600 minutes, 500 O2-to-O2 minutes, unlimited texts and 500 MB of data for a low price of £32 per month, too!
BlackBerry Torch 9810: Not to be outdone, this model is free under contract, too, and offers 300 minutes, unlimited texts and 500 MB of data for a low monthly fee of only £27.
But if those prices aren’t quite low enough, O2 offers others under contract for even less.
For £21.50 per month, choose one of these smartphones and cheap mobile phone plans that include 200 minutes, 250 O2-to-O2 minutes, unlimited texts and 500 MB of data per month:
Samsung Galaxy W or the BlackBerry Curve 9360 or the BlackBerry Curve 9380 or the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray.
Most if not all of these mobile phones are available for outright purchase and a PayGo option as well.
For prices like these, you might want to consider two smartphones!
We've only had the opportunity to look at one Origin PC so far, and while the performance was impressive the packaging was equally so—Dustin had to struggle to get the large wooden crate into his place. Origin does have some seriously high-end (almost ludicrously so) PCs that you can put together if you're willing to shell out, but some people just want a reasonably high-end PC that's ready to go with a minimum of fuss. And if you're thinking of getting something for the holiday season, a ready-to-ship system could be exactly what you need. Enter the Origin Millennium RTS.
Origin states that it will ship within one day of your payment being processed, and what you'll get is a pretty high-end setup ready to run all the latest and greatest games. Here's a quick rundown of the specs—the only area you can customize on the RTS build is the warranty.
| Origin Millennium RTS Specifications | |
| Chassis |
Bitfenix Shinobi Red/Black Noiseblocker fans |
| Processor | Intel Core i5-2500K overclocked to 4.0-4.5GHz |
| Cooling | Origin Frostbyte 120 Sealed Liquid Cooling |
| Motherboard | ASUS P8P67 Pro B3 stepping |
| Memory | 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB GDDR5 |
| Power Supply | Corsair 1050W HX1050 |
| Storage | Corsair Force 3 120GB SATA 6Gbps SSD |
| Optical Drive | 24x CDRW/DVDRW |
| Networking | Onboard Gigabit Ethernet |
| Audio | Onboard Realtek ALC892 HD Audio |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
| Warranty |
Standard 1-year part replacement 45 day free shipping Lifetime phone support DVD image Upgrade to 1-, 2-, or 3-year warranty with free shipping |
| Pricing | ,799 online, ships in one day from payment processing |
If you're like me, the first thing you're going to do when you see the above list is to go spec out how much it would cost you to put everything together yourself. Never fear, I have already done that (substituting the Corsair H80 for the Origin cooler, as that seems to be similar), and my total price for the parts comes to ,675, plus around for shipping (with pricing predominantly coming from Newegg, linked for your convenience).
We might have a few quibbles with the parts selection—specifically, I'd like to see a large secondary HDD included, and while the Bitfenix Shinobi is a good case I'd be more inclined to go with a Fractal Design Define R3 personally—but overall this is a beefy gaming system priced just 0 over what it would cost for me to put together the same system. In fact, my own gaming/work PC is running a stock GTX 580 with a Core i7 CPU, and even with a 30" LCD I've found that the GTX 580 is able to handle nearly every game I've got at near-maximum details. Given that my time (and your time) isn't free, if you're happy with the part selections and you want your new gaming system ASAP, we have no qualms about recommending Origin's latest offering.
Hewlett-Packard is offering customers an alternative to its Integrity servers based on Intelâs Itanium chips in response to Oracleâs decision to stop developing software that runs on the chipset.
ComputerWeekly: IT hardware
Pay-what-you-can indie game bundles are all the rage these days. By joining together, indie game developers can help to raise the profile of their titles and encourage customers to support their labors of love. If you consider yourself a patron of the indie scene, you now have one more way to buy games in bundles: Indie Royale.
Launched by the creators of IndieGames.com and the download service Desura, Indie Royale will offer new bundles (each with four games apiece) every two weeks. The sales will only last five days, so you’ll have to act swiftly.
Indie Royale’s variable pricing model also sets it apart from other purely pay-what-you-can bundles like the Humble Bundle. There is always a minimum price for an Indie Royale bundle and paying the minimum price actually raises it for the next customer by a small amount. Paying above the minimum, however, will lower the price for future customers. It’s perhaps a little odd, but it sounds like a fun way to encourage generosity (you are getting four games on the cheap, after all).
As of this writing, the current bundle’s somewhere in the -6 dollar range and offers four games that all cost more than that individually: A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda, Sanctum, Gemini Rue, and Nimbus. Of the four, I’ve only tried Sanctum, which is a decent entry in the current trend of third-person tower defense shooters. The bundle’s available until Sunday, if I’m reading their countdown clock correctly.
We’ll be keeping our eyes on Indie Royale in the weeks to come, and you should, too.
Source: Indie Royale
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