Beep beep! We make it om nom time, so stop what you’re doing and tuck into a feast of top tech stories pulled together from this morning’s headlines. They’re all here ready and waiting for you in the lunchtime lowdown!
February, 2011
So we’re sitting here, minding our own business, opening the post like we do every day, when what should we find in an envelope but what would appear to be real, live bullets? No, we’re not being stalked – it turns out it’s a marketing ruse for Bulletstorm, the gory, OTT shooter out on Friday.
If Facebook Chat and Skype had a baby, it would be the Facebook Messenger iPhone app, currently in the iTunes Store for £1.79.
However, the app is by no means officially endorsed by Facebook. It taps into your Facebook contacts list and lets you make VoIP calls to them, share pictures and files and swap IM messages with push notifications for when you’re doing something else. It’s a great little app but surely VoIP is something Facebook should slip into its own app and the desktop version besides. Hear that sound? It’s the cogs in Mark Zuckerberg’s brain turning. Hurry up now…
Out now | £1.19 | iTunes
Minecraft iPhone and iPad apps are on the way. While unofficial Minecraft iPhone apps have popped up before, Markus “Notch” Persson, Minecraft’s creator and founder of Mojang, the studio which produces it, has confirmed a legit one is coming. Notch says the iOS game will feature only elements of Minecraft which “make sense” on a touch screen. We should see the Minecraft iPhone and iPad apps later this year but no definite release date has been announced yet.
Out TBC | £TBC | Minecraft (via Destructoid)
The iPad 2 is over the horizon but it could be getting even closer. Orange and T-Mobile have both slashed the price of the entry level iPad 3G and WiFi models. Orange is now selling the iPad 3G for £99 on a two-year contract and T-Mobile has gone ahead and matched that for exicting customers.
The iPad 3G UK price cut is £100 off Orange’s previous price for exciting customers. Clearing stock ahead of the iPad 2 makes sense and we really wouldn’t be surprised that Orange and T-Mobile are getting themselves ready for iPad 2′s glorious arrival. There’s no guarantees with Apple but we’re getting more and more certain that iPad 2 is just weeks away.
The HP TouchPad is going to drop in April if you believe the claims coming from DigiTimes. It says partsmakers have been gossiping that HP will ship the webOS tablet in April, two months earlier than previously predicted.
DigiTimes says HP will sling out up to 5 million HP TouchPad units initially and is aiming to give the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 and Motorola Xoom a run for their money. The question is: does the webOS tablet appeal to you more than the idea of iPad 2?
Worried about Android Honeycomb Flash support? Worry no more. Adobe has kicked out a blog post saying that Flash will be available ” within a few weeks of Android 3 (Honeycomb) devices becoming available, the first of which is expected to be the Motorola Xoom“.
Sounds like we’ll see Android Honeycomb Flash sometime in March but Adobe has kept its options open with that “few weeks” statement. The rest of Adobe’s blog post is reserved for bigging up Flash and inherently giving the Flashphobic iPad a little kick. Click the headline and let us know: is lack of Flash a dealbreaker for you?
Out TBC | £free | Adobe