Android Dominating Surging Smartphone Market

Compared to a year ago, worldwide sales of mobile phones dropped 3.1 percent to 428 million in the third quarter of 2012, but broken down by category, smartphone sales are surging. According to the latest data compiled by Gartner, smartphone sales are up nearly 47 percent from one year ago. Overall, 4 out of every 10 mobile phones shipped is categorized as a smartphone.
"After two consecutive quarter of decline in mobile phone sales, demand has improved in both mature and emerging markets as sales increased sequentially," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. "In China, sales of mobile phones grew driven by sales of smartphones, while demand of feature phones remained weak. In mature markets, we finally saw replacement sales pick up with the launch of new devices in the quarter."
This is mostly to the benefit of Google's Android platform, which now holds a 72.4 percent of share of the smartphone market, climbing 19.9 percent from a year ago. In second place is iOS (iPhone), which declined 1.1 percentage points in the same period to 13.9 percent.
After that, it's a scrap the bottom between RIM (5.3 percent), Bada (3 percent), Symbian (2.6 percent), Microsoft (2.4 percent), and all others (0.4 percent).
Image Credit: Flickr (opopododo)

New Darkfall dev diary vid talks art direction, Unholy Wars changes

So Darkfall 1.0 has come and gone, as Aventurine has officially closed the servers in preparation for the Unholy Wars reboot. The firm has also released a five-minute dev diary video featuring creative lead Adam Oikonomopoulos, who talks at length about the game's art direction updates and AV's expanded creative vision.

The video boasts a bunch of fly-through shots that show off Agon's new textures, higher polygon counts, and improved shaders, many of which are a marked improvement over the originals (that date back to the game's genesis in 2002 in some cases).

Oikonomopoulos also mentions that Unholy Wars and the original Darkfall are set "several hundred years apart," which accounts for some of the changes in both the landscape and the game's architecture.

RaiderZ announces launch date with new screens and a video

Since the beta doors opened on October 24th, more folks have been checking out the action of RaiderZ, banding together to engage massive bosses and even using mobs' own limbs as weapons against them. But if you were waiting for launch to jump in and experience the free-form class system and monster transformation ability for yourself, get ready: Perfect World Entertainment has just announced that the free-to-play game will launch on November 20th.

Senior Producer Mark Hill noted that launch was just the beginning. He stated, "We'd like to thank fans for their continued support and also welcome new players to explore the Kingdom of Rendel. This is just the first part of our commitment to provide players with a great experience for years to come."

Want a glimpse of what you can expect next week? Check out the beautiful world and watch a variety of battles in the launch trailer after the break, and enjoy some exclusive images in the gallery below.

[Source: Perfect World Entertainment press release]

Gallery: RaiderZ launch exclusives

RAM Gone Wild: Overclocker Pushes G.Skill TridentX Kit to 3,900MHz

Memory maker G.Skill is laying claim to the "world's fastest RAM" after an overclocker goosed the company's TridentX Extreme Performance memory kit to 1,950MHz (3,900MHz effective). Whether you want to qualify that as the world's fastest RAM is up to you (and clearly G.Skill does), but it is a new memory frequency world record, so there are some well deserved bragging rights to go around.
Overclocker "Christian Ney" achieved the world record just a few days after another overclocker, "HiCookie," first broke the record with the same kit. HiCookie achieved 1,677MHz (3,354MHz effective) using a Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H motherboard and Intel Core i7 3770K processor.
Christian Ney trumped HiCookie's frequency using an AMD system with a Gigabyte GA-A75-UD4H motherboard and A8-3870K processor. In both cases, a healthy dose of liquid nitrogen was required to keep everything cool.

"Despite being the world's fastest RAM manufacturer, G.Skill will continue to strive for first-class quality at competitive pricing to the market," said Bill Wang, VP at G.Skill.
Gee, good to know G.Skill isn't hanging its hat up and calling it quits.

A (spoiler-free) jaunt through Guild Wars 2's Lost Shores

Guild Wars 2's Lost Shores update is just around the corner -- that is, if you can consider nighttime to be a corner. What I'm trying to say is that Lost Shores goes live tomorrow. We brought you a content primer a couple of days ago to give you the basics of what's going on. Now it's time to take a closer look at what's to come.

Skip on below the cut for a spoiler-free look at the Lost Shores content. I mean, reasonably spoiler-free. I'm going to tell you that the karka are involved and that there's a dungeon where you fight things. We can't really have much of a conversation elsewise, but what I'm not going to do is give away any big finales or gotcha moments. Now that we understand each other, let's get going.

Gallery: Lost Shores hands-on

On the Surface, Microsoft's "Kludgey" Tablet is Hardly Competition, Says HP

Microsoft's hardware partners continue to take potshots at the company's Surface tablet. Last week, Acer warned Microsoft that delving into hardware is like "hard rice and "is not so easy to eat" (no joke, though something may have been lost in translation), and now HP is piling on the criticism, calling Surface a "slow" and "kludgey" solution. HP credited the press for hyping up a tablet that otherwise isn't very competitive.
"I'd hardly call Surface competition," Todd Bradley, head of HP's PC business, told IDG Enterprise in an interview, according to CiteWorld.com. "[Reason] one, very limited distribution. It tends to be slow and a little kludgey as you use it. It's expensive. Holistically, the press has made a bigger deal out of Surface than what the world has chosen to believe."
HP's last real attempt at the consumer tablet market was the ill-fated TouchPad, a promising webOS tablet that was perhaps priced too high to woo buyers away from the iPad. These days, HP is more focused on enterprise slates, and that isn't about to change.
"We're not entering the consumer tablet fray any time soon," Bradley added. "We'll be doing something next year, but you won't see a consumer tablet from HP before Christmas. You'll see convertibles that are focused on how you use the device, keyboard, clamshell."
Bradley also expressed interest in getting into the highly competive phone business, but hasn't yet formulated a strategy.

EVE Online prepares to roll out Retribution ship rebalancing

With EVE Online's newest expansion, Retribution, only a couple of weeks away, the devs are all abuzz over the features and changes coming with it. One of the biggest of these is a widespread effort to rebalance ships and put them in line with each other. CCP Fozzie reports that 40 new and existing spaceships are slated for the expansion overhaul, with more on the way after that.

Even though change can be a scary prospect, Fozzie sees the rebalancing as a boon to the community: "Every time EVE's balance changes, it creates new opportunities for clever players to demonstrate their creativity and separate themselves from the pack. We know that our customers are amazingly creative with ship fittings and tactics and that if we give them a new set of tools they'll do things better than we could have imagined with them."

Blade and Soul – Live TV Show Available

                   Blade and Soul – Live TV Show Available  


 


Last week, NCsoft and media broadcast company Daum has made an joint effort to launch the "Blade and Soul TV", actually it's a live stream program on the internet, not exactly on TV. So it means that Blade & Soul will be having its own live show everyday except Tuesdays.


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Allods Online is going to release a new update titled Autumn Wind

MMO Update: Allods Online is going to release a new update titled Autumn Wind

 Allods Online is going to release a new update titled Autumn Wind on October 30. The update comes with changes to its interface, changes in the Xadaganian female model and additions to the craft systems and to the popular skirmish system.

World of Warcraft Mega Bloks commercial airs

MMO Toys: World of Warcraft Mega Blocks commercial airs



Don't call them "LEGOs" or "Blocks," although we would forgive you if you did make one of these common mistakes when dealing with Mega Bloks. The definitely-not-LEGO toymaker is releasing a series of World of Warcraft sets and now has the commercial to prove it.

The 30-second spot shows the creation of Stormwind castle, one of the Horde zeppelins, and several action figures of WoW characters (including Arthas). Each has interchangable armor, which is right in step for what you'd expect from an MMO franchise.