Tech Weekly Round up - 25/09/2013

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Hello and and welcome to this week's edition of tech weekly roundup.
Right! Down to business.

BlackBerry agrees deal to go private



Smartphone maker BlackBerry has agreed  in principle to be bought by a consortium led by Fairfax Financial in a deal worth $4.7bn  in a bid to take the company private.(wow! who saw this coming?) Fairfax owns 10% of the stock and had offered $9(NINE DOLLARS!!!)  a share in cash to buy the company stock. (My advice? take it and run!) Five years ago, Blackberry was one of the biggest technology companies around and certainly the biggest smartphone maker.So what happened? Well, the iPhone happened. Apple launched the first iPhone in 2007 and blackberry was to slow or too blind to see what its impact would be.As if the introduction of the iPhone wasn't enough, android was also launched in October, 2008 to provide further competition in the smartphone business. Your guess is as good as mine as to what happened next.You can read more on the deal here.

Still on BlackBerry.Is BBM for android on Google play store yet? BBM for android was supposed to roll out to the android faithful via Google play on 21st September and to the iOS community the next day but it never showed.Okay, not completely anyway (surprised?).The good news for blackberry is that there has been considerable interest shown in the new cross-platform version of BlackBerry Messenger after an unreleased older version of BBM for android app was leaked on the internet. BlackBerry announced on Monday that the launch of BBM for iOS and Android has been delayed for at least another week.The BBM team is now working to completely block the leaked versions of BBM from accessing BlackBerry’s servers before it launches the final version of the app.

Microsoft officially announce  Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2.



Microsoft announced Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 at an event on Monday in New York.Surface Pro 2 features Windows 8.1, while Surface 2 will feature the Windows 8.1 RT.The surface 2 is faster, thinner compared to the earlier surface RT and boasts of a 1080p Full HD display as well as an Nvidia Tegra 4 ARM-based processor and 2GB of RAM.The screen resolution  of 1920-by-1080p is certainly and an improvement on the last make not to mention the inclusion of dolby digital sound.

The surface pro 2 packs  a 1.6Ghz Intel Core i5 chip, and you've got your choice of RAM and storage(the priciest model tops out with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SDD).Surface General Manager Panay said that the  Surface Pro 2 is more powerful than 95% of laptops on the market.(Shut up and take my money now!).The Surface Pro 2 has a 10.6-inch screen with resolution 1920-by-1080p and due to the use of Intel’s power-efficient fourth-generation Haswell processor along with other improvements, gives it 60 percent more life on a charge than the  the previous surface pro.That translates to about 8 hours of battery power. Read more on the full specs here and find out how it stacks up against the iPad 4 here.
Pre-orders for the Surface Pro 2 will start on September 24th through Microsoft's online and physical stores. Both the Surface Pro 2 and Surface 2 will be available starting October 22nd.

GTA V released



GTA 5 was released on 17th Semptember. “Grand Theft Auto V was a massive undertaking for us, I'm so proud of what the team created,” said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. “We cannot wait for people to finally play it.” After the release, Take Two confirmed today that Grand Theft Auto V made over $800 million during the first day of sales worldwide (excluding Japan and Brazil). This is a new record for first day sales, beating the previous record holder Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which made $ 500 million on its first day. No matter how you look at it that is extremely impressive. for any product on any market.I haven't yet tried my hands on it since i don't own any gaming console but i can't wait to get it on PC. Watch out for a full review on tekhabit.

Our app of the week goes to Homestyler.It is available on both iOS and android.
Okay that's it for this week.

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