Looking for a place to stick that super-sized slate? You might opt to mount it in a wooden table modeled after a treehouse, or a piece of furniture designed to accommodate a digital "family game night." Of course, you'd clearly be drawing some inspiration from two such concepts that feature Lenovo's Horizon Table PC as the star of the show -- both, along with a third project that employs a more traditional bar-stool concept, will debut at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair next week in New York City. (You're going, right?) It's certainly not the first time we've witnessed a non-traditional marriage of form and function, but considering that we have yet to see these gigantic 1080p tablets on the street, it's a bit of a curiosity at the moment.

Filed under: Desktops, Household, Lenovo

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Amazon's Cloud Player may have been accessible on PCs through browsers since its launch, but today Bezos & Co. have given the service a desktop app of its own. Once installed, the free program will detect and add music from iTunes and Windows Media Player to its library, and continue doing so as new songs are purchased from other storefronts. Naturally, tunes bought from the firm can be streamed and downloaded through the application, and even exported to iTunes. While there's no sign of Linux support, the company says it's working on a version just for Mac users. If you count yourself in Microsoft's camp, hit the neighboring source link for the download.

Filed under: Software, Amazon

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Via: Mashable

Source: Amazon

Upcoming third-person action game Watch Dogs is set in a near-future environment modeled on Chicago, a city that's overseen by computers that can be manipulated. And while the game has some instances of fantastical hacking perpetrated by main character Aiden Pearce, Ubisoft's creative team is also working with security firm Kaspersky Lab to bring an air of realism to the game's hacking themes.

"They have really hardcore experts there on hacking. We send them some of our designs and we ask them [for] feedback on it, and it's interesting to see what gets back," Ubisoft Montreal senior producer Dominic Guay told our sister site, Joystiq. "Sometimes they say, 'Yeah, that's possible, but change that word,' or, 'That's not the way it works.'" Check out the full piece right here.

Along with a new Assassin's Creed game, Ubisoft is bringing Watch Dogs to next-gen consoles this year (as well as current-gen and PC), leading its next-gen push.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD

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Source: Joystiq

Windows-using TiVo owners should make a beeline for the TiVo Desktop download link below, because on June 5th its free edition is going away. This software allows user to bring their personal music and photos to the TiVo, and more notably, transfer recordings from the DVR to their PCs. The paid version that adds support for transferring videos to the TiVo and DVR recordings to mobile devices will still be available at a cost of $15.99, lowered from $24.99. As ZatzNotFunny points out, there have been indications that a replacement may be in the works, but nothing -- including updates for Windows 8 -- has been promised yet. The free Mac version is still kicking, but it's only good for pushing photos and music to the box, although Tech of the Hub notes several free alternatives (for both platforms) including kmttg, PyTiVo and iTivo. The current software hadn't seen many updates recently, so if this is just clearing the table for a version that ties into the TiVo Stream transcoder, it might be worthwhile.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Software, HD

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Via: TiVo (Twitter), @BrennokBob (Twitter)

Source: TiVo Desktop PC, TiVo

Sure, you could see and manage your Google Drive files from within the comfort of your PC / Mac file management system, but you couldn't publicly share them with friends -- until now. Google Drive files are now sharable via right click directly on your desktop, meaning the Drive desktop app now has one more feature that Dropbox already had several years ago. We hope you'll forgive our lack of enthusiasm for Google's catchup effort, but it's hard to get all jazzed up about functionality that should've probably been there at launch. Anyway, if you're not seeing the new feature pop up on your dashboard yet, Google says it's "rolling out over the next few days." Hold tight!

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: Google

At some point next year, EA will release The Sims 4 on PC and Mac. At least that's what the Madden publisher is saying today alongside news of the game's existence; it's the fourth Sims title handled by the folks at EA Maxis (the same team behind SimCity and Spore, among others). Outside of the game's existence and year-long launch window, EA isn't offering much in the way of details -- we're taking a wild guess that you'll once again be tasked with managing the lives of various sims in their day-to-day affairs. Of course, many folks will indulge their darker side, banishing sims to houses without doors and watching the virtual person's descent into both madness and uncleanliness. Perhaps if their cries for help weren't in simlish, it wouldn't be so adorable (but we doubt it).

Filed under: Gaming, Software

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Source: EA

Like Punxsutawney Phil's shadowgazing, we can rightfully expect a new Call of Duty game to be announced annually and available at the holidays. Also like our groundhog friend, the only annual questions we must ask are in the details -- what is this year's Call of Duty about, and who's making it? It turns out that this year's Duty development, unsurprisingly, falls on Infinity Ward's shoulders -- the folks who created the much lauded Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare -- and it's named "Call of Duty: Ghosts." The first-person shooter is arriving on a whole mess of platforms this November 5th, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, but also PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox -- given that we don't know release dates for the PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox, it stands to reason that Ghosts will arrive on a different date for those platforms. It's also likely we'll see a handheld version on Nintendo's 3DS made by someone other than Infinity Ward, but we've got no direct word on that just yet. More ambiguous, Nintendo's Wii U isn't listed, but it stands to reason it'll head that way as well (the last series entry, Black Ops 2, got a Wii U version).

The "Ghosts" in the title references ... well, we're not entirely sure. Previous CoD games featured a character named "Ghost" fairly prominently, though the plurality indicates a game about more than one individual. Infinity Ward head Mark Rubin calls Ghosts "a new sub-brand" in the CoD franchise, and it's getting a new (unnamed) game engine to boot -- another indicator that previous characters aren't involved. We're holding out hope that the often overserious, dramatic tone of previous CoD games is being completely thrown out in favor of a goofy game about hunting ghosts. The bullets pass right through their ethereal form! Run for your life! We'll hear more about Call of Duty: Ghosts at Microsoft's big next-gen console unveiling on May 21st, so hold tight. The first teaser video is just below the jump.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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Source: YouTube

Lenovo's ThinkPad Helix has had one of the rockier roads to the US market, having been promised for February only to be delayed to April. Things are getting smoother, however, as the first units of the are rolling off the production line -- and there are already customers waiting at Seton Hall University. Keeping up its recent practice of handing out gadgets to junior students, the school expects to test the dockable Windows 8 tablet within a few weeks, and then deliver about 2,000 units to newcomers starting in June. The turn toward a hybrid lets the university settle on one PC design for the fall rather than divide its attention between tablets and Ultrabooks, Seton Hall's Drew Holden says. As for the general public? Lenovo hasn't officially put the Helix on sale through its own store, but a handful of customers say they've already received theirs through other channels. In any event, keep a close watch on third-party stores if you're willing to part with $1,499 for a ThinkPad convertible.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Lenovo

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Via: Ultrabook News

Source: The Setonian

Microsoft has repeatedly told us that we'll see smaller Windows 8 tablets, but all that talk has amounted to precious little walk. If the latest rumor is accurate, though, Acer might be the first to take action: French site Minimachines claims to have images and details of the Iconia W3, which could be the first 8-inch tablet on Microsoft's newer platform. The slate wouldn't be a barnstormer with a 1.8GHz Atom Z2760 and 2GB of RAM, but performance also wouldn't be its selling point -- the W3 would be small enough to fit in one hand while carrying the full software support of a PC. It will reportedly include front and rear cameras as well as a possible microSDHC slot, and the accessories we see in the purported leak involve both a tiny keyboard dock and a cover that doubles as a kickstand. We don't know if there's any truth to claims of a launch around the back to school season in September, although that would certainly be appropriate timing for what could be a welcome backpack companion.

[Thanks, Pierre]

Filed under: Tablets, Acer

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Source: Minimachines.net (translated)

Our eyebrows are officially raised. Acer has revealed that it's going all-in with a promotional connection to Star Trek Into Darkness, and it's hinting at the May 3rd unveiling of a "unique" laptop that it believes would be at home in Captain Kirk's universe. We doubt that many people will still use Windows 8 in the 23rd century, but there may be some truth to the claims of novelty: a brief clip shows a clamshell design whose display can tilt outward like that of a desktop monitor, most likely to improve the comfort of touchscreen input without going the full convertible route of PCs like the Dell XPS 12. We'll know soon enough whether or not Acer's PC is the stuff of sci-fi or remains firmly grounded in reality.

Filed under: Laptops, Acer

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Source: Acer