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A super expensive Super Sonic figure
Just in time for Sonic's birthday, high-end figure company First 4 Figures is taking pre-orders on a new statue of the hedgehog hero's occasional Chaos Emerald-infused Super Saiyan form, Super Sonic. The figure depicts Super Sonic in the "classic" Genesis-era art style, sparking across a platform in Sonic 2's Chemical Plant Zone. If you want to buy one of these 15-inch-tall figures, you'll have to dig up some Chaos Emeralds or other precious materials of your own. Two versions will ship in the first quarter next year: one for $140 and a deluxe version that lights up for twenty dollars more.%Gallery-96121%
How-to: figure out the best value iPhone 4 contracts in the UK (updated)
Choices, choices. Do you get the 16GB or 32GB iPhone 4? The black one now or the white one a little later? We can't tell you which variant of Apple's next phone will hold its value best over the coming months, but we can try to clear up a bit of the fogginess surrounding price plans on offer from UK networks. Orange and O2 are the first to drop handset pricing and full contract details, but they haven't made it easy for the discerning buyer, with each carrier offering more than a dozen options. Vodafone, T-Mobile, Three, and even Tesco Mobile are set to follow suit in the coming days and weeks, but we thought we'd get the ball rolling with the pair we have now. Update: And just as we publish this, Voda has gone official with its tariffs. We've now broken them down into a more digestible format as well. Just for you. Update 2: Tesco Mobile has also outed its pricing and it's by far the best of the bunch. Check out the full chart inside the post. Update 3: Three's iPhone 4 pricing has now also been made known.
Sprint fires employee who leaked weak EVO 4G sales numbers
You know the backstory by now: Sprint boasted that the EVO 4G was its fastest selling phone ever a couple of days after hitting the American market, before abruptly correcting itself and admitting that the EVO's sales were in fact in line with those achieved by the Pre last summer. What you, and we, didn't know till now, however, is that Sprint's self-correction was sparked off by an employee with a curious mind and posting privileges over on the xda-developers forum. On June 6, according to MobileCrunch, this unnamed hero of truthiness browsed Sprint's internal inventory system and nailed down a figure of 65,500 sold units from Sprint's own stores -- a stat far south from what Sprint would announce a day later. That number ultimately found its way onto the message board, and though it obviously shouldn't be taken as authoritative (or exhaustive), it was enough to get Sprint to hit the auto-correct button and part ways with the activist member of staff. Harsh. [Thanks, Carol]
iPad corners 22 percent of ebook market, iBooks gets iPhone version and PDF reader
Apple has just announced that the iPad has collected 22 percent of ebook sales since its launch and is about to get new features too. A PDF viewer is going to be thrown into the iBooks app later this month, and will be accompanied by new bookmarking and note-taking functionality. Yeah, they're basic enhancements at best, but we're still trying to wrap our minds around this idea that Apple is already responsible for nearly a quarter of all ebook sales. Then again, as Steve points out, a cool five million of the darn things have been downloaded in the first 65 days of the iPad's availability. Update: Seems like even five mill ain't gonna be enough for Apple, which is set to massively expand its iBooks user base by bringing the app to iPhone and iPod touch users. You'll be getting the same note-taking, same bookmarking -- same everything -- just on a smaller screen, and at no extra charge. Users will be able to purchase a book on one device and then consume it across the full range of iDevices, with bookmarks and progress getting synced across the ether.%Gallery-94570%%Gallery-94595% Check out more from WWDC 2010 in our liveblog!
'iPhone vs Android' report finds Apple has three times Google's market share
It's oftentimes easy for us to get swept up in Android mania and forget that Google's mobile platform is still in its infancy. Then we get cold hard numbers like these -- showing iPhone OS owning 28 percent of the US smartphone market and closing in on RIM's leading 35 percent -- and we face up to the realization that Android handsets still account for less than one in every ten smartphones owned by Americans today. In spite of collecting 28 percent of all consumer smartphone purchases in the first quarter of 2010 (according to NPD), Google's OS was only able to climb up a couple of percentage points in terms of total market share, showing just how long a road lies ahead of its world-conquering plans. Guess that now explains why Apple's response to the earlier numbers was so nonchalant. Other intriguing figures include a high rate of loyalty among iPhone OS and Android users, with 80 percent of the former and 70 percent of the latter expressing a preference for the same OS in their next phone -- both rather shaming Microsoft and RIM's numbers, which were a mediocre 34 and 47 percent, respectively. Funnily enough, despite its inflammatory title, this report finds Android and iPhone users are more similar to each other than anyone else -- an uncomfortable fact for both parties to deal with, we're sure. The source link contains some more demographic comparisons, so why not go check them out and drop some sage analysis for us in the comments?
Windows 7, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu 10.04 meet up for an OpenGL benchmarking session
So these three operating systems walk into a bar one night ... alright, we'll behave. With all the Steamy conversation about gaming on non-Windows desktop platforms going on, we thought you might care to peek at a little OpenGL performance comparison review. As the chief cross-platform API, it's the only way we're going to be seeing the latest games running natively on Mac OS and Linux, but how will that experience compare to the market leader? As it turned out, Windows maintains superiority in this field, with frame rates that were habitually above those on the latest Ubuntu and well ahead of what you might get on Mac OS 10.6.3. It's still early days -- after all, Steam's non-DirectX cupboard is pretty bare right now -- but at this point in time, OpenGL gaming is a crown that Microsoft retains with relative ease. Hit the source for all the line graph evidence, and let's hope things improve for the rest of us in rapid fashion.
The most expensive toy Goron you'll see today
Goron into the gallery First 4 Figures has created a niche for itself as a destination for insane, rich Nintendo fans' extra money. The company has dipped pretty deep into the Zelda character catalog for its latest high-quality, high-cost figurine: Ocarina of Time's Goron King, Darunia. Zelda adherents who really want to festoon their desks, shelves or dioramas with a 15-inch rock man (he's to scale with First 4 Figures' other Zelda toys) can order one of these for $154.99 in advance of its Q4 2010 release. The rest of us can just look at pictures of the thing in the gallery below. %Gallery-92287%
A set of Chrono Trigger figurines that you'll want
You have an empty shelf, right? Of course you do. So there's really no choice in the matter: You've got to fill it with something, and that something might as well be game merchandise. As luck would have it, we've got some particularly sweet merchandise in mind just for you. Specifically, we're talking about the nifty Chrono Trigger figures you see above -- or "Chrono Figures," if you prefer. As Destructoid points out, the statues recreate scenes from the original SNES instruction booklet. Entertainment Earth has the figurines available for pre-order -- scheduled to ship this October -- with the set of 4 statues available for $40. There's no indication of the actual dimensions of each statue, though each certainly appears detailed. The only question that remains: Where's Marle? [Via Destructoid]
Android Market gets 9,000 new apps in March, world domination can't be far behind
Wanna know what exponential growth looks like? Try following Android's progress over the past few months and you'll be treated to plenty of rapidly ascending charts. This latest one from AndroLib is no different, illustrating as it does the ever-increasing influx of new games and applications for Google's mobile platform. Developers must clearly believe Android's growing market share is only going to keep expanding, as last month saw their most productive output yet, with a sweet 9,308 new additions to the Market. Naturally, the same proviso applies as with Apple's inflated App Store numbers -- quantity does not guarantee quality -- but what we're witnessing is surely the solidification of Android as a legitimate and fully fledged member of the smartphone OS upper echelon. And that can only be a good thing.
Windows 7 is safer when the admin isn't around
Not that we necessarily needed a report to tell us this, but the fewer privileges you afford yourself as a Windows user, the more secure your operating system becomes. Such is the conclusion of a new report from BeyondTrust, a company that -- surprise, surprise -- sells software for "privileged access management." The only way we use Windows 7 is as admins and we've never had a moment's bother, but some of you like stats, and others among you might be involved in business, which tends to make people a little more antsy about these things. So for your collective sake, let there be pie charts! The report looks into vulnerabilities disclosed by Microsoft during 2009 and concludes that all 55 reported Microsoft Office issues and 94 percent of the 33 listed for IE could be prevented by simply running a standard user account. Or using better software, presumably. Hit the PDF source for more info -- go on, it's not like you have anything better to do while waiting for the Large Hadron Collider to go boom.
Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels
AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob's smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn't be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it's interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica's own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.
NPD: Xbox 360 wins US sales war in a downbeat February
The cosmos must clearly have approved of Microsoft's actions over this past month, as today we're hearing the Xbox 360 broke out of its competitive sales funk to claim the title of "month's best-selling console" ... for the first time in two years. Redmond's own Aaron Greenberg describes it as the best February in the console's history, with 422,000 units sold outshining the consistently popular Wii (397,900) and the resurgent PS3 (360,100 consoles shifted, which was a 30 percent improvement year-on-year). In spite of the happy campers in Redmond and Tokyo, the overall numbers for the games industry were down 15 percent on 2009's revenues, indicating our collective gaming appetite is starting to dry up. Good thing we've got all those motion-sensing accessories coming up to reignite our fire.
McFarlane's Halo: Reach figures infiltrate Toy Fair 2010
[Kotaku] A couple weeks back, McFarlane Toys announced it would be producing a line of action figures for Bungie's upcoming Halo: Reach. Nothing too surprising there, as most of us with any kind of flat open surface can attest -- you have lots of Halo toys already, right? Well, we hope you're ready to at least look at some more, because that's what this post is about! Kotaku attended this year's Toy Fair show in NYC today, where the preliminary packaging and prototype images for the toys were presented. The original announcement for the figures only detailed that we could all expect Halo: Reach stuff from McFarlane this year and well into 2011, but it would appear the initial run is being limited to Noble team (the Spartans the game revolves around) and at least one Ghost-riding Grunt. Hit up Kotaku for the images.
Apple's App Store said to have 99.4 percent of all mobile app sales, more like 97.5
The latest research from Gartner indicates that, for the year 2009, only 16 million app sales were executed on mobile devices not bearing the infamous bitten apple logo. In reporting this data, Ars Technica inadvertently conflates Apple's latest announcement of three billion apps downloaded with the notion of three billion apps sold and pegs the App Store's market share at a whopping 99.4 percent -- but more realistic calculations still show it to be somewhere in the vicinity of 97.5 percent. Going off estimates (obtained by GigaOM) that a quarter of App Store downloads are paid-for apps, and taking a rough figure of 2.5 billion downloads in 2009, leaves us with around 625 million app sales performed by Apple, which comfortably dwarfs all its competition. Considering the fact 18 months ago there wasn't even an App Store to speak of -- whereas today Cupertino is gobbling up the best part of $4.2 billion in annual mobile apps revenue -- maybe you can now understand why we're covering every tiny drip of info about that mythical tablet.
Ratchet and Clank, Resistance figures now on sale
Six-inch tall news now, as DC Comics has released a line of figures based on Insomniac properties Ratchet and Clank and Resistance. As you can see above, the gang's pretty much all here -- the titular duo of Ratchet and Clank, along with Dr. Nefarious and Captain Qwark. Oh, then there's the Resistance guys, like hero Nathan Hale and Chimera A and Chimera B and (our personal favorite) Chimera C! We kid, but if you're interested in plunking down some green on these bath-time buddies (where do you play with your action figures?), you can find them at most retailers. [Via PlayStation Blog]
Intel profits recover to $2.3 billion in Q4 2009, company describes it as 875 percent jump
Yo Intel, when your 2008 fourth quarter was one of the worst you ever recorded, it's slightly, just slightly, facetious to go trumpeting an 875 percent improvement in your 2009 fortunes. The self-appointed chipmaking rock star has clocked up $10.6 billion in revenues for the last quarter, which filters down to $2.3 billion in pure, unadulterated, mother-loving profit. That's good and indeed technically nearly nine times what the company achieved in the same period the previous year -- we'd just appreciate this to be represented as the recovery it is, rather than some major leap forward in the face of a global financial meltdown. Either way, the Santa Clara checkbook is now well and truly balanced, even if it would've looked fatter still but for the small matter of a $1.25 billion settlement reflected in last quarter's results.
Mass Effect 2 figures feature Shepard, if not your Shepard
We already know what you're going to say. While DC's upcoming Mass Effect 2 figure series includes decent likenesses of Thane, Grunt and Tali, the company is way off on its version of Shepard. In DC's defense, however, the company has no idea what your Shepard looks like, so it was stuck with a mold for Default Shepard instead of the real Shepard -- who everyone knows is vaguely Asian and female. According to the scans of DC's solicitation book, posted by Gamervision, the figures are still pending approval, but are due for release August 25 of this year. By then, you may be done with Mass Effect 2, so you can use these action figures to stage your own adventures on Planet Your Shelf.
Netbooks party hard in 2009: shipments up 103 percent year-over-year
The whole "man, how time flies" thing feels a little played out, but we definitely just heard the Pavilion dv2 say as much to the Wind U100. Believe it or not, those two machines were just a couple of the legions that ushered us into a netbook-crazed 2009, and now DisplaySearch has the figures that prove what we've all been thinking: netbooks are the bees knees. According to their research, shipments of low-cost, miniaturized laptops shot up 103 percent year-over-year; compare that to the 5 percent uptick in the conventional laptop market, and you'll start to get a feel for the shifting trend. Potentially more amazing is the revenue analysis, which found that netbooks experienced a 72 percent rise in year-over-year revenue growth while all other mobile computers saw a loss. It's tough to say if the momentum can be stopped, but if folks have continued to buy these things despite the limited CPU options and lackluster multimedia performance, we suspect there isn't anything those angered CULV alternatives can do to stop the inevitable rise to stardom.
TurpsterVision: Hands on with Chen Stormstout
We can't believe it either – Turpster has been let loose on WoW.com to bring you videos from in and around the World of Warcraft! You've heard him on the WoW Insider Show, and now see him on TurpsterVision right here on WoW.com. So it's Black Friday for a lot of you guys out there -- Happy Thanksgiving for yesterday and yes, my Turkey was awesome thanks for asking! A day for picking up electrical bargains and stopping The Intersect falling into Fulcrum's hands -- I'll be honest, my knowledge of Black Friday stems pretty much directly from episodes of Chuck. I was lucky enough to have my latest purchase come through today and I am super stoked to be able to show you guys, Chen Stormstout! This guys is many kinds of huge -- some say he looks like a fat Gene Simmons, I don't see that being a bad thing since The Demon is also pretty awesome (though he's no Starchild). Standing over 8" tall and weighing in at 4.5 lbs, this guy is built to impress. The detailing is beyond anything I've seen on my previous DC Unlimited figures. Enjoy the video and pick one up if you haven't already -- I wonder how much mine is worth now that it's out of the box... Check out more of Turpster's work, recent work like sites made for a Bristol Garden Landscaper or classic stuff from his WoW parody songs to TV previously on Massively.com, not forgetting everyone's favorite podcast 'The WoW Insider Show' and of course, TurpsterVision right here on WoW.com!
Nintendo Wii has lion's share of female console gamers
Nintendo's been doing a bit of digging and it turns out it's already won the console wars. If we're only talking about the ladies, that is. A whopping 80% of American female primary gamers (the person who primarily uses the console rather than the occasional dabblers) do their thing on the Wii, which we see as a clear indication to the graphics-obsessed Xbox 360 and PS3 developers that women prefer their games to be fun to play, rather than just look at. Maybe if we also stopped dressing female characters in swimsuits, they'd find non-Wii games relatable too -- that's just a guess though, probably wrong.
