Still remember our interview with the first guy in the line for Diablo III’s Southeast Asia launch event in Singapore? Apparently, it has already been one year since Diablo III was released to the market. Time flies indeed.

To celebrate the occasion, Asiasoft – who handles Blizzard’s games in this region – is now offering the game at reduced price of RM 168 instead of the usual RM 218. Furthermore, each purchase comes together with a free SteelSeries Diablo III mousepad and the offer is valid until 30 May.

That being said, Asiasoft didn’t provide the list of participating retailers to us. Hence, you might want to contact your favourite retailers to see if this particular promo actually applies to them.

One of the many cool things Google announced at its Google I/O event includes several new features on Google+ Photos – Auto Enhance, Highlight and awesome Auto Awesome editing tools within Google+ Photos. First up, Auto Enhance well, will automatically enhance your photos such as adjust the exposure, soften skin, minimize wrinkles, reduce noise and such, so your pictures are perfect before you share them on Google+.

Using Highlight, Google will automatically select the best pictures in an album and highlight it to you. This means that it will only pick out unique and clear shots, hiding away all the blurry and duplicated ones. Highlight can also recognize smiling faces and highlight those, minimizing the effort on your side to pick out the best photos to share.

Finally Auto Awesome is as its name suggest, awesome, to me at least. Auto Awesome can automatically create collage, HDR, panorama, smile and motion GIF images. This means that if you have a continuous shot of your pet running towards you, Auto Awesome will group those images together to create an animated GIF for you. All these editing tools are reversible by the way, so if you don’t want an enhanced image or the stitched panorama picture, you can easily revert back to the original picture.

Now, Google’s move to integrate the storage space from Gmail, Google+ Photos and Drive suddenly makes so much more sense. Google+ Photos now allows you to automatically upload camera shots into it in full resolution however, I have a feeling that 15GB will not be enough. If you use Google+ Photos, do downsize your picture to smaller than 2,048 pixels so that they don’t count towards that storage limit.

Visit Google+ Photos to test out the new features now.

(Source: Engadget)

Is the sun setting on MeeGo, or merely rising to welcome Sailfish?

In three days, a fire shall be rekindled. In three days, the dream shall be relived. In three days, the other half shall be revealed.

In three days, Jolla will announce its first-ever smartphone. The mobile world may never be the same.

Imagine searching on Google using only your voice. Imagine, instead of typing out key words in your search query, you ask a sentence – just as how you would ask a friend. With Google’s latest addition to its already-powerful search engine, soon everyone will be able to perform the most natural of searches, further breaking down the barrier between man and machine.

This new conversational search feature, announced early this morning at the ongoing Google I/O developer conference, will soon not only be available for those performing searches on mobile devices, but also on laptops and desktops using the Chrome browser. Utilizing the same hotword detection as found on Google Now (where users say “Google” to activate the voice recognition software), those on desktops and laptops can perform conversational search queries by only saying “OK Google”, and a voice recognition icon appears. What’s more, Google is now also able to understand context from the previous search. For example, if the user asks for the weather in, say, London, before then asking “what about here”, Google’s search algorithms will be able to produce the correct reply.

In addition, Google has also been working on providing better answers to simple queries, and even tries to answer any follow-up questions before the user asks. For example, if the user asks “what’s the population of Canada”, Google will provide a graph featuring the population of the country in recent years, as well as other lines showing the population in other countries usually associated with Canada. Also, Google’s Knowledge Graph, the company’s map of real-world people, places and things, has been expanded to support Polish, Turkist, as well as simplified and traditional Chinese.

Finally, Google has also added more cards to Google Now. The most interesting addition is the Reminders card, which features geofencing capabilities. It allows reminders not only to be triggered by the time, but also by the location the user is in. Also, Google even triggers a reminder if you’re running late to catch a train or other public transportation. Best of all, users can set most reminders on Google Now using only their voices.

Google is also working on making the ubiquitous search box even more powerful. At Google I/O, Googlers also demonstrated the ability to draft emails on the search box with simple and natural commands – much like how iOS users are accustomed to with Siri. However, Google’s execs admitted that the feature is still some way away from seeing a public release – but the I/O demo certainly proves that we’re not too far away from that reality. Perhaps that is why that part of the keynote was called “The End of Search as We Know It”.

(Source: Google Search Blog)

Google announced quite a number of new, as well as improved products at the on-going Google I/O 2013 but most of them are either not available in our country or not available yet like the Galaxy S4 that runs on stock Android, Google Play Music All Access, the new Google Maps, and such, so let’s focus on something new that we can get our hands on right now, immediately – the all new Google Hangouts.

The new Google Hangouts is the unified messaging service we’ve previously seen but it will not be called Babel, Google is sticking to the name Hangouts. Instead of having various messaging services, the new Hangout integrates everything – group conversations, video calls, together. If you’re a Gtalk user, everything works pretty much more or less the same except, you can now use group video chat right within the messaging platform; it has a whole list of new emoticons for your chat conversations.

Google+ is now live on Chrome, Google+ and Gmail though, you might need to wait a little more before the Hangout option reaches your Google Mail; I’m still waiting for mine. For mobile users, you can download it immediately on iTunes or Google Play Store.

(Source: Engadget)

Just mere hours ago, Honda have just announced that the company will make a return to Formula One starting from 2015 and guess who will be their partner when that moment take place? The answer is the team that Honda have shared some F1 history together: McLaren.

You read that right: McLaren Honda will be racing together once again. According to the press statement by Honda, the Japanese automotive giant will be change of development, manufacture and supply for the engine as well energy recovery system for the team. On another hand, McLaren will be responsible for the chassis together with the management aspect of  the new McLaren Honda team.

Since 2014 will mark the arrival of 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 engine due to new regulations instead of the existing 2.4-litre V8 engine, their timing to return to F1 once again couldn’t be better. It is even more interesting to see if McLaren Honda are able to repeat the glory of their previous outing back in 1988 to 1992.

[Source: Honda. Image: Wikipedia]

It has been rumored for quite some time now that Google will be introducing its own music streaming service to go head on with the existing ones like Spotify, and true enough at the on-going Google I/O event, Google announced the Google Play Music All Access.

Google Play Music All Access not only allows you to stream music from three major record labels, in radio mode, you can even tweak your playlist and remove songs that you don’t like. Subscriptions costs USD$9.99 a month, in par with other similar music streaming services, and users who subscribe before 30 June 2013 will enjoy a USD$2 discount.

Unfortunately though, for now, All Access is only available in the US and is supported only on Android devices. More information available at our source link.

(Source: Engadget)

Think that the new Google Maps that was leaked is awesome? Of course it is and it’s official, during the Google I/O event that kicked off earlier this morning, Google officially announced the new Google Maps that is not just any mapping service out there, it’s “a map for every person and place”.

First up, the new Google Maps is now full-screen and fully interactive. This means that each time you search for a location and click into it, not only will Google highlight routes that matter to you and dim out the rest, a pop up box will appear, allowing you to dive straight into Street View to have a better look at the place, and even view user-submitted photos of say, the restaurant or mall.  The map also gets better and customized with each use. Each time you star a place or write a review, Google will be able to make smart recommendations to you based on those information.

Directions wise, Google has also revamped how things work. When you search for a direction between two places, all the routing information (travel mode be it by car, public transit, or by walking)will appear on the result box as well as on the map, whereby the ideal traveling method will be highlighted. Google also gave the public transit mode a make over, showing detailed information about all the traveling mode – the number of stops, travel time, walking distance and such – making it much more easier to pick a route.

The redesign is applicable for desktop only but according to Google, they are also working on a mobile version. It’s not live yet but if you’re interested to get a preview, visit www.maps.google.com/preview and submit your email to be in the queue.

(Source: Engadget)