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- Photoshop Touch coming to the iPad, reminds us Adobe finally gets mobile
- GamesBeat Only weekly roundup
- Samsung reveals 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab 2, Galaxy Beam phone with built-in HD projector
- VBWeekly: The Galaxy S II, Eco-Apple, and book club
- Unfriending and private profiles are the new trends on social networks
- Circle to search: Google patents “continuous gestures” for Android
| Photoshop Touch coming to the iPad, reminds us Adobe finally gets mobile Posted: 26 Feb 2012 08:58 AM PST
Adobe will officially launch its Photoshop Touch iPad app at the Mobile World Congress on Monday, months after Android users first got their hands on the app. Adobe has certainly seen its fair share of trouble with Apple, and it suffered a major black eye when it gave up on developing Flash for mobile devices. But with apps like Photoshop Touch — which genuinely seem geared towards giving tablet users something new and compelling, instead of just recreate the desktop experience — it seems like Adobe finally understands what mobile users need. Adobe announced Photoshop Touch and its suite of companion Touch apps back in October alongside the unveiling of its Creative Cloud service, which will enable users to store, share, and collaborate on documents stored on Adobe’s servers. Now the flagship app in Adobe’s new tablet ambitions, and a core part of Creative Cloud, is will be available to iPad owners for $9.99 on the iTunes App Store. Photoshop Touch briefly appeared on iTunes in Australia and New Zealand today, before it was quickly pulled by Adobe. Like its competitors, Photoshop Touch is a tablet image editor with support for layers and plenty of effects. But what sets it apart is an exclusive feature dubbed the Scribble Selection Tool, which lets you easily extract objects by scribbling on the screen with your fingers. It’s the sort of innovation that tells us Adobe finally gets mobile (or so we hope). Adobe says that the other iOS Touch apps will hit later this year when Creative Cloud launches (the Ideas app has already been released for the iPad). Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2012 01:38 AM PST
Here are the best stories that appeared exclusively on GamesBeat this week: Co-op vs. Zombies: Leading Resident Evil to multiplayer shooter territory (interview) How to get your start in the game industry John Robertson on The Dark Room, his merciless and hilarious YouTube game (interview) NeuroSky launches Focus Pocus learning app that kids can control with their minds World of Warcraft could help your grandma focus Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational is Vita's surprise delight (review) Bejeweled maker PopCap bets on Facebook casino-game gold rush You'll fall 70 stories if you lose in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Overwatch map Double Fine's Tim Schafer on Kickstarter success: It can happen again (interview) Reality Fighters: All style, no substance (review) Red Dead Redemption studio worked on an "interactive girlfriend project" for Microsoft Ridiculous: 300 Space Cores rolling down a mountain in Skyrim (video)
The Facebook gaming boom is fizzling out, analyst firm says After Disney, Bungie founder dives into mobile games with Industrial Toys (exclusive interview) The DeanBeat: Creating a pop icon that will never age (exclusive) Game analyst Michael Pachter: The Wii was a bubble, but social gaming isn't Game Closure raises $12M for HTML5 cross-platform games OnLive delivers ridiculously fast web browsing on the iPad PlayStation Vita starts moving off the shelves Everything you need to know about the PlayStation Vita Sony's marketing chief: PlayStation Vita to be biggest marketing spend ever in U.S. (interview) Striiv says its step-counting gadget inspires people to walk more PlayStation Vita: THE hardware review
Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a flawed flagship for the PlayStation Vita (review) Filed under: games, mobile        
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| Samsung reveals 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab 2, Galaxy Beam phone with built-in HD projector Posted: 26 Feb 2012 01:11 AM PST
Samsung kicked off its Mobile World Congress presence by revealing two new devices this morning: a larger 10.1-inch version of the Galaxy Tab 2 Android tablet, and the intriguing/baffling Galaxy Beam, an Android smartphone with a built-in projector. Given Samsung’s propensity to delivering tablets of many different sizes, the larger Galaxy Tab 2 doesn’t come as much as a surprise. The Galaxy Beam, on the other hand, is a bit of a head scratcher. The Beam is a traditional Android smartphone, aside from the projector aspect. It has a 4-inch display, a 1 gigahertz dual-core processor, and runs Android 2.3. Honestly, it sounds like a phone that would have been announced last year, not something that Samsung would save for the biggest mobile event of 2012. But the Galaxy Beam’s real claim to fame is its powerful built-in projector, which Samsung says can project HD up to 50-inches wide at 15 lumens. You’ll be able to project photos, videos, and games using a special Samsung app. Like the Galaxy Note, the Beam appears to be a very niche device, but it’s the first step towards Samsung bringing projectors to its future mainstream devices (it’d certainly be a nice addition to next year’s Galaxy S lineup). The 10.1-inch version of the Galaxy Tab 2 is clearly Samsung’s volley to stay competitive with the iPad 3, which could be announced as soon as next week. It sports a 1280 by 800 10.1-inch display, Android 3.0, and 1 gigabyte of RAM. It’s only 9.7 millimeters thick and will come in 16 gigabyte and 32GB varieties. Samsung is also expected to announce a 10-inch version of the Galaxy Note this week, so it’ll be interesting to see how it fits into the company’s tablet lineup. I found the Note to be iffy as a phone, but the S Pen stylus has a lot of potential in larger screens. It’s certainly one way for Samsung to stay a step ahead of the iPad 3.
Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| VBWeekly: The Galaxy S II, Eco-Apple, and book club Posted: 26 Feb 2012 12:43 AM PST In this week’s VBWeekly, Jolie O’Dell walks us through first impressions of the Samsung Galaxy S II, the PlayStation Vita, and, in what turns out to be a blatant rip off, an iPhone game called Pokemon Yellow that is nothing more than a load screen that crashes. Sarah Mitroff talks about Apple’s latest environmental efforts — the construction of the largest solar array in the United States. GamesBeat’s Dan ‘Shoe’ Hsu reviews PlayStation’s newest offering, the Vita. We’ve also included additional video from Reid Hoffman (“The Startup of You”) and Baratunde Thurston (“How to be Black”) as part of our first ever VB Book club review. Take that Oprah! Filed under: offBeat, video        
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| Unfriending and private profiles are the new trends on social networks Posted: 25 Feb 2012 03:05 PM PST
A growing percentage of people are wising up to the consequences of willy-nilly friending and status update-posting. The Pew Internet and American Life Project, which surveyed 2,277 adults 18 and over, determined that two-thirds of people online are using social networking sites, but these folks are also now more likely to correct for their past friending mistakes.
Altogether, 63 percent of adults have deleted friends (up from 56 percent in 2009), and 44 percent have deleted others’ comments from their profiles. Privacy appears to be the new preference of social media denizens. The majority of social network users (58 percent) have set their profiles to private, and just 20 percent of adults said their profiles remained public. Women are especially keen on privacy: 67 precent of women, compared to 48 percent of men, set the highest privacy restrictions for their profiles. Men, however, are twice as likely (15 percent) as women (8 percent) to regret posting content. “Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts,” Pew concluded. Photo credit: xXxRawrKidRawrxXx /Flickr Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Circle to search: Google patents “continuous gestures” for Android Posted: 25 Feb 2012 12:33 PM PST
Copy and paste is for squares. The future of search on Android-powered mobile devices will be all about circles, if a recently filed patent by Google is any indication. Google has invented a new way to search on touchscreens with a functionality it calls “continuous gestures,” according to a patent discovered and dissected by Patently Apple. In essence, continuous gestures will let you simply circle content such as text, photos, and videos to search Google or other sites. A continuous gesture is a two-part action that starts with the user drawing a “g,” or another letter, to indicate a desired activity, and then continuing the movement by lassoing content to be acted on. So you would draw a “g” to indicate a desired Google search and then continue the gesture by circling the content you wanted to search. Drawing another letter, say a “w,” would perform a different action — in this case a Wikipedia search. The patent also includes specifications for handling ambiguous drawings (of which, we’re sure they’ll be many) and multi-content searches. “If a user has a news article open that displays the words ‘restaurant’ and ‘Thai food’ and a map of New York City, a user may, via a series of continuous gestures cause a search to be performed on the phrase ‘Thai food restaurant New York City,’” Patently Apple explained. The Google patent was filed in the third quarter of 2011 and was recently published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to the patent blog. No word from Google on if and when the company plans to implement these intriguing search concepts. “We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t,” a Google representative told VentureBeat. “Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”
Photo credits: Shutterstock and Patently Apple Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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Sixty-seven percent of American women and 58 percent of men who maintain social media profiles delete people from their network, according to Pew’s findings, published Thursday in a report titled “
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