August 31st, 2011 marks the day that Canadians will be forced to switch over to digital television as analog television comes to an end. As the CRTC have decided, all local Canadian television stations will stop broadcasting in analog and begin with digital. If you think you will be affected, take a look at this article for your options.

A large Canadian ISP, Shaw, has stepped up to the plate to change Canadian internet once and for all. Shaw has finally come up with reasonable priced packages with decently fast speeds as well. Check out the comparison chart included in this article!

Take a look at what goes on behind the scenes in the mobile industry because of current patent laws. You may be shocked to see the revenue made from patents alone, as well as get a chance to see what companies are suing other companies because of intellectual property infringement.

There have been reports recently that a presentation of AMD’s upcoming plan with their processors to compete with Intel’s Core series (i3, i5, i7) have been leaked onto the internet. Note that these are not official reports and just speculations at this point.

Google is getting ready to launch their new Chromium OS-packed laptop soon – the ChromeBook. Learn more about the ChromeBook here (launch date, how it works, features, etc.) and check out another product that Google hasn’t officially announced yet – the ChromeBox.

We have big news to report this week! Four big giants are in the news (Microsoft, Skype, Netflix, and Sony) each with good news (about time the PSN is back online..). Check out full details after the break.

AMD Fusion is a technology whereby you combine a sophisticated CPU architecture/chipset along with a Direct X 11 capable GPU (Radeon architecture) and you optimize the hardware significantly so that you combined the CPU and GPU on a single processing die. AMD calls the combination of the CPU and GPU, the APU.

With an increasing demand for HD in our world, the next big thing to go HD is closer than ever – HD Voice. With this improved technology, we will be able to more or less drown out any background noise while improving speech quality dramatically – a more enjoyable experience for everyone.

Here we are with week #2 of the weekend round-up. This week Google once again had some big news – a change in CEO is coming soon! But that’s not all! A crucial engineer for the Kinect project for Microsoft has left the company and joined the search giant as well – Google.

Check out the newest addition to ECE PlayGround: the weekend round-up. Every weekend we plan to post a list of articles (linking to the original source of course!) of technology news that has happened the past week. This week we have some big news – Google acquired eBook Technologies but drops H.264 support.

While some of us are impressed by the processing power of Apple’s A4 or Qualcomm’s 1Ghz Snapdragon. ARM has laid out its next generation mobile devices processor upcoming in few years. Read on to find out more!

If you happen to own a computer that is no longer (on average) than few years old, then you are probably capable of 64bit computing, but what difference does it make? Will everyone benefit from it? Is it worth it? Read on to find out more!

Internet Explorer has seen a declining share over the past few years. Will this trend be broken with Internet Explorer 9? Improved UI and performance is part of what Microsoft is aiming for. Similar to Google’s Chrome by design, will it have the performance lead? Read on to find out more!

Think you know the fastest microprocessor manufacturer? Hint: It’s not from the same companies that design the microprocessors for Windows OS based machine or Apple computer. Read on to find out more!

Back To School: Despite the MacBook Pro not having the sales lead in the notebook computing category, they are quite popular around university campuses. Interested in purchasing one soon? Curious about technology and specs? Read on to find out.