Flappy Bird, the simple yet rage-inducing game from .GEARS Studios, is now available to download on Android. Like its counterpart on iOS, it’s completely free and insanely addictive, and it makes you want to throw your phone out of a window. But you’ll almost certainly want to play it anyway.
Some gadgets are unique, carving out their own nonpareil niche while eliciting wide-eyed, slack-jawed appreciation. Other gadgets swim in a thick soup of contemporaries, and stand out for their high bang-for-buck score. It’s the latter reason we mention Swann’s new SwannEye HD, a weather-resistant, bell-and-whistle-stuffed outdoor security cam priced at $180.
Back in 2012, Google introduced Chrome for Android and paved the slow and steady way to replace the AOSP browser with it. With the Nexus 4, Google stopped shipping the AOSP browser on Nexus browser and instead replaced it with Chrome for Android.
With KitKat, Google completely killed the AOSP browser and even stopped actively updating it.
In Western Europe, one of the biggest chains to sell smartphones is a company known — somewhat hysterically, given that no one has bought a dedicated carphone for fifteen years — as the Carphone Warehouse. But there will now be 60 less Carphone Warehouse stores in Europe… thanks to Samsung, who have snapped them up with the intention of turning them into dedicated Samsung Stores. And as a bonus? The deal will help Samsung challenge Apple’s retail dominance in Europe.
Global smartphone shipments grew 41 percent to reach a record 990 million units in 2013, and Android-powered devices accounted for a whopping 79 percent of them. Despite the lowest growth rate in the platform’s history, Android phones still managed to ship four times the amount of iPhone and Windows Phone devices combined.
