It’s news that seems to have come completely out of the blue. Google is selling Motorola’s mobile division to Lenovo for just $2.91 billion less than three years after picking it up.
Many of us would love to develop our own apps, tweaks and learn programming, but like our aspirations to master a new language, pick up a new instrument or go to Australia, issues such as time, money and work often prevent these things from happening. But a tweak called Flex has long since given those with little knowledge of code the ability to create their own patches, and with a thriving community having helped to make the sequel - aptly named Flex 2 - a reality, those of you looking to create your own iOS mods can continue to do so with ease.
Moments ago, it emerged that Apple had released a minor update for iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c users in the form of iOS 7.0.5. In the release notes, Apple made note of the point that the update amended some issues affecting folks in China, but it wasn't immediately apparent whether the jailbreak had been patched or not. Now, seasoned jailbreaker MuscleNerd has taken to Twitter and urged those eligible for the iOS 7.0.5 update to refrain from doing so.
Apple just released iOS 7.0.5 download links for select devices. This update is currently only available for iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c and corrects network provisioning for models that are sold in China.
Google has pushed out an in-app notice to users of its iOS Gmail app stressing that a bug may have caused them to accidentally delete emails received between the 12th and 21nd of January. Furthermore, the bug - which is also said to have affected the mobile browser and the offline version of the popular email client - may also have led users to inadvertently mark the wrong emails as spam.
Google has, for the first time, showcased a series of mini-games designed specifically for use with its Glass project, in a move that the search giant hopes will inspire developers into creating some interesting, exciting, and cutting-edge titles tailored to the face computer. If Glass is ever going to offer any kind of appeal to fans of casual games, though, one suspects that devs will need to vastly improve what Google has mustered, with the company's collective of mini-games hardly rousing even a flicker of entertainment.
Backward compatibility is a big deal in the gaming world, and when Sony announced its PS4 console, much of the talk was about the lack of any ability to play those back catalogues of games that everyone had spent the last few years accumulating. Sony has since sought to rectify that by announcing PlayStation Now, the game streaming service that will see PS3 games streamed over the Internet, but there is no local support being added to consoles.
Lock screens are a largely personal affair. What one person thinks is perfection personified, another may call ugly and overbearing. We're big fans of minimalistic lock screens here at Redmond Pie, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people out there that want every option known to man to be available as soon as they turn their screen on. Being able to tweak iOS to do just what you want is what jailbreaking is all about, after all.
Google has teamed up with Lego in its latest Chrome experiment, which allows users to create their own buildings using virtual Lego bricks. Yes, it is quite a flagrant copycat of Minecraft et al, but Lego is something that most of us share in common to varying degrees, and this WebGL-based environment makes construction as fun as when we were five years old. Not only can you let your imagination run wild and build castles, mansions and so on, but you can also select the plot of land you wish to build upon using the Google Maps utility. Luckily, though, there's no planning permission involved, enabling you to get straight to work!
Just yesterday it was leaked that both the NSA and GCHQ were able to scrape information from smartphone apps, with demographics and more able to be pulled from the most mundane of apps thanks to their reliance on third-party advertising agencies. Rovio's hugely popular Angry Birds games were mentioned in particular by the report, which was based heavily on leaked information coming out of the now infamous Edward Snowden.
