Hasta La Gadget!

One of the most popular games from PopCap Games for casual gamers was Plants vs. Zombies. The game first debuted a long time ago and was incredibly popular on a number of platforms. PopCap Games has announced that it is launching a new Plants vs. Zombies game in limited beta on Facebook for social gamers.

The new game is called Plants vs. Zombies Adventures, or PvZ Adventures for short. The game is currently in closed beta with the release targeted to a limited audience of Facebook users. The game will be available to more Facebook users later this spring. Fans of the game will also be excited to hear that PopCap Games has also confirmed that a sequel to the original game called Plants vs. Zombies 2 will launch in early summer.

The Facebook version of the game will be the first of several new adaptations for the franchise. Players will travel beyond the confines of their own backyard with a series of entertaining road trips. These road trips will see players traveling near and far to battle the zombie invasion in a variety of settings.

The game will also allow Facebook users to send hordes of zombies to their Facebook friends. Other features of the game include new zombie and plant types, new ways to obtain items needed in the game, the ability to cultivate and deploy plant defenses, and global leader boards.

[via PVZ Adventures]

Plants vs. Zombies Adventures hits limited beta on Facebook is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Ultrabooks have started to become popular alternatives to regular laptops due to its thin and slim form factor, and the fact that most Ultrabooks come bundled with speedy SSDs versus regular HDDs found on normal laptops. However Ultrabooks tend to be priced at the higher-end of the market, meaning that customers who don’t see the point in paying $999 for a laptop will not buy one. However according to Intel at the Intel Solutions Summit, Kirk Skaugen, the senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group came out and said that we might be able to look forward to $599 Ultrabooks entering the market this holiday season.

These $599 Ultrabooks are expected to be built on Intel’s Haswell chipset, making it more affordable, but apparently more feature-rich compared to current generation devices. Intel’s reference Haswell model is expected to come with a high-res touchscreen display, speedier SSDs, voice recognition and facial recognition, and best of all, “all-day” battery life which we guess is definitely subject to testing and will vary from user to user. However we have to wonder if dropping the price down to $599, will OEMs have to sacrifice premium materials in favor of plastic (i.e. the Samsung Series 9 uses aluminum for its chassis)?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook Tests Targeted Ads In News Feed, Internet Slows Down After History’s Biggest Cyber Attack,

Planning on picking up the brand new Samsung Galaxy S4 for yourself when it arrives in the US? While a rough timeframe has been given for its US release, T-Mobile has come forward and announced that come 1^st of May, the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be available for purchase via T-Mobile. Pricing for the phone and the repayments have not been made official yet, but T-Mobile did state that Galaxy S4 owners will be able to choose from plans starting as low as $50. The Galaxy S4 will be launched with T-Mobile’s new pricing scheme which basically involves the customer putting a downpayment for the phone and making monthly repayments over a period of time.

Considering that T-Mobile has priced other flagship devices like the HTC One and the iPhone 5 at $99 on their new scheme, we wouldn’t be surprised if the Samsung Galaxy S4 received the same treatment as well. T-Mobile’s announcement of the Galaxy S4’s availability makes them the first carrier in the US to offer an official launching date, but for all we know other carriers might offer the phone earlier or later, but we guess we will just have to wait and see.

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Boxee TV has a new firmware update making its way out to its connected set-top boxes this week, which includes a number of big improvements including the addition of DLNA streaming. Spotted by GigaOM, the update also adds 3D streaming of content from Vudu, the video streaming service from Walmart, and changes to its TV guide and notification settings.

Boxee TV is the follow-up to Boxee’s original hardware, the Boxee Box. That first-gen device actually had DLNA streaming while the Boxee TV shipped without it. The addition of DLNA means that the Boxee TV can now play back media over a local network from a computer or drive running DLNA server software, and can also play content from select Android devices and from a number of iOS apps. Photos, video and music can all be shared via the DLNA streaming protocol. It’s like a non-Apple-specific version of AirPlay, and it’s a very handy addition to Boxee TV that considerably increases its general usefulness.

The Boxee TV also now gets on-device DVR management, which is a big improvement over the old system where you can to schedule recordings via a website on a separate computer. In other words, this whole update seems to have been about ironing out the kinks and making sure the Boxee TV fully delivered on the generally good impressions it received when it launched late last year.

If you’re in the market for a set-top streaming device, the update makes Boxee TV a good option for consumers who might be looking at either an Apple TV or the new Roku 3, but who want a DLNA-capable device to handle streaming of their own media collection. Like both of those devices, the Boxee TV retails for $99.

Fingerprint security sounds like a pretty solid way of securing your devices, although after watching countless movies, thieves may not only steal our phone, but could end up chopping off one of our digits as well. Pretty scary stuff, right? However if you do not believe that will happen, or at least be a rare occurrence, then how do you feel about an iPhone with a fingerprint sensor that could act as a security measure? We’ve all heard the rumors that future iPhones could come with said technology, especially after Apple’s acquisition of security firm AuthenTec last year.

Many speculated that this feature would make its way into the iPhone 5S which could be seeing a release later this year, but Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster, believes otherwise and claims that the fingerprint sensor will instead arrive on Apple’s iPhone 6, a rumored 4.8” device that according to Munster, will be revealed in Q1 2014. A rather odd date since Apple has of late revealed their phones towards the later part of the year, but then again with Apple releasing the iPad 4 less than a year after the iPad 3, we don’t see why not.

We’re not sure what the fingerprint sensor could do, or if it is even needed, but we guess it could give Apple an advantage in the enterprise and government sector if they could offer not just more secure software, but hardware as well. In the meantime we will be taking this with a grain of salt and suggest you do the same.

[Image Credit – Arthur Reis]

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