Engadget

You know what'll go perfectly with that waterproof Bluetooth speaker ball that a Billy Corgan doppelganger recommended a few years back? That odd tube you're undoubtedly fixated on above. That's the Ultimate Ears UE Boom, and those people underneath are presumably blitzed from a day of raving at [insert EDM festival here]. Parent company Logitech is calling this thing the "world's first social music player," but last we checked, it's not capable of tweeting whatever you're listening to. Instead, it's seemingly engineered "to help you rage, riot, party and play the music you love, out loud." Seriously -- that's in the description.

In order to do so, there's a Bluetooth radio within, NFC support, a 15-hour rechargeable battery and an exterior that'll turn away light splashes. Of note, you can wirelessly link two UE Booms together using an associated Android or iOS app to play them in either stereo-to-stereo mode or traditional left / right stereo mode. It's expected to hit US and European shores later this month for $199.99, which means you too can take weird shots of yourself holding it at frat parties in the very, very near future.

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Between WhatsApp, Viber, Google+ Hangouts and a raft of others, the mobile messaging app space is crowded, but recent entrant MessageMe has still managed to make notable headway. After a mere 75 days since its launch, the application has amassed 5 million registered users, up from 1 million in its first ten days. Now, the software is churning out an average of 1,500 notifications per second and handling approximately eight image uploads each second.

For the uninitiated, the app is attempting to woo chatty folks on Android and iOS away from its rivals with the ability to send pictures, doodles, videos, audio, music and location information between two people or a group of friends. Sticker- and money-sending features are poised to bring home the bacon for the firm, but CEO and co-founder Arjun Sethi recently told The Next Web that it doesn't plan to activate them just yet, as it's focusing on attracting more users first. If you're itching for another outlet to dispatch notes to pals, hit the bordering more coverage links to grab MessageMe.

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Just as we knew it would, MSI has formally announced pricing for its newfangled GX70 and GX60 gaming laptops -- the world's first machines to ship with AMD's Richland A10-5750M (2.5GHz - 3.5GHz) within. The 17.3-inch GX70 offers up a 1,920 x 1,080 native display resolution, AMD's Radeon HD 8970M on the graphics front, a 750GB hard drive, 8GB of DDR3 memory, a Blu-ray Disc drive, Bluetooth 4.0 and Killer's E2200 networking technology. You'll also get a SDXC card slot, HDMI 1.4 socket, 720p webcam, a 9-cell battery -- likely good for about 89 seconds of use -- a backlit keyboard and a frame that's 2.17-inches thick and 8.6 pounds. If none of that frightens you, you can plan on parting ways with $1,399.99 to call one your own. The (slightly) more petite GX60 boasts a 15.6-inch panel (still 1080p, though), a 7.7 pound frame and a $1,299.99 price tag. Otherwise, the specifications are essentially identical from its big brother, and both should be shipping any moment now.

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Samsung's Exynos 5-based Chromebook may have been available since last October, but how about one equipped with WiMAX radio? Graced with the presence of Google and Samsung reps in Kuala Lumpur (including a video message from Google SVP Sundar Pichai), today Malaysian carrier Yes 4G unveiled this rather special laptop for the local consumers. In fact, we should have seen this coming as Google's official blog did hint this last month, but we failed to catch that blurred "Yes 4G" logo on the laptop in the blog's photo.

As Google mentioned, the ultimate goal here is to help transform Malaysia's education using the Chromebook. And now we know that this ambition will be backed by Yes 4G's rapidly growing WiMAX network -- from the initial 1,200 base stations in 2010 to today's 4,000, covering 85 percent of the peninsula; and the carrier will expand into the eastern side with 700 more sites by the end of this year. This is especially important for the rural areas, where many schools still lack access to water and electricity. As a partner of the Malaysian Ministry of Education's 1BestariNet project, Yes 4G's parent company YTL Communications has so far ensured that 7,000 local state schools are covered by its WiMAX network, with the remaining 3,000 to be connected over the next six months.

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TomTom is looking to beef up its location based services portal by joining forces with TrafficLand to bring real time traffic video to its developers. TomTom's LBS will now incorporate TrafficLand's network of over 13,000 roadside webcams, enabling developers to integrate live footage into their location-enabled apps via the Traffic Camera API. TrafficLand's real-time video will join the other cloud-based location services TomTom provides to devs, like map content, routing and geocoding. For right now, TrafficLand covers only the US, UK and Canada, and it's not clear if the company plans to expand beyond those three countries anytime soon. For more information, you can take a gander at TomTom's full press release, embedded after the break.

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While Microsoft may have unveiled a new generation of its Xbox console yesterday, some companies are still trying to get a piece of real estate on the current ecosystem. Today, Deezer announced that it's making a debut on Xbox Live, giving (some) users of the streaming service access to its extensive music repertoire right from the 360. The app will be available "across Europe" for now, and mum's the word on when, or if, Deezer plans to launch in more markets. For those living in The Old Continent, however, all you'll need is a Premium+ subscription and, as is often the case with similar offerings, a Gold membership on Xbox Live. Jam on.

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Hang around these pages long enough and you're bound to come across Pantech, the South Korean purveyor of everything from giant 1080p handsets down to... giant 720p handsets. Samsung has noticed this rising star too and, so says Yonhap News, has now made a $50 million investment in the smaller company in return for a 10 percent stake. Implicit in that is that the Korean government has allowed Samsung's ever-expanding influence to infiltrate a potential rival, since Pantech is now the No. 3 phone maker in that country and only Qualcomm and a state-run bank possess larger stakes than Samsung's. As a result, the acquisition could have an anti-competitive aura to it -- but then, Pantech has actually been struggling of late, not least with large debts, and it has relied on big backers to bail it out.

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Speed. It's a movie. It's a drug. And it's also something that throngs of internet users the world over cannot get enough of. Thankfully, the wizards at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology have figured out a way to satisfy the unsatisfiable, announcing this week a world record in the area of wireless data transmission. Researchers were able to achieve 40Gbit/sec at 240GHz over a distance of one kilometer, essentially matching the capacity of optical fiber... but, you know, without the actual tether.

The goal here, of course, isn't to lower your ping times beyond where they are already; it's to give rural communities across the globe a decent shot at enjoying broadband. Distances of over one kilometer have already been covered by using a long range demonstrator, which the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology set up between two skyscrapers as part of the project "Millilink". There's no clear word on when the findings will be ported over to the commercial realm, but given the traction we're seeing in the white spaces arena, we doubt you'll have to wait long.

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HTC seems to be encountering a bit of executive brain drain. Jason Gordon, the firm's vice president of global communications, revealed on Twitter that he ended his nearly seven-year-long stint with the handset maker last Friday, but didn't divulge why he left or what his future plans include. Now, The Verge is reporting that Chief Product Officer Kouji Kodera has also flown the coop, following a handful of other execs. According to the outlet's sources, Chief Marketing Officer Ben Ho could be partly responsible for the changes since he's said to be moving the outfit's planning and strategy back to its Taipei HQ. With Peter Chou pinning poor marketing as what held the company back in 2012, it's certainly possible things are being reeled back to home base -- not unlike Nokia's own centralization in recent years. We've reached out to HTC to confirm Kodera's exit and just what the departures mean for the organization as a whole.

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