“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.” - Bill Gates

“Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.” - Mark Zuckerberg Read more »

One of the more interesting things announced at the ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ event yesterday was Find My Friends for iOS devices. It’s basically an optional location tracking service that you can use on your iOS device.

What ‘Find My Friend’ does is let’s you share your location with your friends. People will ask you for your location and you can share it with them, provided you trust them enough. Read more »

Microsoft launched the first Zune player back in 2006 as a competitor to Apple’s wildly popular iPod. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Zune was never the success it may have hoped for and although it managed to amble along for five years, reinventing itself several times along the way, everyone knew it won’t be around for much longer.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they will no longer be producing the Zune players. From here onward, it will only exist in the form of a software and service for Microsoft’s desktop and mobile offerings. Read more »

We have seen screenshots of the redesigned Xbox 360 dashboard before that uses the slick new Metro UI but now a video has leaked that gives us a nice little tour of the interface and all the various menu options that we can expect to see when the update is released this fall.

The video is low resolution and a bit blurry. Moreover there is no audio and the text is all in French so it’s basically like watching a French movie with no audio and subtitles. Read more »

It seems Amazon may have started a tablet price war with its $199 Kindle Fire (or was it HP?). Either that or Best Buy suddenly realized that the HTC Flyer was way too expensive, because they have announced a $200 price cut on HTC’s premier tablet (for the Wi-Fi only version).

This brings the price of the 7-inch tablet down from the lofty $499 to a more palatable $299. For that price you are getting what is arguably one of the best 7-inch tablets around. Read more »

When they are not making cartoons and selling merchandise based on them they also sell mobile phones to girls who watch their cartoons and buy merchandise based on them. So far all they had were these typical pink and fuchsia colored flip phones but now they are trying to get serious so they launched a couple of new Android smartphones, nevermind the fact that Steve Jobs is on Disney’s board of directors.

The two phones include the DM011SH and DM010SH (you’d think Disney could have come up with better names). Both phones have been manufactured by Sharp for Disney. The more expensive of the two, the DM010SH has a 4.0-inch 3D display with a qHD resolution, 1GHz processor and 8 megapixel camera, not bad for a phone with Mickey Mouse head for a home button. Read more »

Alright, so the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is not really new as it was announced back in March along with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and we have even done a hands-on with it. But up until now the availability of the tablet was unknown. Samsung has finally come clean with it though, as you will now be able to get your hands on the Galaxy Tab 8.9 starting October 2, and it is available for pre-order right now.

It will be available in two models, 16GB and 32GB, with the former priced at $469 and the latter being $569. It’s not a lot cheaper than the bigger 10.1 model, which costs just $30 more in either memory capacity and seems better value in comparison. Read more »

Looks like Motorola has developed a fetish for beveled corners recently. After the Photon 4G and the recently leaked 7-inch tablet, another Motorola device has leaked on which the company has cut corners, literally.

This time we are looking at leaked images of the alleged Motorola Xoom 2, the successor to the not-so-popular Motorola Xoom tablet. Unlike the previously leaked tablet this one seems to have a 10-inch display just like its predecessor. Read more »

The headline may come as a shock to some but it’s true. It seems in an effort to make a great gaming phone, Sony Ericsson forgot to add some basic features in the Xperia PLAY that are expected in a phone that costs as much as it does.

Thankfully, the error has been corrected and after the latest firmware update, the Xperia PLAY is now capable of recording videos in 720p resolution, that too with continuous auto-focus. Read more »

It was a big day for Facebook yesterday as they announced a raft of new features for the world’s most popular social networking website. Mark Zuckerberg himself announced all these new features at the Facebook f8 keynote yesterday, which included stuff like the new Timeline view and integration with music and video services, among other things.

Let’s start with Timeline. Timeline will be your new Facebook profile page but instead of just showing your latest posts and info it will show your ‘stories’ as Facebook likes to call them, that will stay there regardless of the new content coming in. Read more »

If you like to run your favorite Linux distribution alongside a copy of Windows on the same machine then you might want to stay away from Windows 8 computers. Thanks to a new secure boot in Windows 8, dual-booting might just become a thing of the past.

Now before I begin explaining, let me say that this will affect only those devices with a ‘Designed for Windows 8′ logo on them, so you can still install Windows 8 on your current computer and dual-boot it. The reason it won’t work on these branded computers is because of the UEFI or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that these machines will be having instead of a traditional BIOS. Read more »

It seems Nikon has finally decided to join the mirrorless interchangeable lens bandwagon with the announcement of the Nikon V1 and J1 models. Both models feature a new CX-size 10.1 megapixel sensor with a 2.7x crop factor, 1080/30p video recording, 1200-fps slow motion capture mode, 3-inch LCD and an ISO range of 100-3200.

The J1 comes with a built-in flash, auto-noise reduction for videos, 73-point AF system, which Nikon claims is the fastest in the world, dual-core EXPEED processing engine and the ability to record videos for up to 29 minutes. Read more »

It seems the old Samsung Galaxy Tab will soon be getting a successor. TmoNews has managed to acquire some hands-on images of Samsung’s next Honeycomb tablet, purportedly called the Galaxy Tab Plus (SGH-T689).

The device is said to have a 7-inch Super AMOLED or Super AMOLED Plus display with a resolution of 1024 x 600. It will also be running on a Cortex A9 and Honeycomb 3.2. Read more »

One of the biggest competitors to Google’s Android Market is the controversially named Amazon Appstore. One of the main reasons for its popularity has been the free app that Amazon gives away everyday to users.

Unfortunately, so far the service has been limited to residents of the US. But not anymore, because it seems now the Appstore is expanding its reach to a wider customer base. Read more »

As promised, AT&T flipped the 4G LTE switch on Sunday. This is not the first time you’ll be experiencing LTE on AT&T’s network, however, as certain areas in the US have been enjoying this for a while now. It’s just that now it’s official.

However, if you were expecting a lot more areas to get LTE after the official launch then you will be a bit disappointed as currently it’s only available in five states. Read more »