Hasta La Gadget!

If you have a spouse who travels often, or if your child is traveling overseas for the first time, foursquare has an update for you that allows you to receive notifications for select profiles even if they check into locations that aren’t near you, such as in other countries or in different states. According to foursquare’s blog, this feature will work even if you have turned off notifications, which we guess in a way would be like putting those select friends/family on an exclusion list. To enable it, all you’d have to do is log onto your foursquare profile on their website, surf on over to your friend/family’s profile and select “Always On” from the drop down menu. While we’re sure that this was designed with good intentions in mind, we can’t help but feel that stalking just got a whole lot easier.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Foursquare’s “Nearby Friends” functionality returns on iOS and BlackBerry, Android up next, Foursquare now has targeted adds,

Gamers if you’ve enjoyed Sony’s LittleBigPlanet game on your PlayStation 3 and would love to take the game with you on the go, you’re in luck as Sony has officially announced the release of LittleBigPlanet for the Sony PlayStation Vita! It has been officially launched in North America on the PS Vita game card and is also available for purchase and download via PSN.

Sony has also announced an added incentive for gamers who get the game early. Basically if you were to download the game during its first week of release (25^th September to 1^st October), you will be eligible for a BioShock and Knights of the Old costume packs together with your purchase. We’re not sure if this applies for the retail copy, but more details can be found on Sony’s PlayStation blog.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: LittleBigPlanet PS Vita goes gold, LittleBigPlanet PS Vita release date set for September 25th,

Sony Computer Entertainment America has announced that the award-winning game LittleBigPlanet has officially launched for the PlayStation Vita portable. Tarsier Studios and Double Eleven Studios developed the video game in conjunction with Media Molecule. The game brings all the play, create, and share capabilities of the franchise to the portable entertainment system with a new adventure for the hero, Sackboy.

The game is built specifically for the PS Vita and allows the player to enjoy an entirely new story to explore and play. The portable game has all the tools to create any type of level or game that the player can imagine and can share player creations via the PlayStation Network. The game has 45 new story levels in games to play across six different themes.

The game features new characters, and all the action is set on the fairground planet of Carnivalia as players battle a Puppeteer, who is stealing all the joy from Craftworld. Players fight through a series of themed levels in a storyline to foil the Puppeteer. The game takes advantage of all the multitouch features of the Vita.

The game also supports location-based functionality to find other players in your vicinity and challenge them to beat your score on a particular level. The game also supports multiple player modes, including local same screen versus competition and online multiple player game play for up to four players. The game includes all existing DLC packs along with new tools specific for the PlayStation Vita. The game is rated E for everyone and is available now.

LittleBigPlanet hits PlayStation Vita is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Toshiba is one of the biggest names in storage products, and it offers a wide range of internal storage devices and external storage devices. Toshiba has announced that it has started shipping its first Hybrid Drive MQ01ABDH series (PDF) storage devices. These new Hybrid Drives combine the performance of a SSD with the capacity and pricing of a traditional HDD.

Toshiba offers the drives with capacities of up to 1 TB, and the drives are 2.5-inch form factor with a 9.5 mm height. The new Hybrid Drives use SATA connectivity and have self-learning caching algorithms to learn the data access patterns of the user and optimize performance. These algorithms determine what data should be stored in the flash memory for quick access and what data should be stored on the traditional magnetic platters.

The hybrid drive is initially available in 1 TB and 750 GB capacities. Toshiba says the drives are sized for use in ultrathin and standard notebooks, gaming PCs, AIOs, and slim desktops. The hard drive portion of the Hybrid Drives spins at 5400 RPMs and has an average seek time of 12 ms.

On 1 TB and 750 GB capacity Hybrid Drives the amount of NAND Flash storage is 8 GB. Toshiba says that the design of the Hybrid Series storage devices will enable faster system boot times and faster data access. Pricing on the new drives is unannounced at this time.

Toshiba Ships First MQ01ABDH Hybrid Series Drive is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It is safe to assume that Samsung’s decision to go with Android certainly netted them more success when compared to their earlier attempts with Bada, Samsung’s own mobile platform. However according to recent reports via Digitimes, it has been suggested that Samsung has plans to launch a Galaxy smartphone that will be based on the Tizen platform. This will be a first considering that Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones have typically been based on Android.

While it is merely a rumor at this point in time, it isn’t that much of a stretch considering that Samsung had reportedly tested Tizen on its Galaxy S3, plus with Huawei looking to launch its own mobile operating system as a backup plan, such speculation isn’t exactly ludicrous. No word on when this alleged Tizen-based Galaxy smartphone will launch, but what do you guys think?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Samsung Galaxy S3 used to test Tizen, Samsung not expected to launch new Bada or Tizen devices for the remainder of 2012,