Samsung is stepping up its advertising campaign for the new Galaxy Note 3 phablet with a musical short featuring Lionel Messi and a group of kids singing Lorde’s Royals.

Messi plays the role of The Developer, a mysterious stranger that arrives with his shiny new Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Gear and uses them to organize the construction of a football stadium. The video is directed by Adam Hashemi, a pop video director from Denmark. Read more »

Square Enix’s director and producer Takashi Tokita confirmed the popular Final Fantasy VI will be launching on Android and iOS this fall. The game won’t be just a port though, Square Enix will make a few changes including a visual facelift.

Final Fantasy VI will launch after the Final Fantasy IV: The After Years expansion is released later this year. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Gear has turned out to be quite the entertaining hacking device. Using Android’s SDK and Android Debug Bridge (ADB) ArsTechnica was able to sideload some proper Android apps on the little smartwatch and it had no trouble running them.

You only need to enable USB debugging on the Galaxy Gear settings in order for this to work – no root required. The Samsung smartwatch runs Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 with an 800 MHz single-core chip and 512 MB of RAM so it’s able to run apps like most droids would – the only limitation is the small on-board storage and tiny screen. Read more »

Gold seems like the new black these days. Apple did it, Samsung did it and we’ve even seen others do it for HTC.

But this isn’t the 24-carat HTC One by Gold Genie, this is the 18-carat through-and-through gold-built HTC One specifically created for the 18 anniversary of the MOBO awards. We’ve got the hands-on treatment inside, let’s go. Read more »

Android-powered consoles are a growing niche – the Ouya made a huge splash with its record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, but MadCatz is looking to dethrone it as the best Android console with its new M.O.J.O. console.

The M.O.J.O. runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and is powered by Tegra 4 chipset (quad-core Cortex-A15 @ 1.8GHz, 72-core GeForce GPU), has 2GB of RAM and comes with 16GB of built-in storage (expandable with microSD cards). On the connectivity side there’s Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 and 4.0 LE, USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, wired Ethernet and HDMI out. Read more »

The smartwatch is a relatively new market niche, but seeing the interest it has been getting lately, it will certainly expand quite rapidly in the next few years. And Samsung, being one of the world leaders in smart tech, certainly wants to be a part of that expansion. The Galaxy Gear smartwatch is built around the idea of being an extension of your smartphone and not the sole star of the show. Currently, as of its launch, the Galaxy Gear only supports the Galaxy Note 3 and 10.1, which is limiting its reach quite severely, but Samsung promises to add more devices to the list in the next few months.

Instead of going all sci-fi with the Galaxy Gear, Samsung decided to take the logical path. The smartwatch can help you unlock your smartphone, acts as a fitness accessory, snap a photo or two and mainly, aid you in those cases when your phablet is out of reach or the circumstances just don’t allow you to operate it. Read more »

Google quietly released its own protective cover for the 2013 Nexus 7 in the United States. The Google-branded case is currently available for purchase directly from the Play Store.

The Nexus 7 (2013) Case is the first tablet cover designed by Google specifically for the slate. Read more »

One of the major complaints with the Hangouts app on Android is that it doesn’t integrate with the other built-in messaging apps on Android. This leaves you with not one but three messaging apps when you first start the device, Hangouts, Google+ Messenger and the standard Messages app for SMS and MMS.

While the jury is still out on why Google needs both Hangouts and Google+ Messenger app since they both essentially do the same, a lot of people have suggested Google integrate Messages with Hangouts (the way SMS, MMS and iMessages are integrated in a single app on iOS or Facebook chat and SMS are integrated on Windows Phone). Read more »

Recently, Samsung introduced a new regional lock on Galaxy Note 3 units shipped in Europe and the Americas, mandating users activate it with a SIM in the region it is sold in before it can be used anywhere else.

Now it appears that the folks over at xda-developers have figured out a way to bypass said region lock automatically via a dedicated app – as long as the device is rooted. Read more »

The popular iOS game Clash of Clans has finally made its way to Android.

Just like the iOS version, the game lets you build your clan and battle other players online, all for free. Read more »

Tiny Tower – a popular block stacking game with a city building theme – is following in the footsteps of Angry Birds and getting a Star Wars edition of its own. Where the birds joined to good guys, the Tower is on the side of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine.

As you probably know, those two made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to construct the Death Star so now they need your help to do it right. Read more »

LG has just launched the LG G Pad 8.3 in Korea. The slate was unveiled at IFA in Berlin last month and LG has promised to launch it globally before the year ends.

LG G Pad 8.3 packs an 8.3″ display with 1920×1200 pixel resolution and runs on the Snapdragon 600 chipset (quad-core 1.7GHz Krait 300, Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB RAM). The internal storage is 16 GB, but expansion is available thanks to the microSD slot. Read more »

Lenovo has been one of the biggest gainers in the smartphone market over the past couple of years. The company even did devices like the K900 and Vibe Z, showing that it’s not out of its depth in the high-end market.

Yet it’s smartphones like the recently announced P780 that Lenovo is strongest at producing. The handset brings four 1.2 GHz Cortex A7 cores along with PowerVR SGX544 GPU on a MTK6589 chipset along with a whopping 4,000mAh battery aiming to become one of the longest lasting smartphones on the market. Read more »

Google has updated the beta version of the Chrome for Android browser and added two new features to the mix. The first one is the ability to save any web page as a shortcut on the homescreen.

What this feature does is lets you have a shortcut to any webpage on your homescreen so you can quickly launch it in Chrome without having to open the browser first. This feature has been available on the stock Android browser but is now available to those devices that don’t have the stock Android browser, such as the Nexus and Google Play edition devices. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 was caught boosting the benchmark results, a couple of days ago. But, as one can expect, Samsung has denied all reports suggesting that the Galaxy Note 3 ups the performance when the phablet recognizes the benchmarking apps.

Samsung continues to defend itself over the recent reports that reveal that almost all the smartphone manufacturers cheat on the benchmark scores. Read more »