Avatar movie franchise is coming to your phone as a mobile strategy game

Kabam has announced plans to release a massively multiplayer mobile strategy game that will be based on the Avatar sci-fi movie franchise from writer-director James Cameron.

Kabam, which has most recently launched Marvel Contest of Champions and Star Wars Uprising, stated in its press release that it will be working closely with 20th Century Fox and Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment on the Avatar game.

The new product will combine the characters and environments from the Avatar films with an innovative game design and the highest production values to bring the world of Pandora to life.

No release date for the Avatar mobile game was announced. The original Avatar movie was released in theaters in 2009 and went on to become the biggest international box office hit of all time (without adjusting for inflation), bring in over $2.7 billion. Cameron has plans to release four sequels to Avatar, with the first due out in December 2018.

When you buy a Chromebook, get as much storage as you can

Size matters when it comes to the storage space on your next Chromebook. Go as big as you can!

Chromebooks are inexpensive laptops, and some people even go as far as calling them network appliances. They fit the bill for the most part — they are designed to use remote servers for file storage (think Google Drive) and are a great interface to a computer network (the internet). But they also can run local programs, and with Android apps and the Play store coming to Chromebooks, they’ll be running even more of those local apps.

The Chromebook Flip’s 16GB of storage is going to become an issue.

We’ve been saying for a while that your next Chromebook should have a touch screen, and we can add another must-have to that list — the model with the biggest “hard drive”. Yes, the word hard drive is in quotes. That’s because most Chromebooks use internal flash memory and not a spinning disk, but we want to make sure everyone knows what we’re talking about here — you want as much space as you can get for Chrome apps, Android apps and files you download or create. The ASUS Chromebook Flip (which has Android apps and Google Play for testing on the Chrome Dev channel) is a great little laptop to run both Chrome and Android apps. But the 16GB of storage will prove to be a pain-point for a lot of us.

Google says new Chromebooks that are better suited to run Android apps are coming. We hope that means models with more storage! Just like your Android phone or iPhone, 16GB just isn’t enough once you deduct the space taken by the system and start adding some apps. A 16GB (and maybe even a 32GB) Chromebook isn’t going to be any different. It already takes a bit of file management for some of us, and that’s before we add Google Play apps into the mix.

We know the folks who make laptops like to charge more for premium features like high-capacity drives, but this is one time where we need to bite the bullet and pay up. If you’re in the market for a Chromebook — whether it’s your first or you’re just shopping for an upgrade — storage space is important. Buy as big as you can afford once Chromebooks with more storage become available.

Facebook launches Save and Share extensions for Chrome

Sharing and saving content around the web via Facebook just got a little easier if you’re using Chrome. That’s because the social network just announced the launch of two new Chrome extensions, appropriately called “Share to Facebook” and “Save to Facebook,” that do just that.

As you’d expect, using either extension is a simple affair. The Save to Facebook extension allows you to save articles to read later on Facebook with one click, much like Pocket. The Share extension, on the other hand, will allow you to create a post and share your current page to Facebook from anywhere.

If you’d like to try either extension, you can grab Save to Facebook or Share to Facebook on the Chrome Web Store now.

VPInput lets you quickly bounce between your PC and LG phone

LG has announced a new app for its G4, G5, and V10 smartphones that wirelessly connects them to your PC. Called VPInput, the app allows you to control your phone using your PC’s mouse and keyboard.

You can also easily transfer things between PC and phone, according to LG:

With VPInput on the phone and the accompanying program installed on the PC, text copied from a Word document on the PC can be pasted directly into your smartphone and a screen shot from your smartphone can easily be displayed on your PC monitor. What’s more, the function keys on the PC keyboard can be setup as shortcuts to launch your favorite smartphone features or apps.

LG VPInput is now available on the Google Play Store for those with compatible phones.

Microsoft reveals Windows 10 Anniversary Update release date by mistake

Someone at Microsoft appears to have hit publish a little too soon.

The company just announced that the first major update to Windows 10 will become available 2 August. Microsoft published a blog post early Tuesday to reveal the news, with the headline “Microsoft announces Windows 10 Anniversary Update available Aug. 2”, but the full post was pulled down just moments later, leading many eagle-eye fans to believe the post must’ve been published by accident.

You can see a web archive version of the original blog post from here. It’s unclear if Microsoft published the wrong information or simply hit the publish button early, but we can expect the Redmond-based company to make an official announcement sooner rather than later. We’re also assuming the information in the now-deleted post’s headline is correct: Windows 10’s Anniversary Update will arrive this August.

Microsoft (Web archive)

Microsoft first announced its Windows 10 Anniversary Update in March during the annual Build developer conference. At the time, Microsoft only said the update would arrive “this summer”. The software is set to bring new features that focus on Windows Ink and improving stylus-use. It’ll also bring extensions for Edge and upgrades for Hello and Cortona, among other things. You can read all about the update from here. 

The Anniversary Update should arrive around the 1-year anniversary of Window 10’s release (which launched 29 July 2015). It’ll be free to everyone with a device running Windows 10. If you’re updating from an older version of Windows, you’ll have to pay $119 for a full install.