When the video of the ‘Wake Up’ protest outside the Australian Apple Store hit the Internet, it was generally assumed that Samsung would be behind this, considering their track record of taking jabs at Apple. But later when asked about this, the company denied being behind it.

A few days ago, Mactalk‘s James Croft went through the source code of the Wake Up page and found clues that pointed towards RIM’s Australian website. The date that the website was counting down to was also speculated as the approximate release date for the BlackBerry 10. And lastly, the blogger who just happened to be there to shoot the video of the protest outside the Apple Store has previously worked for RIM. Read more »

Nvidia announced its newest flagship graphics card at the NVIDIA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, the GeForce GTX 690. Combining two GTX 680s on a single card, the 690 is going to be one hell of a performer.

Combining two chips on a board is always tricky business and contrary to what one might expect the performance is not exactly double that of a single GPU card. In fact it’s usually less than the two cards running in SLi mode. But with the GTX 690, NVIDIA is aiming to get performance that will be equivalent to running two GTX 680 in SLi, while maintaining the convenience and lower cost of having a single card in your system. Read more »

Despite being the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak is known to use products from competing brands and publicly speak and praise them as he sees fit. So when he was asked about Windows Phone 7 by A New Domain, he did not hesitate to speak his mind.

As anyone would guess, Woz finds Windows Phone to be visually a lot superior to Android, going as far as saying that there is no contest between the two. He seemed to be especially in love with the transition animations and the simplicity of the UI, which makes it immediately apparent to the user what they have to do next. In comparison, he thinks that the Android UI is a lot more complex and requires prior knowledge on part of the user. Read more »

One of the best features of Chrome is the ‘Most visited sites’ view in the new tab, where the browser presents you with a grid of thumbnails of sites you visit most often. This is a derivation of the speed dial function in Opera, that allows the user to manually set any site they want as a speed dial on the new tab page for quick access.

Mozilla has recently taken to borrowing every good feature from Chrome in their new release. The recently released Firefox 12 brought the silent update feature. With the Firefox 13 beta, Mozilla has added the most visited sites to Firefox’ new tab page. Read more »

It’s that time of the year when we get a new version of the popular Linux distro, Ubuntu. The newest version, 12.04, dubbed as ‘Precise Pangolin’ in their usual alliterative theme comes with some new features but mostly just refinements to those added in the previous version.

There is now a new HUD that allows the user to simply type what they want to do and then the OS suggests them applications based on the text they enter. So if you were to type “browse the Internet” the OS would display the browser among the results. The HUD can be evoked with a click of the Alt key on your keyboard. Read more »

In the time it took you to install Firefox 11, Mozilla has released Firefox 12 for Windows, OS X and Linux. As usual, it doesn’t bring a host of new features but there is one that makes the process of upgrading that much more painless, which is good considering how often Mozilla has started releasing new updates.

Firefox 12 brings the ability to silently upgrade in the background. What this means is that when a new update is available, the browser will automatically download it (configurable, of course) and then install the update without you ever knowing about it. You won’t even get the Windows UAC warning message asking for your permission to install it. This is exactly how Chrome has been updating itself all this time and it’s good to see this functionality carried over to Firefox as well. Read more »

Apple has announced its financial results for the fiscal second quarter of 2012 that ended in March 31, 2012. Their total revenue for this quarter was $39.2 billion and the quarterly net profit was $11.6 billion. In comparison, the figures were $24.7 billion and $6.0 billion respectively for the same quarter last year.

As usual, the iPhone did very well this quarter, with Apple selling 35.1 million of those, up by 88 percent compared to year-ago quarter. Sales were down compared to the first quarter, however, where Apple managed to sell 37.04 million iPhones, the reason for this being chalked down to the holiday season that boosted the sales in the previous quarter. Read more »

Couple of interesting cloud based storage news from Mountain View. Reuters is reporting that according to its sources, Google Drive service will allow the user to have up to 100GB of storage space. This will of course be a paid extra, with 5GB being made available by default.

Reuters is also saying that the service could be officially launched as soon as Tuesday, that is today. For those who are not aware, Google Drive is said to be Google’s answer to Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Apple’s iCloud service. Users will be able to upload their pictures, videos, documents, etc. all in one place, which will then be synced across different devices. Read more »

The countdown to the Windows 8 launch is slowly ticking (although we are not sure which date it is ticking down to) but while we wait for the final version to go on sale Microsoft is going to keep us busy with another beta version of the desktop OS.

Microsoft announced at the Windows 8 Developer Days conference that the Windows 8 Release Preview (previously known as Release Candidate) will be released in the first week of June. There was no further mention about the exact date or what changes this new version might bring. Read more »

Microsoft has released the final version of the Skype client for Windows Phone devices. The latest version includes the ability to search and add contacts, call landline phones, improved app startup time and general bug fixes.

However, there are still some caveats left. The application cannot run in the background, which means once you exit it you cannot get calls anymore, nor do you get any toast notifications from it. Read more »

Facebook has released a new update for its Android app. Version 1.9.0 brings a much needed performance update, and the whole app feels a lot faster than before.

Unfortunately, it also brings along a new nuisance. Facebook has decided that it will be a good idea to provide direct shortcuts to the messenger and image upload service, so now they have dedicated icons for both of these in your app drawer, taking the total count of icons for a single app to three! Read more »

If you haven’t heard of the Google+ SMS service until now, I wouldn’t blame you. The service isn’t particularly popular (neither is Google+, for that matter) and was only available in the US and India until now.

Google has now expanded the list of countries where the service is now functional and it includes the following places: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Benin, Cambodia, Cameroon, Congo (DRC), Cote D’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia. Read more »

A few days ago, Crytek announced that the third game in the Crysis series will be out in 2013 and now the first teaser trailer has officially been released.

Being true to its name, the teaser shows only a handful of the key elements of the game. For starters, you see that the game is based again in New York City like the previous one, except this time it is within a sealed off portion covered by the Nanodome. Read more »

NVIDIA announced that it will be releasing an updated version of the Tegra 3, called the Tegra 3+, some time in 2012. It will feature improved performance and will be available on both tablets and smartphones.

Unfortunately, though, unlike what it said before, this updated version won’t be bringing LTE support to Tegra 3. This has been one of the shortcomings of this chipset because of which hardware manufacturers such as HTC had to turn to Qualcomm for powering their LTE phones. Read more »

In a survey conducted last year, HTC asked its customers whether they prefer phones with great battery life or those that compromise battery life to be thin and it seems the majority of the people voted for the second option.

HTC was to use the results of this poll to decide the design of their future products and considering the outcome, decided to discard phones with massive 3,000mAh+ batteries in favor of those that are thinner. Hence, the One series phones. Read more »