It looks like the Angry Birds franchise really is unstoppable. After only 3 days, the latest version of Angry Birds has hit the 10 million downloads mark. To put that in context, the wildly popular original version of Angry Birds “only” did that in 10 days. It should be pointed out that this time round Rovio somehow managed to rollout Angry Birds Space to a whole bunch of platforms at once – iPhone, iPad, Android, PC and Mac.

If you have not yet tried Angry Birds Space, it is pretty easy to find it on whatever platform you are using, and Rovio makes it pretty easy to find with free versions available as well. The game follows up from the existing Angry Birds game, but this time round things like gravitational forces around planets make the game a whole lot more challenging.

Apple Appstore: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch

Google Play: Android devices

Have you tried Angry Birds Space?

US customers of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has had access to Google’s NFC based Google Wallet service, which enables instant contactless payments. Google Wallet works with a simple PIN code that is stored on the phone, in order to enable the NFC payment features on the phone, which is connected to bank accounts, loyalty schemes, etc. Even though the PIN code is encrypted, a security firm called Zvelo, figured out a way to get hold of that PIN code, provided the Android phone has been rooted.

Seeing as NFC is still in its infancy on mobile phones, it was only a matter of time before its security vulnerabilities would have been figured out. The problem with the current Android Google Wallet implementation is that the PIN code is not stored on the NFC chip itself, but rather on the phone, which is secured by the Android operating system. Many users of Android devices go through the effort to root their devices, which enables the users to become “superusers” who can then alter the root permissions on the devices. As soon as that phone is rooted, the thief can simply install the Google Wallet Cracker app, and the PIN code will be revealed.

Check out the video below to see how easy it is:

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Clearly the next big battle in the tech world is TV – not in terms of ever growing screen sizes and resolutions, but rather the software and services that power it. With rumours circling about Apple’s apparent entry into the TV market, many manufacturers are taking a wait and see approach. Not Lenovo though – they decided they will build there first TV as well, and it will be powered by Android. Lenovo is planning to release their first TV in China at first, but international markets will get it later. It should be noted that this TV will not ship with Google TV. Instead it will ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, with Lenovo’s own custom skin, and it will pack some serious processing power. Here are some of the specs:

• Snapdragon processor running at  a healthy 1.5 GHz.
• Two screen sizes – 42 and 50 inch. Both LED, Full HD.
• Built in Webcam with 5 megapixel resolution – great for Skype sessions.
• 8GB of built in storage, which is expandable by SD card.
• The remote control will include a touchpad, and it will recognize your voice with a built in microphone.

The TV will still ship with standard HDMI inputs, so you can still connect your set-top boxes. Lenovo must still announce their streaming services that combine with this TV – which makes us think this was rushed to market as an answer to that apparent Apple threat. Which we are not to certain about either… The idea that Apple would move into a highly commoditzed market like TV manufacturing is still difficult to comprehend, but their advantage will lie in the ecosystem that iTunes will provide. But if a Apple Cinema Display costs $1000, we wonder if Apple can crack the TV market where profit margins are lower than ever.

Those of us who use Twitter always welcome changes that improves the interface, while also making it easier to connect with like-minded individuals. So a few hours ago, Twitter rolled out its latest major redesign of their website, as well as brand new Android and iPhone apps. All in all, a pretty well planned execution by the microblogging service.

So what is new? The navigation has been simplified with 4 major buttons – Home, Connect, Discover and Me. If you are already a Twitter user these buttons are not a major change from the previous version, but it does contain a few great enhancements. For example “connect” (which has the familiar @ reply symbol) now also houses things like people who retweet you and new followers, not just mentions of your name as in the past. If you only want to see your mentions, there is still a button for that under Connect.

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One of the major criticisms of Android phones of late is the apparent lack of official updates that land on the devices. Where some other operating systems keep on upgrading existing phones even a few years after production, Android users in many cases will not get any updates at all. There is a variety of reasons for that – one of the major reasons being customized interfaces or skins that need a lot of work from the manufacturers to be rewritten for new software versions. Luckily Google brings out one reference device, called the “Nexus” about once a year with the launch of major operating system upgrades, and these phone typically get new software updates before any manufacturer.

The latest phone to have the Nexus moniker is Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus – a phone that keeps a pure Android interface free of any skins, and more significantly, the first phone to officially ship with Android 4.0, called Ice Cream Sandwich. If the whole iPhone hype is not for you, the Galaxy Nexus makes a very compelling argument.

“Samsung and Google have closely collaborated to push the mobile experience forward. We are pleased to deliver the best and latest Android smartphone experience for customers with GALAXY Nexus. We will continue to move forward with the Android platform to provide the most compelling consumer experience in the mobile world,” says Paulo Ferreira, Head of Mobile Product and Business Solutions at Samsung.

“Ice Cream Sandwich demonstrates the Android platform’s continued innovation with this release which works on phones and tablets seamlessly (and everything in between). Features like Android Beam and Face Unlock show the innovative work our team is doing, and GALAXY Nexus showcases the power behind Ice Cream Sandwich,” said Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile for Google. (more…)

In the past, enterprise was the natural habitat for BlackBerry – but with the recent shift in popularity to other smartphones it means that businesses are stuck with BlackBerry because of previous capital outlay for Blackberry Enterprise Servers. RIM is now approaching the Mobile Device Management market, and has smartly built in control of Android and iOS as well in its upcoming solution.

Research In Motion today introduced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion – the Company’s next-generation enterprise mobility solution and RIM’s entry into the multi-platform Mobile Device Management (MDM) marketplace. Building on years of leading enterprise mobility management solutions from RIM, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will simplify the management of smartphones and tablets running BlackBerry, Google Android and Apple iOS operating systems.

“We are pleased to introduce BlackBerry Mobile Fusion – RIM’s next generation enterprise mobility solution – to make it easier for our business and government customers to manage the diversity of devices in their operations today,” said Alan Panezic, Vice President, Enterprise Product Management and Marketing at Research In Motion. “BlackBerry Mobile Fusion brings together our industry-leading BlackBerry Enterprise Server technology for BlackBerry devices with mobile device management capabilities for iOS and Android devices, all managed from one web-based console. It provides the necessary management capabilities to allow IT departments to confidently oversee the use of both company-owned and employee-owned mobile devices within their organizations.”

RIM is the leading provider of enterprise mobility solutions with over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 provisioning BlackBerry devices today. The enterprise market for smartphones and tablets continues to grow in both the company-provisioned and employee-owned (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD) categories. BYOD in particular has led to an increase in the diversity of mobile devices in use in the enterprise and new challenges for CIOs and IT departments as they struggle to manage and control wireless access to confidential company information on the corporate network. This has resulted in increased demand for mobile device management solutions. (more…)

Interested in a Android tablet? You might want to hold out a little. December cannot get here soon enough – the tablet world is about to be shaken up with some real processing power. You know that powerful quad core processor you might have in your PC? Well expect it in your tablet soon enough.

While sporting a quad core processor, the Asus Transformer Prime will a have thinner and lighter chassis than the iPad 2, while also using aluminium for the casing. See Samsung? It can be done.

Asus’s new Transformer Prime will now sport a Nvidia Tegra 3 chip which actually has 5 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores. Now that 5th core is the interesting one – it is a special low voltage core which is only used when the device is idle. During that time the 4 bigger cores are switched off, so you can expect great battery life. In terms of memory you are looking at 1GB, which is pretty run of the mill for Android Tablets now. There is also a 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front camera. But that rear camera will have a iPhone 4s-matching f2.4 aperture lens. The 10.1 inch screen should be decent as well. Using an IPS panel, viewing angles should be great with the 1280×800 resolution.

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This Android Tablet means business...

The tablet market is in a peculiar situation right now – according to sales figures it is basically Apple’s iPad and then everyone else. This is however not because of a lack of choice. In fact, there is a multitude of Android tablets out there from a variety of manufacturers in all shapes and sizes. The danger with this situation is that the Android tablet market is becoming somewhat commoditized, and there is not really a lot of them out there that are truly unique.

So we have been looking forward to trying the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet, which really does seem a bit different from the rest, and not *Just Another Android Tablet*. Yes, it is called the “Thinkpad Tablet” despite Lenovo making a variety of tablets on a number of operating systems. So why is this one different? First off, it carries the Thinkpad name, so it should have good performance and be built well. Right? And secondly, the Thinkpad Tablet has a decent stylus included (at least the one I reviewed) for handwriting recognition and notes. But we will get to that later.

Our current favourite Android tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (see our review here), but the Thinkpad might just take that crown. So how does it do?

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