Gameloft has announced that it has been forced to postpone the launch of Modern Combat 5 for Android and iOS until 2014 to “fully achieve [its] vision” for the game. The first-person shooter was first confirmed in an impressive teaser trailer back in June, and we initially expected it to be available before the end of the year.
Now we’ll have to wait a little longer.
Microsoft is trying to persuade HTC to make new smartphones that run both Android and Windows Phone, and it’s willing to cut or eliminate its own license fee to make it happen. The software giant is hoping the move will encourage consumers to try out the Windows Phone platform and eventually make the switch to it — but could the scheme backfire?
Samsung’s chief product officer for the mobile division of Samsung Electronics, Kevin Packingham, has left the company after being a key player in the introduction of several of the past Samsung Galaxy devices.
Packingham’s reasons for leaving the company aren’t clear at this time, as the New York Times reports that Samsung and Packingham have declined to provide details about the departure. However, a Samsung spokeswoman did offer the following statement regarding the departure:
Samsung has today unveiled Shape M7, a $400 wireless speaker that hopes to compete with the Sonos. It connects to your smartphone, tablet, or computer via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or NFC, and there’s a handy companion app that makes setup easy on Android and iOS devices.
Had BlackBerry’s cross-platform BBM launch gone as originally planned, we’d all be BBM-ing each other on Android and iOS by now. Of course, that didn’t happen, and so we’re not. But the Canadian company is still working hard to deliver BBM to its rivals.
Earlier this week BlackBerry promised that it was “100% committed to bringing BBM to Android and iPhone,” and it just resumed beta testing on Android with a brand new release.
Retail giant Target confirmed Thursday that it will launch Brightspot, it’s own prepaid mobile service.
The service will use T-Mobile networks and will give customers unlimited talk and texting for $35 per month, with plans that include unlimited data for $50 per month. The unlimited plan will be similar to T-Mobile’s own service, which caps high-speed data use at 1GB per month.
Better yet? After six months of paid service, Target will give you a $25 Target gift card for your loyalty.
When it comes down to who will control the future of the PC, Microsoft, Apple and now Google are battling it out for control of the incredibly important education market, and more specifically, schools.
Not only do school contracts provide each company with massive sales orders, but it allows iOS, Windows, or Chrome to take root in kids lives as they hopefully take their OS of choice with them into the workforce. While Microsoft has asserted its dominance in schools, Google’s VP of product management for Chromebooks, Caesar Sengupta, says 22% of the school districts in the U.S. are now using Google Chromebooks.
Samsung has reputation of making smartphones with screens bigger than the Hindenburg and the newly released Galaxy Note 3 is no different. With a 5.7-inch display the Note 3 is one of the most monstrous phablets ever built, which is cool if you’re using it as a tablet, but really sucks if you’re trying to hold it in one hand and make a phone call.
To make things easier on its single-handed users, Samsung has included a hilarious new tiny screen mode feature called “Use for all screens” that shrinks the UI of the smartphone phablet down to a window that’s small enough for you to use with one hand. To make things worse you’ll have to dive deep into the settings to toggle the tiny screen mode. The only other option was to shrink the size of the actual device, but rumor is Samsung decided that’d be too elegant.
Here’s a video by Android Central on how the setting works:
AT&T has announced that it has extended its LTE coverage across the United States yet again, with 13 markets receiving new or improved LTE this time around. Eleven of them are getting LTE coverage for the first time, while the other two are promised faster and more reliable LTE speeds.
The Hulu Plus apps for Android and iOS have today been updated with support for Google Chromecast. You’ll find a new ‘Cast’ button within the app that will stream your favorite shows to your television with the help of the $35 dongle.
While the iPhone’s Retina display may no longer be king when it comes to pixel count, it’s one of the fastest smartphone displays on the market, easily outpacing all of its rivals.
According to a TouchMark test carried out by Agawi, the Retina display responds more than twice as fast as any of its rivals — including the Galaxy S4 and other high-end Android devices — even on the three-year-old iPhone 4.
Samsung’s Galaxy Gear has been on sale for a number of weeks now, but today the South Korean company lifted its embargo on reviews. If you’ve been trying to decide whether or not you should spend hundreds of dollars on one, then, now’s the time to find out.
To make things a little easier for you, we’ve put together a roundup of the biggest and best reviews so you don’t have to trawl through them yourself.
Some lucky folks at Verizon were recently able to upgrade to a new phone without losing their unlimited data plan. Color us totally jealous.
This was the result of a glitch, said Verizon, and not a change in policy like some may have mistakenly hoped for.
Verizon told AllThingsD on Monday that it would, however, honor the unlimited plans of customers that were able to upgrade without the dreaded limited data plan of doom.
Over the last couple of years Samsung has earned itself a reputation for using Apple products as “inspiration” and then copying them in the most blatant ways possible.
The fury of Apple fans was ignited again last week as Samsung was caught shamelessly copying the Apple’s new golden iPhone creation – the golden iPhone 5s – when the South Korean smartphone maker announced it would be selling a gold variant of the Galaxy S4. Apple fans were quick to dismiss the smartphone as another copycat move,but Samsung took to its corporate blog to explain that it’s totally not copying the gold iPhone because they’ve made tons of gold phones in the past (kind of).
Samsung has today announced that its cross-platform ChatON messaging service now boasts over 100 million users across Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and Windows Phone. It’s taken just two years for the service to become more popular than BBM, once one of the biggest names in instant messaging, and it continues to grow at an impressive rate.
Google is already serving you Gmail ads on your desktop, and soon you’ll see them on your mobile, too. Although they aren’t active just yet, there is evidence for them in the latest Gmail for Android release, which was made available to download via Google Play last week.
Facebook announced this afternoon that Android and web users will now be able to edit status updates after they have been posted, meaning you can finally cleanse your status update masterpieces of careless typos without losing your cherished likes, comments and shares.
The new feature should be live on the web and Android versions of Facebook later this afternoon, but iOS users will have to wait a short while before it hits iPhones.
Seminal 1990s tabletop role-playing game, Shadowrun, has recently come to the digital domain, originally with a version of Shadowrun Returns for the Mac, PC, and Linux platforms. Cult of Mac gave the game a stellar review, calling it a “fully realized tabletop to digital RPG conversion.” Say that five times fast.
Now the game is finally on tablets, both of the Android and iOS variety, and the buzz is that it’s a note-for-note port of the desktop game, minus the campaign editor. That’s a lot of game to smoosh into a tablet.
BlackBerry failed miserably in its attempt to bring BBM to Android and iOS last week, but the Canadian company hasn’t given up on making its popular messaging service available to all. In fact, it isn’t just targeting other mobile platforms, but it’s also planning to bring BBM to your desktop, too.
When it comes to mobile gaming, the upcoming Google Nexus 5 could be one of the most impressive Android-powered smartphones to date. Leaked benchmarks that have surfaced online this week reveal the new device outperforms the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One in graphics performance, matching the new 64-bit iPhone 5s.
A somewhat concerning bug affecting a large number of Google Hangouts and Google Talk users is causing messages to be delivered to the wrong recipients. The problem, which appears to have started early this morning, is already being investigated by Google — but you may want to avoid using these services for the time being if you can.
Samsung has traditionally offered its smartphones in a whole variety of colors, but one we rarely see is gold — until Apple announces a gold smartphone. Just two weeks after the Cupertino company unveiled the gold iPhone 5s, Samsung has begun showcasing its gold Galaxy S4 in the United Arab Emirates.
Does this company have any shame?
PopCap Games free-to-play Plants vs. Zombies 2 is a contentious game to many. If you’re our own good friend Buster Heine, you probably think it’s a masterpiece of a sequel, proof-positive that free-to-play can be done well in the right hands. If you’re me or my girlfriend, though, you likely think it is inferior to the first game in pretty much every way, and a perfect example of how free-to-play mechanisms can ruin an otherwise great game.
Whatever your feelings on the matter, you have to admit that getting Plants vs. Zombies 2 exclusively to iOS is quite the coup. According to EA, it’s a coup that Cupertino (get it?) was willing to pay buckets of money to get. But is that the truth?
Amazon has today unveiled its new third-generation tablet called the Kindle Fire HDX. Like its predecessors, the device is available in 7-inch and 8.9-inch variants, and both feature speedy quad-core Snapdragon 800 processors, high-resolution displays, 2GB of RAM, and stereo speakers.
The larger model also offers an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, which is a first for the Kindle Fire lineup.
In addition to the new models, Amazon has refreshed the Kindle Fire HD to add improved displays, faster processors, and Amazon’s latest software. The retail giant has also reduced the price of the 7-inch device to $139, while the 8.9-inch model is now just $269.
Wunderlist, the hugely popular cross-platform productivity app that now boasts over 5.3 million users worldwide, got a new feature called Comments this week, which brings the conversation to your to-do list. If you use Wunderlist in a professional environment, you can now discuss tasks and projects with your team within individual to-dos.
What’s more, you can now try Comments — as well as Files and Assigning — for free for a limited time, without signing up to Wunderlist Pro.
