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Headphone maker SOL Republic debuts its first portable Bluetooth speaker-- the SOL Republic Deck, a Motorola co-development launched together with the newly announced Moto X smartphone.

Similar to the Jawbone Jambox (if with a larger and flatter design), the Deck promises "powerful sound you can feel" through R2 Sound Engines and a bass port, as well as up to 90m of wireless range.

A curious "Heist Mode" allows the pairing of up to 5 smartphones, with users taking turns to control the choice of music.

Motorola Mobility finally reveals the reason why Google shelled out $12.5 billion for it back in 2011-- the Moto X, the first Motorola product designed with Google supervision.

At first glance, the Moto X looks like any other 4.7-inch Android handset, if one carrying what Motorola calls "innovation themes." These include "Touchless Control" (as in voice-activated Google Now functionality), "Active Display" (a low power means of showing alerts on screen without unlocking the device) and "Quick Capture" (two flicks of the wrist activate the camera).

Powering such features is the "X8 Mobile Computing System"-- a custom-built 8-core architecture designed to handle multiple tasks while sipping as little battery life as possible. It consists of a pair of dual-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Processors, a quad-core Adreno 320 GPU and 2 custom processors (one for natural language, the other for contextual computing).

Apple finds itself facing a class action suit from its retail workers-- a pair of Apple Store employees claim they lost up to $1500 in unpaid overtime yearly due to too frequent bag searches.

According to former employees Amanda Frlekin and Dean Pelle (who worked in New York and Los Angeles stores respectively) Apple demands bag searches whenever a worker leaves the premises on lunch hours and at the end of the day. Supposedly an anti-theft measure, the “personal package and bag search” policy apparently demands 5-10 minutes of "off-the-clock" daily waiting, adding up up to $1500 a year in unpaid overtime (Apple pays $18.75 an hour).

Such a sum might not sound like much when one takes the profits Apple makes into consideration-- but since bag searches are a company-wide procedure Apple faces a potential liability worth $45 million at the face of its 30000 retail workers spread across the globe.

Apple does not provide comment on the lawsuit as yet.

Corning brings its cover glass products to touch-enabled notebooks with Gorilla Glass NBT, claiming it is designed to "protect touch notebook displays from scratches and other forms of damage."

Gorilla Glass NBT features the same benefits seen in the 3rd Gorilla Glass version, including Native Damage Resistance (NDR) flaw visibility reduction and improved strength retention.

“We are confident that Corning Gorilla Glass NBT will outperform legacy soda-lime glass, delivering eight to 10 times more scratch resistance," the company says. "In fact, for just 1-2% of a notebook’s retail price, consumers can now get the best cover glass solution."