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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Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is the name of a mobile game that took app stores by storm earlier this year, despite the fact that it doesn’t really bring any actual value to gamers who may be on the constant lookout for new releases for their smartphones and tablets. What the game did do, however, was boost the share price of Glu Mobile by 50% last month, adding more than $100 million to its market cap, with some reports saying that Kardashian herself stands to make some $85 million from the title, which is available as a free download.
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We’re halfway home, and what better way to celebrate hump day than with a whole bunch of nifty paid iPhone and iPad apps that are on sale for free? Today, we have eight great paid apps for you to check out, and they’re worth a combined $20. If you act fast, however, each and every one of them can be downloaded without paying a dime.
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We called Nokia’s first Android app “wonderfully simple and shockingly innovative” when we gave the world its first look at the sleek Z Launcher app back in June, but the app was only available as a limited pre-beta at the time and Nokia quickly filled all available slots. Well, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that the Z Launcher app just received a major update and opened up to a new wave of pre-beta users at the same time. The bad news, however, is that you can only get in if you had previously signed up for access to the app.
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