Rovio on Wednesday announced that its Angry Birds franchise has surpassed one billion downloads across Android, iOS, Windows and Mac OS X, with 350 million downloads having been served in 2012 alone. The latest Birds installment, Angry Birds Space, was downloaded more than 10 million time in less than three days and a whopping 50 million times in 35 days, making it the fastest growing mobile game of all time. The immensely popular franchise generated $106 million for the company in 2011 and drew in 200 mil...

LG on Monday announced the beta release of its own iCloud competitor, dubbed LG Cloud. The service allows users to manage and consume all types of content across Android smartphones, PCs and smart TVs. “Most companies today only see the cloud as a storage device or in the case of YouTube or Flickr, only for one type of content,” LG’s Home Entertainment President and CEO Havis Kwon said. “LG makes the devices that millions of people watch content on so we can set a new yardstick for eas...

Samsung’s iCloud competitor, dubbed S-Cloud, may be unveiled at next month’s Galaxy S III announcement in London on May 3rd, a South Korean newspaper reported on Friday. The service is similar to Apple’s offering but without any limitations on the type of content users can upload. The service is also expected to have access to popular TV shows, movies and music with free and paid content that will be available across a range of Samsung devices. The amount of storage allotted to users is rum...

NVIDIA sees its mobile system-on-a-chip graphics solutions surpassing the performance of the Xbox 360 in the coming years. A new graph the company shared with AnandTech highlights the performance of Tegra chips in comparison to those found within PCs and gaming consoles. The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. NVIDIA estimates that at some point in 2013, mobile graphic performance will match the Xbox 360 and by 2014, mobile performance will surpass that of the Xbox 360....

The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest poll indicates that one in five adults in the United States still doesn’t use the Internet. “Senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have Internet access,” Pew Internet said. Almost half of those adults who don’t use the Internet found the t...

Microsoft products fit into two different life cycle stages — mainstream support and extended support. With mainstream support, users receive free security updates, stability improvements, bug fixes and occasional new features. In the extended support phase, security updates are available for free but other fixes require paid support. Microsoft reminded Windows XP users earlier this week that XP is now in the extended phase, and it said support for the operating system and Office 2003 will be officially dis...

On April 4th, 1975, two young programmers named Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a partnership called “Micro-soft.” Gates was 22 years old at the time and Allen was just 19. The two young men had been friends since attending high school together in Seattle and after Allen took a job with MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico in January 1975, Gates dropped out of his sophomore year at Harvard and moved to Albuquerque to form what would later become Microsoft. The pair moved from New Mexico to Bellevue...

Android users who are looking to sell their old devices should be wary of the possible consequences. McAfee identity theft researcher Robert Siciliano warned that personal data from Android devices is not completely removed after a user activates the built-in wipe option, The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday. “What’s really scary is even if you follow protocol, the data is still there,” Siciliano said. If you have a BlackBerry or Apple device, Siciliano said your data can be fully delete...

The International Data Corporation on Wednesday announced that shipments of smart connected devices —including PCs, tablets and smartphones — reached 916 million units and surpassed $489 billion in revenue in 2011. “Whether it’s consumers looking for a phone that can tap into several robust ‘app’ ecosystems, businesses looking at deploying tablet devices into their environments, or educational institutions working to update their school’s computer labs, smart, connected, comp...

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday confirmed earlier reports of a major reorganization within the company. The firm plans to merge its Personal Systems Group, responsible for PCs, with its Imaging and Printing Group. Current boss of the company’s printer division Vyomesh Joshi will retire after 31 years at the company, and current PSG executive vice president Todd Bradley will run the combined operations. ”This combination will bring together two businesses where HP has established global leadership,...

Hewlett-Packard will reportedly soon undergo a reorganization that will see its Personal Systems Group merged with its Imaging and Printing Group. AllThingsD cites multiple unnamed sources in reporting the news, and additional details are light for the time being. Vyomesh Joshi, currently the executive vice president in charge of HP’s imaging and printing business, will leave the company as part of the reorganization. Executive vice president Todd Bradley will reportedly run the merged businesses. (more...

Early rumors suggested that devices running Microsoft’s next-generation Windows 8 operating system might launch as soon as this summer, but a new report places the platform’s public release in the fourth quarter. Citing multiple unnamed sources, Bloomberg on Tuesday reported that Microsoft will complete work on Windows 8 this summer, and the first wave of PCs and tablets powered by the new OS will launch in October. Intel x86 and ARM-based devices will both become available at the same time, and M...

Apple on Wednesday unveiled its new iPad, a sleek slate with a stunning 2,048 x 1,536-pixel Retina Display, a speedy Apple A5X processor and embedded 4G LTE. The Cupertino, California-based company repeatedly tossed around its “post-PC” buzzword — Apple’s post-PC devices accounted for 76% of its revenue in the fourth quarter last year — and there is no question that the new iPad will be a hit. Does it spell the end for PCs, however? Not according to market research firm Gartner. Read on ...

Apple is said to currently be considering the launch of a new MacBook Air notebook PC with a 14-inch display. Citing unnamed sources within Apple’s supply chain, DigiTimes on Wednesday reported that Apple is considering a 14-inch ultra-slim laptop computer to better address consumers in China, where 14-inch models have between 35% and 40% of the portable computer market. The site had previously reported that Apple is working on a 15-inch MacBook Air model, a claim that a number of other reports have mi...