Gadgetory

in space no one can hear you complain about megapixels I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet up at the curiosity Mars rover was a two and a half billion dollar project and a technological feat but as images come in from the rover everyone's buzzing about how the camera is just 2 megapixels why would NASA send up a camera that's not even as good as the one on my phone well there's quite a few factors for starters the designs were proposed in 2004 when 2 megapixels and eight gigs of flash memory sounded pretty good then had to go through lots of tests to see if it can handle the Martian environment because you don't just switch a camera Midway and redo all that expensive testing and then there's the issue of data more megapixels the larger the file and that makes it harder to send back to earth plus the computers have to transmit other data to NASA besides those pretty pictures but don't you pout they'll still be getting some great images since everything is so still on the surface it can easily stitch together clear panoramic shots as the juicy courtroom battle between Apple and Samsung continues cnet has learned that Google has been quietly helping out samsung google has kept a low profile in this fight over patents and accusations of copying designs but Google has not abandoned its popular Android partner google has coordinated with Samsung over legal strategies with advice doing some legwork and for searching for prior evidence you've been hearing about NASA's successes with the Mars rover but NASA also made news for a failure the Morpheus Lander crashed and caught on fire during an experimental launch more face is a vertical takeoff and landing spacecraft it's designed to land a thousand pounds of cargo on the moon but back to test she goes you win some you lose some if you're used to term Metro as a way to describing the new look at the block style interfaces and windows well time to drop that term because Microsoft will no longer describe something as having a metro design because it's clashing with a European partner that just also happens to have metro in its name so it's just windows 8 no fancy little terms just keeping it simple and how about we end the show with a super cute attack the angry birds franchise is teasing us with a new bird character this time it's a wittle peak Street heart that blows bubbles but even when she gets angry it's a durable rage Rovio is keeping quiet though on when she'll make her game debut that's your tech news update but if you crave more details just pop on by the blog sina com / update and there you can also sign up for our newsletter to keep you in the loop from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey