Angry Birds has been, by quite a distance, the most popular and successful title to stem from mobile-inspired casual gaming industry. As well as being among the most popular titles on mobile devices, it has also reached a number of browsers, as well as PC, Mac, and Facebook in its quest for world domination. Now, those yapping, bullish poultry specimens are hitting the big time, with version of the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's 3DS in the reckoning, according to creators Rovio.
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was announced to much fanfare at Google I/O 2012. It introduced a nice variety of features like vastly smoother user interface with Project Butter, more powerful notifications system, Google Now, offline voice typing and more.
The Nexus Q is one heck of a weird gadget. The "social streaming" thingamajig has the heart of a Android smartphone with it's dual core processor, powerful graphics 16GB flash storage and 1GB RAM, but the features of a severely crippled Apple TV. It is somewhat similar to the Apple TV in that it can stream content using an Android smartphone or tablet as a remote (Apple TV does this with mobile iOS device or a Mountain Lion based Mac), but the problem is that it costs nearly thrice as much, streams content only from Google Play’s limited library and YouTube and can't even be used without an Android device. The gadget has received mixed reviews so far.
The smaller iPad, which the tech world has been chattering about non-stop for the past couple of weeks, is said to be a 7.85-inch slate designed to counter the new releases of the Google Nexus 7, along with the purported new Kindle Fire.
Although Apple may still be going through the district and county courts in an ongoing battle with Samsung over alleged patent infringements, it certainly hasn't stopped the creative minds at the Cupertino company from coming up with and submitting applications for a wide variety of patents. We all know the technology giants are no strangers to the patent system, something that has been emphasized today with the United States Patent and Trademark Office publishing a total of twenty three patents awarded to Apple.
If you're not a keen follower of Apple rumors, you may want to look away now, for in breaking the continual flow of iPad Mini rumors comes an update on the state of play regarding the next iPhone. The device, which, unlike the iPad talk, is actually backed up by hardware "leaks", looks set to become a little longer, and the display, which has sat at 3.5-inches since the very first day it hit the market back in 2007, is expected to increase rather significantly, measuring in at nearer the 4-inch mark.
New rumors of a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro being on the horizon have begun doing the rounds, with claims that the device is real being backed up with benchmark results that have cropped up online. The as yet unannounced device is also expected to begin arriving in people's hands around October time, according to reports.
One of the world's most successful video streaming services, Hulu, is now offering new customers the chance to take two months free as a trial period - perfect for streaming to an Xbox 360 for instance.
Using Twitter, perhaps more so than any other social platform, seems perfectly matched to the mobile market. Everything said is within the 140 character limit - fending off those who like to broadcast an unabridged version of their life story, and it has overtaken the RSS reader in allowing users to keep up with the news feeds they really want to follow.
Although Google+ has sat around in a somewhat dormant state since arriving last year, Google has continued to maintain it has big plans for its social network. The mobile market, a field in which Facebook has continued to disappoint, will obviously be a key area to corner if Google+ is to be a success, and the official iOS app has just been given a pretty significant update, taking the version number up to 3.0.
