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LG has started its new 'loaner' program, loaning devices to developers who create apps for LG devices.

The program loans devices to devs free of charge, but LG does expect you to design proprietary apps. Additionally, if you have non-exclusive apps, you can test actively test it on your G2.

Reads the site: "LG is pleased to offer the LG Device Loaner Program. The LG Device Loaner Program is designed to make it easier for developers to test and debug their apps on LG smartphones or tablets. Registered developers in the US and Canada will be able to borrow an LG device for a 30-day period.

Please sign in to gain access to the customer prospect demo order form and process. This sign-in process will be required only once while your web browser remains open. If you have questions, please contact us via email."

If you are a developer, check the program here.

Sony has posted the latest concept movie for the upcoming Gran Turismo 6 blockbuster.

The company says over 120 new cars have been added to the game, with a new total of about 1220. Additionally, track layouts have increased to 100, with new circuits such as Ascari, Spain "and the world famous Silverstone, Goodwood and Mount Panorama tracks."

More importantly, Sony says there is a "completely overhauled physics engine making gameplay even more dynamic and realistic, a new interface, and enhanced online functionality to allow you to tailor your multiplayer gaming sessions as you wish."

One of the features is 'GPS Logger'. The GPS Logger "will employ the GPS function of your phone or tablet and Gran Turismo's in-game Course Maker to recreate your everyday school run or work commute as a circuit." Very cool.

Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of the Gran Turismo series, added: "With the release of GT6 we are celebrating 15 years of Gran Turismo. It has been a privilege to have seen so many advancements made over this period, with GT6 now continuing to set new standards that blur the line between virtual and reality racing. With GT6 we will make it even more flexible and expandable by continuing to develop and add new content throughout its life."

According to the latest figures from Canalys, smartphone shipments jumped 44 percent year-over-year, surpassing 250 million for the Q3 2013.

Samsung and Apple unsurprisingly led the pack, followed by Huawei, Lenovo and LG. Samsung had 34 percent market share, followed by Apple at 15 percent.

Android remained king, as well, followed by iOS, and Windows Phone managed to jump 185 percent to 4 percent market share. Windows Phone was the second most popular OS in 19 countries, including Finland (home of Nokia) at 39 percent share, Italy at 15 percent share and Russia at 8 percent share.

Another interesting fact was the breakdown of devices by size. 5" or larger display smartphones accounted for 22 percent of total shipments, with 66 percent of those devices having a 5-inch display. 3 percent had larger than a 6" display.

AMD has launched its new AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card promising stunning UltraHD (4K) performance for $399, or €289 in the Eurozone (excluding VAT).

"With the AMD Radeon R9 290 GPU, AMD cements its position as the provider of ultimate gaming experiences," said Matt Skynner, general manager and corporate vice president, AMD Graphics Business Unit.

"We deliver on the promise of world-class performance and features with the R9 Series graphics cards. With new innovations like Mantle and AMD TrueAudio technology, AMD brings an exceptional gaming experience for enthusiasts while defying the limits of audio and visual realism."

AMD Radeon R9 290 feature information:

• 2,560 stream processing units
• Up to 947MHz engine clock
• 4GB GDDR5 memory
• Up to 5.0Gbps memory clock speed
• 320GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
• 4.85 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power
• API support for DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3 and Mantle

Target is offering $200 in store credit in exchange for working, undamaged iPads - including the first generation iPad.

The exchange can only be made at a Target store, and the iPad must power on properly and not be scratched or damaged. In exchange, Target will issue $200 credit.

The promotional material for the Target offer suggests that the credit is being given "towards the purchase of a new iPad" but customers who have already availed of the offer said they could use it for anything. Still, be sure to ask first.

If you have an old 2010 iPad lying around, you could take it to a Target store and put it toward a newer iPad when you have the chance. You could pick up an iPad Air for $299 with the trade-in or an iPad mini without retina display for $99. But remember, according to the promotional material the offer is only in place "November 3rd thru 9th" so make up your mind soon.

More Info: Target

(Via: Engadget)

Internet radio service Pandora witnessed its market share grow last month, despite the launch of Apple's competing iTunes Radio service.

Pandora CFO Michael Herring said that hours of listening grew 9 percent in October over September, and its share of U.S. radio listening grow to 8.06 percent from 7.77 percent when iTunes Radio began operations.

"October data was in line with our expectations and showed the resilience of our business," he told a Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco yesterday.

The service streamed 1.47 billion hours of content during the month of October, though the number of active users fell from 72.7 million in September to 70.9 million in October.

Pandora is considering whether to use some of the $400 million it raised in a stock offering in September toward overseas expansion beyond the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Such an expansion will force Pandora to seek licensing agreements with record companies.

At the Huawei Mobile Broadband Forum in London, the Chinese company revealed it expects 10Gbps mobile speeds by 2020.

To help achieve this goal, it announced it will invest $600 million in 5G technologies and solutions with the hope of getting high-speed mobile connectivity to the market faster.

"Today's theme is mobile broadband. In this area, we continuously invest in innovation. We started our investment in 5G early, in 2009, and we have demonstrated our 5G prototype capable of 50Gbps speeds," said Huawei's Eric Xu.

"We want to develop a system that will not break, that will support up to one billion connections and offer users speeds of up to 10Gbps. Of course, there are a lot of issues to work out before we get there. We are committed to helping the operators build more efficient and integrated systems, that can link people to people, people to things, and things to things."

Of course, proper 4G networks aren't even available in a lot of European countries at the commercial level, so true 5G technology is still a long ways away for the masses.

Microsoft is back attacking Google services again, with a new webpage and PDF that shows how Google uses content from e-mails to deliver ads.

On the "Keep Your Email Private" page, Microsoft is offering a PDF with information on "how they do it", as well as some screenshots showing ads that are strikingly similar to the content of emails.

For example, one screenshot shows how a mention of "Caribbean" and "South Africa" brought up ads for a Thompson Caribbean Holiday and cheap flights to South African locations. Another email that mentioned divorce proceedings produced an ad for legal advice.

"All email service providers protect your inbox by scanning for spam, phishing attempts and malware, but not all email providers use the words from your email to show you ads," Microsoft's document reads.

By scanning all of your sent and received email messages to display targeted ads, Microsoft said that people who have never even used the service are caught up in Google's advertising reach.

Of course, Microsoft's primary goal is to get users to switch to Outlook.

Have a look: www.keepyouremailprivate.com/HowTheyDoIt

Google has launched Helpouts to 'help people help each other' using the convenience of the web and video conferencing.

The goal is to make it possible to find help for almost any problem you might have like how to fix your garage door, or how to remove a computer virus; or it might be guidance completing a project, like building a deck, or to learn to have a basic conversation in a different language.

With Helpouts, you can choose who you get help from based on their qualifications, their availability, their price, their ratings and reviews. Brands already touted by Google as getting involved include Sephora, One Medical, Weight Watchers, Redbeacon (a Home Depot company), and Rosetta Stone.

Once you're in a Helpout, you can do more than just talk--you can share your computer screen, collaboratively edit a presentation, or record your Helpout.

Putting its money where its mouth is, Google offers a full money back guarantee if your experience lags your expectations.

For Now, Google Helpouts is starting small with only a few categories, but swing by helpouts.google.com and see what's available anyway.

A group of researchers are Cornell University have warned that the Bitcoin system is vulnerable to an attack that could allow a group to gradually take control over it.

The flaw, they allege, involves the process by which new Bitcoin is created. Bitcoins are mined by groups of computers working on a cryptographic problem, and at any given moment thousands of machines and many groups can be working to solve the same puzzle.

Here is where the Cornell researchers find the potential weakness. If one large mining group could game the system to keep the discovery of blocks quiet, then other groups may continue to mine to no avail while they move on. Hence, why it is described as a "selfish" attack.

"Once the system veers away from the happy mode where everyone is honest, there is no force that opposes the growth of really large pools that command control of the currency," wrote Professor Emin Surer.

You can read a more detailed description of the attack from Professor Surer on his blog post titled "Bitcoin is Broken".

Vitalik Buterin, technical editor of Bitcoin Magazine, is sceptical that such an attack would work in practice, because it would require that attackers change fundamental BitCoin software to manipulate the information sharing with the network.

Microsoft has a new ad for its Surface tablet that claims the device is for 'real work'.

If you recall, Microsoft promoted the Lenovo Yoga with Windows 8 over the iPad in an education setting with an ad that showed a class full of students struggling to type out promptly spoken words from the professor on an iPad, with the predictable exception being the one smiling student with the Windows 8 device using a real keyboard.

Now, without specifically mentioning the iPad, Microsoft has revisited education with a new ad showing a teacher promoting the Surface tablet as being for "real work."

"All my students have the brand new Surface, it has the new Windows, it comes with Office, has a real keyboard so they can do real work," he informs us.

"The battery lasts and lasts so after school, they can Skype, play games, or my favorite - do homework. Change is looking pretty good afterall."

As fascinated as Microsoft is with its own products, it has its work cut out for it as the iPad is clearly the more embraced device so far in an education setting. Just last week, Tim Cook said that Apple now owns 94 percent of the education market.

Sony is pushing out a system update for its PS Vita handheld console that includes PS4 Link - letting you connect with your PS4 system when it launches in ten days.

PS Vita 3.0 adds the PS4 Link app to the home screen. Using PS4 Link, you can use your PS Vita to remotely control a PS4 system, and play a range of PS4 games on your PS Vita screen. When you're playing a game on PS4 that supports second screen features, you can also display information from that game on your PS Vita and use it as a second screen. The previous "Remote Play" app on the PS Vita has been renamed to "PS3 Remote Play".

The update also brings improved Parental Controls to the PS Vita. Parents can use it to manage the duration of game play, and the use of games and videos that have parental controls. You can also control access to certain areas of the system, including the use of the Internet browser and Location Data.

Messaging improvements are also part of the update, with the Group Messaging application name and icon changed to Messages. You can now send and receive messages with friends and players on PS4 or on mobile devices installed with PlayStation App. The icon for the Party application has been changed. You can now voice chat and text chat with friends and players on PS4.

Call of Duty: Ghosts has been released but the developer behind the latest title in the franchise is prepared for slower sales due to the transition to next gen.

It took only 15 days for the previous CoD title, Black Ops II, to reach $1 billion in sales. Until the release of Grand Theft Auto V in October 2012, Black Ops II claimed the largest entertainment launch of all time.

With Call of Duty: Ghosts being released for PC, PlayStation 3 (PS3), Xbox 360 and Wii U today, sales will undoubtedly be very high, but Infinity Ward is expecting slower initial sales due to the release of Xbox One and PS4 later this month - both of which claim Ghosts as a launch title.

"Next-gen has historically created a bit of a challenge for all games from a numbers standpoint," Infinity Ward Executive Producer Mark Rubin told the BBC News website.

"It's definitely something we're aware of. I know talking to a lot of people, figuring out what they're going to buy is a problem. I think it will be spread out a little bit - it's harder to do the day-one [sales]... but I think we're in a good spot."

Reviews for Ghosts have been mixed so far, but unlikely to hurt its commercial success.

About a month ago Adobe confirmed that their systems were breached and user account details were compromised. Security researchers and hackers got their hands on the data and news started circulating the web.

The leaked data contains, among other data, email addresses and encrypted passwords. The encryption key is so far unknown, but it could be just a matter of time before all the data is decrypted and millions of email addresses are linked to corresponding passwords. That is because all the passwords seem to have been encrypted with either a very few keys or a single key. Security analysts have already managed to find the top 100 passwords from the millions of rows of data.

If your account was compromised your Adobe account was already locked a month ago. If, however, you are unsure if your email address was in Adobe's records (and it is quite likely that many of the 150 million users affected are), you can check online if your email address is included in the leaked data. This service is provided by a third party, and AfterDawn is in no way responsible for it's behaviour. While we believe the service is legit, there are no guarantees of it.

Motorola has confirmed its Moto G smartphone will be launched on November 13.

The device is a cheaper alternative to the company's flagship Moto X, but the manufacturer has not revealed too many specs of yet.

Via leaks, including a Phones4U card, we know that the device will most likely run on a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, 1GB RAM and have 8GB internal storage and a 5MP camera.