The Play Store is celebrating its second birthday and daddy Google is giving away some discounts on select games. If you open the Play Store, you will find the special anniversary menu right in front of you.

The discounts so far are only on games and are actually quite terrible. Instead of going with popular paid games Google has chosen games that most people haven’t heard of (except a few) and are already free. The discounts then are not on the actual game but on in-app purchases. In some cases, you also get additional in-game items for use. Read more »

Popular iOS trivia game QuizUp is now available on Android. A private beta of the game was released a few weeks back but now the stable version has been released on the Play Store.

QuizUp lets you play one-on-one online multiplayer quiz matches against your friends or other QuizUp players. You can choose from hundreds of topics, with new ones constantly being added. When you start a quiz, you have to answer and depending upon how quickly and how many you answer correctly you are given points. The one with the higher points at the end of the game wins. Read more »

Microsoft will be giving game developers a closer look at the next version of its graphics API set on March 20 at Game Developer Conference or GDC. Microsoft didn’t reveal much about it right now and all we know for sure is that AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are onboard with it right now.

But while Microsoft did not reveal much on its website, the GDC schedule for the DirectX event does give a good hint at what we can expect. According to the description, it seems DirectX 12 will offer lower-level access to hardware, similar to AMD’s Mantle API. Having low-level access to your hardware means you are able to get the most out of it and make better use of it. Read more »

Google has released a new update for the Gmail app for iOS. The latest version brings with a much requested feature: background refresh. This feature takes advantage of the new APIs in iOS 7 and will refresh and keep your inbox updated in the background, so when you launch the app it will be up to date.

Another addition is one-click login. A lot of the Google apps on iOS have one-click login, which means when you log into one Google app, the other Google apps will just borrow that data and will allow you to login with just one click instead of having to sign in separately. Read more »

Few months ago, we saw reports of Samsung running special code on its phones, viz. the Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Note 3, that detected when you ran certain benchmark software on the device and would then run them at full processor clock speed. This was considered cheating as the phone, under normal circumstances, would never run at those speeds in other apps and thus the benchmarking scores were not representative of the actual device performance.

After much ado was made about this situation, it seems Samsung has finally decided to backtrack on its stance on messing around with benchmark scores. According to a new report by Ars Technica, Samsung has removed its code responsible for maxing out hardware on benchmarking apps. This was also confirmed by an independent developer on Twitter. Read more »

Warner Bros. has announced the fourth and final installment in the successful and critically acclaimed Batman Arkham series of games. Called the Batman: Arkham Knight, the game will release on October 14, 2014 and will be available on the PS4, Xbox One and the PC.

Batman: Arkham Knight takes place in Gotham city after the events of Batman: Arkham City. This time, Batman will be facing some of his old enemies, including Two-Face, The Penguin, Scarecrow, Riddler and Harley Quinn along with a brand new villain that was created specifically for this game. Read more »

It seems Google will soon be adding it’s excellent voice dictation feature to Google Drive. This will let you dictate, say, notes without having to type them in manually.

The voice dictation feature has been present in Android for quite a while now but there was no way to use it on the desktop version of Google Drive née Docs. This will put a handy voice button on the Drive menu and speak your text out loud. And Google’s voice recognition feature is virtually flawless so I can tell this is going to work out very well. Read more »

Samsung has released two new commercials for the new Galaxy S5 smartphone and the Gear 2 smartwatch, respectively. Both commercials were also shown during yesterday’s 86th Academy Awards ceremony, which Samsung was an official sponsor of.

Both ads are quite simple and done quite well. They feature simple shots of the products with a few line of text using double entendre, talking about the devices and the ceremony during which they were telecast at the same time. Read more »

Just when we had stopped cringing at the first teaser video for the second generation HTC One, to be announced on March 25, HTC has gone ahead and released a second one.

Just like the first one, which concentrated on the BoomSound speakers, the new video focuses on another important feature of the new One, the anodized aluminum unibody. The new HTC One seems to use the same process that they used for the current HTC One, which is no bad thing as the design and build of the current HTC One is excellent. Read more »

LYNE is a minimalist puzzle game. You connect all the dots of the same shape following a few simple rules and you complete the level. Sounds simple enough, only it isn’t.

Let’s see what this game is like. Read more »

Tengami is a very uniquely designed puzzle game. It takes the appearance of a Japanese pop-up book and you move between worlds by sliding over the pages.

The game has already received accolades for its design and was also chosen the Editor’s Choice on the App Store. We decided to take a look at it for ourselves and see how good it really is. Read more »

A few months back, Google had released an extension for Chrome that would allow you to use search simply by using your voice and saying the phrase “Ok Google”. Now, that functionality is being built-in to the browser and is available first through the new beta.

If you install or update to the latest Chrome beta, you will be able to do a voice search from the Google homepage or from the new tab page. You can use it the same way you’d use it on your Android phone, by starting with “Okay Google” and then saying your query. You can also use it to set a timer or a reminder. Read more »

Google has released a major update to the iOS version of the Hangouts mobile app. Whereas the previous app left a lot to be desired and didn’t look or work as you’d expect from an app on iOS, the updated version completely changes that and also adds some new features.

One of the most noticeable changes in the new version is the new UI redesigned for iOS 7. Read more »

One of the features that was exclusive to the Nexus 5 so far was the Google Now Launcher, that allowed you to go to the Google Now screen just by a swipe on the homescreen and to bring up the voice search simply by saying “Ok Google”.

Google has now released the Google Now Launcher on the Play Store and made it compatible with a wider range of devices, For now this includes only the Nexus devices and the Play Edition devices. Which means you can officially install it on the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 (2012), Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, Galaxy S4 GPe, HTC One GPe, Moto G GPe, Xperia Z Ultra GPe and the LG G Pad 8.3 GPe. Read more »

Apple has released the second major update to OS X Mavericks since it was released last year. The 10.9.2 update brings with it some useful new changes, along with a major security fix.

One of the changes in this update is a fix for the SSL/TLS bug that allowed an attacker to access sensitive information on machines on a network. This bug was also present in iOS, which was patched in iOS 7.0.6 and has now been patched in OS X as well. Read more »