Developer Gaijin Games’ Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien quickly became one of my favorite games this year when it launched for consoles and PC back in February. It had a lot of personality, precise gameplay, and was just challenging enough to keep you on your toes but not enough to be frustrating.

The iOS port, Bit.Trip Run!, keeps the original’s levels, fantastic graphics, and entertaining narration from voice actor Charles Martinet (the voice of Nintendo’s Mario). So it’s mostly the same game. But it drops the necessarily accurate button controls in favor of taps and swipes for the mobile platform, and that really cuts the game down a few notches. I’d almost say that it makes it unplayable, but that’s not quite the case.

But it does take a great deal of patience to play well.

This Cult of Mac Deals offer puts high-speed 4G LTE Internet access in the palm of your hand!

With the Freedom Spot MiFi you can take internet connectivity with you wherever you go – all at blazing fast LTE speed. Connect up to 10 of your mobile devices at once to surf, stream, game, and update with no restrictions. With speeds up to 25mbps, you can even stream HD videos from Netflix. And Cult of Mac Deals has this revolutionary device for only $199 for a limited time – including free shipping! Now, Sprint’s recent upgrade to Spark LTE, this device will be faster than ever.

Last week, we reported that Samsung had beaten Apple and claimed the top spot in J.D. Power’s latest tablet satisfaction survey. On closer inspection of its findings, it was unclear how the South Korean company had earned first place after its tablets received lower ratings than the iPad in so many areas.

J.D. Power has since explained why that’s the case.

Google has tightened security inside the latest Chromium build for Mac, blocking access to all of your saved passwords until you’ve provided your system password. Under previous releases, users simply had to enter a special address to access all of the login credentials they had saved inside the browser, providing access to anyone who uses your computer.

BlackBerry has today announced that it has scrapped plans to sell its hardware business, and that it will be replacing current CEO Thorsten Heins instead. The Canadian company has also secured $1 billion from a group of investors led by Fairfax Financial, and its CEO, Prem Watsa, will become lead director.

You may know that your Mac can send you notifications via the native Notifications Center, introduced in OS X Mountain Lion. You can get notified via a pop up badge or alert window for various activities, like iMessages, Calendar events, FaceTime calls, or Game Center achievements, just to name a few.

In Mavericks, you can even get these messages when your screen is locked with a password via the Privacy system preferences option. Your notification alerts will show up on top of your lock screen.

But what if you want to preserver your privacy when you lock your Mac’s screen but you don’t want to enable Do Not Disturb mode?

The iPad Air might be almost a third lighter than the iPad 4, but Apple insists it gets all the same battery life as previous generations, and it looks like the evidence proves it: not only does the iPad Air get the same 10 hours of battery life in general, but it also gets an incredible 24 hours as an LTE hotspot.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has hit out at the National Security Agency (NSA) over claims that it has spied on Google’s data centers to gain information about its users. Schmidt told The Wall Street Journal that the allegations are “outrageous” and potentially illegal if true.

Apple’s design patterns are pretty much set at this point: every other year, they radically overhaul the look of the iPhone or iPad.

Next year’s iPhone 6, then, will be a major departure from the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s, and designer Federico Ciccarese of Ciccarese Design has a good idea of what to expect: a slimmer device that looks a lot more like an iPad Air or iPad mini called (yup) the iPhone Air.

Not many of us have 4K devices yet. A 4K Ultra HD TV would pack about 33 million pixels, more than six times the resolution of even the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Yet 4K is coming, and when it drops, Netflix CEO Reed Hasting doesn’t want his service to be caught with its pants down, saying during a recent earnings call that he hopes his company will be “one of the big suppliers” of 4K by the time it launches in 2014.

To make sure they’re ready for the crush of 4K Ultra HD TVs next year, Netflix is already streaming some 4K content.

iOS 7 was a major reinvention of Apple’s mobile operating system, but despite all of the new colors, animations, and fonts, it’s still just a grid of apps in a day in which every other smartphone OS has moved on.

Nepalese designer Sangam Bhandari thinks Apple can — and should — further. In his latest concept, he imagines a new home screen that is more than just an app launcher, but something like a mash-up between Notification Center and the current Home Screen.

We think it looks great. Check it out after the jump and tell us what you think.

Timshel (“Time Shell”) is a pretty great looking new service that sends you prints of your own photos once a month. You know those cool apps which mail you your old photos every once in a while? It’s like that, only with real photos.

The creators of The Simpsons love poking light-hearted fun at Apple and its devices, so when Siri made another guest appearance alongside our favorite animated family this weekend, she was never going to be on her best form. But that’s okay, because as you’ll see in the clip below, it makes for an hilarious joke.

I just moved to Germany, which means that I get a lot more weather than when I lived in Spain. There, a quick once-a-week check was plenty to know whether you should get the umbrella from the attic. In Germany, I check every time I want to leave the house.

And now there’s a great app which will will let you customize your own weather notifications, right there on your iPhone.

Imagine Dropbox. That was easy, right? Now imagine that instead of having all your files stored on some NSA-bait server somewhere on the internet, those files are instead stored on a hard drive of your own. And yet they’re still as readily accessible from all your devices via the internet.

That was, admittedly, a little trickier to imagine. But it was worth it, because our collective thinking has somehow magicked the new Transporter Sync into existence.

If, as Tim Cook predicts, “it’s going to be an iPad Christmas” then December 25 has come early to Cupertino, on the back of reports that the iPad Air saw adoption rates of five times those of the iPad 4 following its opening weekend.

Do you like to enjoy the bounties of your own body while you’re on an audio-only Skype call? Who doesn’t, right? And so you’ve probably also “accidentally” enabled the camera and inadvertently revealed your shame at some point, too. What you need, my pervy, flashing friend, is the iShutter, a $15 strip of steel with a hole in it.

If you believe the reports, Apple is currently working on a way of charging iOS devices using solar panels. If you’re not content to wait, however, and want a quick-and-easy means of charging your iPhone or iPad right now, you might want to consider investing in this Indiegogo crowd funding campaign to create a mobile wireless charging solution for Apple products.

Based on the increasingly popular Qi inductive electrical power transfer system, iQi Mobile Wireless is set to bring true, low-cost wireless charging to iOS device. This is done without the fuss of plugging and unplugging wires, since charging is achieved simply by placing your iPhone or iPad on a Koolpuck charger.

Editorially is a web-based text editor that I wish I used. It has a gorgeous interface, lots of great collaborative features, and now it even exports to Dropbox and WordPress, which would let me write pretty much anything I ever need to write in it.

Sadly, I have no need for collaboration, and I swore of writing anything but an email address in the browser years ago after losing work to crashes.

ISkin’s Gravity collection will gather up anything and everything that wanders into its orbit and trap it in its dorktastic embrace. The range consists of two cases, the best of which is the Agent 6 Sling, a utility pack that even an infantryman would find hard to make full use of.

Google’s algorithmically-driven cars may be partially designed to give commuters more time to surf the Internet (using Google, natch!), but if a new report from ABI Research is anything to go by, it’s Apple who have the real early adopter advantage in terms of connected in-vehicle infotainment systems.

ABI Research forecasts that shipments of such infotainment systems, equipped with one or more smartphone integration technologies, will grow substantially over the next five years — reaching 35.1 million units globally by 2018. Of these, ABI projects an impressive 49.8% will be running Apple’s “iOS in the Car”, the standard for allowing iOS devices to work with manufacturers’ built-in in-car systems as unveiled during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference back in June.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has written an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing in favor of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a proposed piece of U.S. legislation that protects against sexual identity and gender discrimination in the workplace. Cook occasionally gives media interviews, but him writing something like an op-ed out from under the umbrella of Apple is pretty significant.

iPads might seem the perfect device for government meetings (if only for a quick game of Angry Birds when things get boring), but not if you’re a member of the UK Cabinet.

This isn’t a review of the Nexux 5. Rather, it’s a review of Google’s new strategy of integration as displayed in the KitKat-running Nexus 5.

You’ll find a gazillion reviews on the Nexus 5 over the next month, some detailing every feature and function. In general, these reviews will tell you that the Nexus 5 is a great phone with a great form-factor and exterior design, incredible screen, good battery life and excellent general performance. They’ll also point out that nothing even comes close to the Nexus 5’s value for money ($349 unlocked). And Nexus5/KitKat has little surprises (such as LTE tethering, even on AT&T).

I’m here not to add yet another review to the mix, but to zero in on what really matters: How Googley is this phone, exactly?

The short answer is: pretty Googley but not Googley enough.

To the extent that Nexus 5 succeeds (is better than other phones), it succeeds with integration. To the extent that Nexus 5 fails, it fails to integrate.

Here’s what I’m talking about.

I picked up one of Apple’s new iPad Airs on Friday. I didn’t think I’d be impressed — but I am. It’s light, fast, and beautifully constructed. Is it the perfect tablet? It’s pretty close. Here’s all you need to know:

• It’s amazingly light. It almost feels hollow. It’s much lighter than you expect. Which means that it’s effortless to hold for reading and carrying around. It’s a big and important difference. It’s super portable.
• It’s plenty fast. Annoying little lags on previous iPads — like slow rendering Web pages with multiple tabs — are gone. It’s much more useable than my iPad 3.
• Battery life is great — more than 10 hours of continuous use.

And there you have it. It’s almost as light as the iPad mini with the speed and big, beautiful screen of a full-size tablet. Go get one. It’s great.