Apple's brick and mortar stores are roundly believed to be partly responsible for the company's meteoric rise from an almost-derelict company to the power house that it is today, but CEO Tim Cook and his retail team are not about to sit back and squander the opportunity that Apple Stores afford the technology company. As iOS 7 launched earlier this year, Apple also kicked another of its projects into gear, with iBeacon now a focus for the business.
Android versus iOS is a discussion that people never get tired of. It seems that within every comment board, social network or forum on the internet, there's a good chance you'll come across an iOS user trying to convince an Android user to use their platform, or vice versa. It's clear that users are extremely passionate about their operating system of choice (some more so than others), but for that reason it's important to show how the latest additions to each platforms stack up against each other. In this case, we're talking about the new iPad mini 2 with Retina Display, which was rather sneakingly released by Apple this past week.
We're now a couple of days into the PlayStation 4's lifecycle and it's not all been positive news from the United States. The largely positive professional reviews have been interspersed with claims of units failing and some simply dead before they've even been powered on for the first time. Normally anyone with an ounce of common sense would put that down to simple statistics - you can't make as many PS4s as Sony has without there being some duds, after all.
Apple's iOS is certainly not short of success stories when it comes to turning little known developers into household names. We perhaps wouldn't put ZeptoLab into the same bracket as the likes of ngmoco, but it certainly knows how to make a good iPhone and iPad game. With Cut the Rope, ZeptoLab showed that big games can come from arguably small premises.
Microsoft’s Xbox One console is just a few days away from public availability, and the company is bound to make it a success by any means necessary. As if all the promotions and advertisements weren’t enough, now the Redmond company has made a new announcement of free access to select few Xbox One titles on a monthly basis for the subscribers of Xbox LIVE Gold.
Google is, beyond question, the most powerful and widely used search engine today, with the scope of its services expanding almost every passing moment. The stock Android, or any variant based on the Android Open Source Project, promises to deliver as vanilla a Google experience as possible, and one of the key elements of that experience is bundled Google Search almost throughout the operating system. With Google Now, this goes a notch further, where you can simply say “Ok Google” to initiate a new search, thanks to Google’s voice recognition engine.
It seems that we can't have any big Apple product release these days without it being laden with some sort of baggage. The infamous 'antennagate’ debacle of the iPhone 4 was perhaps the biggest blow up that we've seen lately, but that doesn't mean that other products haven't had their fair share of issues. It seems that the very recent release of the iPad mini 2 with Retina display may be the latest Apple hardware to suffer from an issue that could very well be blown out of all proportion.
The Zelda-like genre of game has been immensely popular since the days of the Nintendo 64, a widely celebrated console that spelled the end of the old blow-the-cartridge-and-insert routine. Since then, the mobile industry has rigorously sought to emulate what was a truly engrossing game in its era by releasing a series of similar adventures.
Whether you love or loathe the Korean electronics outfit's products, it's a fair assessment that the mobile world wouldn't be the same without Samsung. Tenacious and audacious in equal measure, the company seems to know no limits when it comes to experimenting with new technologies and ideas, and now Bloomberg is reporting that Samsung plans to release a smartphone with a wraparound display in 2014.
It's becoming a rather familiar trajectory; game becomes popular on mobile devices, sells millions, makes a household name of itself, and then inks a deal to make a movie. Angry Birds already has a film in production due for release in 2016, and Temple Run, that Indiana Jones-esque running title that looked as if it was based on a movie in the first place, will also be hitting screens in the not-so-distant future. A Warner Bros. movie, the studio has enlisted David Heyman, producer of the immensely popular Harry Potter series, to take Temple Run to the box office.
