Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to Tuesday evening everyone. Perhaps the biggest story from the afternoon, Samsung’s reported mobile roadmap for 2013 leaked out with the rumored Galaxy Note 8 leading the charge. We heard that the highly anticipated Galaxy S IV might be getting an announcement on March 22, while Microsoft finally announced Surface Pro’s release date, setting it for February 9, 2013. The iPhone might have its best-selling quarter yet in Q1, while Google revealed its earnings for Q4 2012 (spoiler alert: it made a lot of money).

Speaking of quarterly results, AMD posted its report for Q4 2012 as well today, but the company’s earnings ultimately left something to be desired. Microsoft might help Dell become a private company with an investment in the billions, while Surface RT is getting a new 64GB variant and a bunch of different accessories. ZeniMax Online Studios opened up beta registration for The Elder Scrolls Online today, and the 2014 Corvette has been spotted in the wild.

ASUS quietly introduced the VivoBook S330 notebook today, and we learned that Mozilla is working on a version of Firefox for the upcoming OUYA Android console. Synaptics has given its ClearPad touch technology to the all new Razer Edge Pro, and JVC has announced its new MirrorLink receiver, which plays nice with your smartphone. We heard that Zombieland is destined to become a web series after plans for a TV have been left behind, and Orchestra has opened up a reservation system for the soon-to-be-released Mailbox email client for iOS.

We saw a pair of new prototype glasses that protect you from facial recognition today, while Tasker for Android was given an all new user interface. Twitter was seen rolling out an update for embedded tweets, and Nintendo announced that it will be revealing new Wii U games during tomorrow’s Nintendo Direct livestream. Google said that Motorola had “12 to 18 months” of products in the pipeline when it was purchased by the search giant, AT&T seems to be experiencing some U-Verse outages, and we heard that a 5-inch iPhone may not launch until 2014. Finally tonight, Chris Burns delivers his review of the Wicked Audio Solus headphones and tells us why the Galaxy Note 8 is challenging the iPad Mini before its even announced. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, we hope you enjoy the rest of the night folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: January 22, 2013 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It looks like the proud owners of Ouya, the extremely successful Kickstarter-funded gaming console, will be able to browse the web through Mozilla’s Firefox browser. According to a certain Ed Krassenstein who happens to be an adminisrator at OUYAForum, an unofficial forum for Ouya users, he was able to confirm with a Mozilla developer that Firefox is being tested on the Ouya gaming console. Krassenstein went further and posted an image of the browser running on the console. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Zynga Drops From Top Spot In Facebook Gaming To Candy Crush Saga, AMD invests into CiiNOW, a cloud gaming company,

To say that the Android-powered OUYA game console has garnered some serious attention is a hell of an understatement, and that’s sure to be the case as developer units keep trickling out into the wild. As it turns out, it’s not just game devs that are getting some hands-on time here — some of the folks at Mozilla may be working on getting a version of its Firefox mobile browser up and running on the game-centric cube in short order.

The news comes courtesy of Ed Krassenstein, an administrator for OUYAforum.com. According to him, a Mozilla developer reached out to him earlier today to talk briefly about the process of bringing the browser to the OUYA platform:

We’re investigating what we need to do to make Firefox usable on Ouya. It already works and we have some preliminary patches for gamepad support, but there’s still quite a bit of work to be done to make it really usable. Part of this work will be making sure that WebGL and Canvas support performs well on the device, and making sure that the relevant APIs (such as Gamepad API) are also supported

The platform certainly presents some… interesting challenges, thanks mostly to its non-standard control scheme. After all, plenty of people have scrolled down a webpage on a smartphone screen, but I’d wager the number of folks who have done so with the assistance of a full-size game controller is considerably smaller. Still, the fact that some Mozillians have already worked to surmount that particular stumbling block is heartening news for fans of third-party Android browsers.

Krassenstein’s initial post didn’t offer a name for the anonymous Mozillian he had spoken with, but he eventually confirmed that it was Chris Lord, a Mozilla mobile platform engineer who happened to tweet an image of a Firefox build running on an OUYA earlier today (see above). Granted, it doesn’t actually work very well — Lords notes that it’s “kinda unusable” for the time being — but it’s a step in the right direction at least. Lords also revealed on Twitter that a gentleman named Kats (aka Mozilla software dev Kartikaya Gupta) is mucking around with Firefox for the OUYA as well, though there’s no word on how many others (if at all) are spending time on this.

Naturally, this project is in its very early stages, and there’s no guaranteeing that a final, fully-compatible version of the browser will ever actually become available to OUYA owners, but it looks like things are off to a promising start. And hey — they’ve still got a few months before OUYA’s official release, so there’s a chance an OUYA-optimized version of the browser could debut right in that launch window.

Excited for OUYA? So are the folks at Kill Screen — so much so, they’ve seen fit to host a 10-day competition to coax OUYA compatible game prototypes out of the development community. It’s calling the event CREATE, and in addition to drumming up interest for Kickstarter’s favorite game console, it aims to celebrate how OUYA and a new generation of indie game developers are making the television an open gaming platform. Starting on January 14th, Kill Screen will start accepting prototype submissions of playable (but not necessarily complete) games. Ten days later, a panel of indie veterans will cull the fat, and select finalists based on not only the game itself, but the social media efforts of its development team. This is an indie game competition, after all. The contest judges entrants on how effectively they use the OUYA platform too, including processor, sound, controller integration, in-game payments and other elements available in the console’s development kit. Winners can score anywhere between $5,000 to $20,000 in prizes, with an extra bonus if the finished game launches on OUYA. Enough incentive for you? Check out Kill Screen’s full contest rules at the source link below.

Filed under: Gaming

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Source: Kill Screen, Ouya

Well folks, after a brief break to celebrate the new year, we’re back with the first Evening Wrap-Up of 2013. We heard today that the iPhone 5S might come with a number of color selections similar to the iPod Touch along with a larger screen, while rumors are saying that HTC will unveil its new flagship device, the M7, during CES (which is next week!). There are new services floating around out there that let users install pirated iOS apps without jailbreaking first, and Apple has secured Android sales data from Samsung, despite Samsung requesting that this data remain a secret.

The first details for Black Ops II‘s incoming DLC have leaked out, while the Project Paperless patent trolls are at it again with new unnamed subsidiaries to help them do their dirty work. Apple has a rumored relationship with Broadcom for 802.11ac WiFi in 2013 Macs, we learned today that CTIA will consolidate its 2013 shows into one massive mobile event, and the GameStick portable gaming console is looking to do battle with OUYA for Android console supremacy.

Apple is said to be testing out its new 28nm A6X chips while preparing to cut Samsung out of the loop, and in a very surprising turn of events, Ubuntu mobile OS was announced today and should be hitting phones starting in 2014. A US district judge has ruled that Amazon’s Appstore is very different from Apple’s own App Store, while the Samsung Galaxy M Pro has been leaked, complete with a full QWERTY keyboard. Installious has been shut down (so no, you aren’t just experiencing an outage), and we learned that the Do Not Disturb bug in iOS 6 will be fixed come January 7.

We have a couple Xbox-related stories today, as a countdown timer on Major Nelson’s website seems to suggest that the next generation Xbox will be announced at E3, while new rumors said that production on the console’s processor has gotten underway, with a potential launch coming late this year or early in 2014. Elite: Dangerous reached its Kickstarter goal today, with California and Illinois both enacting laws that prevent employers from demanding their potential employees’ social media passwords. Google executive Eric Schmidt might be taking a trip to North Korea soon, Zynga has shut down its Japan studio, and finally tonight, Chris Burns delivers his review of AT&T MiFi Liberate mobile hotspot. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, we hope you enjoy the rest of your night everyone!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: January 2, 2013 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.