Hasta La Gadget!

All Wall Street expectations aside, Google appears to be doing relatively well for itself. And while Android may not be the company’s largest source of income, it is undoubtedly a primed possession to have around — with that, it’s only natural for the Mountain View-based outfit to extend a hand to the abundant amount of folks developing for its open-sourced platform. On this particular occasion, it’s devs in India who are on the receiving end of a grand gesture, with Google announcing it’s now allowing them to cash in on their applications by adding in-app purchases / subscriptions to ones that are currently free, or simply by selling new, paid app creations on the Play store. Google says the valuable move was driven by India now being the fourth-largest market for app downloads, and that this is a great way to “help developers capitalize on this tremendous growth.”

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Software, Mobile, Google

Google announces seller support in India, now allows developers to monetize their apps originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Google  | Email this | Comments

We’ve known for a while now that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be going free-to-play, but at first, neither BioWare nor Electronics Arts wanted to get into details when it came to restrictions for free players. Today, we might be finding out why the companies kept these details a secret for so long. BioWare has listed the free-to-play limitations on the SWTOR official site, and as it turns out, players who don’t want to pay anything to play are going to have a lot of restrictions to deal with.

In fact, the only thing that free players will have full access to is story content, meaning that they’ll be able to level their character from 1-50 and experience class stories in their entirety. Aside from that, though, you’re going to have use Cartel Coins or subscribe in order to get the full Star Wars: The Old Republic experience. For instance, free players will only be able to participate in three Warzones, Flashpoints, and Space Missions each per week, and they’ll be locked out of Operations entirely. In order to do more than what’s allowed, players will need to purchase weekly passes.

Character creation will also be limited for free players, as will the number of inventory slots. Free players won’t have access to the cargo hold until they shell out the Cartel Coins needed to unlock it, and even then, the space in the cargo hold with be limited until players pay more Cartel Coins to expand it. Fast travel cooldown will be longer for free players, and they’ll only have one available Crew Skill slot, with the option to buy more slots with Cartel Coins.

While all of that is sure to make players at least mildly upset, BioWare has put in place one restriction that might make their anger boil over: free players won’t be able to equip most purple items. Sadly, if you want to equip some of the best items in the game, it looks like you’ll have to pony up for a subscription or purchase a license from the Cartel Shop. Whereas once we thought that going free-to-play would be a great idea for Star Wars: The Old Republic, after seeing all of these restrictions BioWare and Electronic Arts are placing on free players, we’re not so sure that’s the case anymore. What do you think?

Star Wars: The Old Republic free-to-play limitations detailed is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

ASRock hits back by showing off their newest E-ATX motherboard, the Z77 Extreme11. Based on Intel Z77 Express Chipset, the board supports for Intel LGA1155 processors and features four DDR3 DIMM memory slots (up to 32GB RAM), three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot, three PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots and one mini PCI-Express x1 slot. Connectivity-wise, it has two SATA3.0, eight SAS2/SATA3.0, four SATA2.0, twelve USB 3.0 and two Gigabit Ethernet. Pricing info is still unknown at the moment. [ASRock]

Check out this newly introduced all-in-one desktop PC from Epson, the Endeavor PU100S. This BTO (Build To Order) system is equipped with a 21.5-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD display, a 2.60GHz Intel Celeron G550 processor, an Intel H61 Express Chipset, a 2GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD Super Multi Drive and runs on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS (Basic Configuration). Price itself is set at 48,930 Yen (about $619). [Product Page]

Welcome to Thursday evening, everyone. This afternoon we had a bunch of quarterly reports hit, and some were better than others. Google posted its quarterly report a little prematurely, a blunder that had a hand in driving down the price of the company’s stock. Later on in the day, we heard from Microsoft, which managed to do pretty good in its first quarter. Sadly, AMD posted its results for quarter 3 just a little while ago, and things aren’t looking too good for the company – in fact, it says that it will have to layoff around 15% of its workforce in an attempt to save some money.

Moving away from that rather depressing news, we heard some more whispers about the different iPad Mini variants today, and Google announced a brand new Samsung-made Chromebook (that’s super cheap, too!). The controversial Copyright Alert System is said to be going live in the next few weeks, and today AT&T released a statement in which it objects to SoftBank’s planned buyout of Sprint. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has started a new file sharing site, and we learned that Apple may just be looking to buy the talent behind the soon-to-be-shutdown Color app, rather than the whole thing.

comScore says that the Amazon Kindle Fire has the highest readership rates for digital content, and today was the day the Motorola RAZR HD and RAZR MAXX HD launched at Verizon. Twitter is ruffling some feathers with the way it censors content, and TweetBot landed on the Mac App Store with a pretty high price tag. Chevrolet announced today that it will be unveiling the 2014 Corvette on January 13, while Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that his company is ready to compete if Microsoft launches a Surface-branded smartphone. Researchers are considering launching a probe to a recently-discovered exoplanet, and Caldexa said that it has plans to begin using 64-bit ARM chips in 2014.

New rumors are pegging AMD with an itch to drop prices on APU Llano chips, and beloved digital distribution site GOG added support for Mac today with the addition of 50 games. Battlefield 3: Aftermath will be available for PS3 Premium subscribers on November 27, so get ready to battle on a handful of new maps that have been decimated by an earthquake. Finally tonight, we have a number of original articles for you to take a look at, as Chris Burns compares the RAZR MAXX HD and RAZR HD side-by-side in a new hands-on article. Chris also gave us his review of the MAINGEAR Potenza, and we ask if picking up the new $249 Chromebook is a good idea for students. One last thing to note before we go – we’ve released version 2.0 of our iOS app, making it compatible with the iPhone 5′s larger screen. You can get it right this minute from the iTunes Store by clicking this [download link]! Enjoy the rest of your night folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: October 18, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.