Romdhane Marble

The other day, we told you that TCL was going to be designing, manufacturing, selling, promoting and handling customer service for BlackBerry's new handsets. Considering that the BlackBerry DTEK50 and BlackBerry DTEK60 are both actually re-branded TCL related phones (the former is the Alcatel Idol 4 and the latter is the TCL 950. Alcatel is a joint venture between TCL and Alcatel-Lucent), this is a process that has already begun. BlackBerry CEO John Chen has said that he would honor his promise to release one last home-grown model sporting a physical QWERTY keyboard. And while images of a phone called the BlackBerry Mercury have been disseminated, something more exciting appears to be on the way. First of all, some of TCL's Twitter accounts have been using the hashtag #TheNewBlackBerry along with the image that you'll find in the slideshow. And secondly, a cryptic tweet from Steve Cistulli, the President and GM of TCL Communication i...

Super Mario Run has quickly climbed to the top spots in the free and grossing app categories on the App Store, and the most dedicated players have probably already gone through the rather short single player campaign (called World Tour). After all, it takes just about an hour or two to finish the whole thing, including the final boss fight that never felt as tense or climactic as you'd expect. But once you start gunning for the full collection of special coins and for building out your kingdom, things start getting more complicated. Here is why we took the opportunity to share our tips and tricks on how you can be better and win at Super Mario Run. Download Super Mario Run for iPhone and iPad Boss fights : Did you know that you could jump over bosses and do not necessarily need to go below them as is the usual case for most gamers? This could save you same attempts, and - of course - it would be always better to ensure that you approac...

Google's Motion Stills app for iOS takes Live Photos that you've shot with your iPhone and turns them into cool-looking, perfectly stabilized and looping GIFs. Now the Big G has updated Motion Stills with even more editing tools allowing you to add motion-tracked text overlays to your clips, create automatic cinemagraphs, and more. Motion Text allows you to add text overlays to your Live Photos, which can then automatically follow a moving object at 1000 FPS, says Google. This happens thanks to advanced machine learning algorithms capable of tracking individual object and camera movement and differentiating between the two. It's pretty neat stuff! Check out this cool example from Google: The new version of Motion Stills can also create automatic cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs are still photographs for the most part, but feature minor repeated movements in either the foreground or background, while everything else remains completely still. Thi...

Facebook has came up with a concrete plan that will aim to reduce the spread of fabricated news on its network. This course of action comes as a result of last month's scandal, in which the social media giant was criticized for becoming an involuntary platform for fake news to spread. This was hardly the first time in which suspicious content became viral via Facebook, however, some of the stories were about the U.S. presidential elections and caused an outrage as part of the community argued that they influenced the outcome of the event.   Adam Mosseri, VP of Facebook's News Feed division, issued a lengthy statement on the company's blog regarding the new changes. Some of it reads: We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully. We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both o...

When Google launched  PhotoScan  last month, we were sort of impressed by the app's premise and intuitive design, but we were also disappointed with the results it produced. Back in November, PhotoScan was only capable of outputting images with a maximum resolution of 2000 x 2000 pixels (roughly the equivalent to what a 3 MP camera would produce size-wise). This, coupled with the fact that PhotoScan was easily confused when cropping and that the final results also exhibited quite a bit of compression, turned us off from Google's new image scanning app. Google has just released a new update for PhotoScan that bumps its output resolution to 3000 x 3000 pixels (roughly around 5 MP), which is a definite improvement over the previous version. The app has also become a bit smarter when it comes to cropping. The previous version of PhotoScan was easily confused by straight lines, so placing the photo you wanted to scan on a plain surface was essential. This update improves t...

Good ol' Mega Man Legendary Japanese video game developer Capcom announced that next year will see the release of all classic Mega Man titles on mobile. All of the Blue Bomber's iconic NES adventures will land on both iOS and Android in Japan in 2017. The press release makes no mention of the games coming to the West, but we'd say there's a big chance this happens sometime following the Japanese release. Mega Man is one of the most recognizable video game characters and has starred in over 100 titles. The first six games in the series, the ones that are launching on mobile next year, first came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System between 1987 and 1993. The first six titles starring the Blue Bomber are notorious for their unforgiving difficulty but are fondly remembered by gamers for their innovative for the time non-linear game design, tight controls and awesome action-packed gameplay. From the single screenshot accompanying Capcom...

Apple has pledged to commit $44 million as an investment for an Indonesian R&D center in order to obtain a certificate that would allow the distribution of the iPhone 7 across the country.  The funds will be provided over the course of three years and the investment will comply with a telecommunications policy that the Indonesian government will introduce in 2017. As of next year, all 4G smartphones sold in the country must have “local content” of 30% or more in terms of software, hardware or an investment commitment. If a manufacturer fulfills these conditions, a“local content certification” will be granted in order to allow the distribution of devices priced at 6 million rupiah ($448) and above. News agency Reuters approached Apple for a confirmation of the investment figure, but the company declined to comment and pointed to an announcement from 2015, in which Apple had committed to construct an iOS App Development Center in the country. ...