A Samsung smartwatch mockup.

We first heard that Samsung may be planning to announce its new “Galaxy Gear” smartwatch at its September 4 Galaxy Note III event earlier this month, but the rumor just got even stronger after it was confirmed by Bloomberg’s reliable sources.

They claim that the South Korean electronics giant will unveil a “wristwatch-like smartphone” powered by Android that will go head-to-head with the new Sony SmartWatch 2, and a potentially competing product from Apple, one of Samsung’s biggest rivals.

With the current Kindle Fire HD almost a year old now, we’re expecting Amazon to unveil its successor in the coming weeks. And according to leaked benchmark results, it could be a significant improvement, with the latest quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor and a high-resolution 2560×1600 display.

Gameloft’s much-anticipated racing game, Asphalt 8: Airborne, was due to be released last Thursday, August 8, but for some unknown reason the game wasn’t quite ready for public release. However, today the developer has announced that the game is scheduled to launch next Thursday, August 22.

Google hasn’t begun selling the new 4G LTE Nexus 7 yet — it hasn’t even confirmed when it will be selling it — but it appears Asus may have shipped some units accidentally in China. One man was delighted to find that the 32GB Wi-Fi only model he ordered was actually a 32GB 4G LTE model when he pulled it out of the box.

Google pushed out an update for its Translate app on Google Play yesterday, bringing handwriting support for both Hindi and Thai. The upgrade also expands the app’s built-in “camera input” feature capabilities.