At the keynote session during BlackBerry World 2012, RIM’s CEO Thorsten Heins showed us a glimpse of what to expect from their upcoming OS BlackBerry 10. Part of that demonstration included a camera app that allows you to highlight regions such as faces of people in a picture and move frames back and forth only for that region to get a perfect picture where, possibly every one is looking at the camera and smiling.

The crowd was certainly surprised and delighted by what they saw, but I knew I had covered something like this a few months back attending Qualcomm’s iQ event. At that event was a company called Scalado demonstrating exactly what RIM did. In fact, as per TechCrunch, RIM has licensed the technology from Scalado:

RIM has been working with Scalado on camera technology and has licensed some of the Scalado technology for the BlackBerry 10 platform. As shown during the BlackBerry World Keynote, RIM is planning a unique implementation of the technology on BlackBerry 10 to provide an incredible user experience, allowing for more customization by the user and enabling them to easily capture and share their perfect moments.

The following video shows my original session from Scalado last year and as you can see, this is exactly what RIM demonstrated at the stage.

It’s a pretty awesome technology that I have see working well. And it’s great to learn that it will be a part of BlackBerry 10. All we need is a good and fast camera and hopefully, taking that perfect group picture will become a thing of the past.

The message was clear to all attendees of BlackBerry World 2012- RIM’s annual gathering of employees, partners, developers and media. BlackBerry 10 will deliver all that it’s promised to deliver and on time, this time around, which is set for the later part of this year. RIM’s recent CEO Thorsten Heins took stage and showed us a tiny glimpse of what is expected out of the new OS and I must say that I walked away impressed by what little he showed.

Just a few days back, I had written an article on what RIM needs to show us with the BlackBerry 10 platform so lets find out how well RIM did. Let’s start with the official video clip posted by RIM on their YouTube channel that shows some of the features of the BlackBerry 10.

Impressive right? Now let’s tackle the questions I had put forth and find out what was answered.

Gorgeous UI that is different

I’ll give RIM a thumbs up on this one. The UI is extremely stylish and from what little I saw, different that iOS and Android. The task switching pane reminds me of Meego found on Nokia’s N9 whereas swipes and rounded-corners for applications take a page out of Palm’s WebOS. We still don’t know what the main/home screen will look like but I certainly like the flow of applications.

Smooth and Snappy

One of the things that Thorsten mentioned in an interview session with the press is the thing he was most excited about was how smooth and snappy BlackBerry 10 is shaping up to be- no more hourglasses or lags. The video and the live demonstration of the unit showed it to be fairly capable and with the rest of the year left to optimize, I am going to give RIM a thumbs up on this as well.

Social Integration

The start of the video shows the Universal Inbox that BlackBerry is famous for and the Accounts tab selected at the bottom so expect the same Social integration that is part of PlayBook and hopefully some more. With Gist as a part of RIM now, I think this will be a no-brainer so another thumbs up for RIM

Great Camera

While the quality/specs of the camera were not revealed, what was revealed was the application that looked very much like what we saw from Scalado at Qualcomm’s iQ event. Here is a video of Scalado demonstrating exactly what we saw at the keynote

RIM confirmed that they have indeed licensed the technology from Scalado in a statement posted at TechCruch.

RIM has been working with Scalado on camera technology and has licensed some of the Scalado technology for the BlackBerry 10 platform. As shown during the BlackBerry World Keynote, RIM is planning a unique implementation of the technology on BlackBerry 10 to provide an incredible user experience, allowing for more customization by the user and enabling them to easily capture and share their perfect moments.

This means good things, and I’m pretty sure that RIM will pair the incredible software with the hardware it deserves. So another thumbs up.

Apps, Apps and More Apps

There were close to five thousand people that attended BlackBerry World 2012 and a good number of them were developers- each of whom is going home with a BlackBerry 10 Alpha Dev device. This will certainly give RIM a lot of traction by the time their OS is released and allow for a fairly featured App World at launch.

However, we did not hear about any partnerships with big companies like Skype/Microsoft or Amazon/Kindle. For RIM to succeed with BlackBerry 10, they need to get the heavy-weights behind them as no matter how good of a platform they build, Apps are what matters to end-users and the lack of popular apps will make the general user turn away.

The Keyboard

In closing, I mentioned that RIM will not abandon a hardware keyboard as that is one of their primary strengths and Thorsten confirmed that they will launch a BlackBerry 10 device with a hardware keyboard. That being said, the innovation that RIM is bringing to soft-keyboards was one of the highlights of the videos you saw above and probably the feature that impressed me the most about BlackBerry 10. Swiping up to complete works and back to delete them makes using a soft keyboard with one-hand extremely impressive.

In closing, Thorsten mentioned that there are plenty of surprises that RIM has yet to show with BlackBerry 10 and considering that the devices are still a good quarter or two away, I can understand that he did not want to give the competition any more ideas by showcasing what else they have.

Of course the biggest challenge for RIM is making sure they survive the next few months by the time BlackBerry 10 is released. While things are looking good for them in the Middle East, other parts of Asia and South America, they are losing share in the US market which tends to produces the most vocal critics.

With the impending release of the $1k GTX 690 and HD 7990, let’s not forget those cards that are still fighting the mid-range fight and vying for our $350. When the HD 7870 launched two months ago it turned out to be pretty impressive. Today I’ll be looking at two custom builds of this card from both ASUS and XFX. Both cards have special heatsinks and also come factory overclocked to some extent.

ASUS HD 7870 DirectCUII TOP

The ASUS HD 7870 DCUII TOP continues the trend of their legendary DirectCUII heatsink that encapsulates some of their best engineering efforts. However, the HD 7870 isn’t the monster that comes in the form of HD 7900 series, so don’t expect an especially heavy duty heatsink. However, what we have here is more than enough to keep the Pitcairn chip running cool.

The PCB itself is 9.5-inches, while the V2.0 updated DCUII heatsink extends out to measure a total of 10.5-inches. The GPU itself is connected to the base of the heatsink, with three heatpipes extending well into the rest of the aluminum fins above. The whole structure covers the entirety of the board, keeping everything cool from the two 75mm fans pushing air downwards into the fins.

The two 6-pin power connectors don’t demand more than the regular HD 7870, requiring a PSU of 450W. In addition to the card itself, the HD 7870 DCUII TOP comes with the Drivers CD and installation guide, plus a CrossFire bridge, a DVI to VGA converter and a 6-pin power cable extender.

Overclocking the ASUS HD 7870 DCUII TOP was a fairly easy deal, with the voltage already maxed out at 1.3v, and factory speeds at 1100MHz Core Clock and 1250MHz (5000MHZ effective) Memory speeds. Compared to the reference AMD speeds of 1000MHz Core and 1200MHz Memory speeds, we already have an overclock of 10% and 4.2% respectively. I managed to bump up these speeds to 1257MHz Core clock and 1304MHz (5216MHz effective) Memory speeds. That’s 14.3% core clock and 4.3% memory speed increase compared to factory settings; a whopping 26% core clock and 9% memory speeds compared to reference AMD speeds.

A recent study by Gartner revealed that the number of tablets that will sell in 2012 will be close to 120 million. I guess you can safely say that tablets aren’t necessarily a fad but possibly the future of portable computing. They’re surely getting better in terms of features and performance and with convertible devices like the ASUS Transformers as well as the embracing of Touch screen devices by the upcoming Windows 8, there is a possibility that the future of traditional laptops is in jeopardy.

So if you are planning on jumping on the tablet bandwagon, you probably have a few questions on which slate will work better for you. Of course there is no single right answer for that so we have put together a list of five tablets that we think are the best options to choose from. Lets have a look at the five tablets we have chose for you today.

Interestingly, between these five devices, we only have three manufacturers- Apple, ASUS and Samsung. This is probably more of a coincidence than anything else and next year’s article on the five tablets we recommend will probably have five different manufacturers. Let’s take a look at these five tablets and what we like about them. The next few pages are based on Alphabetical order and not in any other order of preference.

My wife is from Oman and thus we tend to visit Muscat often- usually once every three or four months. With the kids’ schools closed for a couple of weeks for spring break, it was once again time for the 400+ km drive and I thought I’d take one of the cars we have reviewed to see how it fares for a long journey.

I called up VW and luckily they had a Touareg available for the weekend. It wasn’t the top of the line V8 but the V6 model which lacks some of the bells and whistles of its more powerful sibling. I was actually glad that I managed to get the V6 as I knew the V8 would consume more petrol.

This being a long journey and one with kids, there were a few things that I needed to make sure of- safety being the first aspect and nine airbags certainly puts your mind at comfort. The higher-end model features two 2.4GHz radar sensors that help detecting vehicles approaching from the rear and work with Lane Assist to warn you when changing lanes. Also present on the higher-end model is a camera that gives you a full top-down view of the Touareg.

The next thing that was important was fuel economy. I was driving almost a thousand kilometers and didn’t want the car journey costing me as much as an airplane ticket. The Touareg has a tank that can hold 100 liters of fuel which, at the current costs of Super 95, translated to about 170 Dirhams for a full tank. While driving on the highway I was getting a little over 10km/liter but with city driving added, that dropped down to an average of about 7.5km/liter. That’s actually pretty impressive for a V6.

One of the reason’s I got such great mileage on the highway is because of cruise control. I set the speed to 130km/hour with ease and that helped conserving fuel. The higher end model features adaptive cruise control which automatically detects any car in front of you and slows down and then resumes the speed once you’re clear.

With safety and fuel-efficiency in check, the next thing I looked at was connectivity. With my iPhone 4S, I was able to connect to a Bluetooth headset profile allowing me to talk on the phone hands-free. Also with a little bit of digging, I managed to connect to the A2DP profile allowing me to wirelessly stream stereo audio from my iPhone thus allowing me to listen to my music and audio books without any wires involved. A 3.5mm jack is also present, however there was no USB port on my model which is always helpful in charging your mobile devices.

The touch-screen on the Touareg allows you to control the media as well as other settings such as air conditioning and car controls. Navigation is also something that could work well with a large touchscreen and I would have liked to test that on the Touareg- it is especially helpful when you’re exploring cities beyond your home and workplace. However, the model I received did not feature navigation

VW also places many of the controls on the steering wheel such as buttons for volume control and media skipping as well as calling and going through your phone list. The in-dash display if of reasonably high resolution and full color making navigating it fairly easy. Sadly, pausing a track can’t be done from the steering wheel and you have to reach out to the touch screen to do that. Maybe VW could use the OK button on the steering wheel to add that functionality while playing a media file.

Last and certainly not the least, when you’re driving over four hours, you need something comfortable and the Touareg scores pretty high on that. The model I received had electric leather seats that were pretty easy to sink into. Other than the usual controls for adjusting your seat, you also have options for lower back and lumbar support. The Panoramic roof is humongous and allows for a brilliant view of the sky all the way from the from seat to the back seat. Speaking of the back-seats, there is quite a bit of space and can seat three adults very comfortably. There is also plenty of space in the Touareg for luggage. The boot is massive, has an automatic close button on the lid, and features a power connector to carry things like a powered portable fridge etc.

Overall, I ended up pretty impressed with the VW Touareg. It’s a pretty good looking car with a decent engine and good technology. It’s also very roomy and comfortable and offers pretty good mileage. Prices start at AED 160,000 for the V6 which is what I drove but obviously, my model had some extras added to it. I am thinking about getting an SUV by the end of the year and the Touareg will definitely be on my shortlist.

Ivy Bridge

Welcome to the 22nm era as Intel swings in the “Tock” phase of their yearly CPU upgrades. Today marks the introduction of the long awaited Ivy Bridge platform which is basically running the Sandy Bridge architecture on a 22nm process.

While basic operations on Ivy Bridge remain similar to Sandy Bridge, let’s look at some of the features that differentiate the new processors from last year’s models. Well, first thing’s first, the 22nm process, shrunken down from Sandy Bridge’s 32nm, provides a cooler processor that requires lesser power.

We see this factor shine during the overclocking process as our Sandy Bridge i7-2600K processor would run stable at an overclock of 4.7GHz @ 1.45v, whereas on some of the motherboards tested, the i7-3770K ran perfectly fine on as low as 1.3v with a 4.7GHz overclock.

Next up is the much touted Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics processor which promises performance increase from the HD 3000 by up to 50% in some cases. Of course, HD 4000 also brings DX11 support which helps with faster QuickSync performance in addition.

Lastly there are some core level changes that improve upon the Sandy Bridge architecture by allowing (overclocked) memory speeds of up to 2800MHz.

Intel Z77

The Ivy Bridge processors are launched in conjunction with Intel’s new Z77 chipset; also an improvement over last year’s Z68 chipset. I have discussed about the Z77 chipset in our review of the MSI Z77A-GD55 motherboard. However, let’s have a quick look at some of the new features.

Not only can you overclock the CPU and memory, but the GPU as well. 2x SATA 3 ports are supported natively, as is Intel’s Smart Response Technology; certain motherboards have mSATA slots for micro-SSD expansion. Up to 4xUSB 3.0 ports are supports in addition to 10xUSB 2.0 ports. Lastly we have native PCIe 3.0 slots, ranging from 2 to 3 depending on the motherboard manufacturer.

So without further ado, let’s look at the contestants in today’s Ivy Bridge motherboard roundup.