It's the most wonderful time of the week once again, pals. Like most seven-day periods, this one comes to a close with the latest issue of our e-magazine for your gadget reading pleasure. Front and center this time around, our own Darren Murph pays a visit to the South Carolina HQ of accessory maker Twelve South to chat about making a big splash while staying small. On the review side of things, we take a gander at the TiVo Premiere XL4 and the HTC EVO 4G LTE to see how they stack up and we go hands-on with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Sounder's iOS app. Reaction Time makes an appearance too -- taking a long look at Max Payne 3 while listing this week's must-have game releases. The usual suspects fall in line as well, as you might expect. Switched On discusses RIM and Nokia, IRL sneaks a look in at our gear collections, former Doctor Who script editor Christopher H. Bidmead pauses for the Q&A and Dustin Harbin has the Last Word on what killed dinosaurs. Go ahead. Grab the device of your choice and hit the appropriate download link to grab a copy of this week's e-publication.

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Distro Issue 41: a visit to the Lowcountry's Twelve South, TiVo Premiere XL4 and HTC EVO 4G LTE originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 09:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Comcast's bandwidth policy has come under fire from several directions lately, and today it's announced plans to test two new systems for managing capacity. In a company blog post, VP Cathy Avgiris describes the new "flexible" approaches it will be testing out in certain markets that start off by raising the limit to 300GB (from 250GB where it's been since 2008) per month. One of the plans involves offering 300GB as a base on its Essentials, Economy, and Performance internet packages, and higher limits on its Blast and Extreme tiers, with extra data available as an add-on, possibly $10 for 50GB or so. The other plan simply bumps all tiers to 300GB per month and offers the additional blocks of data as needed. For markets where it's not testing the new plans, it's suspending enforcement of the 250GB cap entirely for now, although it says it will still contact "excessive" users about their usage.

We're currently on a conference call concerning the changes and Comcast is reaffirming its belief that the FCC has decided it can "manage" data usage on its network, and that it will continue to do so in a "non-discriminatory" way. Particularly since the launch of its Xfinity TV Xbox 360 app others like Netflix and some consumer and networking watchdogs would beg to differ, it will be interesting to see if these approaches change anything. Executives on the call noted "noise" around the Xbox 360 app in making the change, but also pointed to an "ongoing internal discussion" and simply that times have changed from four years ago. The words that keep coming up so far are choice and flexibility, as well as mentioning that even today, very few customers approach the previous 250GB limit. In response to a question, Avgiris indicated the median usage for customers is still around 8-10GB per month.We'll find out more like where the test markets are later, for now hit the source link for all the information currently available.

Update: Netflix has responded to the move, and it's about what you'd expect. In other words, it appreciates the notion, but it's still mad.

Comcast rethinks bandwidth caps, trials two new policies that involve higher 300GB monthly limits originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 13:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.