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Amazon may have slashed prices on their selection of 4G smartphones for the holiday weekend, but they aren’t done yet. On Monday, the same selection of phones will drop to the sweet price of free when purchased alongside a new two-year contract. Phones included in the free-for-all Memorial Day sale include the HTC Thunderbolt Nexus S 4G Samsung DROID Charge and the newly released LG Revolution If you’ve been on the fence about committing to a 4G device, the decision may have just been made for you.

[via MobileCrunch]

Android Phone Fans

During the Super Bowl, a commercial hinted at an Angry Birds secret. Those who figured out the secret were rewarded with a football-shaped golden egg. The hidden level for that golden egg? A teaser for the upcoming Angry Birds Rio. For those that missed the commercial, a screenshot can be found after the break, as well as the full video for how to unlock the golden football egg, and the level you’ll receive as a reward. Kudos to @AndroidThrasher for the screenshot and scarbzscope for the video!
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Golden Football, Secret Level Gives a Tease of Angry Birds Rio

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Droid-Life.com has reported that today on Super Bowl Sunday there will be a secret Angry Birds level to unlock during the Super Bowl XLV. Also, this month the Valentine’s edition of the Angry Birds Seasons game will be released. Sometime in March there will be a new version of the Angry Birds game called Angry Birds Rio. This new version will feature 45 new levels and should be released sometime in March. The Secret Super Bowl level seems to be promoting or hyping up the new Rio game by having the obstacles to break through spell out Rio. Check out Droid-Life.com’s full article and screenshots here:

http://www.droid-life.com/2011/02/04/angry-birds-secret-super-bowl-level-revealed-valentines-edition-too/

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Merry Christmas everyone. As promised, here is another useful video from 23hathman. In an effort to keep my family from killing me, this will be short and straight to the point. Enjoy, and I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas.

View full post on AndroidSPIN

One more day has come and gone and we move one day closer to the end of the Angry Birds Seasons legacy. Well at least for the Christmas themed version. We still have a lot of holidays left in our little calendar. I sure hope Rovio has some more tricks up their sleeves in the near future. Until we get something new, here is another video by 23hathman showing us level 1-23. Enjoy!

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Merry Christmas eve everyone. I don’t know about you guys, but I still have to go Christmas shopping. I am such a slacker! Oh well thats life. Hopefully everyone is safe and happy right now. Enjoying their families and friends.

Have no fear though, we will still be here for you Angry Birds addiction. Believe me I know you will want a break from all those people you have running around your house. Claiming you don’t feel good and hiding in the bathroom works really well. Here is your daily dose of love from 23hathman. Enjoy and good luck.

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Happy Sunday everyone. I hope everyone is almost finished with all their shopping for the Holidays. If not, don’t worry, I haven’t even started yet. I think I am going to take a snow day and keep pushing forward on Angry Birds. What do you guys think?

Here is another video from our 3 star king 23hathman, showing us his way of gaining 3 stars on todays level. Take a look if you are stuck, and as always, have a happy holiday!

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Thank goodness it’s Friday, right? I know I have been waiting all week for this day to get here. Although, this does put us one day closer to the end of the month and the end of our game (I know, I am sad too), I am sure Rovio will have more fun stuff in store for us soon.

On to why you are all here though. How to get 3 stars on today’s unlocked level. We are bringing back 23hathman video sequence for you to visually see how to accomplish the task at hand.

Happy Friday everyone and have no fear, we will bring you the latest levels over the weekend as well.

View full post on AndroidSPIN

We have given everyone a very simple place to locate 23hathman‘s videos of how to achieve 3 stars on each new level of Angry Birds Seasons. He is doing an amazing job of keeping up with each level so far. We started off with level 14 two days ago. I thought now might be a good time to backtrack just a little and have 23hathman show everyone where the first Golden Egg is located and how to beat the level that is unlocked once it is obtained. So without further ado the first Golden Egg is located in level 1-13.

Now that you have obtained the cleverly hidden Golden Egg, you now have a bonus level at your disposal. As usual, attempt to beat the new level on your own. It’s not to terribly difficult. If you need some help, here’s another video from 23hathman illustrating how to gain the 3 stars for that level as well.

Happy Holidays!

View full post on AndroidSPIN

It is a new day in our lives. We are getting up, getting ready for our day and trying to beat the latest level available in Angry Birds Seasons. Here is another helpful video to move you in the right direction when you finally give up. Seriously though, give it your best attempt first. Happy pig hunting everyone.

View full post on AndroidSPIN

TMo News is reporting that the LG Optimus , an entry level Android handset, is going to be dropping on November 3rd with a contract price of $29.99. Not bad for a handset that is running Android 2.2, has WiFi calling capabilities and a pretty fair camera on board.

The 3rd of November is a busy day for T-Mo, with the Defy, Comet MyTouch HD and now the Optimus.  Looks like Big Magenta is ramping up for the holiday season, with offerings at every price tier.  The Optimus is a good looking phone for people looking to get their loved ones a new Android handset!

Entry Level LG Optimus Dropping Nov. 3rd for $29.99 originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

VOTE NOW!  What is your take on all the Android Market alternatives?

View full post on AndroidGuys

Google recently introduced Priority Inbox, which tries to rank your emails based on importance so you waste less time reading things that may not be as important. This feature was also recently brought to Android (but only Android) in the form of update to the native Gmail application.

Well, Messagemind Inc is looking to take mobile email prioritization to the next level, and across multiple platforms. They are currently developing a system for enterprise users of MS Outlook and MS Exchange, but are looking to bring this to all mobile platforms by Q1 of 2011.

Messagemind’s platform breaks emails into five distinct categories – Very High, High, Medium, Low and Someday. The company also touts that their software recognizes the behavior of not just the individual, but users across entire organizations as well.  From the press release.

Messagemind’s technology suite also provides ‘business intelligence’ in the form of performance metrics and knowledge network mapping. This allows enterprises to track the flow of critical information and identify opportunities – whether for new revenue creation or cost savings – otherwise buried within company email correspondence.

Continue after the break for the full presser:

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Image: John Booth

We stood outside the tomb, watching it collapse. Then we got our Experience Points and had pie.

In a moment a quarter-century in the making, I completed my first Dungeons & Dragons quest this month, with my wife and daughter playing their first adventure alongside.

I never got to play D&D for real as a kid. In middle school, my interest was at its peak thanks to TSR’s Endless Quest books like Pillars of Pentegarn and that absolutely terrible Mazes & Monsters movie. (Thankfully, I was too young to realize what a ridiculous pile of anti-gaming propaganda it was, and at any rate, it actually fueled my fire to learn D&D, so BRAINWASH FAIL.) Unfortunately, I only had one friend who shared my curiosity about the game. Over the course of a year or two, we each got a basic set and some modules and books, and while we loved rolling up characters and reading about creatures and cave systems and towns hiding dark secrets, it was tough to actually play with just the two of us. We took turns faking our way through adventures, one of us loosely Dungeon Mastering – in fact, even calling it that is an insult to DMs everywhere – the other running a party of 3 or 4 characters and basically jumping from encounter to encounter and grabbing treasure. Nobody ever died.

Still, my thing for roleplaying games stuck around for years: In addition to my old D&D stash, I owned rulebooks and sourcebooks and modules for Shadowrun, James Bond and Star Wars gaming systems even though I never actually got to play any of them, with the exception of a one-session Shadowrun adventure in college.

This year, though, the D&D itch came back during my trip to PAX East. I met up with my friends Kato and Wendy there, and the three of us spent a good chunk of time hanging out with the other GeekDad writers and Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks author Ethan Gilsdorf. The whole atmosphere really got to me, from the gaming tables and the dice vendors to Wil Wheaton’s keynote to just listening to Natania and Michael and Kato and Wendy talk Dungeons & Dragons. Seriously: I came awfully close to buying a set of dice to replace the ones I’d lost track of decades ago, despite having absolutely no need for them.

Upon returning home, I read Ethan’s book which, coupled with Kato’s offer to make room for me in a game he was running, pretty much made my delve back into D&D inevitable.

The really cool thing is that when I mentioned this to my wife, she threw me for a wonderful loop by saying she’d like to give it a try, too.

So it was that I found myself buying three sets of dice, my first Player’s Handbook, printing out character sheets and puzzling over abilities and powers and traits.

Kato and Wendy are RPG veterans, both with gaming roots going back to their early teenage years, and both have several years of D&D experience. Kato, who blogs about DMing at One Inch Square, ran a few Middle-Earth Role Playing system games as a kid and started sitting behind the D&D screen with the Third Edition.

I don’t have the longview to put D&D’s seemingly-divisive 4^th edition in detailed perspective, but I can say that as a first-timer, I found the d20-based play far easier to digest than the one I remember trying to wrap my junior-high brain around. The power, action and weapon cards Kato provided made for quick learning during combat, and I was also happy to see a hit point system far different than the one I tried to learn when I was younger – one in which, say, the wrong roll of a d4 could off your first-level cleric before you even crossed a tavern’s threshold.

Playing with miniatures also helped the learning curve. As much as I loved drawing maps on graph paper back in middle school, it was really difficult to visualize our combat playing out in those little quarter-inch squares. But with a battle map and walls and pillars laid out on the table, where sixth-grade me would’ve simply settled for saying “I swing my sword,” grown-up me was able to fully consider my character’s abilities and the environment and what moves might work.

Image: John Booth

My wife, having had no prior exposure to the game, was nervous at first, but by the end of our first session, when we got in the car to head home, it was a thrill to hear her say 1) how much fun she’d had, and 2) things like, “You know, I should have used my Elven Accuracy to re-roll one of those attacks.”

Our daughter, at 13, was intrigued and was on the fence about playing – Kato rolled up a character and worked up a background just in case – but while she only sat and watched that first night, as soon as we left, she said something to the effect of “Next time, I’m in.” She joined the party for the remaining two game nights, admirably filling her wizard’s role. Again, those reference cards were invaluable in helping her keep track of spells and powers and abilities, and she took to the game quickly. (She even earned bonus role-playing points for a pure-adrenaline “I kick the body” moment after a really hard-fought encounter.)

It was about far more than the fighting, though. I loved listening to Kato set up our adventure, working in the brief back story I had created for my halfling rogue and fleshing out the stories behind my wife’s elven cleric and my daughter’s wizard and Wendy’s fighter. I loved hearing my wife react in character to a none-too-subtle halfling cough of warning. I loved the moments of silence right after a scene was set, when the four of us needed to figure out what we were going to do next. And I loved the energetic post-session conversations my wife and daughter and I had about the game and our characters and what we could have done, and what we might try the next time around.

The biggest factors for the success of the three-session adventure, of course, were our gaming companions, so if you’ve got friends willing to show you the ropes, by all means take them up on the offer.

Kato not only crafted a great one-shot adventure perfectly suited for our characters’ levels and our gaming experience – our final encounter included a couple pretty close brushes with death, although my inexperience showed in my failure to force a re-roll on a particularly damaging hit – he also ran the game while teaching it and made it a crazy amount of fun.

And Wendy played her half-orc fighter with a great balance of enthusiasm and patience, encouraging us new players and illustrating how to use different actions to achieve specific goals in combat.

I can’t say enough how awesome it was finally playing this game I’d been wanting to give a shot for so long, and having it turn out to be such an incredibly fantastic family experience at the same time.

(Hey, sixth-grade me? If you’re out there — the Second Chance power is important: Don’t forget to use it.)

View full post on GeekDad

Image: John Booth

We stood outside the tomb, watching it collapse. Then we got our Experience Points and had pie.

In a moment a quarter-century in the making, I completed my first Dungeons & Dragons quest this month, with my wife and daughter playing their first adventure alongside.

I never got to play D&D for real as a kid. In middle school, my interest was at its peak thanks to TSR’s Endless Quest books like Pillars of Pentegarn and that absolutely terrible Mazes & Monsters movie. (Thankfully, I was too young to realize what a ridiculous pile of anti-gaming propaganda it was, and at any rate, it actually fueled my fire to learn D&D, so BRAINWASH FAIL.) Unfortunately, I only had one friend who shared my curiosity about the game. Over the course of a year or two, we each got a basic set and some modules and books, and while we loved rolling up characters and reading about creatures and cave systems and towns hiding dark secrets, it was tough to actually play with just the two of us. We took turns faking our way through adventures, one of us loosely Dungeon Mastering – in fact, even calling it that is an insult to DMs everywhere – the other running a party of 3 or 4 characters and basically jumping from encounter to encounter and grabbing treasure. Nobody ever died.

Still, my thing for roleplaying games stuck around for years: In addition to my old D&D stash, I owned rulebooks and sourcebooks and modules for Shadowrun, James Bond and Star Wars gaming systems even though I never actually got to play any of them, with the exception of a one-session Shadowrun adventure in college.

This year, though, the D&D itch came back during my trip to PAX East. I met up with my friends Kato and Wendy there, and the three of us spent a good chunk of time hanging out with the other GeekDad writers and Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks author Ethan Gilsdorf. The whole atmosphere really got to me, from the gaming tables and the dice vendors to Wil Wheaton’s keynote to just listening to Natania and Michael and Kato and Wendy talk Dungeons & Dragons. Seriously: I came awfully close to buying a set of dice to replace the ones I’d lost track of decades ago, despite having absolutely no need for them.

Upon returning home, I read Ethan’s book which, coupled with Kato’s offer to make room for me in a game he was running, pretty much made my delve back into D&D inevitable.

The really cool thing is that when I mentioned this to my wife, she threw me for a wonderful loop by saying she’d like to give it a try, too.

So it was that I found myself buying three sets of dice, my first Player’s Handbook, printing out character sheets and puzzling over abilities and powers and traits.

Kato and Wendy are RPG veterans, both with gaming roots going back to their early teenage years, and both have several years of D&D experience. Kato, who blogs about DMing at One Inch Square, ran a few Middle-Earth Role Playing system games as a kid and started sitting behind the D&D screen with the Third Edition.

I don’t have the longview to put D&D’s seemingly-divisive 4^th edition in detailed perspective, but I can say that as a first-timer, I found the d20-based play far easier to digest than the one I remember trying to wrap my junior-high brain around. The power, action and weapon cards Kato provided made for quick learning during combat, and I was also happy to see a hit point system far different than the one I tried to learn when I was younger – one in which, say, the wrong roll of a d4 could off your first-level cleric before you even crossed a tavern’s threshold.

Playing with miniatures also helped the learning curve. As much as I loved drawing maps on graph paper back in middle school, it was really difficult to visualize our combat playing out in those little quarter-inch squares. But with a battle map and walls and pillars laid out on the table, where sixth-grade me would’ve simply settled for saying “I swing my sword,” grown-up me was able to fully consider my character’s abilities and the environment and what moves might work.

Image: John Booth

My wife, having had no prior exposure to the game, was nervous at first, but by the end of our first session, when we got in the car to head home, it was a thrill to hear her say 1) how much fun she’d had, and 2) things like, “You know, I should have used my Elven Accuracy to re-roll one of those attacks.”

Our daughter, at 13, was intrigued and was on the fence about playing – Kato rolled up a character and worked up a background just in case – but while she only sat and watched that first night, as soon as we left, she said something to the effect of “Next time, I’m in.” She joined the party for the remaining two game nights, admirably filling her wizard’s role. Again, those reference cards were invaluable in helping her keep track of spells and powers and abilities, and she took to the game quickly. (She even earned bonus role-playing points for a pure-adrenaline “I kick the body” moment after a really hard-fought encounter.)

It was about far more than the fighting, though. I loved listening to Kato set up our adventure, working in the brief back story I had created for my halfling rogue and fleshing out the stories behind my wife’s elven cleric and my daughter’s wizard and Wendy’s fighter. I loved hearing my wife react in character to a none-too-subtle halfling cough of warning. I loved the moments of silence right after a scene was set, when the four of us needed to figure out what we were going to do next. And I loved the energetic post-session conversations my wife and daughter and I had about the game and our characters and what we could have done, and what we might try the next time around.

The biggest factors for the success of the three-session adventure, of course, were our gaming companions, so if you’ve got friends willing to show you the ropes, by all means take them up on the offer.

Kato not only crafted a great one-shot adventure perfectly suited for our characters’ levels and our gaming experience – our final encounter included a couple pretty close brushes with death, although my inexperience showed in my failure to force a re-roll on a particularly damaging hit – he also ran the game while teaching it and made it a crazy amount of fun.

And Wendy played her half-orc fighter with a great balance of enthusiasm and patience, encouraging us new players and illustrating how to use different actions to achieve specific goals in combat.

I can’t say enough how awesome it was finally playing this game I’d been wanting to give a shot for so long, and having it turn out to be such an incredibly fantastic family experience at the same time.

(Hey, sixth-grade me? If you’re out there — the Second Chance power is important: Don’t forget to use it.)

View full post on GeekDad

Mint Muenze Oesterreich Sells Gold to a Record Level
Austrian mint Muenze Oesterreich has been flooded with orders for purchase of gold. The crisis in Greece has raised the sale of gold coins. Because of fear that euro will be hit hard by the crisis people are rushing to purchase gold before it gets beyond their reach. Since April 243,500 ounces of gold have [...]

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