NimbleBit and LucasArts has just released Star Wars: Tiny Death Star for most major mobile operating systems.

The game was announced exactly one month ago, and is based upon Tiny Tower – a popular block stacking game with a city building theme. Read more »

BlackBerry’s serious troubles began last June, when the company announced $84 million operating loss despite increased shipments and revenue. The very next quarter the company reported $965 million loss, 97% of which is due to the terrible BlackBerry Z10 sales.

BlackBerry has been looking for partners to invest into the company since its financial troubles became clear. The company’s board has even pushed for a quick sale before the end of the year. At the end of September BlackBerry’s fate seemed sealed when a deal with a consortium led by Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd for $4.7 billion was announced. Read more »

Recently Samsung announced the Galaxy Round smartphone with a 5.7″ 1080p Super Flexible AMOLED display. Lots of people thought the curved display is just a gimmick or, even worse, an unnecessary feature designed to extract more of your hard-earned cash.

The researchers from DisplayMate Technologies don’t seem to share that view and found the curved screen quite useful. Their study found that the curved display reduces reflectiveness, which in turn imrpoves contrast and sunlight legibility. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Gear is surely a cool gadget, but it comes with lots of annoying limitations. Samsung is promising it will explore further the Galaxy Gear capabilities and will deliver more features later on.

Meanwhile an XDA Developers member has made a very useful app that will show full notifications on your Galaxy Gear for all apps, not just messages and emails as it is by default. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Kids was announced back in August. It’s a modified version of Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 with highly customized user interface for kids plus lots of pre-installed age-appropriate software and games.

The slate is already available in Korea and now the company has confirmed that USA is the next market to get it. Read more »

Samsung has released the first commercial of the curved Galaxy Round smartphone. The ad is in Korean, because it is the first (and at this stage the only) country to get the cool gadget. It’s unclear if the curved smartphone will be going global in the future, but chances are looking slim at this point.

Meanwhile, LG has also announced its first curved smartphone – the 6.0-inch LG G Flex. It will be launching in Korea in November as well. Read more »

HTC One Max is powered by a massive 3,300mAh battery that in theory should give you enough juice for 24 days of standby or a whole day of 3G talks.

Those are some impressive stats indeed, but we are now about to test if they translate to actually great real-life performance. The wait is over, all the tests are run and the results are in. Read more »

The Surface Music Kit was announced with the Surface 2 and Surface 2 Pro slates back in September. It is a detachable cover that will let you create and remix songs on your Surface.

The pricing and availability is yet to be announced, though, but now you can learn in detail how the creative process works via nine demo videos. Read more »

Sony Xperia Z1 recently got a firmware update that brings improved camera algorithm for better all-round performance. Sony has also improved the Smart Social Camera platform that boosts the performance of features such as Burst Mode, Superior Auto, AR Effect and Sweep Panorama.

The new update is already seeding to the Xperia Z1 units worldwide and the first samples showing the improvements are now online. Read more »

Nokia is going to launch the Nokia Black update (previously known as Bittersweet Shimmer) with the Windows Phone 8.1 (GDR3) firmware early next year. The update will be compatible with all WP8-running Lumia phones, but 1020 will benefit the most.

The oversampling algorithm in the Lumia 1020 was altered compared to the 808 PureView phone resulting in oversaturated colors and noisier images. Well, Nokia is bringing back the old algorithms with the Nokia Black update. Read more »

As it turns out Windows 8.1 update may cause some trouble with popular action games. If you update to Windows 8.1 you may experience severe mouse lag on Call of Duty, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Metro 2033 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat.

Various users are reporting on Reddit they’ve started to experience mouse lag after they updated to Windows 8.1. Read more »

The official Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 updates kicked off on October 17. Shortly after that the RT update was pulled from the Store, because it was reportedly failing the installation on a small percentage of RT devices, leaving them unbootable.

It seems Microsoft has found the problem and resolved it, because the Windows RT 8.1 update is back in the Store. Read more »

Google has started pushing out a new version of its Play Store app. It brings minor UI changes and will most probably premiere as part of the Android 4.4 KitKat.

Play Store 4.4.21 brings a sliding-out navigation bar for easier exploration of the Store. It also prepares your device for the upcoming Newsstand that will replace Magazines soon. Read more »

The refreshed Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 slate joined our review queue a while ago. We have the Wi-Fi-only model, which is powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 5420 Octa chipset.

The tablet runs the latest commercially available Android 4.3 Jelly Bean with Samsung’s latest TouchWiz customizations on top. The Note 10.1 2014 Edition also features all S-Pen applications and services the Galaxy Note 3 introduced last month. Read more »

Remember how Apple made free a plethora of apps free for all new iPhones? Apple iPhoto, iMovie and the iWork suite (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) for iOS now cost you nothing if you upgrade your iPhone and it seems the GarageBand will soon join this list.

The app’s name appeared at the “Built-in apps” page for the iPhone 5s earlier and even though it was quickly removed, it was probably a hint of what’s to come. Read more »