Google Play hits 25 billion downloads, celebrates with app sale and special collections

The Google Play store hit 25 billion downloads this week. To celebrate, the online store is offering a bunch of 25-cent apps from some major developers throughout the week.

The Google Play store, home to more than 675,000 apps and games for Android-powered devices, hit 25 billion downloads this week, less than four years after opening for business.

To celebrate the milestone, discounts on a number of apps will be available over the next five days.

Anyone interested in picking up some cut-price software will have the chance to choose from a range of titles created by high-profile developers such as Gameloft, Electronic Arts, and Rovio. With an asking price of just 25 cents, Google Play is sure to see a spike in paid-for downloads in the coming days.

Google Play, called Android Market until earlier this year, is also offering special collections, such as “25 movies you must own, 25 banned books, 25 albums that changed the world and our 25 top selling magazines, all at special prices,” Google’s Jamie Rosenberg wrote in a blog post announcing the news.

Arch-rival Apple hit 25 billion downloads with its iOS App Store back in March, taking only slightly less time than Google Play in terms of how long the stores have been up and running. In fact, in terms of downloads and apps available (Google Play has 675,000 compared with iOS’s 700,000), Google Play and the iOS store are now pretty much neck and neck.

But there are now more Android devices in the hands of users than iOS-powered devices, so it surely won’t be long before Google Play surpasses its rival in terms of download numbers.

“Twenty-five billion is more than twice the distance, in miles, that the Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled since its launch 35 years ago,” Rosenberg wrote on the official Android blog. “It’s the amount of time, in minutes, that have passed since some of our earliest ancestors began to set foot in Europe. And now, thanks to all of you, it’s a Google Play milestone. We look forward to the next 25 billion.”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Nikon announces the D600, the smallest and cheapest full-frame DSLR on the market

Looks like full-frame sensors are suddenly in vogue. Yesterday we saw a whole bunch of Sony cameras with full-frame sensors, including one camcorder. Now Nikon has announced the D600, which packs a full-frame sensor in what is the smallest, lightest and cheapest camera on the market right now.

The Nikon D600 uses a 24.3 megapixel 35.9 x 24mm full-frame CMOS sensor. The camera uses Nikon’s EXPEED 3 image processor and is capable of shooting at 5.5 fps.

Other features include ISO range of 100-6400 (expandable to IS 50-25,600), 39 point AF system, 0.13 second startup time, 1080p video recording in 30, 25 or 24 fps and 720p in 60, 50 or 30 fps, uncompressed video out via HDMI, dual SD card slots, HDR mode and a 3.2-inch, 921k dot LCD.

The Nikon D600 will go on sale on September 18 and will retail at $2,099 (body-only) or for $2,699 with the AF-S NIKKOR 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5G ED VR lens.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Rumor: Dark Knight Rises Blu-ray includes 30 minutes of new footage

Will the home release of The Dark Knight Rises include a bunch of footage cut from the theatrical version? It seems likely.

There’s a new rumor swirling about the Internet that claims the upcoming Blu-ray release of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises will include a full half-hour of footage originally cut from the film for its theatrical release. If that seems like the kind of thing Nolan and the suits at Warner Bros. would likely do, that’s because this concept is not all that uncommon. We already told you about the upcoming Blu-ray release of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers which includes a massive amount of superfluous footage, and the idea of an extended “Director’s Cut” of any given movie is nearly as old as theatrical film releases themselves.

What makes this particular rumor so intriguing though, is that despite a lack of official confirmation that this extra footage might find its way onto a Blu-ray disc, the arguments supporting the idea are very convincing. Those of you who read us regularly may recall a piece we published last month which claimed that Bane’s origin story was originally intended to be a significant part of The Dark Knight Rises, but that it was removed during the movie’s editing process. At the time we posited the idea that this extra content might appear on the movie’s inevitable Blu-ray release, both because that sort of thing is increasingly common, and because Nolan’s departure from making superhero movies will likely push Warner Bros. to “market any extraneous scraps from the movie that were left on the cutting room floor.”

Apparently that idea made a lot of sense to the fine people over at Nuke The Fridge. Not only do they make the same claim in an article published earlier today, but they also claim to have corroboration from an unnamed, supposedly reliable insider source. While that alone wouldn’t be enough to convince us of this rumor’s validity, in reporting on NTF’s claims, the likewise fine people at Collider have offered a crucial thought on the topic:

Nolan is the effective spokesperson of IMAX.  One downside to his love of the format is the time limitation, and that 165-minute runtime pushes right up against the limit of what can fit on 70mm IMAX prints.  So there is a plausible reason for this to be the one Nolan film that could not fit every scene he wanted.

If — and we’re still working in the hypothetical here — Nolan had been stymied in his attempts to tell the full story of The Dark Knight Rises by a physical limitation of his beloved IMAX format, it would only make sense to include the full version of the film on Blu-ray. Those discs have massive capacity, and if the excised footage is just lying around, why wouldn’t Nolan (and more importantly Warner Bros.) want to include it on the film’s official home release? That extra content both appeases fans who want to see more of Nolan’s Batman universe and offers a handy bullet point for the PR people who have to sell the Blu-ray to your average consumer.

Again, this is all rumor and speculation, but we’re growing increasingly inclined to believe the whole thing. Please, draw your own conclusions.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com