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Samsung has unveiled their first ever Android 4.0 tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2.

The 7-inch tablet (WSVGA display 1024x600 PLS TFT LCD) will run on a Samsung 1GHz dual-core processor with 1GB RAM. The tablet has a 3MP standard camera and a VGA camera up front.

Furthermore, the device will have standard HSPA+, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS, a microSD slot and a larger-sized 4,000mAh battery all in a 10.5mm thin tablet.

The tablet will be available with 8, 16 or 32GB of internal storage.

Samsung has equipped the device with its own TouchWiz UI, including features like Live Panel, Samsung Apps support, Hub support, S Suggest, Kies Air, ChatON and Allshare Play.

Although it is set for official release tomorrow, fans of the game can now play via Facebook.

Rovio announced last month that Valentine's Day would mark the day for "the biggest Facebook event ever," as the developer planned to release the blockbuster mobile game Angry Birds on the platform.

What will separate the Facebook version from the game available on other platforms is you will get powerups that can help you beat the pigs, a feature not available on mobile versions. Additionally, you can invite friends to top your high score after you've played, adding a bit of fun between your presumably real-life friends.

The game uses Adobe's Flash, and you can play in full screen, with no quality loss.

Arctic has a few screenshots:

Apple has moved its attack on Samsung back to the U.S., after spending a year trying to take the company down in Germany and other European nations.

The latest complaint directly targets the Galaxy Nexus, the first Android 4.0 device to be released. The company is looking for an injunction on sales of the device in the U.S.

Four patents are in focus, including one for Siri, one for unified search, one for slide-to-unlock technology and word completion for touch screens.

All of the patents are very new, and were issued in the last few months. Patent specialist Florian Mueller says the patents "are the patent equivalent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Because Apple already won its ITC suit for the "data tapping" patent, the company will almost certainly win again this time, adds Mueller.

A number of sites have leaked specs for the alleged HTC Endeavor smartphone, which could be unveiled at this month's Mobile World Congress.

Making the phone notable is the fact that it will be powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3, the first phone to have a quad-core processor, and the first HTC device to feature Nvidia hardware.

The phone will have a large 4.7-inch 720p screen, an 8-megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, and a quad-band HSPA+ radio. With Ice Cream Sandwich, HTC's Sense 4.0 UI and Beats Audio, the phone will certainly be one of the most powerful and feature-packed in the market.

All current and past HTC smartphones feature Qualcomm processors, but HTC CFO Winston Yung recently noted that the company would be moving to different component suppliers into the future.

Activision Publishing chief Eric Hirshberg seems to believe that the upcoming game will be revolutionize the series.

Speaking on an investor conference call this week, Hirshberg said the "next Call of Duty will bring meaningful innovation to the series." The next game, expected to be Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, will be released later this year.

The exec would not elaborate further but the series has seen some user criticism recently from those who think the series is a lot of "the same" just with a new name and new maps.

2011's Modern Warfare 3 was an unequivocal success, bringing in over $1 billion in sales in just 16 days. Last November, the game helped the video game industry enjoy its best November, ever.

The company will also be updating its CoD: Elite subscription service to version 2.0, soon: "Elite has been a great success. It has generated seven million subscribers and 1.5 million premium members. That's very important to us ? there was a lot of risk in establishing it. So now we're thinking about how we further pursue those kinds of opportunities."

Internet consulting firm DeepField Networks did some digging and it seems that the high-profile take down of major cyberlocker Megaupload has done nothing to affect global piracy.

The firm analyzed Web traffic from six companies, says BGR, "that provide the storage facilities responsible for roughly 80 percent of all file-sharing traffic" and found that piracy is still alive and well, despite triumphant statements from the US government and trade groups like the MPAA.

In the days leading up to the shutdown, Megaupload accounted for about 35 percent of all file-sharing downloads. When a global raid took the site down last month, the entire Internet saw traffic fall about 2 percent. The US DOJ had certainly caught their big fish in the ongoing fight against copyright infringement.

However, within days, the traffic had recovered as users moved on to Rapidsahre, Putlocker, FileFactory and MediaFire, says DeepField, completely negating the takedown.

What will be the main impact of the MegaUpload takedown? DeepField concludes: "Well, file sharing has not gone away. It did not even decrease much in North America. Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links."

Following in the footsteps of Best Buy, Wal-Mart has started a Valentine's Day promotion in which they give away $50 gift cards with the purchase of select phones.

The deal is only available at brick-and-mortar Wal-Marts, however.

Furthermore, the iPhone, on all carriers, is excluded as are most of the better phones available from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

Finally, you can only take advantage of the deal if you are signing up for a new two-year contract or have an eligible renewal.

The deal ends on Valentine's Day, this Tuesday.

Netflix was forced to restate its previous quarter's earnings this week, following its settlement of a lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which alleged Netflix violated consumer-privacy laws, was settled for $9 million, forcing the company to restate its earnings by 14 percent.

In January, the company announced strong earnings and a surprising gain of 600,000 subscribers, its first significant gain in months. Following its PR disaster year of 2011, where its stock fell from over $300 to $60 per share, the company's stock has rebounded and now sits at over $120.

Netflix is expected to report a loss for 2012, thanks to its massive expansion plans into the UK, Ireland, Latin America, the Caribbean and its investment into original programming.

The lawsuit had alleged that since Netflix retains the records of what DVDs customers rent or stream for up to two years after they cancel, they are breaking the Video Privacy Protection Act, which was put into action in 1987. The Act specifically states that all "personally identifiable information must be destroyed within a year from the date that the information is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected."

This looks to be the end for Adobe's Flash.

Apple started the trend by blocking Flash from its iOS devices. The company then stopped developing its Flash player for Android and BlackBerry within a few months. Finally, Google's latest update to the Chrome browser does not support the most recent version of Flash.

Now, it appears that Internet Explorer for Windows 8 on ARM devices won't support Flash, either.

Windows 8, at least for ARM-based devices, will not support web plug-ins at all, due to their propensity to lead to unstable performance and worse battery life. Plug-in free browsers will be the future, as HTML5 and JavaScript continue to improve, but Flash still remains as one of the top standards, making its very quick demise somewhat surprising.

According to Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley, Amazon is building an 8.9-inch model of the Kindle Fire for release this year.

Additionally, the company will release an updated 7-inch model sometime "during the summer," less than a year after the launch of the first generation tablet.

For the year, Bartley has raised his shipment forecast to 15 million in 2012, up from 12.7 million.

Adds the analyst: "We believe there is an upward bias, particularly from the new 7- and 9-inch models, which we expect to launch in mid-2012."

There have been rumors of a family of Fire products for some time now, including a 4-inch smartphone, a 10-inch tablet and the "in-between" 8.9-inch tablet.

AT&T, one of the kings of bleeding consumers dry, has announced it will be doubling its upgrade fee for new handsets.

Whenever a subscriber upgrades to a new handset after signing a new contract, the fee is currently $18. Starting tomorrow, that fee will be doubled to $36.

Says the carrier: "Wireless devices today are more sophisticated than ever before. And because of that, the costs associated with upgrading to a new device have increased and is reflected in our new upgrade fee. This fee isn't unique to AT&T and this is the first time we're changing it in nearly 10 years."

It is not entirely clear what "costs" are actually associated with the upgrade, as all it takes to switch phones is to switch SIM cards over being that AT&T is a GSM operator.

Regardless, AT&T users should take note that next time they upgrade their phone, expect a heftier fee.

Spotify goes 'extreme.'

Premium users of the Spotify service have access to unlimited streaming on their mobile devices, but there has always been questions about the quality of the streams. The company has put those questions to rest this week, adding an 'extreme' option.

Until this week, there were only two options, "low" at 96kbps and "high" at 160kbps. While the high quality was probably okay for quick listening on the way to work, the quality certainly left audiophiles with expensive headphones hoping for more.

The new "extreme" mode bumps mobile streaming to 320kbps, the highest bit rate available in the MP3 container.

For now, extreme is available only for iOS, with the update headed to Windows Phone and Android soon.

Blizzard's experiment seems to have paid off in a big way.

Last year, Blizzard introduced the World of Warcraft Annual Pass deal, which give users a free copy of Diablo 3 and 12 months of game time in World of Warcraft. The subscription package costs £8.99 per month, for a grand total of £107.88 per player for the year.

At 1 million subscribers "in the west," the pass seems to be a large success.

More importantly for the company, after the first subscriber dip in years last year, the game appears to be headed back to growth.

Finally, Blizzard CEO Mark Morhaime noted that updates to the game have "contributed to retaining our players in the wake of competitive launches," naming Star Wars: The Old Republic without actually naming the game.

Tencent, the Chinese mobile game platform and microblogging company, has confirmed they have now hit 200 million registered users on the gaming side.

13 million users are actively playing every day, with an average of 1 million concurrent gamers at any given point.

The company offers support on Symbian, Java, Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7, alongside HTML5 versions of the platform for in-browser gaming, making it available to almost everyone in China's fragmented mobile phone market.

Tencent still only has around 30 games, but they are adding more casual games weekly. A few of the most popular titles are Chinese Tetris and Chess. The platform is linked closely to the Weibo microblogging service, which has 250 million users and is the Chinese version of Twitter.

At 200 million, the gaming platform almost rivals that of Zynga, which has over 225 million users via Facebook and smartphones. In fact, both companies tied up in the past to offer a Chinese version of the popular CityVille game, dubbed "Zynga City" on Tencent.

Eldar Murtazin has posted today that the Samsung Galaxy S II and Note devices will be getting Android 4.0 on March 1st.

Murtazin, the controversial blogger known for breaking news stories and being completely wrong on many others, tweeted the details:

"Android 4 aka ics for sgs2 will be officially available from march 1(depends from country/operator). Update over the air or using kies."

Late last year, Samsung confirmed the devices would be getting ICS, but stuck with the press-friendly time table of "in the first quarter 2012."

For now, Samsung has not confirmed the date so it will remain as a Murtazin rumor, but the date should make owners happy as the ICS update is the most highly anticipated software update for Android, to date.