Apple game of the year ‘Monument Valley’ is now free on iOS
If you’re looking for a free iOS game, an interesting new option has just opened up. Puzzle-adventure game Monument Valley managed to pull off the hat trick of being fun, zen and beautiful all at the same time — which helped garner it Apple’s Game of the Year and Design awards for 2014. The title, normally $4, is now showing as “free,” though there’s no word on how long that offer will last. After launching in May last year, it had earned $5.8 million by January 2015, mostly from sales to iOS gamers (creator Ustwo said that only 5 percent of Android sales were paid).
Via: @Wario64 (Twitter)
Source: iTunes
Google’s Christmas Santa Tracker is up and running – the countdown begins!
Winter is coming and December has just taken off. ‘Tis the season, and for Google enthusiasts that means much more than great food, gifts, frosty snow and colorful homes. It’s time for Santa Tracker to begin its exciting countdown to Christmas!
For those of you who may be out of the loop, Santa Tracker is a Google tradition of sorts by now. It does much more than count down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until December 25th. The site is full of games, educational material and very fun interactive content.
What’s interesting about Santa Tracker is that more games show up daily, as we get closer to Christmas. Today’s special activity happens to be a coloring game. There’s also a tool that teaches you how people celebrate Christmas in other countries, as well as a code training tool that will help you polish the fundamentals of developing. If you want some fun, you can also click on the parachuting Santa and dive right into your location!
Needless to say there is a fun reason to come back to the Santa Tracker every day, so bookmark the website and keep checking it daily! It’s fun as hell. I happen to follow it every single December. Will you?
Download free Christmas tunes from Mariah Carey, Blake Shelton and Josh Groban from the Google Play Store
Google has a few Christmas albums for you to download at the Google Play Store free of charge. If you love Christmas music, you can download Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas (Google Play Exclusive Version), Blake Shelton’s Cheers, it’s Christmas, and Josh Groban’s Noel albums all free of charge. You will need to sign into your Google account in order to download the albums for free.
If you do not have a free account, you can create one here and the music will be yours to own for the life of your Google account. Mariah Carey’s album does include her famous “All I want for Christmas is you” song.
Google’s Santa tracker is also back and can be found at www.santatracker.google.com or at the Google Play Store by following this link.
Download links:
Mariah Carey – Merry Christmas
Blake Shelton – Cheers, it’s Christmas
Josh Groban – Noel
Google Play Store
The post Download free Christmas tunes from Mariah Carey, Blake Shelton and Josh Groban from the Google Play Store appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Hololens (briefly) shown streaming ‘Halo 5’ and Netflix
We’ve known for awhile that you can beam practically anything to Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, Hololens, but seeing someone playing Halo 5 on a TV that seemingly appears out of thin air is still pretty damned neat. And it’s not just Microsoft’s disappointing first-person shooter that’s getting the augmented-reality treatment: Candy Crush and a Netflix stream by way of an Edge browser window are on display as well. The clips below are brief and look pretty impressive, but based on firsthand experience with the device, these videos don’t quite line up with the actual user experience.
Via: Thurrott
Source: Varun Mani (YouTube)
60 HD wallpapers of majestic animals from around the globe
Sometimes all we need to do is stop and look at the majestic animals sharing the globe with us for beauty. We’ve selected 60 HD wallpapers of beautiful animals from around the world, from fish to lions, we hope you can appreciate them too. I particularly love the Pandas, Lions, Polar bears, and Elephants but still adore them all.
Check out the wallpapers and download as many as you would like.
The wallpapers are all in the scrolling images above, and if you want to save them, follow these instructions:
- Click the left/right arrows to scroll through the images
- Maximize the image you like by clicking on it
- Long press or hold down on the image and click “save”
- Go to your gallery or Google Photos and find your image
- Click “use as” and then click wallpaper
If you see a wallpaper that belongs to you and you would like to receive credit, I would love to give it to you! Just drop a comment in the section provided below with some proof (You know, just so we don’t have people claiming things that are not theirs…) So, please choose those that you like and enjoy!
The post 60 HD wallpapers of majestic animals from around the globe appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Wikipedia’s AI can automatically spot bad edits
Wikipedia has a new artificial intelligence service, and it could make the website a lot friendlier to newbie contributors. The AI, called Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES), will scour newly submitted revisions to spot any additions that look potentially spammy or trollish. Its creator, the Wikimedia Foundation, says it “functions like a pair of X-ray specs” (hence the image above) since it highlights anything that seems suspicious; it then sets that particular article aside for human editors to look at more closely. If the Wiki staff decides to pull a revision down, the contributor will get notified — that’s a lot better than the website’s current practice of deleting submissions without any explanation.
Source: Wikimedia
Could we see a Huawei Nexus 7 in 2016?
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It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a new Nexus 7 – and no, the Nexus 9 doesn’t count because it was a premium tablet. We’re talking about the cheap, yet noteworthy tablets that Asus manufactured in 2012 and 2013, and with Google‘s new take on having one cheap device (Nexus 5X) paired with a premium device (Nexus 6P), you could have been forgiven for expecting Google to launch a new Nexus 7 next year. If a report on Weibo is to be believed, that Nexus 7 might be already under development and at a manufacturer that Google has only recently gotten close to – Huawei. A Huawei Nexus 7 would be expected to be announced around October, when Nexus devices are now almost expected to launched.
Apart from a possible manufacturer and release date, there’s not a whole lot of detail to share – it’s still early days so it’s worth taking this news with a grain of salt, or two. Still, with the market for flagship and premium devices faltering, it’s definitely within the realm of possibility that a new Nexus 7 belongs somewhere in Google’s device portfolio – we hope.
What do you think about a Huawei Nexus 7? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Weibo via TalkAndroid
The post Could we see a Huawei Nexus 7 in 2016? appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
Half of Airbnb’s New York City hosts are breaking the law
New York’s Attorney General already suspects that most Airbnb rentals in New York City are dodgy, and he now has some extra evidence to back up that claim… from Airbnb itself. The room sharing service has published data which, when given a close inspection, reveals that 55 percent of NYC hosts are (typically) violating the law by renting out whole apartments while they’re gone. They’re not necessarily setting up illegal hotels, but the Attorney General’s 2014 report revealed that 37 percent of revenue came from hosts with three or more listings. Unless there’s been a change in the past year, the odds are high that some of those recent hosts are abusing Airbnb to make a tidy profit.
Omate Rise is a smartwatch with 3G support for only $200
There are many smartwatches on the market and most run Android Wear. However, what if you want a smartwatch that runs full Android and is 3G-enabled? Well, look no further than the Omate Rise.
Omate has previously made an Android powered smartwatch that, to me, didn’t really look the best. However, times have changed with the Omate Rise. It looks way better than the previous Omate watch, and even features a real carbon fibre bezel. This gives it a very strong, modern, and sophisticated look.
On the inside, it features a 1.3-inch, 360 x 360 round LCD display, MediaTek’s MT2601 dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 CPU, a Mali-400 GPU, 512MB of RAM, a 580 mAh battery, and 4GB of storage. For the most important part, it can accept SIM cards with 3G HSPA connectivity on both 1900 MHz and 2100 MHz bands. This is excellent as it should run on any carrier in the US or Canada, unlike its previous version. Also, it runs full Android 5.1 meaning you should be able to run virtually any Android app you would like on it. If you want to use it more as an Android Wear device, you can receive notifications with phones running iOS 9 and up or Android 4.4 and up.
This watch is seriously packed with features too. It has a GPS radio, gyroscope, accelerometer, microphone, speaker, Bluetooth 4.1, sapphire coating on the glass, and changeable 22mm strap. The watch is even water resistant up to 10 meters deep.
You can get all of this for only $200! Just based on the specs and looks, this seems like a fantastic deal. The Omate Rise will be heading to Indiegogo on December 7th at 10am ET. Only the first 500 watches will be $200, the next 500 will be $209, and the rest for $220. What makes this deal even sweeter is, because the watch lacks a heart rate monitor, Omate will be including an external Bluetooth LE chest belt for the first 1000 watches sold!
This seems like a really awesome watch and pretty great deal, but you will have to hurry if you want one. The entire Indiegogo campaign will start on December 7th and only last 48 hours. Expect delivery in March 2016.
Source: Omate
Come comment on this article: Omate Rise is a smartwatch with 3G support for only $200
Samsung Galaxy S6 Active survives multiple slap shots
The Samsung Galaxy S6 Active is aimed at being a more rugged alternative to the normal Galaxy S6 for people with more rugged lives. However, just how strong is it? YouTube channel, Unbox Therapy, has decided to test just that by taking it out to a hockey arena and using it as the puck.
I expected the S6 Active to basically break right away, but it did way better than I would of guessed. It was used as a puck for pretty much every aspect of a hockey game from passing to slap shots.
Click here to view the embedded video.
The most insane part is it even survives not one, but two full-on slap shots. The only time it blew up was when one shot was just a little too hard and it hit the post. No phone will ever survive that. Obviously, we do not recommend you go out and try this with your S6 Active, but pretty cool to watch someone else do it.
Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy S6 Active survives multiple slap shots
AIVAnet 