Games maker Blizzard Entertainment, currently a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, has just posted a downloadable beta of its upcoming Warcraft-themed free-to-play strategy card game, titled Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. It's been in closed beta since August of last year.
The open beta is now available to Mac and Windows users in North America through the Blizzard website. The game is about lively duels that "evoke the spirit of a friendly match played beside a crackling tavern fire"...
This one's a stretch, but Apple's Macintosh is soon celebrating its 30th anniversary and advertising legend Lee Clow hinted in a pair of tweets that the company just might celebrate the occasion by running an ad during the Super Bowl XLVIII.
"Good football. Good sunset. Mac's gonna be 30 this week," his tweet reads. "Gonna be a good Super Bowl. Mac's gonna be 30 :)," another tweet teased.
Clow was Steve's personal friend and he is the Chairman, Global Director and former Chief Creative Office of TBWA\Worldwide, one of the world's top ad shops.
More importantly, the advertising guru helped create Apple’s ‘Think Different’ slogan, the iPod silhouettes ad series and the famous ’1984′ ad, which was directed by Ridley Scot and televised as part of the third quarter Super Bowl XVIII telecast on this day thirty years ago.
So, is Apple going to run this epic ad (or a new one) during the upcoming Super Bowl?
Apple and Samsung are gearing up for round 2 of their landmark US patent trial. The first round ended in Samsung paying nearly $1 billion in damages for infringing on some of Apple's patents, and this new trial will look for similar infringement in newer devices.
The court proceedings don't start for another two months, but Samsung has already suffered two big blows. This week, Judge Lucy Koh found the company's multimedia synchronization patent to be invalid, and found it to infringe on an Apple autocorrect patent...
Wall Street analysts have been foaming at the mouth since Apple announced it would be discussing its Q1FY14 financial results on January 27. Record holidays have become the norm for the company, but with two new iPhones released last fall, this one is expected to be over the top.
How much over the top? Well Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty says she believes Apple may have sold between 54 and 55 million iPhones last quarter. That would be a new record for the company, and a nice jump from the 47.8 million handsets it sold over the holidays last year...
Phil Schiller doesn’t tweet very often. But when he does, he tends to make good use of his 115,000+ followers. Early last year the executive tweeted a link to an Android-slamming mobile malware report, and today he's pointed to another report that highlights Android's security flaws.
This afternoon, Schiller tweeted a link to Cisco's 2014 Annual Security Report, which was released last week. The report notes that overall vulnerabilities are the highest they've ever been (since tracking began in 2000), and that 99% of all mobile malware is targeted at Android devices...
Developer Steven Troughton-Smith posted several images on Twitter this afternoon of what looks like Apple's iOS in the Car project. The screenshots don't show the entirety of the feature, but if legit, they do offer some insight on what the Maps app will look like when in use.
For those unfamiliar with iOS in the Car, it's an interface that deepens the integration between iOS devices and cars far beyond playing music. First introduced at WWDC, the feature will allow users to view and manage many iOS applications using their in-vehicle hardware...
I've always felt that the watch itself should be almost an afterthought in the never-ending discussion pertaining to what Apple’s rumored iWatch should be. ‘You’re thinking about it all wrong’ instantly comes to mind whenever new iWatch concepts hit the web. Looking at the current crop of mockups, their predictability and untenableness is starting to feel depressing and really killing all the fun for me.
But there’s some hope left as 3D artist Todd Hamilton took it upon himself to improve upon Thomas Bogner’s Nike FuelBand-like iWatch concept, taking his idea to the next level of awesomeness. It's right after the jump: have a look at the renderings and dare tell us it’s not the best iWatch concept you’ve seen thus far...
Social games developer King, perhaps best-known for its wildly popular Candy Crush Saga match-three game (free in the App Store, currently #9 on the free apps chart), has filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) seeking to trademark the word 'candy'.
And guess what? King won the trademark last week and is now asking fellow developers to remove games with 'candy' in their name. The full story is right after the break...
Today is a big day for Apple's strides in education as the company in a media release announced a significant expansion of its educational content.
iBooks Textbooks are now available in a total of 51 countries around the globe while iTunes U Course Manager is available to customers in 70 countries, Apple said.
Starting today, iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager are rolling out to new countries in Asia, Latin America and Europe, including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia...
Verizon Wireless, the nation's top wireless carrier, on Tuesday reported its earnings for the 2013 holiday quarter. Despite notable gains from T-Mobile, whose attention-seeking CEO earned his company a lot of coverage while lambasting competitors, Verizon has managed to add 1.6 million new contract subscribers during the Christmas quarter of last year, pushing its total subscriber count to 102.8 million customers.
Quarterly net income of the wireless division was $5.07 billion on $21.1 billion in revenue, or $7.9 billion on $31 billion in revenue for Verizon Communications.
The figure compares favorably to a massive $1.93 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2012, attributed to the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy and rising costs in employee pensions. More tidbits below the fold...
Two years ago, our iPhones were all 3.5-inch. It was a time when jumbo-sized handsets had started to steal Apple's thunder as a bunch of people responded enthusiastically to bigger smartphones from the Android camp, namely, Samsung.
Our non-scientific poll asked you back in May 2012 whether the then-unreleased iPhone 5 should rock a bigger screen. More than four out of each ten respondents voted for a four-inch display being the new gold standard for iPhones going forward.
But a lot has happened in the past eighteen months. Fast forward to today and all of a sudden what seemed preposterous in 2012 is commonly accepted in 2014.
The line between a smartphone and a phablet is now blurred to the point where a lot of Apple fans have taken notice of these oversized handsets and are now demanding that Apple responds to the trend accordingly.
The rumor-mill is adamant that Tim Cook will further diversify Apple's mobile product portfolio in 2014 by commissioning a 12.9-inch iPad alongside larger-screened iPhones. Taking it all in, what screen size the next iPhone should be, do you think?
As promised in a report earlier this month, Apple has begun repairing iPhone 5c screens in-store this week. 5c owners with cracked or otherwise damaged displays can now take their handsets into their local Apple stores and have them repaired quickly for a flat fee.
Apple has been doing this since last year for the iPhone 5, but just recently updated the hardware and training necessary to work with the newer models. The move is the company's latest effort to cut down on device repair and—perhaps most of all—replacement costs...