We’ve seen numerous announcements of tablet computers in recent weeks, as the R&D labs of the world push out their hastily assembled attempts at competing with Apple’s game-changing iPad. But are any of them up to the job?

Last week alone saw ViewSonic, Toshiba and Samsung all officially unveil new models of keyboard-less computer, with a mish-mash of operating systems and screen sizes hoping to somehow build themselves a market in the wake of Apple’s market-leading device.

So here’s a summary of five of the best tablets out there and on the way this year. Or, to put it another way, the iPad +4.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

Screen: 7-inch Super TFT-LCD, 1024×600
Storage: 16GB internal, up to 32GB micro SD
Processor: Cortex A8 1.0GHz
OS: Android 2.2

The closest Android has got to Apple so far, at least in terms of hype and noise prior to its launch. Officially unveiled at IFA this week, the Samsung Galaxy Tab features a 7″ screen and the latest 2.2 version of Android at its core.

The internals are the same as those of the Samsung Galaxy S, offering the Cortex A8 processor that won so many fans when in mobile phone format. The hardware feature set closely adheres to Apple’s template, but also offering a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera for video chat—despite the fact that not many Android apps currently support the feature. Samsung has confirmed the Galaxy Tab has one big advantage over tablets—access to the Android Market.

Much more pocketable than the iPad with only a 7″ screen, it’s the best Android currently has when looking for a proper iPad competitor.

iPad

Screen: 9.7-inch LED backlit
Storage: 16, 32 or 64GB flash
Processor: Apple A4 1GHz
OS: iOS

The current tablet king, thanks to making tablet interfaces fashionable and usable. Apple’s tablet is typical of an Apple product—polished and beautifully functional as long as you don’t want to do anything outside of Apple’s closely controlled world.

Obviously the big winner here is compatibility with standard apps from Apple’s App Store, meaning iPad comes with the world’s biggest collection of apps and games from day one. Albeit most of them are upscaled, but high-res iPad reworkings are quickly becoming the norm from most top developers.

The hardware is fast and responsive, and although there’s no camera, USB connector or Flash support, for casual browsing of your feeds and blogs in Star Trek style there’s simply no better option.

ViewSonic ViewPad 100

Screen: 10-inch LED backlit LCD, 1024×600
Storage: 16GB SSD, 32GB micro SD
Processor: Intel Atom N455 1.66GHz
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium, Android 1.6

The killer feature in the ViewSonic ViewPad 100 is dual-booting capabilities with Windows 7 and Android, so you can kill two birds (cell phone nerd, work use) with one stone.

The rather outdated Android 1.6 isn’t going to stand up against Windows 7 very well, though, which makes us think the Android support here is more of a tagged-on feature to help whip up a bit of excitement among Android fanatics. It’ll be good to see Android running on an Intel Atom, though.

The main worry here is that the ViewPad 100 is an awkward combination machine, either way too powerful for Android 1.6 or not man enough to operate Windows 7 with ease. And can Android 1.6 really cut it as a tablet OS? ViewSonic had better have one hell of a user interface skin lined up.

Toshiba Folio 100

Screen: 10.1-inch 1024×600
Storage: 16GB flash
Processor: Nvidia Tegra 2
OS: Android 2.2

Another tablet that clones iPad’s winning 10-inch screen size, we expect the Toshiba Folio 100 to operate at lightning speed thanks to the coupling of the next-gen Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset and the optimised Android 2.2 as its OS—so it’s also fully Flash-enabled.

You get a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, so you can tell people it’s got a front-facing camera. Even if you never, ever, actually use it. Plus there’s a mini HDMI port for proper HD media connectivity with your big TV.

Its other connectivity options are plentiful—802.11n Wi-Fi, SD/MMC card support, plus there’ll be a 3G version launching in Q1 2011.

Archos 101 Internet Tablet

Screen: 10.1-inch TFT LCD, 1024 x 600
Storage: 8GB flash
Processor: Arm Cortex A8
OS: Android 2.2

Archos is betting its family farm on Android, with a whole heap of Android tablets on the way. The top of the bunch has to be the Archos 101, the 10.1″ version powered by the impressive ARM Cortex A8.

Form factor-wise, the .5-inch thick tablet is plenty thin, and at .93-pound, it felt really light in hand compared to the iPad. The 1024 x 600-resolution, capacitive touchscreen was responsive and the 1GHz processor gave it enough power to play a 720p video. It has a front-facing VGA cam as well as USB and HDMI ports. It’s also got a kickstand on the back that allows you to prop it up at a nice angle for typing on the on-screen keyboard. Obviously, there’s a number of more Android tablets hitting soon, but this one definitely seems like a new contender in our book.

[Gizmodo]

It’s a mobile platform…

Google’s out with Android 2.2—codename: Froyo—and so far I am impressed and excited. But what is it, exactly?

Froyo (following Google’s adorable alphabetized dessert naming convention) is the latest iteration of Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Simple enough! If you bought an Android phone recently, Froyo’s what it will eventually be running.

…with a slightly different look…

Aside from the nice touch of being greeted by an Android icon at start-up, Froyo users can also expect a new homescreen widget. There are some other minor aesthetic changes, and transitions and animations seem a bit smoother, but the user experience isn’t all that different from using 2.1 on a Nexus One.

…that supports USB tethering and acts as a portable hotspot…

Froyo lets you turn your phone into a hotspot—including for your Wi-Fi iPad, if you’re so inclined. (Or any other Wi-Fi device.) It’s still not confirmed if every Android carrier will support tethering (AT&T?), but Froyo’s definitely capable. As of now every Froyo equipped device like the new Motorola Droid 2, HTC Evo and the Nexus One have this feature, though there are extra carrier charges imposed for that.

… that’s way faster than its predecessor…

It was already demonstrated at this year’s Google IO that Android 2.2 is ridiculously faster than Android 2.1, and boy its true: Froyo is up to 5x faster than Eclair, thanks to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. And that’s just the OS; Google’s also claiming that Froyo has the world’s fastest mobile browser, period. Froyo on the Nexus One is blazingly fast with no lags or delays between swiping screens or opening applications. The browser too was very responsive; panning and zooming on the Nexus One was definitely better than it was in Eclair.

…that supports Flash 10.1…

Android 2.2 supports Flash 10.1—important, because Flash 10.1 is optimized to run on mobile devices. And more than finally killing off those little question mark cubes that litter the web on your phone, it’ll also be a huge differentiator for Google in the fight against Apple. There’s a line in the sand, and Adobe and Google are on the same side of it. Flash performance on Froyo equipped phones like the Nexus One, HTC Evo or the recent Droid 2 have been appreciated, finally lauding Adobe’s effort to bring flash to the mobile devices.

…that updates apps and music OTA…

Speaking of leapfrogging the iPhone: with Froyo, when you download an app to your computer you don’t need to tether your phone. Instead, the update will automatically be installed over-the-air to your device – we finally get the option to update all our apps simultaneously with the “Update All” button. Same goes with music you buy. Hear that, iPhone users? No syncing required.

…that streams your music…

You’ll also be able to stream your (non-DRM) iTunes library wirelessly to your Froyo phone.

…that lets you send data to your phone OTA…

The new Cloud to device messaging API lets developers create apps that send messages that trigger actions from the cloud to your device. That sounds boring. It’s not. Here’s what it means: You can view a map in your desktop web browser, hit a button, and driving directions will automatically open up on your phone. You don’t just get an email or a text message with a link to click. The navigation app opens up and starts giving you directions.

You can also use this API to do things like click a button to open the web page you’re viewing in a desktop browser on your mobile device, it should be interesting to see what other uses developers come up with.

…that’s introducing a bevy of new app features…

Froyo gives hardware compass access to the browser, handy for orienting maps according to which direction you’re facing. You’ll be able to access the camera from the browser, as well. Google continues to blur the difference between native and web apps.

Other tidbits: voice recognition for search and for Google Translate—the latter of which, when plugged into text to speech, makes a handy speech-to-speech translator. There’s also a handy new application manager that’ll let you move apps to and run them off of an SD card and allows background updating.

…and that’s coming soon to most of the handsets (depending)…

Congratulations, Nexus One users! You were the first one to get the Froyo update. The HTC Evo has already got it OTA and the Motorola Droid 2 came with Froyo pre-installed. Everyone else, you’re just going to have to hold tight; firmware updates are largely up to the carriers and OEMs, and some poor saps only got their Android 2.1 upgrade. The more recent Android handsets should see an update in the next few months.

[Gizmodo]

Time picked this deliciously crispy photo as one of the images of the year, revealing Saturn’s ring bumps as high as the Rocky Mountains.

I’m not surprised, because it’s a truly unique moment, one that happens at Saturn’s equinox, which is an event that only happens twice in 10,179 Earth days. And this time, we had Cassini there to take this amazing photo, just when the sun illuminates the rings edge-on. As Carolyn Porco—Cassini imaging team leader—puts it:

The geometry revealed structures and phenomena in the rings we had never seen before. We saw this famous adornment spring from two dimensions into three, with some ring structures soaring as high as the Rocky Mountains. It made me feel blessed.

The team used Cassini during a week to take photos of vertical clumps in the ring, and when the equinox happened, they could measure their true size looking at the shadows. According to NASA’s Bob Pappalardo at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

It’s like putting on 3-D glasses and seeing the third dimension for the first time. This is among the most important events Cassini has shown us.

Well, Bob and Carolyn, Carolyn and Bob and the rest of the Cassini team, all I can say is thank you for an amazing work, and the stunning desktop backgrounds in 2009.

[Gizmodo]

The Droid Incredible follows HTC’s standard remix formula: Two parts existing phoneware—Android 2.1 with Sense, speedy processor—one part fresh spice—Verizon’s network.

To proceed directly to the spoilers, this is the best Android phone you can buy on Verizon, which, at the very least, makes it the best smartphone you can buy on Verizon. It’s also possibly the best Android phone you can buy in the US for now—with the caveat that running a custom user interface introduces the high possibility it will get screwed on future Android updates from Google, as owners of HTC’s other custom Android phones could attest to, still waiting patiently for the update to 2.1 themselves.

The Software

Firstly, we need to talk about the differences between Android 2.1 with and without the Sense UI. If you’ve looked at a Nexus One (or own one), then you probably know that the experience with the UI is a mixed bag. Some portions of the software have been dramatically cleaned up, while others seem to be left on the cutting room floor. That’s absolutely not the case with 2.1 and Sense. Basically, the Incredible — and all devices with that combo — feel like complete, polished, modern smartphones, with none of the perks or features missing. In particular, the homescreens have been massively expanded here, giving you seven screens in which to store icons and widgets… and there are a lot of widgets. HTC has included a handful of its own widgets alongside some of the familiar stock ones which Google offers. Of course, the widgets (and their corresponding apps) which HTC offers generally offer far more functionality than Google’s options, and they’re also tied together with Sense in way that makes the experience of using them within the OS feel complete — something notably missing from the Google-only experience. To say that this UI is competitive with something like iPhone OS 3.1 (or 4 for that matter), or Palm’s webOS is an understatement; in many ways it’s superior to what Apple and Palm are offering.

HTC has done a marvelous job in tweaking Sense in all the right places. The performance of the Incredible couldn’t have been more faster. The phone never hiccuped, and scrolling between pages or up and down long lists happened without hesitation. Not only was the UI blazingly fast and responsive — even with all seven homescreens running heavy widgets — but as we mentioned previously, the touchscreen response on this phone seem remarkably better than its contemporaries, which leads us to believe that HTC has honed the software in this regard as well. That sensitivity comes in especially handy when using HTC’s new pinch feature on the homescreens, which brings up a “card” view of all your pages. The only spot where we noticed any kind of slowdown was when using the live wallpapers — we’re not really big fans of the concept to begin with, but it did seem to make the homescreen frame rate visibly more sluggish. Besides just the cosmetic stuff, HTC has also done seriously heavy lifting in the details department, continuing to improve the music, video, and photo browsing options on their devices, as well as making their fantastic on-screen keyboard even better in this higher resolution version. We found finger tracking and typing speed to be considerably improved, as well as word prediction and correction. Apple, watch your back… HTC has done a damn good job of sneaking up on your tech, and maybe improving on it. We can’t stress this enough: HTC has made a really good OS (Android) into a truly amazing and competitive OS. HTC has even improved upon the copy and paste functions of the phone, making the process much more iPhone-like, but expanding on that with options to share and look up your selections via a context menu. Oh, and did we mention the amazing new text flow in the browser? No matter how far you zoom in, HTC’s software will reflow the text you’re looking at to make it zoomable. It’s pretty amazing, actually. We don’t know why Google doesn’t just collaborate with the company in a more formal fashion, because no one else has been able to deliver this cohesive and enjoyable of an experience with Android.

It should also be noted that the browser on these phones is equipped with Flash lite, though we had lots of trouble getting videos to play on many of the sites we visited. If someone was hoping to convince us that Flash could work on a device like this, consider the job unfinished.

Verizon and HTC have collaborated on a few perks in the OS as well, cleaning up the Google Navigation, er, navigation, and also collapsing Visual Voicemail into the messaging app on the phone, making it easier to get at all your communications at once. We’re Google Voice users (which of course perfectly integrates with the device), so we didn’t spend much time with Verizon’s version. HTC was also happy to point out that its email app supports multiple Exchange, POP, or IMAP accounts with a unified inbox — something that should please a number of enterprise users. Other bundled apps include Quickoffice, a PDF viewer, HTC’s Teeter game, and Peep, the company’s built-in Twitter client. A note about this latter application; we’re big fans of HTC making Twitter an integrated part of its UI, but this app has the annoying habit of auto-updating your timeline and jumping to the most recent tweet, which makes this “solution” less than appealing. We ended up sticking with Seesmic, and probably will until HTC addresses this minor issue. One other item that cropped up — which may or may not have to do with this being an unreleased device — is that we got very different results for apps in the Market. Some programs we were looking for just simply didn’t show up in our searches. We had the same problem with the Desire and Legend when testing, and HTC says it’s looking into this problem, though we have yet to hear a proper explanation from the company on why this is occurring.

Overall the experience with 2.1 and Sense was a complete pleasure — using the phone felt fast and efficient. We’d like to point out that we’ve been running the Incredible without any third party task managers, and without manually killing any applications. Android is designed to multitask without the need for utilities of the sort, and based on Steve Jobs’ words from the recent iPhone OS 4 event, we were extra curious to see how this brand new build of the software would fare. We can tell you this — it hasn’t let us down yet, and we’re not seeing any sluggish behavior or force closes on apps. If this OS has a need for management of its processes, we haven’t experienced it yet.

The Hardware

The Incredible might be the world’s first mullet phone: flat, straightforward business in the front, stylized rubber party in the back. In fact, if you pop the back condom off (it’s got ridges and it’s rubber, it’s basically a hard condom), the Incredible’s hot-rod red underneath. It saves the phone from verging into boring-as-hell territory. Slightly thicker than a Nexus One or iPhone, but lighter, it feels (and looks) chintzier than both.

The phone’s face is its 800×480 AMOLED display, with four capacitive touch buttons and an optical joystick. The display appears to be the same as the Nexus One, a super-saturated crowd pleaser, which also happens to have a few color reproduction issues. Running the test patterns, the Incredible also showed the same kind of color fringing that the Nexus One has. For all but the nerdiest of people though, it’s a non-issue. It’s a really pleasant screen to feast your eyes on, even if it’s not producing the most technically accurate colors.

DO NOT BE ALARMED by the funky looking port on the side. It’s not proprietary, it’s just a weird-looking micro USB port. The optical joystick works, though it feels unusual at first. It proves useful mostly for navigating between text, since Android still as a whole sucks at text editing. Battery life is okay, not good. But this is a function of Android, and its marvelous freedom to run things in the background, as much anything else. Verizon’s 3G network actually works in New York, unlike a certain other carrier’s and it was as fast as you’d expect. Calls, they were fine.  Further testing does reveal, however, weaker than expected reported signal strength—that said, performance still felt okay.

The Camera

The camera is actually one of the few unique characteristics of the Incredible. It’s a new eight-megapixel shooter with a twin-LED flash, versus the five megapixel cam HTC’s been shoving in phones. The photos and video it takes are passable, not incredible, as you can see.

Two things make it mostly excellent to use, though. First, it’s fast. You can snap a photo in two seconds from the home screen. That includes autofocusing, which is touch-to-focus. (You can also long touch to focus-and-shoot, but this takes longer than focusing and pressing the optical joystick button separately, which immediately fires the camera.) The software is really responsive, too. There’s no dedicated camera button, unfortunately—so you do have to launch via software, which is a downer.

Second, the controls are impressively extensive. You can adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, even manually set ISO (100-1250). It also comes with a variety of picture effects, like grayscale, sepia and negative, saving you the step of running it through a separate Android app to add effects to your shots.

Verdict

The calculus is relatively simple: If you’re on Verizon and want a smartphone (and aren’t stuck with BlackBerrys), the Incredible is pretty much the one you should buy. With Palm’s future unclear, and its app ecosystem shaky, it’s hard to recommend the Pre, even though its software is generally more usable than Android. And the Droid’s single redeeming feature over this, a physical keyboard, is actually less usable than the custom keyboard HTC’s put on the Incredible. The Nexus One for Verizon looms, but the only reasons it could be considered superior—it feels better built and more expensive, and the promise of timely updates from Google—are mitigated by the fact the Incredible is here now, and HTC’s Sense does glossy up some of Android’s rough spots.

Calling this phone Incredible is a bit hyperbolic. But it is impressive.

It’s fast

HTC’s Sense makes Android a bit more usable and connected

Camera controls and interface are great, shots and video only decent

Feels a little cheap, and too plasticky

The places where Android and HTC’s custom Sense interface overlap can feel a bit weird and confusing

Gallery

[Gizmodo]

Jailbreaking is a software process that unlocks the access to the iPhone original system files so that you can modify some of them for the better. You shouldn’t confuse it with a carrier unlock. Jailbreaking allows us to unleash the true power of the Apple’s iPhone.

Getting your iPhone jailbroken is like getting a totally different device – at least software-wise. And while I find it next to impossible to resist the tempting new features, I can totally understand you may have perfectly good reasons to keep your iPhone untouched. But hopefully, this list will help you convert.

And a word of warning! This post is not a tutorial in jailbreaking your iPhone. If you need one, a nice place to start is iClarified iPhone section. Installing unofficial third-party apps may cause unwanted side effects so always rely on your good judgment when dealing with those. I am not to be held responsible for any damage you may inflict to your iPhone.

Now that I’ve taken that off my chest, please, say hello to freedom.

1. Multitasking

The first new benefit from jailbreaking is surely true multitasking. There is a free and a paid app that both offer task switching and management each in its own way. Both depend on a third-party app – the free Backgrounder – to do the minimizing for them. While that may sound complex, switching apps is as easy as it gets.

The free task manager is called Kirikae and shows the running apps as a list. Tapping one will switch to it, while a finger swipe reveals a button to kill the process.

Multifl0w is the paid task manager. It offers the same functionality as Kirikae, but uses a cover-flow-like view for your running apps. It’s kinda like the way Safari displays the opened tabs. Multifl0w looks really fancy and even outperforms Palm Pre’s Card Interface at times.

2. UI themes and custom sounds

The second benefit from jailbreaking is customizing how the UI looks and feels via the Winterboard theming app. With Winterboard you can apply various themes and widgets to the iPhone UI.

Developers have had full two years to work on themes and nowadays an elaborate theme can replace all of your icons, wallpapers, menus, sliders, sounds, page controls, menu layouts and even add live widgets and weather information on the Springboard.

Here are some examples of themes changing the springboard and menus:

Here are some examples of themes changing the lockscreen (using Weather Elements V3 Lockscreen theme)

3. Lockscreen applications

Thanks to the several available lockscreen applications like LockInfo and IntelliScreen, you can get acess to your calls, messages, calendar events, weather information, etc. straight from the iPhone lockscreen.

Parallel to those two, the various Cydgets allow you to make use of several lockscreens. They are still in early stage of development and there aren’t many cydgets to choose from, but still the concept looks promising.

4. Improved messaging

The devil is in the details, they say… The iPhone is skimpy on a lot of them details. Delivery reports and a sms character counter are certainly two of those.

With the help of the SMS Helper app you get a nicely integrated character counter, which looks as if Apple made it themselves.

Need delivery reports? The iPhoneDelivery is a simple, but highly useful app that’s capable of *delivering* you delivery reports in various customizable ways.

5. Make ringtones out of your music without iTunes

The iPhone ringtone limitations are quite a bugger. The AnyRing app will set your incoming calls music free of Apple.

You can choose any song from your iPod library, trim it and assign it as a ringtone or alarm tone. The downside is that you have to pay for AnyRing itself (yes, the most innovative unofficial apps are paid).

6. Video recording on iPhone 2G and 3G

You don’t have to own an iPhone 3GS to shoot video. Thanks to the Cycorder app you can capture videos at CIF resolution at 15fps, which is way better than that joke of a video recorder in the official AppStore.

7. File access and management

After you jailbreak your iPhone, you have full access to the file system. The iFile app is a popular file manager running directly on your iPhone. It is capable of copying, cutting, moving, renaming and deleting files.

8. Safari file download manager

If you’ve missed having a way to download files on the iPhone, you may be interested in the Safari download plug-in. It’s basically a download manager for the mobile Safari browser. However you will need a file manager to access the files once they’re downloaded.

9. Extended TV-out functionality

If you are tired of the TV-out restrictions in your iPhone, you’re in for a nice surprise once you jailbreak your iPhone. The TVOut app is here to help. It enables the TV-out output for all iPhone applications. It has some problems with the landscape apps, but there’s another application called Landscape TV Out that fixes that as well. Now imagine playing your iPhone games on a big TV screen.

10. Misc UI improvements

As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, there are a lot of other benefits from jailbreaking. Though none of them is a major thing, I appreciate every single one.

If you happen to own an iPhone 2G or 3G you will most definitely welcome the battery percentage level (3GS-style) that can be enabled via the asBattery app.

Perhaps all iPhone users will appreciate the HapticPro app, which enables vibration touch feedback. The SBSettings app is practical as well. It gives you quick access to various features and it’s always a single swipe away – some of the functionality it offers is a basic task manager, 3G, Wi-Fi and EDGE switches, respring shortcuts and even more.

SBSettings

Turn-to-mute has been a novel feature for quite some time now and almost all other phones with accelerometers have some sort of turn-to-mute functionality. Thanks to the AutoSilent app you can mute an incoming call simply by turning the iPhone face down. You can even opt for shaking instead of turning.

Conclusion

I get it, there are people who respect all the restrictions Apple make on the iPhone. But this short list should be enough to convince you that Apple should really reconsider their whole app policy. The unofficial third-party app scene is flourishing and people are enjoying the freedom their devices have. That should definitely tell Apple a lot, right? Now that I’ve made my point, I’ll see you on the other side!

P.S. If you still feel hesitant to jailbreak your iPhone, you can check out Gizmodo’s Guide on the most popular and useful free AppStore apps.

Collectors and Keepers, Shepard is coming!

If you have played and completed the first Mass Effect game, you will be able to import your character into the sequel and continue your galactic journey from where you left it. But be aware that all of your critical decisions from the first game will affect directly the world and the story in Mass Effect 2. Even your romantic relationship will be important.

Don’t worry, if you want to start over, you can create a new character from scratch and in the beginning of the game the important aspects will be decided via some dialogs with other game characters.

In the second game the story focuses on the Collectors – mysterious invaders, who make whole human colonies disappear. Commander Shepard will need to gather the deadliest team in the galaxy, earn their trust and respect, and go on a suicide mission against the Collectors. It will be really important that your team trusts you, otherwise your character may die right before the very end of the game.

After tens of videos released by BioWare to maximize the hype, this launch trailer will be the last one. Mass Effect 2 comes in 26 January in USA and 29 January in Europe for PC and Xbox 360.

[GSMArena]

After beating the former bronze medalist Pirates of Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Avatar has just moved into second place in the all time generated revenue leaderboard. The previous runner-up – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King now occupies the last podium spot. Earning more than 1.36 billion US dollars worldwide for 20 days only from IMAX/3D cinemas, Avatar is almost sure to dethrone the current leader – Titanic with its revenue of 1.84 billion US dollars.

Sure that 500 million dollars sound like a huge advantage at first, but once you give it a better though and it seems anything but comforting. Currently Avatar is available only in IMAX or 3D capable cinemas and despite that it has earned more than 1.3 billion bucks in only 20 days. If Titanic fans would pardon the unfortunate choice of words, it might turn out that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

That James Cameron fella must be feeling quite happy with himself having directed the two movies to lead the all time international box office ranking.

Recently Fox uploaded the Avatar’s original script, from where you can learn what was cut or changed during the filming. If you think you can handle 150 pages worth of Avatar goodness, check it out.

[GSMArena]

The assembled game critics team-up to take on EA’s latest co-op shooter Army of Two: The 40th Day in our Mash-up Review.

Salem and Rios teach us an important lesson about friendship as they make their way through decreasingly scenic, increasingly war-torn Shanghai, adding their bullet-holes and shrapnel to a situation that’s quickly getting out of hand. Only by relying on their greatest resource – each other – can they hope to survive.

And I’m spent. That was far too much drama in a single paragraph. While I recover, check out what the assembled game critics had to say about The 40th Day.

GameSpy
Take away the armored masks and you’d have a hard time telling Army of Two: The 40th Day from a glut of other third-person shooters. It’s not bad enough to be especially memorable, and it’s not good enough that people will talk about it for very long. And while the “buddy” mechanics of The 40th Day could have done wonders to make it more unique (including giving it the angle it needed to tell a cool story about two characters), it’s woefully underdeveloped. Instead, we get a confusing tale about two vaguely developed characters, told through an occasionally fun but ultimately generic — and at times, frustrating — third-person shooter.

VideoGamer
While the two-man squad travelled all over the world in the original game, here they’re in Shanghai for the duration, with location variety coming from within the city itself. As well as blown up buildings, you’ll be moving through an eerily empty zoo (taking cover behind a dead elephant is a somewhat morbid experience), a war-torn hospital, dangerous Shanghai streets and more. As before, the game is linear in design, with a clear path through each level, but maps are fairly open and allow for a variety of combat options.

Official Xbox Magazine UK
…while you’ll spend a lot of time plugging standard troops, every so often there are enemies that have been specifically designed to require co-ordination and flanking to take out. There are also some brilliant moments when you’re forcibly separated, often over surprisingly long distances, and have to fight your way back to each other through entirely different parts of the level – suddenly you’re far more vulnerable because you can’t rely on your buddy to haul you out of trouble and heal you up. It’s not just built like a single-player shooter with an extra player lobbed into the mix, and the game’s scripted moments actually take advantage of the fact that there are two characters in the game, rather than just accommodating them.

IGN
Now, the basic gameplay mechanics haven’t changed too much from the original. Instead, they’ve been augmented to feel fresher and deeper. One of the first game’s most appealing elements was the option to “pimp” your gun, swapping gun barrels or stocks or even gold plating the weapon to make it more effective in battle. Unfortunately, the first game’s options were shallow, but in The 40th Day they have been vastly expanded. There are loads of new paint schemes, more options to modify your weapons, and you can even change the melee attacks based on your gear. Equip a screwdriver or kitchen knife “bayonet” on your gun and you’ll see just what I mean.

GameFocus
Multiplayer is also more robust this time around compared to the underachieving online experience in the first game. Three modes can be played with up to twelve players: Warzone (a returning mode from the first game), Control (two factions fight to take and hold control points) and Co-Op Deathmatch. A fourth mode known as “Extraction”, a horde-like survival mode with an emphasis on cooperative play, is only available to those who pre-ordered the game with EA but will be made available to everyone as DLC (not sure if it will be free or paid) a month after the release.

Kotaku
Army of Two: The 40th Day has some great ideas and a number of very strong levels. It even makes better use of a nearly-abandoned zoo than any other game I’ve played that contains abandoned zoos. It is, more importantly, a fascinating laboratory for the psychological design of co-operative games. It is, however, also a game that feels too short, too choppy, to highly praise, though not short enough or chopped-up enough to encourage the kind of constant replaying that some of its co-op peers enjoy. Stuck in the middle, and built with creative ideas, the 40th Day points toward greatness but doesn’t go there.

Price you ask? Under $100, ATI will tell you.

AMD recently announced they shipped more than 2 million DirectX 11 graphic cards all over the world. They were also happy with the growing developer interest in making DirectX 11 game titles. And while NVIDIA is still silent on the news front, AMD puts even more wood to the fire – this time in the budget segment.

The new HD5670 card will cost a bit under $100, but will offer fast DirectX 11 graphics, 1GHz GDDR5 equipped memory, 775MHz core speed, Eyefinity multi-display support along with the usual CrossfireX capabilities and very low power consumption. The HD5670 won’t require any additional power connectors and will burn the meager 15W in idle mode and 64W power at full throttle.

ATI promises the Radeon HD5670 will be able to deliver 620 gigaflops of compute performance, which is 20% better than the NVIDIA GT240 512MB, which costs about 20 bucks more and does not support DirectX 11.

The new ATI Radeon HD5670 is expected to hit the market any moment.

[GSMArena]

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