NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 System-on-Chip (SoC) powers a range of current high-end tablets including the Google Nexus 7 and the Microsoft Surface RT.  But the company is hard at work on the next-generation of their ARM platform, the Tegra 4.

According to a newly leaked document, the Tegra 4 – codenamed Wayne – will (like its predecessor) include four application cores, but will move to the latest Cortex-A15 architecture.  It will also have 72 graphics cores, besting the Tegra 3’s 12-core GPU handily.  These extra cores will enable screen resolutions up to 2560×1600.

The Tegra 4’s app cores will likely be clocked between 1.2 and 2.0GHz.  It will also include support for USB 3.0 and DDR3.

NVIDIA is expected to unveil the new SoC  in Q1 2013, with the first devices powered by the Tegra 4 likely shipping mid-year.

Verizon Wireless was the first of the four major U.S. wireless companies to deploy LTE in any meaningful way, and competitors like AT&T and Sprint continue to play catch-up.

And while the spread of Verizon’s LTE coverage has taken longer than some had hoped, it’s now picking up steam in a big way:

Today, the company announced that its LTE network will cover “more than 70 percent of the U.S. population,” when new and expanded networks come online tomorrow. 

This is great news for Verizon customers since most new smartphones and tablets sold by the carrier are compatible with LTE, which can offer blazingly-fast download speeds above 20Mbps under optimal conditions, far faster than 3G EV-DO or HSDPA.

After the break, you can see a list of cities where LTE will become available for the first time, in addition to locations where LTE coverage will be expanded.

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We’ve updated Pocket PC Central with a new section for Google Nexus 7 Tablet Accessories.

There are various pages in the Nexus 7 Accessories Center for different types of tablet accessories.  Pages include, but are not limited to:

Nexus 7 Cases & Skins

Nexus 7 Chargers

Nexus 7 Screen Protectors

Visit the Google Nexus 7 Accessories Center for a full list of available accessories.

It’s a day worth nothing in your journal when Microsoft surprises us with a new, innovative product, so grab a pen and get comfortable.  The company behind Windows, Office, XBox and Windows Phone unveiled a product that some had speculated about, but none had come close to nailing down: new Surface tablet.

And they even managed to pull it off with a bit of punk, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo cool.

While there’s a lot going on here, and surely much more to come over the next few months, here’s what you need to know about Microsoft’s upcoming Surface tablets:

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If you want to transcode video for a smartphone or tablet, there are few better tools – paid or free – than Handbrake. This open source application, which runs on both Mac OS and Windows, makes converting video for mobile device viewing as easy as a few mouse clicks.  The main downside is that it is so infrequently updated (it’s been more than  year since the last version was released).

But the folks behind Handbrake have finally updated the application, which is now at version 0.9.6.  There are a slew of changes and improvements, but the primary benefit we’ve seen is that the new version transcodes videos considerably faster than before.  There are now two Android presets: Android Mid (phones) and Android High (tablets).  iPhone and iPad presets remain, of course, along with an improved “Normal” preset which churns out excellent general use MP4 video files.  On the downside, HandBrake 0.9.6 breaks VLC-powered DVD ripping since VLC 2.0 no longer supports this. Also gone is the file size option which users could employ to generate video files that were a specific size.

On Windows, make sure you download the bit version that matches your OS installation (32-bit or 64-bit); Windows XP, Vista and 7 are supported.  On the Mac side, HandBrake now requires Mac OS 10.6 or above and is only available in 64-bit.