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T-Mobile USA has announced this week that for a limited time you can now purchase high-end smartphones for $0 down, with just a small increase in monthly payments.

For example, before the new move, the iPhone 5 cost $145.99 down with payments of $21 per month for two years. Now, the device is $0 down with 24 months of $27 payments.

"The number of reasons not to switch to T-Mobile this summer is ZERO," added John Legere, president and CEO. "This is a fantastic offer and we're making it easier than ever for customers to get the latest amazing devices. Adding Zero Down in addition to JUMP!, and Simple Choice with no contract is all about making wireless work for consumers and shaking up this industry."

Zero down started yesterday, and will run for a limited period that the company has not specified. The JUMP program Legere mentioned costs $10 per month for insurance and allows you to upgrade your device for free twice per year, starting after six months.

To take advantage of both, you must be part of T-Mobile's no-contract Simple Choice plan, which costs $70 per month for unlimited text, talk and 4G data with no caps or throttling.

Netflix has announced that the final season of the hit show 'Breaking Bad' will air in the UK and Ireland immediately following the episode's original air date in the U.S.

Broadcaster AMC made a similar deal with Netflix UK for new episodes of "The Killing," making fans of the show overseas very happy that they will not have to wait 6 months or longer to legally see the episodes.

"We are thrilled to be bringing the highly-anticipated Final Season of Breaking Bad to Netflix members in the UK and Ireland on a first-run basis," said Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos. "Breaking Bad is a once in a generation calibre of show and continues to be a huge success on Netflix."

Creator of the show, Vince Gilligan said, "Netflix has been instrumental in making Breaking Bad the success that it is – particularly in the UK and Ireland, where it has built an audience and become a huge phenomenon. I am delighted that fans there will be able to enjoy the end of Breaking Bad on Netflix so soon after it airs in the US."

Breaking Bad follows the story of Walter White, a chemistry teacher who becomes a crystal meth kingpin using his scientific background to help pay for his cancer treatments. The show's final season will start airing on August 11th.

Research firm IDC has released their global market share figures for the smartphone market for the Q2 2013.

While Apple and Samsung remain the clear leaders, the real battle is for third place.

IDC estimates Samsung shipped 72.4 million smartphones during the quarter, followed by Apple at 31.2 million. Samsung's figure is 43.9 percent higher year-over-year and Apple's is 20 percent higher.

Samsung has the lion's share of the market, at 30.4 percent, down from 32.2 percent during the same quarter last year. Apple, despite the growth, fell to 13.1 percent share.

LG, Lenovo and ZTE rounded out the top five, with each seeing incredible growth. On the low end, ZTE saw 57.8 percent year-over-year growth, while LG saw 108 percent growth and Lenovo saw a massive 130.6 percent jump. LG shipped a record 12.1 million smartphones, as did Lenovo at 11.3 million and ZTE at 10.1 million.

Starbucks seems to be one of the few companies to successfully implement mobile payments.

The coffee company has just announced that a full 10 percent of payments in the U.S. are now made using smartphones and the Starbucks app.

For those who have not used the app, it is very simple. You get a Starbucks gift card, register the number with the app, and load money online, through the app or in-store. You can then pay in-store using the digital version of your card. Each purchase helps you towards rewards, like free drinks and food items.

Additionally, Starbucks's loyalty cards in North America saw dollars loaded grow by 30% year-over-year.

Finally, the company will begin installing wireless charging mats in more stores, with a full rollout expected for the end of next year.

Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos recently spoke with 'Arrested Development' series creator Mitch Hurwitz at a Q&A at the Just for Laughs comedy conference in Montreal and their answers should make fans happy.

Sarandos asked Hurwitz, "are we going to do more?" to which he responded, "Definitely."

The creator than went through a number of possibilities for the series' return, including a movie then another season, another season with no movie, or an extended three-part episode in the interim. "Are you game for that?" Hurwitz then asked Sarandos. "Absolutely, in any form," was the response.

Arrested was recently nominated for three Emmy awards, helping Netflix to twelve total nominations.

Speaking at an internal town hall event, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that the company built way too many Surface RT tablets, and that the company is not selling as many Windows devices as it would like to.

Ballmer, alongside COO Kevin Turner, spoke about the company's recent $900 million writedown due to excess Surface RT units and also discussed the company's focus on getting Facebook's Instagram on the Windows Phone platform.

Microsoft recently slashed the price of the Surface RT by 30 percent across the board, in an effort to move inventory. "We built a few more devices than we could sell," admitted Ballmer (via Verge).

Ballmer also confirmed the next-generation Surface tablets, without giving away any details. The new tablet is expected to be a minor update, but with improved specs, including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU.

Moving to Windows (tablets, smartphones and PCs), Ballmer also confirmed "we're not selling as many Windows devices as we want to."

Activision Blizzard will become an independent company, buying back shares from Vivendi for $8.2 billion.

The company, the world's largest video game publisher, will purchase 429 million of its shares for about $5.83 billion in cash. Additionally, CEO Robert A. Kotick, co-chairman Brian Kelly and an investor group will purchase 172 million shares for $2.34 billion.

Vivendi will stay as a minority 12 percent owner, and Kotick and Kelly will keep their positions. Investors seem to like the plan, as Activision's stock jumped 16 percent today.

Activision, which makes blockbuster games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, will "emerge stronger" from the move, says Kotick: "We should emerge even stronger. The transactions announced today will allow us to take advantage of attractive financing markets while still retaining more than $3 billion cash on hand to preserve financial stability."

While the Google Play Store sold out of stock early, Amazon, Wal-Mart and Best Buy have all put the device up for sale, as well, four days early.

Available both online and in-store (for the companies with brick-and-mortar presence), the device was supposed to launch on July 30th.

Other retail partners like B&H, RadioShack, OfficeMax, and Staples will make the device available on its scheduled date.

The new tablet will keep its predecessor's 7-inch display, run on the latest Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, and include a 1080p resolution, a large upgrade.

Under the hood is a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, 2GB RAM, and Adreno 320 GPU, NFC, dual cameras 1.2/5MP, dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and wireless charging support if you have a Qi-compatible charger. Additionally, the Nexus 7 supports OpenGL ES: 3.0, which supports higher-quality reflections, lens flares and other shading during gameplay.

Wikimedia has announced today that mobile editing is now enabled for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The beta version of the editor is available now, but will require a Wikimedia account.

"For our first release, our primary goal was to create a fast, intuitive editing experience for new users and experienced editors alike, while still sticking with markup editing for now," Wikimedia's Juliusz Gonera noted via their statement. "We started simple so we could observe our users' needs and expectations."

The company added that 15 percent of its users now access the site from mobile devices, with that number growing at an increasing clip.

Editing is easy. Get an account if you don't already have one, and head over to Wikipedia. Look for the edit (pencil) icon next to a section you may want to edit, and click on it. You'll be able to see a preview before submitting, as well, just like on a desktop.

Thanks to a new $30 million program, 640,000 kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District will receive free iPads.

The first 31,000 will be given to kids this year, with the full rollout planned before September 2014. The goal of the program is to give students technological skills they may not have, and a better way to learn.

Adds Mark Hovatter, the chief facilities executive for the LAUSD: "The most important thing is to try to prepare the kids for the technology they are going to face when they are going to graduate. This is phase one, a mix of high school, middle school, and elementary students. We're targeting kids who most likely don't have their own computers or laptops or iPads. Their only exposure to computers now is going to be in their schools."

Every iPad will be pre-loaded with educational applications, as well as a few other apps that will help students with their studies.

The district has 1,124 schools (K-12), and the first deployment is hitting the first 49 of those schools.

Despite a small decline in mobile sales, Samsung posted a record $8.5 billion profit last quarter.

The company's operating profit was 47 percent higher year-over-year, but still slightly below analyst expectations.

On the surprise side, Samsung's mobile division revenue fell 3.5 percent from last quarter, but still rose 52 percent year-over-year to $5.6 billion.

Samsung says it expects smartphone sales to remain strong in the third quarter, but that sales will grow at a slower pace than previous quarters: "Entering into a typically strong season for the IT industry, we expect earnings to continue to increase. However, we cannot overlook delayed economic recovery in Europe and risks from increased competition for smartphone and other set products."

In other divisions, Samsung posted an operating profit of $1.6 billion for their semiconductor unit, and $1 billion for their display unit.

Mega, Box and Dropbox have a new competitor, Shared.com.

Shared allows users to drag and drop files into a cloud and share it with others, with others able to download without speed restrictions.

The site gives away 100GB free space, well above the competitors, with a file size limit of 2GB.

"We are taking additional time to understand the specific needs of our early adopters and making specific changes to accommodate suggestions from our first group of users," said Florian Cervenka, CTO of the project, when asked about traffic.

Try it out here: Shared.com

Microsoft has made its Internet Explorer 11 browser available as a developer preview for Windows 7 users.

The browser will be built into the upcoming Windows 8.1, and then made fully available for Windows 7.

With over 700 million Windows 7 users in the world, keeping the operating system updated with the latest software is a key part of Microsoft's strategy.

While the versions are similar, the Windows 7 IE11 preview will be missing some of the features of its Windows 8.1 version.

ZD has those differences listed:

-In the Windows 7 version of IE11, the URL bar remains at the top of the browser (like it is with IE10 on Windows 7). IE11 for Windows 8.1 puts the URL bar at the bottom.
-Support for up to 100 simultaneously opened tabs per window isn't enabled in IE11 on Windows 7. (Officials said this is because IE11 on Windows 7 is a desktop/Win32 app, not a "modern"/Metro-Style one.)
-IE11 on Windows 7 won't support for premium video extensions like the 8.1 version does. "There are many solutions available for Windows 7 customers to stream and view protected content online, those methods will continue to function for customers," a spokesperson confirmed. (Read: Silverlight and Flash.)
-No support for Google's SPDY protocol (the precursor to HTTP 2.0) in IE11 on Windows 7. IE11 on Windows 8.1 does support SPDY.
-IE11 on Windows 7 will not support Enhanced Protected Mode browser security enhancements. (IE10 on Windows 7 didn't, either.)
-The UI Responsiveness tab is disabled in the F12 developer tools. However, support for this will be coming by the time the final version of IE11 for Windows 7 is released, thanks to "an update to the underlying Windows 7 platform."

Sony has quickly confirmed which of its devices will be receiving the brand new Android 4.3 operating system.

There is no roadmap for the phones/tablets getting the OS, but here is the list:

Yesterday you probably saw Google announce the next version of Jelly Bean (Android 4.3) – we're already getting stuck in and can confirm we'll make 4.3 available for: Xperia Z, Xperia ZL, Xperia ZR, Xperia Tablet Z, Xperia SP and Xperia Z Ultra

Sony just recently upgraded their Xperia Z and Xperia ZL devices to 4.2, and the Xperia ZR and Xperia Tablet Z will see a rollout in August.

Google just announced Android 4.3 yesterday with the launch of the 2013 Nexus 7.

Geeksphone has made their first consumer "Boot to Gecko" smartphone available for pre-order today, the Peak+.

The device is not a certified Firefox OS device, but does use pre-release versions of the open-source operating system.

Upgrading from its developer cousins, the Peak and Keon, the Peak+ runs on a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 1GB RAM, has 4GB internal storage (expandable with microSD), an 8MP camera and an 1800 mAh battery.

Out of the box, the Peak+ will run on Firefox OS 1.1, which has many bug fixes, and faster load times. Additionally it comes with 25GB of free cloud storage.

The Peak+ can be reserved for €149 with a September release date.