https://youtu.be/wE7AQY5Xk9w

While Microsoft has lost an astonishing $900 million on the Surface RT and dropped the price to $349 to clear out inventory, they’re still bashing the iPad on national TV, this time using Siri to woefully lament her own feature-by-feature inadequacy compared to the Surface RT.

I have to admit, I love this commercial. Sure, the iPad is an infinitely better tablet, but I still think this is a funny and effective attempt by Microsoft to make the Surface RT seem like less of a lame duck. They should really be exerting this effort on the Surface Pro, though, which has gotten a much better reception than the also-ran RT.

Source: YouTube

Apple has acquired Locationary, a small Canadian startup that crowdsources location data, according to a report from AllThingsD. Apple has refused to comment on its plans for the company, but the acquisition will undoubtedly help improve Apple’s widely criticized Maps service.

Aakash Doshi is a third-year student at the Srsihti School of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore, India, and he has a wonderfully hobby: he distills Apple’s Mac line-up down to their essence in bright, colorful, beautiful abstractions of their classic designs. I love them. We’ve put more after the jump, but be sure to check them out in hi-res on Doshi’s Tumblr, where he’ll be adding more over time.

Realmac Software, creators of Clear, Analog Camera, and other terrific apps for Mac and iOS, have announced Ember, a “digital scrapbook” for your Mac. Ember lets you collect photos, notes, web clippings, and anything else that’s important to you and your projects and store them all in one place.

Check out the new introduction video below.

iPhone chargers are dropping bodies all over China this week. Following an incident earlier this week in which a Chinese woman was electrocuted using a third-party charger, a 30-year old Chinese man has been put into a coma for ten days after plugging in his iPhone.

In the OS X 10.8 version of Messages on the Mac, you can set the background color of your own messages, and you can set the background color, font, and font color of anyone who sends you messages.

Now, though, in OS X Mavericks, you can do all those things, plus send messages in your own choice of font, as well as let your friends send you messages with their own font choices.

Here’s how to make that happen.

Do you ever wish you had a better camera in your smartphone? Well, before you upgrade to a hideous Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, you might want to take a look at the blurry picture above. It’s an accessory that Sony is rumored to be working on that’ll help you take incredible pictures with your smartphone.

It’s not just a fancy clip-on lens; it’s actually a 20.2-megapixel Exmor RS camera with a Carl Zeiss lens that uses your smartphone’s display as its viewfinder.

If you’re already wearing a backpack, then the best place to hang your camera might be from one of its straps. That’s the idea behind the Capture Camera Clip v2, a follow up to the runaway success that was the Capture Camera Clip.

We’ve seen lots of demand for BBM on Android and iOS since BlackBerry announced in May that the service would finally go cross-platform. And the Canadian company has promised us that the app will be here by the end of summer. But how long is BlackBerry’s summer?

According to one company executive, we could be waiting up until September.

Instants is a great new iPhone app for browsing your photos. It brings several of iOS7’s organizational ideas to the current iPhone, but does it in a much cleaner and more intuitive way. Plus, it’s free (with an in-app purchase for one extra feature).

Just this week DigiTimes reported that the iPad mini with Retina display wouldn’t be available until 2014 due to supply constraints, but its “industry sources” appear to have changed their minds. The Korean outlet now reports that the device will launch this October instead.

Remember those cool, ultra-light wooden iPhone 5 cases from Kubxlab? Now they’re available with the skins of exotic animals replacing the slivers of rare-tree flesh on the back panel. They’re called “Exotics” and “Elegance.” Let’s see if they live up to that.

There’s a great little trick with the latest Google Maps for iOS (the v2.0 that shipped earlier this week). Just by typing a magic phrase into the search box, you can cache the current map view for online use.

VLC, the popular open-source media player, has made its comeback on iOS and is available to download now from the App Store. The release comes more than two years after VLC was pulled from iOS due to licensing issues, but this time it’s back for good — with lots of improvements.

The official Evernote app for iOS now allows you to mark up images, PDFs, and notes thanks to the Skitch integration added in its latest update today. The release also brings shortcuts, recent notes, the ability to submit support requests, and more.

Gather up a substantial clump of geeks in any one place and you’re bound to get some interesting concoctions. In this case, two Comic Con pilgrims have taken a certain favored S-themed superhero and combined it with a certain favored S-themed smartphone. Behold, the Superphone.

If you like flight simulators, especially those of the more arcade variety, the Sky Gamblers series is a great place to start.

Originally published by Namco Bandai Games, the last couple of installments have come directly from California-based developer Atypical Games. Sky Gamblers: Cold War is, appropriately enough, set in the 1980s with all the weaponry and aircraft that implies. Your task will be to learn how to fly a Cold War-era fighter plane, head out on covert and not-so-covert ops, and blow stuff up. Sounds fun, right?

New Zealand-based games developer Ninja Kiwi just released Bloons TD Battles to the iOS App Store. It’s a faster, more multiplayer take on popular Bloons TD, a single-player fixed path tower defense game with loads of depth, with wacky monkeys that stand in for towers as well.

The new, free Bloons TD Battles lets you go head to head against other random or known opponents on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, while using ninja monkeys, sniper monkeys, and helicopters (among other equally bizarre characters and items) to keep your enemy’s “bloons” from making their way to your base.

Panasonic’s new Lumix DMC-FZ70 flaunts a nonsensical 60x optical zoom range, completely unaided through the use of Viagra.

The fine folks at Lucky Frame are at it again, this time with an iPad-only multiplayer dueling game, Gentlemen!. It’s a bit of a departure for the team that brought us music-based games like Pugs Love Beatz, Bad Hotel, and Wave Trip, but it’s intriguing nonetheless.

UpTo might be the best social calendar app ever made. I’ve never really seen anything like it; so if it isn’t the best (or really the only) social calendar app around, whatever else is out there must be perfect — because UpTo is pretty damn fantastic.

The whole point of UpTo is to create a social experience around calendars, in a way that’s at once instantly recognizable and ridiculously simple to use.

It seems like summer is just getting started but Best Buy is anxious to start raking in some money from the upcoming back-to-school season. To kick things off, Best Buy just reduced the price on two of the most popular MacBook Pros by $200.

Students can get a 13-inch MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive for $999.99 (regular price $1,199.99) or a 13-inch MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and a 750GB hard drive for $1,299.99 (regular price $1,499.99).

To take advantage of the deal you have to sign up with a “.edu” email address. If you don’t have one you just get $100 off the regular price, which isn’t a bad deal either. Promo starts today and ends on July 27th

Source: Best Buy

Via: ATD

If you use Reddit and own an iPhone, chances are you’ve heard of Alien Blue. It’s considered the go-to client for Reddit on the iPhone and iPad, and up until now it didn’t have any real competition.

A new app called Ruby for Reddit is out, and it offers a load of features while adhering to a more minimalist, clean design.

On the right, the iPad mini, with its distinctive thin bezel design. On the left, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, with its distinctive thin bezel design. Both are eight inch tablets that look pretty much identical. I’m sure this will be the last time that Samsung follows Apple’s lead though, right? Absolutely shameless.

Source: Gizmag

Remember when Microsoft unveiled the Surface RT last year and people said it totally makes the iPad and the MacBook Air obsolete? So far the Surface RT has been anything but an iPad-killer and according to Microsoft’s latest earnings, it’s losing them a shit ton of money too.