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Microsoft said to be working on a 7-inch Surface tablet

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We have reported in the past that Microsoft is allegedly working on a 7-inch gaming tablet under the Xbox brand. It seems, though, there will be another 7-inch tablet from Microsoft in the near future.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is working on a 7-inch version of the Surface tablet. There are no other details available about this product at this time, including which version of Windows it would be running and what would be the specifications, pricing and release date. WSJ does say, however, that the tablet will go into mass production later this year. Read more »

Microsoft releases two new Scroogled videos in its crusade against Google

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Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign has been going on for a while now. For those not in the know, the Scroogled campaign aims to highlight some of the nefarious practices at Google, such as going through your mail to offer you relevant ads in Gmail.

The company has now released two new videos that now take potshots at the Android privacy issues. Through the two videos, Microsoft is highlighting how every time you purchase an app through the Google Play Store, your personal information, such as your full name, email and your address, is passed on through Google to the app developers, who may use it for malicious purposes. Of course, the underlying message here is that you really, really should be using Windows Phone and Bing. Read more »

Chrome for iOS update brings fullscreen mode, wireless printing

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Google has updated the Chrome browser for iOS with a couple of useful new features. The first is a fullscreen mode for the iPhone and iPod touch. This works much the same way as on some other browsers, where the toolbox on top moves out of the screen when you scroll down. Scrolling back up brings it back to the screen.

The second addition is the option to do wireless printing, using either the Google Cloud Print service or Apple’s AirPrint. Lastly, you can now also save any web page as PDF on Google Drive through the browser. Read more »

Samsung announces ATIV Book 6 Windows 8 notebook, arriving shortly in the US

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After the ATIV series of Windows-based tablets and smartphone, Samsung is now launching a series of notebooks under the same brand name. The first of the lot is the ATIV Book 6 note book, which will be releasing in the US shortly.

The ATIV Book 6 runs Windows 8 and has a 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 resolution touchscreen. Inside it has a quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU, AMD Radeon HD8770M GPU, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. Read more »

Batman: Arkham Origins arriving on PC, PS3, Xbox and Wii U on October 25, 2013

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Warner Bros. Games Montreal have announced the newest installment in the highly popular and critically acclaimed series of Batman games. After Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, Arkham Origins will be the third game in the series, however, it will serve as the prequel to the first two, as you can guess from the name.

Arkham Origins takes place several years before the events of Arkham Asylum and features a much younger Batman, facing his enemies for the first time. The two main antagonists of the game are Black Mask and Deathstroke, with the former being more prominent of the two. The game will take place within Arkham City like the previous one. Read more »

Panasonic launches LUMIX GF6 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera

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Panasonic has launched the new LUMIX GF6, a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. The GF6 has a 16 megapixel sensor with a new Venus Engine that can shoot up to ISO 26,000 and can record videos at 1080i60.

The GF6 has built-in Wi-Fi and NFC. The Wi-Fi can be used to transfer images and playback content on a DLNA compatible television. The NFC helps connect the camera over Wi-Fi to compatible devices with just a tap. There is also built-in GPS for geo-tagging your photos. On the back is a 1040k dot articulating touchscreen LCD. Read more »

Upcoming Play Store 4.0 screenshot leaked

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We got a peek at the upcoming Play Store 4.0 update a while back when the APK for the application got leaked out. Back then, however, while category and content pages were viewable, the home page for the app was unavailable.

Now thanks to this little leak by a YouTube employee, we can finally get a good look at this upcoming update for our Android devices. Read more »

Nokia Music arrives on Windows 8

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Nokia has released a new desktop application for their Nokia Music service on Windows 8, which can be downloaded from the Windows Store and takes advantage of the new Modern UI.

The Nokia Music app, as you might know, let you stream music from Nokia’s vast library and even download them to play them offline. Nokia also offers features such as curated mixes, which are essentially ready-made playlists spanning across different genres and artists, and provides suggestions based on the music you listen to. Read more »

‘Mittens’ for iOS game review

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Disney is no stranger to making video games. Over the years, there have been several games released on various platform with the Disney logo on them. But when asked to name any of these, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with even one.

Things are different on the mobile platform, however. When asked to name some Disney games on the mobile, names like ‘Where’s My Water?’, ‘Where’s My Perry?’ and ‘Temple Run: Oz’ spring to mind. Now the company has released a new game called Mittens for iOS. Let’s see how this one fares. Read more »

‘PUK’ for iPhone and Android game review

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There are big, complicated games, with guns, cars and explosions, missions to complete, stories to follow and characters to remember. Then there are simple games with just one objective where you have to do one thing over and over again till you get it right. PUK falls in that latter category.

In PUK, you hit larger circles with smaller circles before the time runs out. That’s basically all you do. But despite the simple premise, PUK is fiendishly addictive and one of the best games to have come out on mobile in recent times. Let’s see what makes it so good. Read more »

Samsung starts rolling out Android 4.1.2 update to Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

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Good news for Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus owners. According to SamMobile, Samsung has started rolling out the Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean update to this tablet.

The first country to receive this update is Austria, however, other regions should be getting the updates shortly. As usual, the Jelly Bean update would bring features such as Project Butter, Google Now and several other improvements under the hood. Read more »

Google announces Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit

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After Samsung, it’s Google’s turn to part ways with the WebKit rendering engine. Google has announced Blink, a new rendering engine based on the existing WebKit.

The WebKit engine has been part of the Chromium project ever since the first Chrome browser was released and has also been the basis of Android’s stock browser. Now, however, Google feels the current WebKit has become too bloated, with several features such as the multi-process architecture being duplicated, since Google has its own version for them. Read more »

Mozilla and Samsung collaborate on Servo, a brand new web browser engine

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Mozilla has announced that it has been working with Samsung to create a brand new next generation web browser engine. Called the Servo, the new engine is designed from the grounds-up to take advantage of the new mobile hardware with multi-core, heterogenous computing architectures.

Servo is written using Rust, a new safe systems language developed by Mozilla. Rust has been development for several years now and is said to be rapidly approaching stability. Also, like C++, it is said to have efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. Read more »

Twitter updates mobile apps and website, brings Holo UI to Android version

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Twitter has updated the Android and iOS version of its mobile application, along with the mobile version of their website. The biggest changes are in the Android version, which gets a brand new UI that follows the new Holo UI guidelines (for most parts).

The new Twitter for Android now lets you swipe horizontally on the screen to move between the tabs on the top. This means that you can no longer swipe on an individual tweet to get quick access to tweet options. Moving between hierarchies is now accompanies by slick sliding animations where the next screen is stacked above the previous one, similar to the animation in the stock Android app drawer. Read more »

Windows Blue to be known officially as Windows 8.1

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We have been hearing about this Windows Blue for quite some time now. The newest build of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, Windows Blue, as it has been known until now, features some significant improvements, most of which are under the hood, that promise improved performance and user experience over Windows 8.

Now, according to the sources at The Verge, it has come to light that Windows Blue will be known officially as Windows 8.1 when it releases later this year. This won’t be like your run-of-the-mill service pack and will feature more significant upgrades. As such, it could be a paid upgrade for existing Windows 8 users, although that is yet to be officially confirmed. Read more »