Gadgetory

prepare yourselves the Google bots are coming I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update google is very serious about building its own fleet of robots it has acquired several robot making companies and it most recently purchased Boston Dynamics it's an engineering company that's gained fame for its animal like robots such as the Wildcat which can run 16 miles an hour Boston Dynamics has designed robots for the Pentagon and it also is working on a humanoid robot called atlas it can walk through rubble and handle many obstacles google told the new york times that it will honor existing government contracts but it's not out to become a military contractor on its own you see Google may be working on robots that can help do work in a warehouse or a manufacturing plant or maybe these robots will eventually help humans in the home Google does have big dreams but it would take many years for that to happen the guy in charge of this new robots apartment at Google used to be in charge of the Android operating system and Google isn't the only one with ambitious acquisitions the wall street journal reports that sprint is working on a bid to merge with tmobile next year sprint may be offering more than 20 billion dollars but according to the journal sprint hasn't decided yet if it'll actually move ahead with the bid to buy t-mobile in the meantime sprint expanded its 4G LTE coverage to 70 more cities in total Sprint's past service is now in 300 markets across the u.s. and it's been playing catch up to the other three carriers when it comes to rolling out 4g LTE but sprint has also been touting a new program called sprint spark it uses new technology to ramp up 4G speeds to a possible 60 megabits a second compare that to four G's average speed of 8 megabits per second that means a one-hour HD video would download in under three minutes sprint says the technology could go as fast as one gigabit per second but right now sprint spark is only in New York LA Chicago Tampa Miami and you can only reach that speed with a tri-band device such as the galaxy s4 amazon is making a last minute holiday shopping push to sell more kindle tablets by offering an interest-free payment plan for those that want to Kindle Fire HDX and the HDX 8.9 you can pay for the Android tablets in four installments over the course of nine months so if you want the 7 inch version you just put down $58 and Amazon will automatically bill you the rest every three months amazon is offering that until December 24th that's your tech news update you can find more details at cnet com / update and you can follow along on Twitter from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey