For years, Nintendo has believed it could reject smartphone and tablet apps, yet still flourish. The reason for this delusion is familiar — it’s the toxic Last Blockbuster Syndrome that doomed the consumer electronics divisions of Motorola in 2004 and Nokia in 2007. Often at the start of a massive trend shift in consumer electronics, dominant dinosaurs get one massive hit built on a nearly obsolete paradigm, and that allows them to be lulled into a comfy trip to the grave.

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Comcast’s customer care service is a mess, as many affected customers and even former and current employees will attest, no matter what the company says in public. It all became even clearer following that customer call that was recorded by a certain tech personality, and which quickly went viral, as it revealed that Comcast is desperately trying to put a stop to service cancellations. The company took immediate action by apologizing for the incident and explaining its customer care policies publicly. Internally, the company served its employees a new memo supposed to be a reminder of its “customer interaction policy.”

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Samsung’s first metal smartphone is reportedly releasing in less than a week, but don’t get too excited — it’s not going to be as great as you hoped. SamMobile reports that the upcoming Galaxy Alpha is going to be unveiled on August 4th, or roughly a month before Samsung takes the wraps off its highly anticipated Galaxy Note 4.

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BlackBerry fans, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. In a memo sent to some customers earlier this week, BlackBerry announced that its most loyal users will soon be able to test pre-release BlackBerry products ahead of launch. The program is open to a limited number of BlackBerry device owners who are registered in the free BlackBerry Beta Zone, which currently has more than 400,000 registered members.

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TouchPico is an Android-powered pico projector that’s about the same size as the Galaxy S4, and it can turn any surface, including a wall, into a touch-friendly 80-inch screen. With 28 days left in its Indiegogo campaign, the TouchPico has already raised more than $96,000 in pledges, topping its $55,000 funding goal.

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We’ve oohed and ahhed over interactive maps that detail the world’s mysterious network of undersea Internet cables, but a new report over at Builtvisible is taking things to an entirely new depth. The exhaustive account looks at the entire history of the process, ranging from experiments in the 1840s to a rash of undersea surveillance taps in the 1970s. Today, there are 263 active cables that carry upwards of 95 percent of global Internet traffic, with 22 new drops planned for the coming years.

Hungry for a few more nuggets from the report?

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Are Apple and other smartphone manufacturers straight-up gouging you when it comes to smartphone storage? LaptopMag’s Mark Spoonauer seems to think so and he makes a case that there is no real reason that a 32GB smartphone should cost a full $100 more than a 16GB smartphone.

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Virgin Mobile on Wednesday announced a new bold prepaid plan that may give certain smartphone buyers exactly the kind of tools they may have been dreaming of. Subscribers will be able to customize their Custom plans on the go, including number of voice minutes, messages and data allowance per month, via a special app that will let them make as many changes as they require.

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Thanks to our exclusive reporting earlier this year, there was absolutely nothing about Amazon’s Fire phone that came as a surprise — including the public’s reaction to the handset. The handset definitely has some unique features such as Firefly, tilt controls and the 3D effects in the user interface, but none of them appear to be helping to move a significant amount of inventory at this point.

Now, users can get a bit of a taste for what the Fire phone has to offer without actually buying one, because a new free app adds some simple tilt gesture functionality to the iPhone.

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Was former BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins actually right about tablets? While we laughed at Heins’ prediction last year that tablets would be dead in just a few years, there’s now some evidence to suggest that he might have been onto something. In an interview with Re/code, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly says that tablet sales at his stores have been absolutely plummeting this year while PC sales have actually experienced a rebound in the wake of Windows XP’s demise.

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