Hardware

Visual inspiration can strike anywhere, but you might not be in front of your computer when it does. The color of a piece of fruit, the typeface on a book of matches—the best you can do to capture these moments is take a photo and reference it later.

That’s not the worst solution, but Fiona O’Leary has a better idea. For her graduation project at the Royal College of Art, O’Leary developed a handy, handheld tool she calls Spector that captures typefaces and colors in the real world, and then transfers them directly to InDesign.

You wanted the latest iPhone, but you could only afford the 16GB model. By the time you install some cool apps, load some songs and shoot some pictures and video, you can expect something else to appear on your screen: the Storage Almost Full message.

You can go through the sometimes frustrating task of backing everything up to the cloud or your could drop a dime on your iPhone – an i.dime, that is.

Have you ever seen an up-close view of how a computer processor works?

If you're in the UK, you can head over to Cambridge and see the process firsthand, thanks to the work of Reg friend James Newman, who has finally finished constructing his 16-bit masterpiece, the Mega Processor.

Samsung on Tuesday announced production has started for its new PM971-NVMe, a solid state drive that crams non-volatile memory express technology, onboard NAND flash memory, DRAM and an SSD controller into a package slightly larger than a postage stamp.

Following rumours that an upgraded PlayStation 4 is on the way, a new games console is coming into the horizon. Riot Games, under the arm of Tencent, along with Intel and Haier, have announced the Tencent TGP BOX, which will be released as the Blade BOX, a games console designed to change traditional gaming.

In the way of specifications, all we know so far is that it will use Windows 10 as its operating system, with the Tencent Games Platform being the overlay that users will make use of. It will also come with sixth-generation Intel processors, namely the i3, i5 and i7.

We've seen many iPhone clones come out of China, like the Oppo R9 and the Meizu Pro 6. Now, that phenomenon enters the gaming arena.

Chinese company Fuze on Tuesday announced a new gaming console, the Tomahawk F1, and it shares some striking similarities to both Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One.

Life may be sweeter under the sea, but it’s clearly safer under the screen. As biometric security becomes more common on our devices, the problem of placement has become a proper predicament. Whereas companies like LG and Huawei have been keen to keep fingerprint readers on the back – where they can’t be seen – others like Samsung, Apple, and now HTC are placing them on the bottom bezel. Then there was Sony which decided to slide the unit off to the side. LG Innotek however, may have solved the problem entirely: put it under the screen.

Designing a portable gadget is all about compromise. The main tension is between power and portability: how light can I make this phone without making it unacceptably slow or killing battery life, and how fast can I make this laptop without making the battery and necessary heatsinks and fans too large to comfortably carry around?

According to Re/code, Samsung met with major chipmakers in Silicon Valley to push its cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and fabrication facilities, announcing plans to roll out new 14-nanometer and 10-nanometer processes. The Korean tech giant's 14nm process, once the industry standard, has been surpassed by offerings from competitors like Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the latter of which produces Apple's latest A-series silicon.

After finally reaching the tipping point with off-the-shelf solutions that can't match increasing speeds available, we recently took the plunge. Building a homebrew router turned out to be a better proposition than we could've ever imagined. With nearly any speed metric we analyzed, our little DIY kit outpaced routers whether they were of the $90- or $250-variety.