Month: December 2015

We traded the thing on the left for the thing on the right. And yes the display really looks that bad in real life.

12 more images in gallery

The other day we were rather shocked to hear that Walmart was selling a pre-paid smartphone for ten whole dollars. When we saw the device was running Android, we just had to see what it was like. So we walked into our local store, plunked an entire $10 bill down on the table, and walked out with a rough facsimile of a smartphone. Meet the LG Sunrise.

This is not our first trip into the masochistic world of ultra-cheap smartphones. We previously reviewed the Intex Cloud FX, a $35 smartphone that ran Firefox OS. The Cloud FX had a ton of problems, but for us the most limiting thing was FireFox OS. It couldn't run any benchmarks or our battery tests, making the device a $35 slab of uselessness that could occasionally render a webpage without crashing. The Sunrise is packing something much more familiar though: Android. It's only running Android 4.4 KitKat, but that's a lot better than Mozilla's app-less browser OS.

We should mention that while we walked into a Walmart and spent only $10 on this device, it was on sale. Various carrier models have the MSRP of the Sunrise listed for $40-$60. We should also mention that this $10 deal is for a locked prepaid phone. If you want to have cell service on this device, it has to be with TracFone unless you want to unlock it somehow. You could also just never get service and have a $10 Wi-Fi device.

(credit: Don LaVange/Flickr)

‘Keep your eyes on the sidewalk and your hands off the phone’ may become the slogan of safety campaigns of the near future.

Between 2004 and 2010, emergency room visits for injuries involving distracted pedestrians using cellphones doubled, according to a 2013 study. Yet, in a new survey, few American pedestrians said they were the source of the problem. Instead, those surveyed suggested the blame mostly falls on the sidetracked, sidewalk-dwellers around them.

It’s not a problem caused by “others,” Alan Hilibrand an orthopedic surgeon, survey coauthor, and spokesperson for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), told Ars. “It’s really all of us.”

Buy the Dagobah expansion set, it is your destiny. (credit: Aurich vs Vader)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our new weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

For those of a certain age, the original Star Wars movies premiered at formative moments in our lives—and thus stayed with us forever. I had only recently turned four when Star Wars came out in 1977, but I saw Empire and Jedi in the theater, and these movies fueled my inner geek for years to come.

We geeks needed lots of fuel, too, for it was a long slog between the Jedi credits rolling off the screen in 1983 and standing in line for The Phantom Menace premiere in 1999. We subsisted on Star Wars collectibles from action figures to Lego Millennium Falcons to LaserDiscs. Later, in 1995, some of us also played a ridiculously complicated but addictive customizable card game based on the Star Wars universe.

Block diagram of Chakra's design. (credit: Microsoft)

At JSConf in Florida today, Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing Chakra, the JavaScript engine used in its Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. The code will be published to the company's GitHub page next month.

Microsoft is calling the version it's open sourcing ChakraCore. This is the complete JavaScript engine—the parser, the interpreter, the just-in-time compiler, and the garbage collector  along with the API used to embed the engine into applications (as used in Edge). This will have the same performance and capabilities, including asm.js and SIMD support, as well as cutting-edge support for new ECMAScript 2015 language features like the version found in Microsoft's Windows 10 browser.

There are some small differences, however, between ChakraCore and Chakra as ships in Windows 10. The full Chakra includes the glue between the JavaScript engine and the browser's HTML engine, and similarly, glue between the JavaScript engine and the Universal Windows Platform. Neither of these are part of ChakraCore. Chakra also has diagnostic APIs that use COM and hence are Windows-specific. These won't be in ChakraCore either. Instead, a new set of diagnostic APIs will be developed and eventually integrated into the full Chakra.