LG teams up with Rovio to bring you Angry Birds Rio on every new Optimus smartphone

LG teams up with Rovio to bring you Angry Birds Rio on every new Optimus smartphone

Angry Birds Rio is going to be preloaded on every upcoming Optimus starting with the Canadian Optimus 2X.

You can bet the LG Optimus 3D and Optimus Black are getting Rio as well as the regions where the Optimus 2X is still scheduled for launch.

According to LG, “Angry Birds Rio will help showcase the power, smoothness and speed of LG’s Optimus series of Android smartphones to our customers”.

There is no official information on the specific Optimus models entitled to go with Rio out of the box except this: “Angry Birds Rio will be available on LG’s Optimus Series smartphones starting in the second quarter of 2011″.

I am not sure how exactly a 2D game will squeeze the power of a Tegra2-based device or will play in LG’s favor since it’s a free title everyone can get from the Android Market. May be LG is talking for an ad-free version, but somehow I doubt that.

Whatever LG is thinking this won’t make the people wait in line for an Optimus smartphone.

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New Apple iPad: expectations vs reality

New Apple iPad: expectations vs reality

The rumor marathon leading to the announcement of the new iPad was one of the most intensive we have ever witnessed, so naturally we expected to see plenty at the Apple event tonight.

Now we’ll try and go through the rumors that came up most frequently on the web and see if the new Apple iPad actually matches the expectations or fails to deliver.

Retina display
This one was obviously spot on and is by far the biggest update brought by the new iPad. Okay, you might argue that a 264 ppi screen does not technically qualify as Retina, but that’s nitpicking, really. We can’t think of many real world scenarios, where you’ll be holding the iPad 10 inches away from your face, so the screen resolution is really as much as you are ever going to need (if not even more).

A6 chipset with quad-core CPU
This one went right down the drain – everyone was all but certain that the new iPad will come with a quad-core CPU, just like most of its Android market rivals did recently, but Apple chose to only upgrade the GPU instead. The two extra GPU cores will probably be just enough to make up for the extra resolution, so you shouldn’t expect a dramatic change in performance compared to the iPad 2 or the iPhone 4S.

No home button
We kinda liked the idea of an iPad without a homescreen button. The screen is big enough to fit all the buttons you need and it would probably make the whole UI simpler and more straightforward. Alas, it was not to be and the new iPad sticks to the tried and tested formula.

8 megapixel camera
This one came up partially true – the new iPad does represent a significant improvement over the one in terms of camera prowess, but its shooter does 5 megapixel, rather than 8 megapixel stills. We don’t think anyone will argue that this would have made any difference on a slate, though.

Thicker and heavier
Unfortunately, this one came out true – the new iPad has gained 55g of weight and 0.6mm of thickness compared to its iPad 2 predecessor. That’s the price you need to pay for getting the same battery life on a slate with four times the pixel count and LTE connectivity. Mentioning which��

LTE connectivity
That’s another particularly exciting bit about the new Apple iPad. Web browsing is bound to be its element with a large ultra high-res screen and it would only make sense for you to have the fastest network data transfers to make full use of it.

Siri
It seemed inevitable that Siri will be available on the new iPad, but that turned out not to be the case. Given that it uses the same version of the platform and a newer chipset, it’s rather puzzling why Apple chose to leave it out and only include the voice dictation option. Not that we are too disappointed – the whole talking to your smart devices thingy seems a bit awkward to us, but we are a bit confused nonetheless.

Obviously, we couldn’t get everything we wished for, but the new Apple iPad still feels like a pretty solid update. Any existing iPad user will be tempted to upgrade and we bet many newcomers to the tablet world will put it on top of their shortlists.

Final Firefox 17 for Windows

Final Firefox 17 for Windows, Mac and Linux is out today

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Firefox for Android update, today we see the proper desktop version of Firefox get updated to ver. 17. The version spent about a month at beta stage, available to everyone interested for testing, so today’s release is a final, stable thing.

The new version of Firefox doesn’t have that many new end-user features. One change is the way it handles older versions of plugins such as Flash, Silverlight, or Adobe Reader. If you have an older version of these (perhaps because you don’t have enough user rights to update them), they will be temporarily disabled until you explicitly allow them to run for particular elements on the page via the so-called Click-to-play interface. But there’s even more.

Mozilla Firefox 17 brings along several other changes besides the click-to-play for blacklisted plugins. Here are some of them:

• Updated Awesome Bar experience with larger icons
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is no longer supported
• Web Console, Debugger and Developer Toolbar faster and easier to use
• Over twenty performance improvements, including fixes around the New Tab page
• Social API is now fully supported along with Facebook Messenger for Firefox

So how about you? Anybody already tried it?

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New Samsung Galaxy S II ad mocks Apple users and promotes the 4G-enabled smartphone

New Samsung Galaxy S II ad mocks Apple users and promotes the 4G-enabled smartphone

Samsung’s latest ad for their Galaxy S II strikes hard at Apple fans as if the South Korean manufacturers wants to get even for the latest patent infringement cases Apple won in Germany. The scenario in the video is played out in front of an apparent Apple store that will open in 9 hours and, most likely, start selling a new iPhone.

Apparently, according to Samsung Apple’s die-hard fans consist of hipster, “creative” folk and they line up in wait of the new iDevice – which, as you can imagine, is prime material for abuse in a comic form.

Now, without further ado, let’s get straight to the ad, which some of you might consider too insulting, some fair and others plainly funny. Check it out.

It’s not the first time someone has taken aim at Apple via ads in the media and social spaces. It’s natural – Apple has almost a cult-like following and it also accidentally makes one of the best-selling smartphones in the world.

So let the wars begin – if you are an Apple fan, doesn’t this ad utterly insult your intelligence? Is Samsung taking it too far with this after their Galaxy S II marketing campaign in Australia? Share your opinions in the comments!

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