Monthly Round-Up: New GTA, Android Accused of Copying Features from iOS 5 and Much More

First things first, let’s start with the news that there’s finally been a new Grand Theft Auto announced. At long last, for the first time since 2009 there’s been a new GTA game announced, GTA V as it’s been called.

There’s not much news out there about it as of yet, just that there’s set to be a trailer released on November the 2nd and other than that, and that the “V” in the logo looks a little like it is relating to money, so that could be a big part of the game, as in every other game.

Also, Android has been accused of copying some of the features from Apple’s highly anticipated and eagerly awaited iOS 5. When asked about it, Hugo Barra, the product management director for Android at Google claimed to have not heard about what has been said in Steve Jobs’ biography where he “swore to destroy Android” and he was so annoyed at what he saw as blatant copying in the 2.1 version of Android that was released in January 2010.

There’s the sad news that ex Apple CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs died the day after the new iPhone 4S was announced at Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event on the 4th of October. His biography was released not so long ago and there’s been much controversy surrounding it and what is written in it.

Also, Blackberry users suffered a fair bit this month. The Blackberry servers suffered an outage meaning that Blackberry Messenger, internet services and a couple of other aspects of the whole Blackberry package were also unavailable. So as you may imagine, there may be a few people switching from Blackberry to Apple after this fiasco.

So, too summarise, you can say that it’s been an eventful month in the world of tech and also a sad one. Let’s hope that next month there’s no more sad news, just good, in the build up to Christmas!

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iPhone 4S Sales Top 4 Million in First Weekend!

As you all know, the iPhone 4S was released to the world on Friday and over the first weekend of sales, there was well in excess of 4 million handsets sold. That’s a lot of handsets and that’s a hell of a lot of iPhones in the world.

There’s a lot of apparently “new” features on the iPhone 4S, but other than the obvious new and improved camera, the faster A5 processor, the all new iOS 5 and finally the big one that seems to be the main selling point for a lot of people, Siri.

What is Siri?

If you don’t know what Siri is, it is basically your own little assistant in your phone. You can ask it an abundance of different things and the vast majority of them it will carry out for you.

Ask it anything from setting your alarms in the morning for you, or setting a reminder for you. Siri can even find directions for you if you need it too, although I stress this is only available in the US at the minute.

There are many people out there, myself included, who are still the very proud owner of an iPhone 4 and I have no doubt that an awful lot of people have been wondering about how or even if you can get Siri on the iPhone 4. Well it’s not official that you can, but somebody, somewhere out there has managed to get Siri on to the iPhone 4 which just proves that the software is more than capable of running on the iPhone 4.

Will Apple roll this out officially?

We doubt Apple will officially roll this out across the iPhone 4 world as Siri is still only, according to Apple a “beta” version at the minute. That doesn’t mean to say that once Siri is up and running properly on the iPhone 4S that it won’t be made available on the iPhone 4. If you don’t believe that it’s been ported on to the iPhone 4 then why not check out this video and see for yourself!

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iOS 5 Review – Worth the Download?

After reaching its fifth birthday, iOS 5 has undergone major changes. Apple have released the new iOS in conjunction with the release of their latest handset, the iPhone 4S.

It’s safe to say that the iPhone 4S was a hit seeing as it sold over 4 million units in its first weekend of sales and on the first day of pre-order there was over 1 million units ordered, which smashed any previous record.

But the question everyone wanted an answer too was; “How good is the new iOS?” Well we have a review on the latest iOS to hit people’s iPads and iPhones. According to Apple there’s well over 200 new features on the new iOS. Don’t worry we aren’t going to list all of them for you, that would be ridiculous and would definitely take a long time to read through.

Notification Centre

First of all we’ll start out with the general feel of the new iOS. There’s a lot that’s had an overhaul, but there’s also a lot that hasn’t had any kind of change. There’s the all new notification centre which has been introduced to the iOS 5. Anything from Facebook and Twitter notifications to text and Whatsapp notifications will appear in the notifications centre.

It also has a new banner that appears at the top of your page when you get a notification. So if you’re busy killing pigs on Angry Birds, or slicing your way through fruit you won’t get interrupted by a big, horrible, blocky looking notification; instead it will be a sleek banner that rolls in and rolls out at the top of your screen. A lot smoother, less annoying and more aesthetically pleasing, we think.

Twitter Integration

The next big thing that has been introduced in iOS 5 is Twitter integration. It has been integrated into the heart of your handset and it allows you to Tweet anything from your phone, so if you’ve just taken a really cool photo, or maybe a stupid one of one of your friends then you can Tweet it directly from your photo library. We think this is pretty cool and it saves you constantly opening up your Twitter application.

Siri – iPhone’s Personal Assistant

If you have an iPhone 4S then you will be more bothered about how good, or as the case may be how bad Siri is. If you don’t have an iPhone 4S then for those of you who don’t know what Siri is then it’s pretty much your very own personal assistant.

You can hold a conversation with him, ask him to text or ring people for you, and he will even set alarms and reminders for you. Siri is sadly not available on the iPhone 4, but there have been a few people who have managed to port it onto a jailbroken iPhone 4.

iMessage – Apple’s Answer to BBM

There’s long been rumours of a cross platform app that allowed you to talk to people who used the Blackberry messaging system (BBM) but nothing ever materialised and it still hasn’t, however Apple have brought out their own version of BBM, iMessage.

This is where anybody who has an iPad, iPhone or one of the newer iPod touches with iOS 5 on it you can all talk to each other, cost free. It leaves behind the pin system used in BBM and it just recognises any iOS 5 registered Apple device. Pretty seamless and very sleek if you ask us, and definitely cool!

iCloud – Free Cloud Storage

With all the rave about how you can store things from your computer “in the cloud”, apple have decided to take that concept and bring it to their iOS devices. This brings you iCloud. Wireless back up, and “in the cloud” storage for all of your songs, apps, contacts and emails. You get 5GB free storage but if you’re upgrading the OS on say an iPhone 4, you will undoubtedly need to purchase some of the extra storage space.

There’s the option of 10 GB, 20 GB and 50 GB. All of which you need to pay for but if you want the extra room to store all of your apps, songs and photos then you will more than likely pay for the extra room.

Last but not least, the new iOS is a massive improvement on the previous one. It’s an awful lot slicker, better looking and it operates a lot better than the old version of iOS. So, it seems that they’ve got a bit of a job on their hands when it comes to the next update of the iOS and we’d love to see how iOS 6 will look this time next year, and yes; iOS 5 is definitely worth the download!

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EA President confirms there will be a Battlefield 4

Only a couple of weeks old, Battlefield 3 has already been shot down in flames by EA’s president. He has all but confirmed that there will be a Battlefield 4. Although nothing else was said about Battlefield 4’s release, but you can expect some improvements.

Battlefield 3 which is officially EA’s fastest selling game ever after selling over 5 million copies in its first week, made it two weeks at the top of the chart after its release on the 25th of October, but it is widely expected that the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will knock it off the top now that it’s finally released.

The game was released on the 08/11/11 and it has been predicted that 18 million copies of the game will be sold by the start of the next calendar year. There’s been a massive amount of hype surrounding the release of this game and it’s shown with the amount of people who were seen to have been queuing up outside 13,000 stores up and down the country.

According to Activision there were 1.5million people queuing up on the night of the game’s release. Obviously not all of these people would have turned into sales, but that’s a lot of people for just one game and that’s precisely why it’s the biggest entertainment launch of all time!

With Christmas just around the corner you can almost guarantee that the sales will continue to rise and we could see a record amount of games sold, who knows maybe even the most games ever sold, which would knock MW3’s predecessor Call of Duty: Black Ops off the top spot.

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