BlackBerry Pearl 3G to Soon Land at Rogers, TELUS

Canadian mobile phone users should soon be able to enjoy a new device available on the airwaves of their national wireless carriers, namely the BlackBerry Pearl 3G, which should land within a matter of days, it seems. Moreover, along with news regarding the phone's launch at these operators, came a series of details on the phone's pricing, which appears to be identical at the two. 

When it comes to Rogers, the company is expected to make the BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 available for purchase for only $49.99 upon the signing of a three-year contract agreement, but also says that those interested in acquiring without a contract can do so for $374.99. According to a recent article on BGR, the carrier should have the device available via various channels within the next few days with a promotional price tag of $29.99 on contract.

As for TELUS, it should put the new mobile phone on sale during the next few days for only $29.99 on a three-year contract agreement, while making it available for purchase for $349.99 without one. However, TELUS is reportedly getting ready to launch only the pink flavor of BlackBerry Pearl 9100, though it expects for the black variant to arrive in a couple of weeks.

For the time being, the new BlackBerry smartphone is not present in the carriers' online stores, but it might not be too long before it is listed there, that's for sure. No details on why the carriers have Pearl 3G priced differently without contract are available at the moment, nor on whether other operators in the country are planning on picking the device up, though one might expect them to do so.

One way or the other, the new BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 should prove a nice option for those interested in purchasing an affordable handset with nice features. It comes with an HVGA display, a 3.2-megapixel photo snapper, Wi-Fi 802.11n connectivity, SureType keyboard, trackpad, and more. It might not be a high-end BlackBerry device, but it should do the job just fine.

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Need for Speed World Comes on July 20 - Racing for everyone

Electronic Arts has announced that it plans to launch Need for Speed World, the MMO based around its popular racing franchise, on July 20 of this year, aiming to create a persistent world that offers exciting racing and intense social interaction. A significant portion of the experience will be offered for free to all those who download the client for Need for Speed World but those who want access to the entire content will have to pay for it.

The free client will be accessible on July 20 and all races and pursuit events will be available to those who get it, the level cap being set at 10. Those who are prepared to spend some money and actually preorder Need for Speed World will be able to download the client one week earlier than the masses and will be receiving more experience points for the first week of play.

They will also be guaranteed a place to all the Need for Speed beta stages that will take place between the moment they preorder and the day the game goes live for everyone. Another advantage is the fact that they can reserve their driver name the moment they preorder and that they will get a new VIP badge for the profile.

EA announced Need for Speed World last year, with the Black Box studio handling the development duties. The open world will encompass more than 150 square miles and players will be able to race both one another and the ever present police in a combination of the best bits of the long running Need for Speed series. Light role playing game elements are added in order to keep players interested and include the progression element that is central to the MMO genre.

Black Box and Criterion are at the moment rumored to be working on new Need for Speed games that will aim to revamp the more single player focused aspects of the series. 

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Download AMD Catalyst 10.5 Graphics Drivers

Now that AMD has a run for its money with NVIDIA's latest line of Fermi-based GeForce cards, the company is focusing on improving the performance of their current Radeon cards with updates of their graphics drivers. After the recent major releases of Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3, the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker is ready to provide consumers with the next iteration of their display drivers, now at version 10.5. As with all new releases, this version adds a couple of fresh features and improves the performance of Radeon cards.


As the previous releases enabled AMD's graphics cards to be used with third-party 3D solutions, AMD is adding support for 120Hz displays on ATI Radeon HD 4000 and 3000 series of GPUs. The releases notes also detail an ATI Overdrive enhancement, which provides full support for overclocking a Radeon GPU connected to multiple display configurations. AMD has managed to solve a number of known issues, which you can find in the release notes of the new graphics driver version.

With the fresh release, AMD has also issued a hotfix for a “No compatible hardware found” error message that reportedly appeared when attempting to install the ATI Catalyst drivers directly from the AMD download home page for the company's Radeon HD 4000, 3000 and 2000 series of AGP graphics cards.

The problem appears to have been resolved and although there's no WHQL driver for the aforementioned products, the company outed a hotfix that is available for download here at Softpedia.

We will now provide you with the download links for AMD's latest Catalyst 10.5 series of drivers, as well as the hotfix for the abovementioned issue with AGP card drivers.

AMD Catalyst 10.5 graphics drivers for Windows XP 32-bitAMD Catalyst 10.5 graphics drivers for Windows XP 64-bit
AMD Catalyst 10.5 graphics drivers for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bitAMD Catalyst 10.5 graphics drivers for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit
Catalyst 10.5 Hotfix for Windows XP 32-bitCatalyst 10.5 Hotfix for Windows XP 64-bitCatalyst 10.5 Hotfix for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bitCatalyst 10.5 Hotfix for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit
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Samsung Behold II will get only Android 1.6

We've got some good news and bad news for Samsung Behold II owners. We'll start with the good first: you're getting an update to Android 1.6. The bad? You won't be getting anything beyond Android 1.6.

Samsung dropped the bomb late Thursday evening via itsTwitter account, and its official statement reads:

Samsung Mobile and T-Mobile USA are planning to update the Behold II to Android 1.6 which provides access to Google Maps Navigation, Google Voice Search capability and quick search box for Android.

The update will also supply additional benefits including Swype, an improved Media Player, updated core Android applications, and improved Bluetooth capabilities. However, the Behold II is not upgradeable beyond Android 1.6.

We reached out to Samsung for comment as to why the smartphone will be limited to just the Donut flavor of Android, and a company representative said he would get back to us later today. However, we suspect it may have to do with Samsung's TouchWiz user interface, which sits on the Behold II, and trying to update it so it plays nice with all versions of Android.

Meanwhile, Behold II owners are quite upset, especially since Samsung promised an Android 2.x update in a promo video that has conveniently been taken down. Before Samsung released its official statement, some customers started a petition asking the company for either a refund, a replacement Android 2.x device, or the promised update, and if their needs weren't met, legal action would be taken.

Somehow I don't think most people are going to be satisfied with just the Android 1.6 update. Samsung Behold II owners, what are your thoughts?

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VLC Media Player 1.1 release candidate 1 available

The VideoLAN organization has released a new build of VLC Media Player for OS X. The version 1.1.0-rc of the player has been updated with numerous changes and fixes, including a major reworking of the VLCKit framework, CoreText-based text renderer for subtitles, and support for new codecs and enhanced features of current codecs.

More specifically, the new release includes the following new features:

1. GPU and DSP decoding, depending on the platform
2. Faster and more stable
3. New codecs and HD codecs enhancements
4. Webm and VP8 support
5. MKV, mp4 and avi improvements
6. Extensions
7. Important code cleanup and rewrite
8. Interface and playlist reworked

In brief testing, I played two H.264-encoded QuickTime movie files in both the previous version 1.0.5, and the current release candidate to see the CPU usage differences. For the smaller of the two files, version 1.0.5 of VLC used about 16.5% of the CPU to play the file, whereas the current version uses around 12.5%. For the larger movie, version 1.0.5 takes about 35-40% of the CPU, and version 1.1 takes around 26-30% at the same scenes.

This is a decent improvement in performance, so lets hope it scales to various codecs and more complex and enhanced encoding schemes as well.

The player is freely available for download from VLC's website (see the News section below the current 1.0.5 download link), and is highly recommended by us as one of several alternatives and enhancements to Apple's QuickTime (MPlayer OS X Extended and the QuickTime Plugin "Perian" being some others). Keep in mind that this is a release candidate, which means it has left the "Beta" status but is not yet an official release. As a result it may have one or two quirks, but the major issues with the development of this version have been tackled.

While the VideoLAN website will point you to the download for the 32-bit version of VLC by default, there is a 64-bit Intel and PowerPC version as well. These are available at the following download page:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/1.1.0-RC.html

Recently there was news that the Mac development of VLC was basically dead, and that version 1.1 would be the last supported release on OS X. The problem was primarily the lack of interface developers for the program (though this version sports a slightly tweaked UI), so hopefully VideoLAN has been able to recruit a few Macdevelopers to continue this project. We would love to see VLC continue for the Mac well beyond version 1.1.

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