If you weren’t up all night playing The Last of Us on your PlayStation 3, then you may have avoided the drama that occurred overnight in regards to the console’s latest 4.45 system update. The update has reportedly been the cause of a number of PlayStation 3s to become unusable, or “bricked” as most gamers would call it. Fortunately, Sony is aware of the problem and has pulled the update from the PlayStation Network.

Sony’s PlayStation European Twitter account sent out a message earlier today confirming firmware update 4.45 has been pulled, saying they’re “aware of reports that the recent PS3 update (4.45) has caused,” and are currently investigating what could have caused the issue as well as what users are being bricked as a result of the update.

At this time, it’s unknown how Sony will treat customers who have unfortunately had their consoles bricked as a result of its 4.45 firmware update, but we would think the company would offer some kind of reimbursement, especially since its PlayStation 4 is going to be released in just a few months. The last thing Sony needs right now is a PR nightmare over this bricking issue.

We were able to spot the HTC Butterfly S last week in the wild, which looks to feature Beats Audio BoomSound speakers. Today, HTC is officially announcing its newest Android handset and its specs seem to be pretty good.

The HTC Butterfly S is a nice improvement over the original Butterfly as it features a 5-inch 1080p Super LCD 3 display, 1.9GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor, 16GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, 2GB of RAM, an UltraPixel rear-facing camera, 2.1MP front-facing camera, 3,200mAh battery and will use HTC Sense 5 with BlinkFeed.
Read full post →HTC Announces HTC Butterfly S Featuring 5-inch 1080p Display, Quad-Core CPU

In February earlier this year, Microsoft Research rolled out BLINK, which happens to be a handy free photo app for Windows Phone 8 which is capable of capturing a burst of images whenever you keep the shutter button on your smartphone pressed down, letting you select the best shot from the entire bunch later on. Microsoft claimed the BLINK ended up as an unprecedented hit, having achieved over 317,000 downloads and hundreds of 5-star reviews in the four month period following its release.

Well, there is no point in sitting on one’s laurels, which is why Microsoft scientists have churned out an update to BLINK, where version 2.0 would be able to introduce additional abilities that enable one to create and share short video clips. Is it just me, or are short video clips growing to be all the rage these days? After all, Instagram is set to unveil video support from June 20th onwards, while Vine continues to rise in popularity. BLINK could be taken to the next level where a Lens app is concerned.

Here is where Daft Punk’s “Higher Stronger Faster” song comes in to echo the latest updates that are applied to the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0, where it would then allow this particular device to fly further, faster and of course, higher. You will get to experience even more astonishing flights, as flights will now be able to be displayed in 3D, while video storage and GPS localization is also made possible courtesy of a new Flight Recorder module. Not only that, you are able to gain access to the Director Mode feature which will cater for filming what is under the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 from high up above, making you feel like you are an old hand with it.

Not only that, a spanking new High Density Battery has also been touted to increase the flight time by a whopping 50%, now how about that? I guess it is technological advancements and updates like these which breathe a new lease of life into your Parrot AR.Drone 2.0, and we definitely are wondering what other surprises that Parrot has in store for the AR.Drone 2.0 sometime down the road.

Earlier this February, we brought you word that GameStick pre-orders have been going up for $79 a pop, with the first orders tipped to ship sometime in April 2013. Having said that, April 2013 has already come and gone, and we are more than halfway through the year now without any further news on GameStick’s next proposed shipping date. At least, until now, as PlayJam recently announced that the first GameStick Android gaming devices will begin to ship this coming August.

Better late than never applies here I guess, and those who have placed their money to back the GameStick in their Kickstarter campaign will be able to receive theirs first before the rest of the world who preferred to stand back and watch things happen before taking the plunge. Just a quick refresher – the GameStick device comes across as a small stick which can be plugged into the HDMI port on a TV, so that you can enjoy an Android-based game on a far larger display in your living room as compared to even a 13.3” Android-powered tablet. There will also be an optional dock that increases the amount of connectivity by including USB ports, an Ethernet jack, and power.

The folks over at Google have done it yet again, increasing the reach of their online services by rolling out support for another 18 languages, bringing the total number of languages “spoken” by Google Drive to 65 after the latest additions. The new languages would be Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canada), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malay, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu, and Zulu.

You would have the option of switching the languages back and forth according to your whim and fancy, since most of these languages would also be supported by Drive’s spellchecker. Regardless of whether you are collaborating over the cloud with someone else on the different Drive apps available, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms, you would still be able to work in real time in any language of your choice, while your fellow collaborators might be comfortable with another supported language. It would be interesting to see just how this is going to make working together across the cloud be more cohesive in the long run. [Press Release]

It seems that there is another game coming up which could very well sap your life as well as time, as you get involved in a virtual world while forgetting everything about the real world in the process. The time blackhole that I am referring to would be confirmation for The Sims 4, which is set to take to the stage this August 21 in terms of an official preview. Both Maxis and Electronic Arts have confirmed over Twitter that the world would be able to get the first actual look at The Sims 4 at gamescom, which so happens to kick off this coming August 21st.

The Sims 4 was first announced in early May, where Maxis did do their part to reassure fans of the franchise that The Sims 4 would be a true blue single-player, entirely offline experience. Hmmm, this is kind of ironic, especially when you consider how the entire Sims franchise was meant to let you live out a social lifestyle, and to play all alone while making friends with virtual avatars seem rather sad. Ah well, at least they don’t go around stabbing you in the back, and neither will there be rumor mongering among the other Sims.

If you happen to own a Sony PS3 (with an obvious succession plan to make the jump to the PS4 when that particular bad boy arrives at the end of this year, of course), you might want to take note of the latest firmware update version 4.45 as well as the troubles that come along with it. In fact, a bunch of owners who have already applied the update have reported that their PS3 consoles have actually locked up during the booting process, but it seems that this particular issue has been narrowed down to affect only those PS3 owners who have 500GB or larger hard drives installed.

The PS3 4.45 update’s changelog did mention that it was meant to enable users to choose whether they would want to receive an in-game notification when a trophy is earned. Assuming the speculation that this issue arises from user-replaced hard drives, then it would bring back memories of the time when the 3.41 update caused a few corrupted PS3 drives, too. Hopefully things will look up for the better in the long run, and a solution should be released sooner rather than later.

Earlier today, most folks would have heard a collective cry of screams across the galaxy, one that bellows as a long “NooOOOoOoOooo!”, which has an effect that is far more painful for Master Yoda to feel in the Force compared to when Order 66 was executed. The reason behind that? A global outage of Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. Well, you can now heave a collective sigh of relief considering how Facebook is now up and running. While the outage did affect folks living in the US, South America, Australia and Europe, apparently not everyone experienced difficulties. We do wonder whether those whose birthdays fall during those crucial moments saw the intention of your friend’s plan of sending you an Amazon Birthday Gift over Facebook thwarted.

Apparently, Facebook was down and out for approximately 20 minutes, where error messages can be seen on Facebook’s launch page. One of Facebook’s messages read, “Sorry, something went wrong.” Obviously it is moments like these when one would take to other alternatives such as Twitter to get the message across, and it remains to be seen as to why Facebook went down in the first place.

It was just last week when we brought you an announcement from the folks over at Nintendo that they would be offering free-to-play games before March 2014 rolls along, and it is nice to see the company keep their promise with the announcement that Steel Diver would make the cut as the first free-to-play title from the Japanese gaming giant, with other titles to follow suit soon.

For those who were hoping that some of the free games would be part of the Super Mario and Pokemon game franchise, be prepared to be disappointed as that is just not going to happen. Having said that, just in case Steel Diver sounds familiar to you, that is because this happened to be one of the launch titles for the Nintendo 3DS some time back. Nintendo’s work on the free-to-play version of the submarine simulator should complete soon, and I do wonder whether anyone has pangs of regret for forking $40 for this puppy at launch. What are some of the titles that you wished would make the free-to-play cut?