With a substantial interest in the tablet market through its Kindle Fire range, it's looking very much as though Amazon's next objective will be to deliver its very own smartphone. Just last week, we heard reports that said device would feature a 3D display, and now, a bunch of intriguing details - including the handset's supposed tech. specs - have just been leaked into the wild.
The iPhone may have been a major contributing factor in the fall from grace of standalone consoles like the Game Boy, but this isn't to say that we, as gaming fans, don't have something of a soft spot for the old handhelds. With the recent spate of emulators enabling jailbroken iOS device users to enjoy the ROMs of various antiquated devices, one individual has sought to make the experience even more realistic by creating the 'G-pad,' a nifty, silicone-comprised accessory that wraps around the iPhone, a offering physical, Game Boy-esque set of buttons, and is designed specifically for GBA4iOS.
With Google clearly feeling extremely confident about the future of Glass, and with a whole heap of new users likely to come on board, Google has announced that Glass Updates are back. Owners of the powerful Glass headset will be able to update its firmware later this week and receive a number of powerful updates that should boost the overall Glass experience for end-users.
Google is apparently preparing to give its next major version of Android the iOS 7 treatment, with some cleaning up some of the visual elements offering a slicker-looking overall interface. Jony Ive and the software design team in Cupertino were radical in their redesign and ruthless in their disposal of skeuomorphism, and while it is not thought that Android 4.5 will be quite such a departure from the current configuration, the company is thought to be planning some notable aesthetic tweaks.
Even though Samsung's just-released Galaxy S5 will serve as the company's biggest smartphone release of the year, it certainly won't be its last, and as with every major Galaxy handset, we're anticipating a slew of follow-up devices. The Galaxy S5 Zoom, which will likely include some major camera-centric features in order to serve the growing group of wannabe photographers, has been detailed in several leaks during the course of the past few weeks, and now, Samsung has sent out an invitation to an event on April 29th in Singapore that could well see the device finally showcased to the world.
The probability of the next-gen iPhone sporting a 4.7-inch display seems to increase with each new discovery, and today, a mold of what its alleged to be the iPhone 6 only underlines this ongoing belief. Given that a further, 5.5-inch version of the next Apple smartphone seems beset by delays and other issues, the focus of the spotlight is now almost squarely upon the smaller handset sporting a 4.7-inch panel, and although it's hard to glean much by way of specifics from today's new leak, the depicted mold appears as though it could facilitate a display of roughly this size.
It's an accepted fact that Apple changed the face of the smartphone industry with the introduction of the iPhone back in 2007, and even though it has only been seven years, it feels as though we've always been tapping home screen icons and gesturing our way through interfaces. Not only did the iPhone completely turn the market on its head, but Google's in-development Android interface - which didn't, at the time of the Apple smartphone's announcement, support touch input - also had to be completely re-thought.
In the earlier days of the modern smartphone, it was the new, casual games that really caught our attention, with the likes of Angry Birds and Cut the Rope really taking a stronghold. But as devices have improved considerably during the past few years, developers of famed PC and console apps have seen the mobile market as an important outlet, and joining the many classic titles to reach the mobile platforms, Age of Empires will soon be heading to the App Store, the Windows Phone Store, and Google's Play Store.
In the run-up to Windows Phone 8.1's announcement at the start of April, we heard that Cortana, Microsoft's answer to Siri and Google Now, would take elements of both pre-existing voice assistants and combine them into the best all-round voice feature in the mobile industry. Since the BUILD dev conference, we've heard a great deal about how wonderful Cortana supposedly is, although until we've seen it up against its two major adversaries, there's no telling just how it holds up. With the release of the developer preview of Windows Phone 8.1 today, though, we finally get to see first-hand if Cortana can compete with its more established peers, and the Cortana vs. Siri vs. Google Now video embedded below reveals all!
You can now download Windows Phone 8.1 early. If you're a non-dev and want to give it a shot, here's how you can still download it.
