BlackBerry 10 no longer coming to BlackBerry Playbook Tablets

Well Blackberry certainly have pulled a fast one!

Back in January the former RIM announced its next generation of BlackBerry OS, in the form of BlackBerry10, the new operating system was supposed to re-invigorate RIM’s (the company changed their name to BlackBerry at the same time) future and was looking set to offer a new Smartphone and Tablet experience. BlackBerry was so keen on their new OS that they even announced that they would be bringing BB10 to its older range of Playbook tablets.

Well, as of today you can officially forget that promise. BlackBerry’s CEO Thorsten Heins has stated (at the company’s annual update) that BlackBerry were no longer planning on bringing the BB10 operating system to the 7inch Blackberry playbooks.

Heins stated that he was “not satisfied with the user experience” that BlackBerry 10 provided on the PlayBook, which led him to make the “difficult decision” to stop the production on the Playbooks software update.

This will come as a blow to Playbook fans who have held out upgrading away from the Tablets to see what the newer operating system would bring to the table.

BlackBerry currently have no Tablet devices available on the market with BB10 although a new range is expected (more likely assumed) by fans of the OS.

Now it certainly was a surprise when BlackBerry originally announced the Playbook’s update to BB 10 as the Tablets are nearing on 2 years old at the time, but with BlackBerry promising the update its going to be a big blow for anyone with a Playbook.

However with Tablet prices dropping a competition being raised, there are plenty of great Tablet devices about to replace the PlayBook.

Source: Gadget Helpline

Google Edition of the Huawei Ascend P6 coming?

Its looking like Huawei are set to follow in Samsung and HTC’s footsteps by offering their latest Huawei Ascend P6 smartphone up with a Google Edition of the Android Jelly bean OS in the coming months, if a report from Pocket-Lint is to believed.

This week Google have placed on sale “Google Editions” of the flagship handset from HTC and Samsung, the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 on the Google play store where users can buy the top notch handsets minus all of the Samsung/HTC user interfaces (called Samsung TouchWiz and HTC Sense).

What users then get is a pure form of the Google Jelly Bean OS, which will have more speed and memory allocated to it, but lacking some of the top features that Samsung and HTC bundle with their devices.

Huawei’s president of the handset product division, Kevin Ho, has been speaking to Pocket-lint where he has said that the company is collaborating with Google to create a Google Edition of the company’s new P6.

He states: “We are working with Google to analyse the possibility of bringing out a Huawei Ascend P6 with Google Edition,”

Huawei’s sleek and slim Ascend P6 was launched in London on June the 18th and the Device is the Chinese companies answer to the flagship handsets from Samsung, HTC and Apple’s current iPhone. It features a sheet of tough Gorilla Glass 2 covering a 4.7-inch 720p HD display sporting a resolution of 1280 x 720. Huawei’s own processor that is a quad-core chip clocked at 1.5GHz. That’s paired with 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, the latter of which can be expanded upon by up to 32GB via micro SD.

Plus it’s got the same 8 megapixel f/2.0 Exmor R sensor that Sony uses in many of its own smartphones. The P6 will come with Jelly Bean 4.2.2 on board and will have the Huawei’s Emotion UI built in, which will be dropped for the Google Edition.

It’s a great smartphone that will be a bit cheaper than the HTC One and Galaxy S4 in price, so a Google Edition could be a great bargain handset.

However Huawei have previously stated that the company isn’t interested in a Standard edition of the Google Os, which offers a conflicting report.

We will wait out and see if the Ascend P6 will become the latest Google Edition handset in the coming weeks.

Source: Gadget Helpline

Google blocking Blogger sites with porn adverts from June 30th

Google has issued a warning today to users of its Blogger platform, stating that they will be cracking down on the usage of pornographic content for monetization purposes. Google advised that from June 30^th that posts or blogs will be removed if they deem a sites to that have links to adult content and advertisements for pornographic websites.

The use of adult adverts has always been prohibited by Blogger’s current content policy but this does not mean that users cannot post images and videos that contain nudity and sexual activity, provided they categorise their blog appropriately in the settings panel. The policy just means they cant make money from them!

However, this has been happening on the platform (possibly due to a lax attitude from Google) and now Google is putting its foot down to stamp out this money making scheme.

Google has sent an email out to all Blogger users where they state:

“You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified as having Adult content”

“Please be advised that on June 30^th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30^th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and displaying advertisements to adult websites.”

“If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.”

“Sincerely, The Blogger Team”

So that’s it for those making a bit of cash from advertising adult related websites on Blogger, as Google is cracking down and making sure that they are the only ones making money from porn!

So if you do have adverts of adult nature on your Blogger site then now is the time to remove them before the Google Police get you.

Source: Gadget Helpline

Google said to be developing Android games console and smart watch

Google has its very first Android powered games console and smart watch in the works, according to the Wall Street Journal.

According to sources familiar with Google’s secret projects, WSJ believes that Google is getting ready to expand beyond just Android software and into hardware. The Mountain View company is also said to be working on a “digital wrist watch”, which to us sounds very much like a smart watch.

Google has been in the hardware game for a while with Nexus phones and tablets, but these are often manufactured on its behalf by other companies such as Samsung, HTC and LG. The console and watch will be made by Google itself, featuring Google branding.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is Google’s reasoning for the development of a games console. According to sources, Google is acting on the belief that its main rival Apple will also break into the games area. According to WSJ the company has “expectations that rival Apple will launch a videogame console as part of its next Apple TV product release.”

Until now we’ve not heard anything of Apple’s plans to move into the gaming space, although recent additions to iOS 7 do hint at a much bigger emphasis on gaming with iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, with game controller accessories planned. If Apple and Google really do go head to head with gaming we could be seeing some awesome innovation coming our way.

In addition to reports of a games console and smart watch, we’re also hearing that Google has a second generation Nexus Q in the works. This mysterious device was revealed at I/O 2012 as a media streamer, but didn’t get much attention from the public or Google and seemed to disappear off the radar. Now an upgraded model has been spotted going through checks at the FCC and looks set to arrive later in the year.

Google is said to be launching a new version of Android – dubbed Key Lime Pie – later this year, alongside at least one of these products.

Source: Gadget Helpline