February, 2011
Steam ‘Big Picture Mode’ Announced By Valve – Allows Console-Style Gaming Through Your HDTV!
February 28, 2011
Well, GDC has begun, and Valve has already dropped what could potentially be a bombshell. Valve, the masterminds behind the incredibly successful and popular gaming franchises Half Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead, has announced that PC and Mac gamers on Steam will soon be able to play games through their television sets, using a controller.
According to the guys at maclife.com, Valve is keeping fairly tight-lipped on the details, but the basic principle behind the new feature, named ‘Big Picture Mode’, is clear for all to see. However, this could cause many problems in the gaming world online, especially, as anyone who has ever played games on both PC and console will know that using a mouse/keyboard combination can provide much greater performance than using a console controller.
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STM Vertical Laptop Shoulder Bag Released
February 28, 2011
It wasn’t that long ago that we looked at the new STM JET laptop bag but the Australian bag manufacturer are back again this time with the STM Vertical Laptop Shoulder Bag offering that offers the same sort of laptop protection just in a more vertical and, erm, shoulder orientated form.
Although the overall shape is a lot more angular than the JET we looked at before, the design is very similar with the same varied colour scheme of black, black and black (yes, sarcasm!), multiple large pockets and what look like reasonably sturdy metal zips.
Continue reading »Google Deletes Around 150,000 GMail Accounts Due To Reset Bug – Do You Have Backups?
February 28, 2011
With over 100million accounts, Gmail is one of the biggest email providers out there, and as we increasingly use email to conduct and document pretty much everything we do it would pretty annoying if the provider of your email service accidentally deleted everything that you had on your account, but that is exactly the situation that about 150,000 individuals woke up to this morning.
Throughout today on Twitter and a variety of support forums victims of the bug (which Google say has affected less than 0.08% of their users) have been reporting that years worth of messages, chat logs and attachments have been lost as their accounts were effectively reset, complete with welcome messages.
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The Game Maker’s Companion Review (Book)
February 27, 2011
Times are changing fast within the gaming world. Nowadays, there are more and more people creating their own games for the iPhone and Android devices with some of them become big successes.
The good thing about this is that games don’t have to be the best looking title, or give you endless customisation, just as long as they’re fun and easy to play. I’ve always wanted to make my own game and with this is definitely a step in the right direction.
The Gamer Maker’s Companion is the second book, with the first one being The Game Maker’s Apprentice. Unfortunately, I haven’t read the first book, so sinking my teeth into the second book was a bit tricky as it assumes you’ve already read the first.
Continue reading »LaCie ‘Little Big Disk’ Announced – External Hard Disk With Thunderbolt Technology!
February 27, 2011
Unless you’ve been living under an impressive noise-cancelling rock over the last few days, you’ll no doubt be aware that Apple has become the first manufacturer to incorporate Intel’s new Light Peak technology, under the assumed name ‘Thunderbolt’ into its latest MacBook Pros laptops.
I won’t go into too much detail over exactly what the Thunderbolt (aka Light Peak) technology is (I’ll assume at least some knowledge for the purposes of this article), but suffice it to say that LaCie has followed suit and become one of the first third party to release a Thunderbolt capable peripheral.
The external hard drive will obviously be capable of previously improbable transfer speeds using the Thunderbolt connectivity built in to the latest MacBooks, and will become part of the daisy chain linking all of your Thunderbolt peripherals together, should you accumulate them.
Continue reading »Facebook Valued At $70 Billion, But Will It Ever Crash & Be Replaced By Another Social Network?
February 27, 2011
Bebo. Friendster. MySpace. All great social networks that have come and gone in what the history books will call a blip, a blink of an eye. Of course, they are still in existence, but when you pit them against the almost insanely powerful Facebook, they pale into almost complete insignificance. Twitter, which is more of a micro-blogging tool than a social network, is the only viable competitor to Facebook, and even that is a debatable statement.
In truth, Facebook commands what must be one of the greatest monopolies in the relatively recent history of the technology industry. I mean, even Microsoft’s Windows has it’s competitors, despite their comparatively diminutive stature. But, will Facebook ever come crashing down?
Continue reading »Activision Say Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Rumour Is A Hoax
February 27, 2011
Earlier this week we brought you the rumours surrounding the next game in the Call of Duty franchise brought about by the launch of a countdown site at www.findmakarov.com and the release of dog tags to the press with the name Sheperd on them suggested to be the same character that appeared in Modern Warfare 2.
However Activision has announced today that the countdown site is a ‘hoax’ and that there will be no announcement from them regarding the future game in the coming weeks; the result of this fresh information is that its rivals, EA, are now suspected of the hoax as the countdown points to when they are due to reveal Battlefield 3 at GDC.
Continue reading »Apple Purchased LaLa As ‘Insurance’ For iTunes – Could It Now Pave The Way For New MobileMe?
February 26, 2011
In 2009, the music streaming service LaLa was snapped up by Apple in a typical move from the Cupertino based giants, and as yet nothing has come of it in any way, shape, or form. And today, executives at Apple declared that the move was indeed comparable to insurance, and they have no plans to replace the almost entirely dominant iTunes distribution platform with a streaming service.
However, along with the discontinuing of Apple’s current MobileMe service, there is speculation arising that at last something will become of LaLa, as it becomes the building blocks for a new music streaming service from Apple, allowing iTunes users to upload their iTunes libraries to the ‘cloud’, and access the music from any device connected to the Internet. Of course, this is exactly what LaLa was originally set up to do back in 2007, so it is not altogether unfathomable that it may be the eventuality we are heading for.
Continue reading »ScentScape USB Odour Add-On – Games & Movies To Get Smelly?
February 26, 2011
Have you ever been sat there, playing your games and thinking to yourself, “I really wish I could smell what it was like in that dungeon/swamp/blood stained pit”. Well all your dreams have just come true.
A new USB accessory is going to be released for PC and consoles later this year which will allow gamers to smell games like World of Warcraft. It will be called ScentScape and will contain 20 scent wells that will spray out different aromas up your nostrils like Ocean, Forest, Smoke….let’s just hope the smoke smell isn’t actually the ScentScape burning out!! The game will prompt the device to spit out the correct smells when in the right enviroment.
Continue reading »Samsung Galaxy S II Pre-Order With High Price Tag – Will It Drop Further Before Release?
February 26, 2011
The recently announced Samsung Galaxy S II, obviously the successor to the hugely successful Galaxy S, has now been given a price. Admittedly, the price will not be the final retail price when the device goes on sale on March 31st, which is the date being touted by Play.com.
Well, hopefully not, that is, as the prices being banded around range between the ambitious and the altogether insane, with the aforementioned Play.com listing it at £599.99, which is actually a come down from yesterday’s pricing, which was just shy of £650. Crazy.
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Alien Breed Trilogy Boxed Set For Xbox 360 Announced
February 25, 2011
It was only last week that we reported that Team 17 were in the process of releasing Worms merchandise to the masses, but now there’s more news coming from the Yorkshire games company.
This week, it’s been announced that Team 17 will be releasing the reboot of the Alien Breed Trilogy as a boxed game with all three games on one disc. It was back in 2009 when the first game of the trilogy was released on the Xbox 360 via Xbox LIVE and was titled Alien Breed: Evolution.
Since it’s original release, it was renamed Impact for it’s release on the Playstation Network and PC via Steam. Since then Episode 2 (Assault) and Episode 3 (Descent) have been released with the PSN version of Descent only being released this week.
Continue reading »Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 To Be Announced In Next Few Days? (Rumour)
February 25, 2011
Although Activision has taken a break from the Modern Warfare series with the most recent edition to the record-breaking series of Call of Duty games, Black Ops it looks all set to return with the next instalment potentially being Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and it could be announced within days at the upcoming Games Developers Conference (GDC).
The rumour has arisen after the launch of a countdown site, with the URL www.findmakarov.com, displayed a ticker sporting the familiar font of Modern Warfare.
Continue reading »Top 10 Mobile Phone Handsets – Android & Blackberry Devices Lead The Way Over iPhone In The UK
February 25, 2011
It may seem like every Tom, Dick and Harry is packing an iPhone 4 or one of the previous generations, however it may surprise you that the iPhone is not top of the smartphone dominance rankings here in the UK. Instead, it has dropped from 3rd to 6th, whilst 3 Android devices storm into the lead.
More specifically, the Android devices in question all come from the same manufacturer. More unsurprisingly, that manufacturer is HTC, with its original HTC Desire, and the Desire HD follow-up in first and second respectively, with the budget offering of the HTC Wildfire following up in bronze medal third place.
Continue reading »Apple Pulls MobileMe From Stores – The End? Or Start Of New Cloud Services?
February 25, 2011
For one reason or another, Apple has clearly decided that right now is a good time to make changes. A lot of changes. First, Apple gives us new MacBook Pro laptops, then that is swiftly followed by an impressive developer preview of the next version of Mac OS X, 10.7 (Lion), and on top of that there is an iPad 2 event just next week.
Today, though, might mark the end of another product, rather than adding a new one, as Apple has pulled it’s MobileMe cloud services package from online stores and shelves in its many high street stores.
Continue reading »Star Walk iPhone & iPad App Review
February 25, 2011
Star Walk is an app for the iPhone and iPad, created by the same company who brought us Solar Walk. It acts as an interactive astronomy guide, allowing you to hold up your device towards the sky and see where all the stars are in real time on the screen, thanks to the built in GPS and accelerometer of your phone or tablet.
When you first open the Star Walk iPhone & iPad App, you’re presented with a bundle of information regarding when each planet will rise and set in the sky, as well as where the sun will rise and set at your current location.
Continue reading »First Windows Phone 7 Update Has 1 in 10 Failure Rate – Microsoft Mobile Efforts Further Hindered?
February 25, 2011
Much was made on the announcement and release of Windows Phone 7 of the apparently impressive software update procedures. However, the boasting, if indeed there was any, from within the Microsoft camp can come to a halt this week, after the first update hit the rocks.
The first update is not the Copy and Paste update that will be the first major update to the latest smartphone platform, instead it is a minor update to pave the way for the major ‘NoDo’ update that should hopefully dramatically increase the functionality of Windows Phone 7 and put it more on a par with its rivals.
There were rumours circling earlier this week that the carriers were blocking the first update, in a bid to bypass Microsoft’s update policy, which states that devices should never be more than one update behind the official schedule. By blocking this first update, and to all intents and purposes voiding it, carriers can take time on the second update. The major update.
Continue reading »Google Food Recipe Search Introduced – What Meal Will You Cook Up?
February 25, 2011
Search giant Google has today begun to roll out a further expansion of its already comprehensive search tools by introducing a food recipe search facility.
Google itself hasn’t actually spoken out about it officially yet like they did with their recent Instant Search feature, however some engineers within the company, in an exclusive interview with Wired, revealed the plans.
The tool itself allows users to obviously search for recipes, but also filter based on number of calories, ingredients and more, with all the usual kitchen related stuff going on, however it is not this which is so amazing, more what goes on behind the scenes.
Continue reading »Angry Birds App Coming To Windows Phone 7 In April
February 24, 2011
Microsoft caused quite the stir when they put an Angry Birds icon on their pre-release market images before the launch of Windows Phone 7, only for Rovio to come out and say that they weren’t committed to developing for the platform at all. Fortunately, it looks as though all that’s behind us now, as Angry Birds is arriving on Windows Phone 7 by April, Microsoft announced today.
In addition to Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Plants vs. Zombies, Hydro Thunder Go, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode 1 and geoDefense are also being released on the growing platform.
Continue reading »FaceTime For Mac Out of Beta – Video Calling With iPhone 4, But At What Price?
February 24, 2011
Well, after four months of beta testing the Mac version of FaceTime is available to the masses through the Mac App Store. However, there’s a catch. A catch which has ignited the fires of fury amongst Mac owners around the web. Apple want your money for it.
On any iOS device, the application is free. As it will be on the new Mac models, and with OS X 10.7. However, you want it now? 59p, please.
Continue reading »Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Preview Available to Mac Developers
February 24, 2011
The debut of Apple’s latest and hopefully greatest version of Mac OS X is still some months off, but to whet your appetite, a developer preview of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is being pushed through the recently launched Mac App Store.
Of course, you have to be a member of the Mac Developer Program, which has a quite substantial membership fee to be paid up front, but if you’re one of the lucky few to be part of the program, or have an extremely generous pal who is, then you can get a sneak peek at OS X 10.7 right now.
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