Nokia has invited the public to view its Windows Phone 8 press event live via a dedicated webcast.
The joint event with Microsoft will take place on September 5th and 10am EDT. It is hotly tipped that Nokia will showcase a new line of phones that will run on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8.
Smartphone fans and tech journalists alike are expecting to see the Nokia Phi make an appearance. Said to be thinner and larger than previous Nokia Lumia devices, the Phi is rumoured to have a 4.7-inch screen.
Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8 at an event earlier this year, claiming that it is the most advanced mobile OS the company has ever produced.
We know from that event that Windows Phone 8 can support two new screen resolutions – 1280 x 768 and 1280 x 720. We also know that the mobile OS has NFC wireless sharing, making it easier to share photos, docs and other info.
Bookmark www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/webcast/live/ and tune in on September 5th to see what Nokia and Microsoft unveil.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...es-live/029066 ...

Is there an end in sight to the ongoing mobile patent wars?
Google's Larry Page and Apple's Tim Cook have been in secret talks with the aim of preventing the two firms descending into the kind of legal warfare that has plagued Apple and Samsung.
At least, that's according to a report in Reuters, which says the two CEOs have been engaged in conversation about patents in the wake of the Apple v. Samsung ruling.
The also says that in-person meetings are potentially in the works.
There's no way of knowing yet if this story is even true, let alone if the talks are bearing fruit, but it's good news that there is at least the suggestion of the two mega-firms meeting to find a solution to potential problems.
The current situation cannot continue indefinitely, and if there we are ever going to see a truce in the mobile patent wars it will take a long-term commitment and lots and lots of conversation to find a solution that is acceptable to both sides.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/...t-talks/019198 ...

In the wake of E3 in June serious questions were being asked about PlayStation Vita.
For all its whizz bang technology, high-end games and control schemes, the portable has yet to find its audience. And not just in the UK, but in Sony’s homeland of Japan, too.
So retailers looked to E3 to discover what Sony would do to transform the platform’s fortunes. Yet outside of a Call of Duty teaser, Vita was sidelined in favour of PS3. The trade wasn’t getting the answers it needed.
“At E3 we took a fairly deliberate decision to focus on PS3,” explains SCEE president Jim Ryan.
“I think with hindsight we should have probably spoken more about Vita because we had things to say.”
SCE UK chief Fergal Gara adds: “There’s definitely been an expectation that we should do more. I’ve picked up different reactions from retail over recent months. Some have been reasonably calm, cool and collected and saying: ‘You know what? The sales curve looks like the 3DS from last year. No panic. We expect a bigger spike into the peak season.’ Meanwhile others were saying: ‘You need to tell us more’.”
VITAL SIGNS
Sony’s Gamescom showing focused heavily on Vita. There were hardware bundles, big brands and even a new IP in the form of Media Molecule’s adorable new adventure, Tearaway.
Best of all, Sony revealed more ‘cross-buy’ games. Consumers who pick up Ratchet & Clank: Q-Force, Sly Cooper or PlayStation All-Stars can own them across both PS3 and PS Vita for one price.
But the big focus was on the third-party brands due over Q4, including the power three of Call of Duty, FIFA and Assassin’s Creed.
“There’s been a certain amount of comment that third-party support hasn’t been what has been expected, and we wanted to lay that to rest,” says Ryan.
“And wheeling out FIFA and Need for Speed, and putting more emphasis on Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified. When you have got IP like that, and then added to LittleBigPlanet coming next month, it puts the platform in a good place.”
“If you were looking at peak season and you were saying what would be the list of IPs we’d love to have, the dream list would look quite similar to the real list,” continues Gara.
“And they’re not necessarily just replicas of PS3 versions, there are parallel storylines and complementary experiences that are not available elsewhere. So it’s not enough to own a PS3 version of it, or dare I say an Xbox 360 version of it. If you want that new and additional experience, there’s a real incentive to go down the PlayStation Vita route.”
Third-party support for Vita has come under some scrutiny, but the backing the device has achieved from Ubisoft, EA, Activision, Capcom, Warner, Konami and so forth has been significant. These firms have not just rushed through ports onto the platform, but carefully re-worked games or created exclusive products purpose built for Sony’s portable.
“We wanted to create a game from scratch from our biggest franchise and be able to launch at the same time as the PS3 version with links between the two,” says Ubisoft Europe boss Alain Corre. “Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation itself is a huge project for us and it brings a totally new experience to the gamers.
“I think this game can give a boost to the Vita when it comes out. It’s a flagship game and it’s an exclusive product and it will use all of the technological capacities of the Vita to become a fantastic product. In terms of state of the art handheld games, it will be one of the best ever made and I think we can help the Vita go into the next level as Metal Gear Solid did for the PSP when the PSP came out.”
Capcom’s US and Europe marketing VP Michael Pattison adds: “It made perfect sense to do Street Fighter X Tekken on Vita. I think we are probably one of the first companies to leverage most, if not all, the feature sets of the actual handheld within the game.
“Vita is important to us, we know it is a slow burner at the moment but I do expect Sony to rally around. It is a great piece of kit.”
ACTION ‘STATIONS
Sony is putting its third-party support at the centre of its campaign this Christmas. Vita bundles featuring Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, FIFA 13, Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified, LEGO?Lord of the Rings and Need for Speed: Most Wanted are being prepared, while these games will be central to Sony’s marketing campaign.
The UK team has pledged to spend more on marketing Vita this Christmas than it did during the platform’s launch in February earlier this year.
“We’re currently putting the finishing touches to our campaign that’s been created locally in the UK which allows us to focus on the unique challenges we face in this territory,” says senior product manager Ian Vinten.
“We’re backing this with the biggest ever spend for a Vita campaign. Our comprehensive TV plan kicks off in September and will run in key bursts throughout peak to Christmas, focusing on the ...

Team Bondi has confimed that Whore of the Orient will be a next-generation IP.
The official blurb reads as follows:
“Shanghai, 1936. Whore of the Orient. Paris of the East. The most corrupt and decadent city on the planet, where anything can be had or done for the right price. Plaything of Western powers who greedily exploit the Chinese masses. Boiling pot of Chinese nationalism, with the Kuomintang ruthlessly trying to suppress Communism and the labour movement. Home to the International Police Force, a group of Western cops hopelessly trying to keep the lid on and keep the peace.
“From the development team who brought you LA Noire and The Getaway, along with the Academy Award winning film production team of Kennedy Miller Mitchell comes a completely new and original IP being developed for next generation games consoles and PC.”
We’ve seen plenty of games that seemingly are in development for next-gen machines (Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313) although Bondi has become the first studio to come out loud and proud about its development plans.
The announcement reinforces two notions.

1. That the next-gen consoles are very close now
2. That the industry is becoming impatient with Sony and Microsoft’s unwillingness to announce them

Don’t be surprised to see other developers to follow where Bondi is seemingly leading.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/la-no...orient/0102061 ...

Future Publishing's independent Nintendo-focused magazine Nintendo Gamer printed its final issue today.
Nintendo Gamer will continue to run its website but the magazine will cease to exist.
The magazine's editor Nick Ellis wrote a farewell note in the final issue stating that the move "draws the curtain on 20 years of independent Nintendo mags from Future Publishing".
Future Publishing's independent Nintendo magazines began in 1992 with the launch of Super-Play. It continued to publish Nintendo magazines including N64 Magazine, NGC and NGamer before rebranding to Nintendo Gamer.
"After careful consideration we've taken the decision to close Nintendo Gamer magazine. However, with Future's ongoing strategy to drive digital growth across its international, digitally-focussed brand business, the website, Nintendo-Gamer.net will continue as excitement builds ahead of Nitnendo's Wii U launch," said Nintendo Gamer's publisher Lee Nutter.
Online editor Chris Scullion added: "There will always be a place for Nintendo Gamer – it's just in a different medium now. Over the next few months we'll be sharing the best features and issues from the Nintendo Gamer vaults, dating all the way back through the magazine's 20-year history.
"On behalf of everyone who's ever written a word, designed a page, checked some text, written a caption or reviewed a game for Nintendo Gamer, thank you so much for reading the magazine. Please do buy the final issue when it's released on September 6th, and we hope you'll continue to stick around the website as it continued to evolve".
Nintendo Gamer launched in 2006 and retained an average circulation of 7,745 in 2011. Future will continue to publish Official Nintendo Magazine.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/futur...aining/0102066 ...

We think [Brian Delacruz] latched on to a good idea with this photo printer project. Instead of building a big photo booth for his party he developed a Raspberry Pi based WiFi photo printer. Right now it’s a prototype that lacks the kind of polish necessary to make a true user-friendly device. But the idea is solid and just waiting for you to improve upon it.
In addition to the RPi he’s using a quality photo printer and a small wireless router. The router simply provides WiFi capabilities for the RPi which is running a web server, mySQL, and FTP. This provides a wide range of upload options which he can work with. Watch the video after the break to see him print a smart phone photo wirelessly.
This can be simplified by using a package like hostapd to use a USB WiFi dongle as an access point. Or if the venue already has Internet access a server could be set up with a QR code to guide people to it. The party starts off with an empty bulletin board and guests would be invited to print and hang their own photos which will go into the host’s guest book/scrap book to remember the event.

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/29/party...-raspberry-pi/ ...

Improvements in processing power really hit home when you see . Sure, we’re talking about a system which launched more than 15 years ago (the original PlayStation launched way back in 1995), but this is a $99 device which seems to be playing the games at full speed!
[Sean] wrote in to share the project with us. After rooting the device he installed System 7 (aka Mac OS 7) using Mini vMac for Android. He uses Free PlayStation Emulator (FPSE) to run the games. There is an Android version which provides the touch-screen controls you see above. We figured the graphics would be awful, but the video after the break proves us wrong. Other than being in black and white we think the graphics are fantastic. Just one hack was necessary to make this happen. [Sean] uses NoRefresh to keep the Nook from refreshing the screen which is what causes the film-negative type of flashing after several page turns.

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/30/plays...-simple-touch/ ...

Assassin's Creed III, the cover star of E245, is no mere sequel with a new setting, according to the team who've spent the past three years working on Ubisoft's biggest-ever project. Instead, it's intended as a reinvention, rather than mere iteration, of the multimillion-selling series.
Whereas previous Assassin's Creed games have built upon an existing foundation, adding new mechanics and ideas but keeping to a broadly similar scope, the third game proper is rebuilt from the ground up - starting with brand new engine AnvilNext.
"When we started Assassin's Creed III, right after Assassin's Creed II, we knew Brotherhood was starting, and Brotherhood was a much more direct iteration on [the series]," lead design technical director Marc-Antoine Lussier tells us. "[The Brotherhood team's] guideline was, 'don't reinvent too much, use everything we know, and use the fact that we know how it works to make it even better, but faster'.
"Whereas our challenge was, 'reinvent everything, if possible'."
It's a daunting task. The Assassin's Creed series has hardly lacked ambition over the years, and nor has it held back in terms of the technical demands it placed on the current generation of consoles - a generation that's beginning to creak under the weight of ever larger, and more elaborate, worlds.
"The final product had to be revolutionary," Lussier continues. "On the same consoles, on the same hardware, we had to make sure that we had the power we needed. Also, the fact that we knew the team would be much bigger, that's another aspect - we had to make sure that [AnvilNext] was solid enough and efficient enough to be used by a much larger team."
The engine not only has to survive being pushed and pulled in various directions by hundreds of development staff, and draw the game's 18th century America environments at a decent lick, but also handle an uncommonly expressive protagonist - placed back to back, the 5,000 new animations for Assassin's Creed's main character Connor Kenway would take an hour to watch.
"And there's no cinematic in that - it's just the behaviour when you play," Lussier enthuses. "So there's a lot of new stuff. Everything's changed."
Productions of such scale are becoming increasingly rare, with more developers turning to simpler, more lithe development projects - the charge led, perhaps, by Curiosity, Peter Molyneux's first 22Cans experiment - and the industry becomes ever-more polarised. It's a fact not lost on creative director Alex Hutchinson.
"We're the last of the dinosaurs," he says. "We're still the monster triple-A game with very large teams [and] multiple studios helping out on different bits. There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out."

http://www.edge-online.com/news/assa...ent-everything ...

Amazon has released a rather bizarre bit of news today. The Kindle Fire has completely sold out. You can no longer buy one, and the wording of the press release suggests there won't be any more manufactured. In nine months on sale Amazon claims to have secured 22 percent of tablet sales in the U.S.. With that in mind, Amazon will definitely be selling more Kindle Fires, however, the next one you'll be able to buy will probably have a '2' at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...ld-out-forever ...