After some hesitation, Samsung is finally delivering the promised Value pack update for the original Galaxy S. The new firmware adds some Ice Cream Sandwich features to the Gingerbread-tasting Galaxy, including Face unlock.

It turns out, though, the Face unlock is actually better than the one present in the stock Android ICS, which is easy to bypass with a photo. Samsung’s team responsible for the value pack heard those concerns and made this unlock option more secure. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note is quite popular with people – Samsung just announced thatover 5 million Notes were shipped. Not all of them went to humans though – at least one elephant is quite happy with his Galaxy Note.

Peter the Elephant uses the Note to play some music, browse photos (even snap a few himself) and the S Pen proved to be well-designed for use with a trunk, too. Read more »

The Angry Birds hasn’t cooled off, even after being around for over two years. The new major release – Angry Birds Space – that launched less than a week ago has already seen millions of downloads.

Angry Birds’ Twitter account broke the news that Space saw more than 10 million downloads across the various platforms – and that’s just for the first three days since its release. Read more »

A groundbreaking new Android app is rising in popularity in the Google Play store. It’s called Solar Charger and lets you use the phone’s screen to charge the battery with sunlight.

Yes, of course it’s a fake. The app’s description says so itself, in case your common sense failed you. It’s still a very interesting app, here’s why. Read more »

The Acer Iconia Tab A510 that we saw at CES this year just went on pre-order in North America. The A510 is a 10.1″ tablet running Android 4.0 ICS on a Tegra 3 chipset. Acer has decided to go ahead and sell the Olympic Edition of the tablet.

They also unveiled the remaining features and specs to fill in the blanks (Acer announced only preliminary specs at CES). They include a list of productivity apps that come preinstalled with the tablet and other cool stuff. Read more »

The new iPad runs hotter than the iPad 2 – yesterday we saw the first exact numbers of just how much hotter and also Apple’s response. Today, it’s Consumer Report’s turn to weigh in on the issue and their measurements show a much more drastic difference in operating temperatures.

They put the new iPad on a smart cover, plugged it in, switched off 4G connectivity and left the Wi-Fi on. The temperature in the room where the test was conducted was 22°C (72°F). Infinity Blade II was left to run for 45 minutes and then the measurements were made. Read more »

The new iPad has double the GPU cores count of the iPad 2 model and Apple had to increase the battery to handle the increased power usage. However, the increased power consumption isn’t the only problem that the extra GPU power creates – it also produces more heat and causes the new iPad to run hotter than its predecessor.

Many users reported that the new iPad feels hotter, but Tweakers.net brought out a thermal camera to get exact numbers. Read more »

Rovio is gearing up to launch the next major version of their absurdly popular Angry Birds game and they’re stepping up the promotion – yesterday we saw a custom helmet for F1 driver Heikki Kovalainen and today brings more F1 promotion and two new birds.

Heikki’s compatriot Kimi Raikonen will wear a patch (seen above) featuring a new angry bird on his race suit. The bird was chosen to match Kimi’s nickname “Iceman” and is called (surprise!) Ice bird. Read more »

Maemo and MeeGo have an awesome community around them with strong DIY attitude. It’s thanks to that community that the Nokia N9 and the N900 are getting WhatsApp, even though the company behind it hasn’t made an official app for the platform.

The app is still a work in progress and you can’t get it right now, but it seems like the dev working on it is making headway. Read more »

PC manufacturers can’t wait for Windows 8 to come out and they’ll be competing to be the first to offer a tablet running Microsoft’s new OS. Rumor has it that Lenovo will try to launch a W8 tablet as soon as the OS hits the shelves.

But they’ll have competition – Dell’s head honcho has already said “We’ll be there right on the very first day that Windows 8 is available”. Read more »

Initially Mozilla took a firm stance when it came to HTML5′s video tag – only open-source video codecs are welcome, proprietary stuff like h.264 will not be supported. Now however, their position has softened – Firefox will support whatever media codecs the host OS has in addition to Theora (which was there from the start).

The change will first be implemented in their experimental Boot 2 Gecko mobile OS (which we saw in action at the MWC) and later added to the Android version of Firefox. Desktop Firefox might prove a bigger challenge, however. Read more »

FaceTime caused a lot of “oohs” and “aahs” but there are still problems with it – like needing a Wi-Fi connection for it to work. Even if you have blazing fast LTE connection on your shiny new iPad, you still can’t do a FaceTime call.

It has already been pointed out that using the iPad as a Wi-Fi hotspot and connecting an iPhone 4/4S to it to do a FaceTime is one way to get around this restriction, but that’s hardly an ideal solution and it certainly won’t work for everyone. Read more »

Tizen – what became of MeeGo after Samsung took Nokia’s place in the project and also Bada’s replacement – kept a very low profile at the MWC, but it was there. A short video demo of the gallery shows that the new OS delivers a lot of eye candy even in this early stage of its development.

Earlier this year we saw some Tizen screenshots, but the traditional grid of thumbnails has given way to a less useful, but definitely prettier 3D arrangement. Read more »

Google revealed they are busy at work to create a Metro version of their popular desktop browser Chrome for Windows 8. Microsoft’s new OS is a strange beast with two different environments – Windows 7-style desktop and the new Metro interface – which will run separate apps.

While the current browser will work just fine in desktop mode, it won’t be accessible in Metro, which is the preferred UI for tablets. Google is specifically looking to improve touch support for the Chrome on Metro. Read more »

Asus announced two new ultrabooks powered by Intel’s oft-delayed Ivy Bridge processor. There are 11.6″ and a 13.3″ versions – Asus Zenbook UX21A and UX31A respectively. Either size will have a FullHD IPS screen – yep, that’s 1920×1080 resolution on a 11.6″ screen.

The IPS screens will offer 350 nits of brightness, but if they are too pricy for you, you can switch to a vanilla LCD screen instead. That drops the brightness to 300 nits and the resolution is downgraded to 1600×900 for the 13.3″ model and 1366×768 for the 11.6″ one. Read more »