Rockstar has shipped more than 33 million copies of GTA V

Reporting results for fiscal year 2014 on Tuesday, Take-Two Interactive revealed that the enormously popular Grand Theft Auto V has now shipped over 33 million copies. Rockstar's latest title, which accounted for over half of all game software sales in the month it launched, has generated well over $1 billion for Take-Two, contributing heavily to one of the most successful years in the publisher's history.

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Posted in 2014 at 10:30PM, May 14

Ahead of iPhone 6 Launch, One-Third of Smartphones Sold Have Screens Larger Than 5"

With the next iPhone widely expected to be available in larger screen sizes, Canalys reports that a third of all smartphones sold worldwide in the first quarter had screen sizes larger than five inches, a full inch larger than Apple's 4" iPhone 5s screen. The size of the five-inch market -- some 90 million units in the quarter -- shows just the competitive disadvantage Apple is facing the longer it goes without a large screened smartphone.



Internal documents released during the Apple v. Samsung trial show how Apple has been aware of consumer interest in larger screened smartphones for quite some time, and the iPhone 6 is expected to have 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch options to compete in this market.

Smart phones with 5" and larger screens grew 369% - a substantially greater rate of growth than the overall market. Worldwide, they represented just over a third of shipments (34%), and in Greater China the figure hit 39%, and 43% in Asia Pacific.



"This is still a market segment led by Samsung, but the trend is unmistakably toward larger-screen handsets at the high end of the market. It held a 44% share of devices with displays of 5" and above, and 53% if the view is narrowed to look at 5.5"-plus displays," said Canalys Analyst Jessica Kwee.



[...]



Consumers now expect high-end devices to have large displays, and Apple’s absence in this market will clearly not last long. It is notable that 5" and above displays featured on almost half (47%) of smart phones with an unlocked retail price of US$500 or more. Of the remaining 53% of high-end smart phones, 87% were iPhones.

Only 12 percent of smartphones sold had screens of 5.5-inches or larger, with 22% between 5 and 5.4-inches and the rest smaller than 5-inches, including all iPhones.



The iPhone 6 is widely expected to be launched this fall with a a 4.7-inch option, perhaps at 1704x960 pixels, and a larger 5.5-inch version that may launch later due to supply constraints.

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Posted in 2014 at 10:03PM, May 14

Here’s even more proof the Surface Pro 3 is coming soon

Microsoft is expected to unveil a Surface mini next week during a special media event, possibly alongside other Surface products, according to a recent Bloomberg report. One of these devices may be the Surface Pro 3, The Verge reports, as the unreleased device has been spotted on a Microsoft Windows 8.1 support page published on Tuesday.

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Posted in 2014 at 09:45PM, May 14

Flappy Bird to Return to the App Store in August, Will Be Multiplayer and 'Less Addictive'

Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen today announced plans to return Flappy Bird to the App Store in August in a new interview with CNBC's Kelly Evans. According to Nguyen, the new version of Flappy Bird will be a multiplayer title that is "less addictive."



Back in February, Nguyen unexpectedly pulled Flappy Bird from the App Store after it became wildly popular, due in part to the attention he was receiving. "Please give me peace," he tweeted just a week before removing the app from the App Store. At the height of its popularity, the game was generating approximately $50,000 per day in revenue from in-app ads, causing a media frenzy.





In a March interview with Rolling Stone, Nguyen confessed that the reason he pulled the app was in part due to the overwhelming amount of attention he garnered from the media, but also because of troubling messages he received from Flappy Bird players about the game's addictiveness. One woman told him he was "distracting the children of the world."



Nguyen noted that he had trouble in school in his own youth because of an addiction to video games, and admitted to feeling guilty that Flappy Bird was an "addictive product."



After Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store, hundreds of other Flappy-style apps flooded the App Store as developers attempted to clone some of Nguyen's success, and at one point towards the end of February, one-third of new games released over a 24-hour period were heavily influenced by Flappy Bird.



Though the prominence of Flappy Bird clones has died down in recent weeks, fans will likely welcome the return of the original game. As Nguyen has said, "People can clone the app because of its simplicity, but they will never make another Flappy Bird." While Nyugen has mentioned multiplayer as one new aspect of the game, it is unclear how he plans to make it "less addictive."



During the interview, Nguyen also relayed some details about his next game, which is said to be a jumping game where players control a character jumping from building to building.

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Posted in 2014 at 09:17PM, May 14

Norwegian Consumer Group Files Complaint Over iCloud's 'Convoluted' Terms of Service [iOS Blog]

Apple is facing a complaint from the Norwegian Consumer Council over the terms and conditions for its iCloud service, reports ZDNet . The consumer watchdog group claims the agreement violates the Norwegian Market Act, which governs marketing practices in the country.



The complaint arose from a study of seven cloud storage providers offering service in Norway and was part of a broader investigation into how digital services are being offered to Norwegian consumers. The Norwegian Consumer Council cited Apple for its 8,600 word iCloud terms of service, which it claims is "convoluted and unclear."



Particularly troubling to the Consumer Council were terms that allow Apple to modify the agreement at its discretion without notifying customers of the changes.

"Cloud storage services rely on users' trust and confidence. However, the current terms undermine this. It is important that consumer rights and privacy also apply to online services. We are convinced that all parties are better served with more user-friendly terms. Apple offers to store valuable information on behalf of its users, but gives itself the right to amend the agreement at its sole discretion. As consumers, we are left with no real rights or security. Receiving notice when terms change should be a bare minimum requirement. The fact that this can be done without informing the users is unacceptable," Finn Myrstad, head of digital services unit at the Consumer Council, said in a statement.

This is one of several overseas complaints Apple has faced recently, including a Belgian claim that Apple misled consumers about warranty information and an accusation of tax fraud by Italian authorities.



Despite these occasional hurdles, Apple continues to operate a strong global business with international sales accounting for 66 percent of revenue in Q2 2014. Apple also opened its first stores in Brazil and Turkey this year, and now has a retail presence in 15 countries worldwide.

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Posted in 2014 at 05:05PM, May 14

Apple Customer Support Claims Apple Stymied by Phone-Switching iMessage Glitch

There is a long-standing problem with lost iMessages for select users when they switch from an iPhone to another device. Apple allegedly is aware of the problem and not able to provide a fix, claims former LifeHacker editor-in-chief Adam Pash, whose iPhone was affected by this message delivery problem.



After disabling their iPhones, some users experience an issue where iMessages sent from other iPhone owners are routed to the now-disabled iPhone and not forwarded as a text message to the active phone. The recipient never receives the text message, creating a situation that is frustrating for both people involved in the conversation.



Pash spoke to Apple's customer support after he stopped receiving messages from iPhone-owning friends when he switched to an Android phone. The support personnel confirmed "this is a problem a lot of people are facing" and "added that engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it."

In the meantime, Apple has completely hijacked my text messaging and my phone number portability (portability between devices, not networks). No one can fix this but Apple because it’s a problem at the device level, which means people in my position have no recourse but to wait for Apple to figure out what the problem is. But Apple isn’t offering any public support on the issue that I’ve been able to find (and it’s worth repeating that proper support is behind a $20 paywall for most people who’ve switched devices, who would also be the most commonly affected by this problem)

This issue with iMessage has been reported as far back as 2011, shortly after the messaging service debuted as a flagship feature of iOS 5. iPhone owners are advised to disable iMessages before they deactivate their phone in order to remove the device from Apple's system and allow messages to be forwarded properly as text messages to their new handset. This precautionary step of disabling iMessage apparently works for some, but not all iPhone owners who switch to another smartphone platform.

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Posted in 2014 at 04:45PM, May 14

Transition to '3x' iPhone 6 at 1704 x 960 Likely Smoother Than Move to Retina

With an expected transition to a larger screen on the iPhone 6, MacRumors forum member pgiguere1 has taken a look at how non-optimized apps would appear on a rumored 1704 x 960 display that would move from the current "2x" pixel doubling technique to achieve Retina quality to a "3x" technique.



In Apple's earlier transition to 2x Retina displays, it was relatively simple for non-Retina assets to be scaled up using automatic pixel doubling techniques to represent a single non-Retina pixel as a 2x2 grid of Retina pixels until developers could get up to speed. But with a potential move to 3x (or 1.5 times current Retina), many have wondered if that transition would be awkward.



As pgiguere1 shows, while developers will undoubtedly want to optimize their apps with new 3x graphical assets, automatic scaling of current 2x assets will look considerably better on this new iPhone display than non-Retina assets did during the transition to 2x.

Keep in mind however that unlike with the @1x -> @2x transition we had in 2010, this time we’d only have a 50% enlargement rather than 100%.



The thing is, a 50% enlargement with interpolation doesn’t look worse than a 100% enlargement with pixel-doubling, despite the loss of details due to the interpolation. [...]



As you can see, older non-@3x-optimized apps would actually look better on an @3x iPhone than non-@2x-opitmized apps did on an @2x iPhone. Add to this the fact that the screen's pixel density would be higher this time around, and the perceived image quality difference would be even smaller.

While Apple is unlikely to announce a new resolution for the iPhone 6 at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference, the company is likely to begin providing more tools and encouraging developers to speed a push toward resolution-independent vector graphics and other changes that will facilitate a smooth transition to denser displays. But for those developers who are not ready by iPhone 6 launch day, their users are likely to still have a decent experience with unoptimized apps.

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Posted in 2014 at 03:26PM, May 14