When it comes to video games, mobile gaming grows more impressive with each new device generation. Controlling a game with on-screen buttons never quite offers the same experience as a physical video game controller though, so it seems odd that Ideum would put so much time and effort into creating an app that transforms an Android smartphone or tablet into a video game controller for PC gaming. The result is quite impressive, however, and it actually adds some nifty functionality that standard gaming controllers simply cannot offer.

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Researchers from Stanford including former U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate Steve Chu are currently working on “fixing” lithium-ion batteries in order to offer a longer charge to various devices that require such batteries, including smartphones and electric cars.

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Here’s a new iOS app that will either delight your friends or make them want to murder you. Gifit, which went live on the App Store earlier this month, has cataloged “thousands and thousands” of GIFs and has made them searchable by several different topics, including the TV show they’re from, the celebrities they feature and even just the emotional reaction that they’re conveying. Once you find the GIF you’re looking for, you can send it in messages to your friends, which they’ll either find endearing or infuriating.

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Samsung has hit another roadblock in its troubled journey to replace Android as the primary operating system for its mobile devices. The Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is postponing the release of its first Tizen phone, the Samsung Z, which was originally set to go on sale in Russia in the third quarter of this year. The company didn’t give any specific reasoning for the delay, but did note that it still needs to “further enhance [the] Tizen ecosystem,” referencing the platform’s lack of software.

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More and more videos recorded with GoPro cameras are popping up online, some daring, some scary and some weird, as the tiny portable camera gets more and more popular. But what happens when a GoPro owner decides to stick his camera to one of the wheels of his car using nothing but duct tape and to record a short drive at 45mph or so? First of all, the resulting nearly 3-minute long video is impressive, showing yet another way the camera can be used to obtain some stunning visual effects. Secondly, you start to get dizzy, and the video seems awfully long.

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An app called Popcorn Time that has been dubbed the “Netflix for pirates” has been making waves recently because it makes finding and streaming pirated movies and TV shows easier than it has ever been before. The app is also quite sleek, with a nice user interface and, apparently, equally elegant code. The program’s code has been used in a number of similar apps, and now a new offering of particular interest has popped up: TorrenTV.

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It’s one thing to have to abide by the requirements of carriers and include their bloatware alongside yours when selling a new smartphone – unless you’re Apple – but the same rules don’t have to apply to tablets. Unless you’re Samsung. The company has preloaded such “gifts” on the Galaxy S5 smartphone as well as on Galaxy Tab and Note Pro tablets from earlier this year. And the newly released Galaxy Tab S, with its gorgeous 2K Super AMOLED display, is no exception.

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Anything Sprint tries to do, T-Mobile is determined to try to do better. T-Mobile on Monday unveiled a new family plan that will cost $100 per month for four separate lines and offer a total of 10GB of LTE data, or 2.5GB per line. In contrast, Sprint’s most comparable “Framily” plan costs $160 per month and offers a mere 4GB of data total, or 1GB per line. You can get an unlimited-data Sprint “Framily” plan, of course, but it will cost a total of $240 per month since the unlimited option costs an extra $20 per line.

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The New York Times cried wolf in late October last year, observing that the iPhone 4 has became more sluggish following the iOS 7 update and wondering, without any kind of data to back it up other than one user’s experience, whether Apple has intentionally slowed down performance on older smartphone models to convince more iPhone users to upgrade. However, the publication is now back with a more scientific approach to the quandary. In a new piece penned by Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan, the publication draws our attention to the correlation between iPhone launches and the perceived slowness of older devices. Similarly, the study looks at Galaxy S phone slowness and relation to new Galaxy S model launches.

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Even though the iPhone offers users a rather consistent smartphone experience, the device can get slower the more it’s used, as is the case with any other kind of computer. However, there are plenty of tricks that can significantly improve the iPhone’s performance, and Business Insider has put together a collection of 12 such handy tricks every iPhone user looking for performance improvements has to know.

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