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The games of Japanese game developer Kairosoft are known for their gameplay and the distinctive pixellated art style. There's a new one out now, named 8-Bit Farm which... you guessed it, simulates a farm in 8-bit graphics.
Home security cameras are great, made all the better when there's a great app to control them with. Accordingly, tinyCam Monitor has just had a major update to version 7.4, with some big features surrounding the cloud in tow.
Heard of Mr. Robot, the popular USA show that features developers, hacking, giant, evil corporations, and computers? If so, listen up: Glitchskier is a game where the player hacks the computer to progress, defeating enemies, boss fights, and the system itself.
Playboard, the Google Play Store and Apple App Store aggregator with various channels and lists, has announced it will be discontinued at the beginning of February 2017 (i.e. any time now), in lieu of a new company, 42matters, taking its place.
The web component of Samsung Pay has long been rumored to be coming, so it's no real surprise to see it formally announced today. The service, which sees Samsung attempting to broaden its services offerings in response to Google, Facebook, and Apple, will go live in South Korea before the end of the first quarter.
Animations are an important part of an app's design and user experience, so much so that Google made them an integral part of material design. The folks at Airbnb just made making an animation a whole lot easier, with a new tool called 'Lottie.'
Europeans will know the pain of roaming charges. Head to another country on holiday or business and try and check email, or text the boss/wife/husband/partner/colleague/friend (delete as applicable) and you'll be hit with fees. However, in a good piece of news, the European Union, the legislative body that governs most of Europe, is set to abolish roaming charges by summer 2017. Fantastic!
While on the face of things, it may seem like Google steals data and invades privacy, the company is actually very serious about security. That doubles when it comes to the security of G Suite, Google's enterprise accounts product range. Today the company has announced it's adding a few things to make the accounts even more secure.
If it's indie music and new, unknown artists, chances are it'll be on SoundCloud. The Berlin-based company has long pioneered a music platform that doesn't focus on the big, stadium-filling artists, but on the small, independent ones. An update to the app adds in Charts, letting users see what others are listening to on the service and what is popular at any given moment. While these were actually implemented in the previous version, they've just been added to the changelog, indicating it's possible they were rolling out on a server-side basis.
The Banner Saga... saga is immensely popular, and for good reason. The incredibly pretty graphics, mythical world, and engaging gameplay are what makes the series so beloved amongst fans. Those who played and liked the other two games will be pleased to hear, then, that the third game in the franchise, The Banner Saga 3, has reached its $200,000 goal with 35 days to go.
I'm sure we all know PayPal by now - internet payments, used for eBay purchases, fees added, etc. PayPal Here, however, might be a little less well-known; it is a card reader for businesses to get paid on an Android device instead of a card reader. In a move to ensure security, the app has been updated with fingerprint support, following its addition in the parent app back in August last year.
T-Mobile is pretty hot on saving its customers money, especially if the company can create positive PR about it (which it's pretty good at, all things being said). The latest scheme takes that dreaded word, 'taxes' and tries to at least make it tolerable by returning sales tax to you when new and existing customers buy a new smartphone.
We all like watching movies, so even better when they're free on Google Play. Today Google is offering Korean film War of the Arrows for free on the Play Store for residents of Canada and the United States.
We're pretty used to smartwatch battery life being a bit mediocre, with Android Wear watches barely lasting two days at the most, and other fitness-orientated watches going for maybe a month or two before needing a top-up. However, four new watches from Swedish company Kronaby can go for two years on a single charge before needing a new battery.
eBay is a service with a huge amount of different options and things to do - search, buy, sell, add to watch list, message a seller, etc - so the new 5.6.0.14 update, adding app shortcuts, is very useful indeed.
In the words of Sprint, it's "doubling down" on unlimited. However much everyone now hates that phrase, this is probably good news. Unlimited data, calls, and texts are scarce nowadays, whereas Sprint is charging just $50 a month (for comparison, the 5GB data deal on Verizon is also $50 per month). Pretty good.
Games featuring phones are all the rage right now, huh? After Strange Telephone earlier today, we came across A Normal Lost Phone, from Accidental Queens. The game features a character who finds, unsurprisingly, a lost cell phone, and then attempts to return the device by looking through text messages and other items to identify the owner.
Healthy living is the, er, in-thing at the moment, so anything which can help with that is welcome. Taking pictures of food is also popular *ahem* Instagram *ahem*, so Bitesnap, from Bite AI, could work wonders with those trying to eat to a specified diet.
Everyone loves a bit of pixel art now and again (I do, anyway), so when I saw this game from Japanese indie developer Magniflop, I was excited. It's a fun horror game with a cool story, which has multiple endings and interesting world generation featuring a telephone. Who'd have thought?
We've often lamented the rather lacklustre approach Google has taken with Google Assistant, but it can do one thing: remember stuff. On all three things which use Assistant - that's Allo, Pixel, and Home - it can recall things it's been asked to remember. As Assistant is cross-platform, this works across all three devices; telling it to remember something on Home and then asking on Pixel does indeed work.