Kiran Upadhyay

If you’ve ever gone out shopping for PC gaming peripherals, it’s likely you would have encountered SteelSeries products. It’s represented at all kinds of eSports events, and with good reason, as SteelSeries makes quality products. SteelSeries has taken its expertise in PC gaming and translated it into the world of iOS gaming, and they’ve come up with a game controller for devices running iOS 7. It’s called the  Stratus , and just from a quick glance, this $79.99 device looks like a promising way to play games on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Does it stack up to the competition? Is it a worthwhile way to play games? That’s just what we are going to figure out today. Best of all, we have a SteelSeries Stratus to give away to one lucky reader! Keep reading to the end of the review to find out how you can enter for your chance to take this controller home for free!

In the latest cautionary tale involving the so-called Internet of things, white-hat hackers have devised an attack against network-connected lightbulbs that exposes Wi-Fi passwords to anyone in proximity to one of the LED devices. The attack works against  LIFX smart lightbulbs , which can be turned on and off and adjusted using iOS- and Android-based devices. Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson gave a  good overview here  of the Philips Hue lights, which are programmable, controllable LED-powered bulbs that compete with LIFX. The bulbs are part of a growing trend in which manufacturers add computing and networking capabilities to appliances so people can manipulate them remotely using smartphones, computers, and other network-connected devices. A  2012 Kickstarter campaign  raised more than $1.3 million for LIFX, more than 13 times the original goal of $100,000. According to a  blog post published over the weekend , LIFX has updated the firmware used to control the bulbs a

For each Android release, Google likes to have a "Project" that picks an area of weakness and focuses on tuning the whole OS to fix it. In Jelly Bean we had  Project Butter , a concerted effort to make Android's UI animations run at 60fps. In  KitKat  there was Project Svelte, which aimed to get the OS running on only 512MB of RAM. Now in Android L we have "Project Volta," an attempt to boost the battery life of Android devices. Like the projects that came before it, Volta is a wide-ranging effort that touches many different parts of the OS. Google did some testing and found that waking a device up for one second burns  two minutes  of standby time. This isn't just turning the screen on—it also means an app waking the processor and modem to check for updates. To cut down on this battery burn, Android L has a new "JobScheduler" API that allows the OS to batch up unimportant app requests like database cleanup and log uploading. Developers can a

Chromebooks have become a tech craze as of late, as they are lightweight, capable machines that have a long battery life. Best of all, they’re very cheap for a laptop. The only real downside to using a Chromebook is the restriction of only using the Chrome web browser, but nowadays,  it’s not really an issue . The first successful Chromebook was the Samsung Chromebook (read our  review of the series 3 Chromebook ), which provided good performance and amazing battery life thanks to the ARM-based processor, as well as great build quality at an affordable price. It’s been out for a while, and Samsung has finally released its successor, the  Samsung Chromebook 2 . You can get the Samsung Chromebook 2 in two configurations — an  11.6-inch model  ($319), which is the same size as the original Samsung Chromebook, and a  13.3-inch model  ($399) for people who want their Chromebook to be more of a laptop replacement. We nabbed ourselves the 13.3-inch model right when it came out, and we

SD cards are mostly just plastic – put a tiny WiFi chip inside and suddenly they take on a whole new life, allowing for wireless data transfer. But not all WiFi SD cards are made equal. Today, we’re putting three different brands to the test to see which is worth buying. At the end of the review, you’ll get the chance to win the best. We’ve gathered two popular brands, as well as a generic Chinese import, to see how they compare. Each card is Class 10 SDHC, with 16GB capacity. Transcend ($50) Note: Since purchasing these cards for review, the Transcend WiFi SD card product line has mysteriously disappeared, resulting in 404 errors on the Transcend site. There appears to be no way to download updated firmware either. Stay well away from this company – it may be related to  violations of the GPL licensing . The Transcend card includes free SD reader, as apparently some standard readers can have a problem with WiFi cards. The manual recommends you only use the one supplie

The Unicode Consortium has just announced the release of version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard, the list of characters "which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards." Unicode 7.0 adds 2,834 new characters to the existing list of 110,187 characters defined by Unicode 6.3, including new symbols for currency, new "lesser-used and historic scripts," and extended support "for written languages of North America, China, India, other Asian countries, and Africa." Of course, the Internet being what it is, what people seem the most excited about are the 250 new emoji characters, listed here by Emojipedia. Notable additions include "hot pepper," "sleuth or spy," "man in business suit levitating," "reversed hand with middle finger extended," and "raised hand with part between middle and ring fingers" (aka the "live long and prosper" thing). The list of emoji also