After running our eyes over RIM’s scheduled plans for 2012, the word at the front of our minds was ‘boring’.
Probably not what the Canadian smartphone maker was hoping for, but there were one or two exceptions which caught our eye, one of which could well be a CDMA variant of RIM’s latest Porsche designed Berry’.
February 22, the launch day for the North American version of the the PlayStation Vita is drawing near and Sony has now announced a new version for those who’d like to buy the console on the day of the launch.
This limited edition Launch Bundle comes with the 3G/Wi-Fi version of the PlayStation Vita, along with a free PSN game, 8GB memory card and an AT&T DataConnect Session pass that will give you 250MB of free 3G data. The Launch Bundle will set you back by $299, which is actually a bit less than the standard 3G/Wi-Fi model, which would cost you $299.99.
Rage HD is not only one of the best looking games on iOS but also one of the best looking games on any mobile platform. Now this gorgeous first person shooter has been upgraded to v2.0 and brings along some nice goodies.
For starters, you get higher resolution player and weapon models in the game. Secondly, the game brings performance enhancements and a wide variety of bug fixes. Next, the game also includes the ability to output the video through an HDMI cable to a television so now you can play the game on a bigger screen.
Over the past year or so, we witnessed the Android smartphones more than double their processing power and graphic performance, thus reaching levels, almost comparable with entry level personal computers. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the battery life of the devices we encountered. Quite often, we witnessed top shelf Android handsets display battery performance which almost questions their practicality.
Meet the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX, people. An Android smartphone, designed specifically with battery performance in mind. In a rather impressive feat of engineering, the guys over at Motorola have managed to stuff a battery big enough to power a laptop, while sticking closely to the impressive waistline of the original Droid RAZR.
In terms of specs, the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX is mostly identical to its slimmer sibling.
It’s not something usual for us to feature specific apps here on our blog (maybe this should be changed?) but this one got our attention. Big time.
The app in question is called Clear and it’s not even out yet. I stumbled upon a video ad for it and I was amazed. It’s been a while since I’ve last seen a user interface so beautifully simple, elegant and intuitive.
Apple TV rumors have been flying around the Internet for some time now, but most of them were based either on wishlists or on blind speculations.
This one, however, seems more on terms with reality, as Technobuffalo claims it has spoken with a “high-ranking source with a major electronics retailer”. He says that we should expect to see to see an Apple TV in flesh around April or May “at the latest”.
The team over at Nikon Rumors think that they know something we all don’t. According to their sources Nikon’s impressive DSLR the D800 will be breaking cover in early February.
Not only that, the expected kick behind the D800′s power is a 36MP sensor rather than a 24MP sensor as previously thought.
Qualcomm recently launched GameCommand to showcase games that leverage on the capabilities of the their Adreno GPUs. GameCommand features games from various dev companies, but apparently, Qualcomm are upping the ante with a game studio of their own.
They are also working on a much improved version of GameCommand, which is expected to launch at the upcoming MWC.
Google Earth has reached version 6.2 and with it come several improvements, the best of which is the improved rendering. It does away with the poor stitching that spoiled the viewing experience in previous versions.
The new version also adds a quick way to share a screenshot on Google+, improves searching and adds waling, biking and transit directions. The updates are coming to both the desktop and the Android version.
Yesterday, 22 European countries ratified a little something called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in Japan. The list includes Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
They joined Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and, of course, the United States, all of which had signed it October 1, last year.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA, as it’s more commonly called, doesn’t sound like much at first glance, but when you start reading into it and it won’t be long before you realize that it’s actually worse than the infamous US-only SOPA and PIPA put together.
Hidden behind the “Trade Agreement” part of its name, this international treaty has the potential to change the way we use the Internet forever. What it does is turn the attention from the suppliers of counterfeit and pirated products to the end consumers of those. You snatched your favorite TV show’s last episode of the torrents, did you? Well, you’re busted! It is that scary. Let’s break it down.
In a little over 3 months, more than one person in a hundred now uses Apple’s cloud-sync service.
That’s more people on iCloud than the total sales of iPhones, iPads, iPods or iMacs combined, during that same period.
This Valentine’s day may be quite lonely for a lot of people, whose significant others are into Angry Birds. Rovio just confirmed that their immensely popular title is hitting the world’s largest social network on February 14.
Rovio plans to hold a huge launch event in Jakarta, which according to the company is the “global capital of Facebook”. The Facebook version will brings some nice new twists to the gameplay, so it’s definitely one worth checking out.
When Google launched the Galaxy Nexus along with Ice Cream Sandwich, they removed the ubiquitous menu button that was found on all the previous Android devices. Instead, they incorporated the functionality of the menu button inside an action bar that appeared on top of the screen. If there were additional options that need not be immediately shown to the user, they were hidden inside a drop down menu signified by a Windows Phone-style vertical ellipsis.
However, this change was only visible inside the native apps in Ice Cream Sandwich whereas the third party apps continued to use a standard menu button functionality, which was replicated on the Galaxy Nexus by displaying the vertical ellipsis in the bar at the bottom of the screen.
It’s obvious that this is not a very elegant solution so now Google is urging everyone to ditch the menu button and incorporate the action bar in their application interface, which as it demonstrated on its site, is not difficult at all.
Samsung has releasing report of its Q4, 2011 earnings and the numbers are very impressive. For starters, the company earned 47.3 trillion Korean won (US$42 billion) in revenue and 5.3 trillion Korean won (US$ 4.7 billion) in profits.
Samsung’s mobile division saw a strong growth of 54 percent compared to last year, helped no doubt by the popular Galaxy S II, with 17.8 trillion Korean won (US$15.2 billion) coming from it. Unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t released sales figures so we have no idea about, say, the number of smartphones sold in the last quarter.
Steam has released a new companion application for the iOS and Android platforms. This app lets you browse all the Steam games, see if there are new offers and chat with your Steam friends. Unfortunately, it seems you can’t buy any games through the app for now but you can add it to your cart so you can purchase it through the desktop client.
But what’s worse is that the app will only let you use it if you’re part of the beta program. Steam has restricted access to a few accounts and you have to sign in to request an invite. After that you wait for the invite to arrive so you can use the app, which let’s face it, doesn’t let you do much.
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