Latest news

In just 9 days since its launch in the Google Play Store, the Facebook Home user interface has been downloaded over 500,000 times.

The number is more notable since the software is only available for the HTC One, One X, Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4, and the Note II. Additionally, the software is default on the HTC First.

As explained by the social networking giant, Facebook Home "brings your News Feed to the surface, for access to important social updates without opening up additional applications."

Additionally, Facebook Home includes; Cover Feed, a constant, fresh stream of photos and updates directly from your news feed and is always present as soon as you wake up your phone; Notifications that appear right on your home screen; Chat Heads, the mobile messenger that lets you jump in and out of conversations while you multitask; App Launcher, which lets you view your favorite apps and post right to Facebook from the same spot.

Facebook has unveiled their newly redesigned logo alongside updated icons.

The new logo removes the blue bar that added a 3D effect, and also repositions the large "F."

Overall, the logos and icons are more "flat," following a wider industry trend of simplified logos that are more "visually striking," says Crunch.

Here are more of the updates:

Nintendo has confirmed that its Wii U Virtual Console will launch in the U.S. on Tuesday.

At launch, a full roster of NES and SNES titles will be available including hits like Super Mario World, F-Zero, Excitebike, Donkey Kong Jr, Super Metroid and Mega Man.

Additionally, the company will bring the cult classic hit "Earthbound" to the Virtual Console later in the year.

Moving forward, titles from handhelds such as the Game Boy Advance will also be made available via the service.

Because most old games did not offer save points, Nintendo has created "Restore Points" for them, allowing gamers to pause and restart later.

Benchmarking company Futuremark recently tested 258 Android devices.

Using their 3DMark benchmark tests, the Ouya came in 92nd place in performance, falling far behind newer flagship phones like the, Galaxy S4, Nexus 4 and HTC One and tablets such as the Xperia Tablet Z and Galaxy Note 8.

Of course, the test were run on the Kickstarter dev kits and really only test raw technical capabilities. The console uses a quad-core Tegra 3 T33.

The device raised almost $9 million from Kickstarter, but most reviews have claimed the dev models are not ready for retail. The retail boxes go on sale via retailers like Amazon in early June.

Full list here: Futuremark

Nintendo long stayed away from digital sales, but that changed last year as Nintendo fell behind rivals.

President Reggie Fils-Aime now says digital downloads are bringing healthy profits to the company, and the figure is still trending higher.

"We have 15 Nintendo-published titles available, both physically and digitally [on the 3DS]," says Fils-Aime. "So far in 2013, of those 15 available in this format, 11 percent of sales have come through full digital downloads of those games."

Some games are more successful than others, such as Fire Emblem Awakening. The game has sold 240,000 units, 80,000 of which have been in digital.

The exec was outright giddy about the prospects of the 3DS, which has seen strong sales, in hardware and software: "When the NPD numbers come out later this week, you're going to see life-to-date 3DS game sales surpass 20 million units in the US. And that's just physical. It doesn't include digital sales. ... So far in 2013 - through April 15 - 3DS game sales are up 55 percent versus last year, counting both physical and digital."

An ex-Sega engineer has shown off a "Sega Pluto" prototype console that was never released.

The console is a Sega Saturn in hardware and software, but also included a built-in NetLink 28.8k dial-up modem for Internet connectivity and online multiplayer.

There are only two Pluto models in existence, and the unit shown off is a fully functioning NTSC model.

Says the engineer, "After a good 14 years or so of sitting on this, I've decided it's time to share a little bit of Sega lore with those who would appreciate it most. Sega is a company with a history of turmoil. Employee turnover is a sad theme, and the Sonic Reaper (as we call him) strikes all too frequently. As such, the past gets forgotten quickly - treasures from the previous generation are quickly cast aside, as a new regime tries to make a name for themselves (or justify their existence).

"As such, some of said treasures get left on laid-off-peoples' desks. And in a beautiful twist of fate, this beauty ended up finding its way to my desk, and then in a box with the rest of my stuff when I left Sega. I was told that only two of these prototypes were made - and this is #2."

After auctioning off most of their intellectual property in January, bankrupt gaming company THQ has auctioned off the rest of their IP.

Some of the more notable properties were Red Faction, Darksiders and Homeworld.

There were 17 bids made, and the IP is expected to bring in $6 million. The offers will now be presented to the bankruptcy court, and the sales will be completed by May.

The IP was split into 6 different auctions; Darksiders series; Red Faction series; Homeworld series; MX series; Other Owned Software, including Big Beach Sports, Destroy All Humans!, Summoner, and more; Other Licensed Software, including Marvel Super Hero, Supreme Commander, Worms, and more.

Crytek, makers of Crysis, are expected to have bid for Darksiders.

Nintendo has released the 3DS XL Circle Pad Pro in the US.

The accessory adds an additional analog stick to the handheld console, and is compatible with a number of games including hits like Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, Resident Evil: Revelations, Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D and Kid Icarus: Uprising.

Nintendo is selling the peripheral exclusively through their online store in the U.S., for $20.

President Satoru Iwata said last year the company would not be selling a refreshed 3DS XL with two analogs, preferring to keep the form factor smaller.


The Circle Pad Pro had been available in Japan and Europe.

MSI has unveiled their All-in-One gaming PC, a few months after announcing it at CES.

The AG2712 packs a massive 27-inch 1080p matte display with 10-point multitouch support.

Under the hood is a mobile Core i7 CPU and a Nvidia GTX 670MX graphics card with 3GB of dedicated memory. The system is powered by 12GB DDR3 RAM which can be expanded to 16GB. Making bootup quick is a 128GB SSD and internal storage is a 1TB 3.5" HDD.

MSI has added a 2MP webcam, a Blu-ray drive, a 3-in-1 card reader, two 5W speakers, Gigabit ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI-out, HDMI-in (that's a big deal) and the other standard ports and features.

Twitter has announced that it will killing off support for the Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers in its Twitter for Websites service.

While the current (basic) functionality will still work, Twitter will no longer care about the browsers. If features break IE6 or 7 in the future, so be it.

Twitter for Websites lets devs and content publishers embed Tweets into apps, websites and more. The company says by dumping old browser support, they can execute "simpler, faster, smaller code."

These are the features that will be killed after May 13th:

The Tweet button, Follow button, embedded Tweets and timelines will cease to be initialized in IE6. The script will detect the unsupported browser and silently exit, but the content from the embed codes will remain in place.

Factory functions for the creation of widgets will be defined, but will return false to any callback provided in IE6. Widgets will still be rendered in IE7, but the browser will have limited support and future features may not be implemented.

E-tailing behemoth Amazon has announced it will expand operations to Russia.

The company has opened its first office in the nation, to be lead by Arkady Vitrouk, the director of Kindle Content for Amazon in Russia.

By doing some digging, it also appears Amazon is hiring Russia-specific positions for the Kindle business, including a senior product manager for Kindle content pricing, and a principal for content acquisition for Kindle Russia.

Additionally, Amazon has applied for patents in Russia for storage and delivery of goods; the storage of electronic texts and media files and book publishing, all the divisions you could imagine for them in an expansion.

Amazon recently announced it was taking its Android Appstore to 200 new countries.

Russia does not have a strong delivery infrastructure, and credit card penetration is light, as well, which could prove to be issues for Amazon at the onset.

Twitter has confirmed that it will be shutting down TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone on May 7th.

The company first announced the news in March without a definitive time frame.

Additionally, all Facebook integration to TweetDeck products will be shut down, as well. TweetDeck for Mac and PC will remain active, and will update alongside the Chrome versions.

Twitter purchased the company in May, 2011 for $40 million, three years after it launched. The app grew very popular with Android and iOS power users.

Lookout, the popular security suite for Android devices has announced the discovery of BadNews, a malware family that has affected many downloaders.

The affected applications have been downloaded up to 9 million times, combined, and Google has only just shut down the developer accounts and the applications thanks to Lookout's warning.

In their report, firm describes the malware: "BadNews masquerades as an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network. This is one of the first times that we've seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network. Because it's challenging to get malicious bad code into Google play, the authors of Badnews created a malicious advertising network, as a front, that would push malware out to infected devices at a later date in order to pass the app scrutiny. Badnews has the ability to send fake news messages, prompt users to install applications and sends sensitive information such as the phone number and device ID to its Command and Control (C&C) server. BadNews uses its ability to display fake news messages in order to push out other types of monetization malware and promote affiliated apps."

Yahoo has announced this week that it will be killing off even more services this month as it continues to streamline.

The company will shut down Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, older versions of Yahoo Mail and J2ME apps for Mail and Messengers.

Earlier this month, the company killed off seven products, including Avatars, the Yahoo BlackBerry app, Clues, app search, Sports IQ, Message Boards, and its Updates API.

Says Yahoo: "Ultimately, we're making these changes in an effort to sharpen our focus. By continuing to hone in on our core products and experiences, we'll be able to make our existing products the very best they can be."

Additionally, Yahoo breaks down the product kills (via TNW):

Here's the breakdown:

Upcoming: On April 30, it will be shut down along with support for the Upcoming API. If you have uploaded events to the site, you can download your information here.
Yahoo Deals: On April 30, it will be shut down. If you have coupons, you can find instructions on how to save them here.
Yahoo SMS Alerts: On April 30, it will be shut down. Yahoo is instead pushing users to stay up-to-date via its mobile apps including Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and horoscope alerts on Yahoo.com. You can still go to alerts.yahoo.com and select to receive your alerts via email or Yahoo! Messenger.
Yahoo Kids: On April 30, it will be shut down. Yahoo recommends its users who are under 13 can instead register for a Yahoo ID through the company's Family Accounts program, use Yahoo Mail, Messenger, and Movies.
Yahoo Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME) apps: On April 30, they will be shut down. Yahoo will continue to support Yahoo Mail and Messenger via mobile web for feature phone users. Everyone else is told to use Yahoo Mail apps for Android, iOS, and Windows 8 or Yahoo Messenger apps for Android and iOS.
Older versions of Yahoo Mail (including Yahoo Mail Classic): Beginning the week of June 3, they will be shut down. Users will be switched to the new Yahoo Mail. Users on dial-up or an older browser will be moved to a basic (HTML only) version of the new Yahoo Mail.

Asus, long the manufacturing leader of graphics cards, has quietly fallen to third in the market.

PALiT and PC Partner moved into first and second place, respectively.

While PALiT does most of its sales under its own brand name, it also builds cards under the brands Galaxy, Gainward, Yuan, Vvikoo, Daytona and XpertVision. PALiT only sells cards using Nvidia GPUs.

PC Partner does not sell using its own name, and brands completely under the "Zotac" and "Sapphire" names. Sapphire uses only AMD chips and Zotac only Nvidia.

Fourth place was taken by MSI and fifth by Gigabyte, the popular motherboard makers.