Life's not so good for 20 people who have just felt the brunt of a commercial stunt gone wrong.
LG had an idea to promote the LG G2 in Seoul - release helium balloons with smartphone vouchers attached, hoping people would would wait for them to come down before claiming their prize.
But LG also doesn't understand human nature, with many participants turning up with knives, spears and BB guns.
The whole thing ballooned out of control with 20 unfortunates getting injured as a result. No surprise that LG's cancelled a bunch of other commercial events for the phone.
Oh, BlackBerry! The company just announced the new BlackBerry 9720, a BlackBerry OS 7.1 phone with 2.8" HVGA touchscreen and a hardware QWERTY keyboard. That's right, this isn't a Q5 alternative, just a leftover design (the Samoa that leaked a while back).
The phone is firmly low-end and is running an OS that’s about as current as Windows Phone 7 or Symbian. That said, we have to admit there's a painful lack of phones with a hardware keyboard, especially when you consider that even the BlackBerry Q5, the current cheapest BlackBerry 10 handset, is pretty pricey.
Besides the keyboard there's only things like BBM that the 9720 has going for it. The 1,450mAh battery won't impress anyone with the 7 hours of talk time and the 800MHz CPU with 512MB RAM seems outdated even before a 2011 model like the Bold Touch 9900. Really now, that was two years ago to the month.
"It's perfect for customers upgrading from a feature phone or entry-level Android or Windows Phone device," says the press release and there's some truth to that - it would make a good feature phone replacement.
The BlackBerry 9720 is targeted at emerging markets and will launch in select Asian, EMEA and Latin American markets, though there's no indication of price. It will come in five colors and there will be a number of accessories too. But is it the kind of launch we need to see from a company in trouble?
We know everything about the Nokia Amber update, except for the launch date. We had heard August from Nokia Spain's Twitter, but those social networking accounts are often unreliable. Now Nokia PR at the Lumia 925 launch in Taiwan says late August, early September is the target.
That's good news, but unfortunately there's some bad news too – apparently, Nokia will prioritize the Lumia 920 update, which potentially means lower profile devices will have to wait. That wouldn’t be ideal, considering the humble Lumia 520 has exploded in popularity.
The Nokia Amber release for Windows Phone 8 handsets is a superset of the GDR2 update from Microsoft and will be available for the whole WP8 Lumia range with some small omissions (no FM radio for the Lumia 620, which doesn’t have the hardware for it). Note that the Lumia 925 and 1020 have Amber installed out of box.
You can read the full changelog, but the highlights are the Smart Camera app, Glance screen and updates to the HERE suit. There will be call and blocking too.
If you can't wait, you can try out the leaked Amber ROM for the Lumia 920 and 820.
As Android phones and tablets have increased in popularity, the number of apps available for the platform has rocketed.
And that means more free Android games. There's a lot of junk out there but, fortunately, there are gems among the junk.
We've worked our way through a whole load of Android games to reveal the ones you should download to your phone.
So without delay, here is our pick of the 80 best free Android games available.
1. Angry Birds
The amazingly popular iOS game moved to Android a while ago, earning over two million downloads during its first weekend of availability.
The Android version is free, unlike the Apple release, with maker Rovio opting to stick a few adverts on it rather than charge an upfront fee. The result is a massive and very challenging physics puzzler that's incredibly polished and professional. For free. It defies all the laws of modern retail.
Bebbled is your standard gem-shuffling thing, only presented in a professional style you wouldn't be surprised to see running on something featuring a Nintendo badge with an asking price of £19.99.
You only drop gems on other gems to nuke larger groups of the same colour, but with ever-tightening demands for score combos and scenes that require you to rotate your phone to flip the play field on its head, Bebbled soon morphs into an incredibly complex challenge.
3. Red Stone
There's an awful lot of square-shuffling games on Android and Red Stone is one of the best. And one of the hardest. You start off with a big fat 'King' square that's four times of the normal 'pawn' squares, then set about shuffling things so the fat King can get through to an exit at the top of the screen.
It's hard to accurately describe a puzzle game in the written word, but seriously, it's a good game.
4. Newton
Released in beta form, Newton is a maths/physics challenge that has you lining up shots at a target - but having to contend with the laws of nature, in the form of pushers, pullers, benders (no laughing), mirrors and traps, all deflecting your shot from its target.
The developer is still adding levels to it at the moment, so one day Newton might be finished and might cost money. But for now it's free and a great indie creation.
5. Angry Birds Star Wars
The Angry physics phenomenon took a turn for the weird late in 2012, with Rovio acquiring the rights to blend Star Wars characters with its popular Angry Birds play mechanics. Angry Birds Star Wars is actually pretty nice, with players using Star Wars weaponry to smash down scenery alongside the usual destructive physics action. Not the car crash IP clash we were expecting.
6. Drop
Some might call Drop a game, others might classify it as a tech demo that illustrates the accuracy of the Android platform's accelerometer, thanks to how playing it simply involves tilting your phone while making a little bouncy ball falls between gaps in the platforms. Either way it'll amuse you for a while and inform you of the accuracy of your accelerometer - a win-win situation.
7. Frozen Bubble
Another key theme of the independent Android gaming scene is (ports of) clones of popular titles. Like Frozen Bubble, which is based around the ancient and many-times-copied concept of firing gems up a screen to make little groups of similarly coloured clusters. That's what you do. You've probably done it a million times before, so if it's your thing get this downloaded.
8. Replica Island
Replica Island is an extremely polished platform game that pulls off the shock result of being very playable on an Android trackball. The heavy momentum of the character means you're only switching direction with the ball or d-pad, letting you whizz about the levels with ease. Then there's jumping, bottom-bouncing, collecting and all the other usual platform formalities.
9. Gem Miner
In Gem Miner you are a sort of mole character that likes to dig things out of the ground. But that's not important. The game itself has you micro-managing the raw materials you find, upgrading your digging powers and buying bigger and better tools and maps. Looks great, plays well on Android's limited button array. Go on, suck the very life out of the planet.
10. ConnecToo
Another coloured-square-based puzzle game, only ConnecToo has you joining them up. Link red to red, then blue to blue - then see if you've left a pathway through to link yellow to yellow. You probably haven't, so delete it all and try again.
A brilliantly simple concept. ConnecToo used to be a paid-for game, but was recently switched to an ad-supported model - meaning it now costs you £0.00.
11. Titres
Once you're successfully rewired your brain's 25 years of playing Tetris in a certain way with certain buttons and got used to tapping the screen to rotate your blocks, it's... Tetris.
It hinges on how much you enjoy placing things with your phone's trackball or pad. If you're good at it, it's a superb Tetris clone. Let's hope it doesn't get sued out of existence.
UPDATE: While Titres seems to have been removed from Google Play, there's now an official Tetris app available to download.
12. Trap!
Not the best-looking game you'll ever play, with its shabby brown backgrounds and rudimentary text making it look like something you'd find running on a PC in the year 1985. But Trap! is good.
You draw lines to box in moving spheres, gaining points for cordoning off chunks of the screen. That sounds rubbish, so please invest two minutes of your time having a go on it so you don't think we're talking nonsense.
13. Jewels
Coloured gems again, and this time your job is to switch pairs to make larger groups which then disappear. That might also sound quite familiar. The good thing about Jewels is its size and presentation, managing to look professional while packing in more levels than should really be given away for free.
14. OpenSudoku
We had to put one Sudoku game in here, so we'll go with OpenSudoku - which lives up to its open tag thanks to letting users install packs of new puzzles generated by Sudoku makers. It's entirely possible you could use this to play new Sudoku puzzles for the rest of your life, if that's not too terrifying a thought.
15. Abduction!
Abduction! is a sweet little platform jumping game, presented in a similarly quirky and hand-drawn style as the super-fashionable Doodle Jump. You can't argue with cute cows and penguins with parachutes, or a game that's easy to play with one hand thanks to its super accessible accelerometer controls.
16. The Great Land Grab
A cross between a map tool and Foursquare, The Great Land Grab sorts your local area into small rectangular packets of land - which you take ownership of by travelling through them in real-time and buying them up.
Then someone else nicks them off you the next day, a bit like real-world Risk. A great idea, as long as you don't mind nuking your battery by leaving your phone sitting there on the train with its GPS radio on.
17. Brain Genius Deluxe
Our basic legal training tells us it's better to use the word "homage" than to label something a "rip-off", so we'll recommend this as a simple "homage" to the famed Nintendo Brain Training franchise.
Clearly Brain Genius Deluxe is not going to be as slick, but there's enough content in here to keep you "brain training" (yes, it even uses that phrase) until your battery dies. The presentation's painfully slow, but then again that might be the game teaching you patience.
18. Coloroid
Coloroid is aery, very simple and has the look of the aftermath of an explosion in a Tetris factory, but it works. All you do is expand coloured areas, trying to fill them in with colours in as few moves as possible - like using Photoshop's fill tool at a competitive level.
19. Cestos
Cestos is sort of a futuristic recreation of curling, where players chuck marbles at each other to try and smash everyone else's balls/gems down the drain and out of the zone. The best part is this all happens online against real humans, so as long as there's a few other bored people out there at the same time you'll have a real, devious, cheating, quitting person to play against. Great.
20. Air Control
One of the other common themes on the Android gaming scene is clones of games based around pretending to be an air traffic controller, where you guide planes to landing strips with a swish of your finger. There are loads of them, all pretty much the same thing - we've chosen Air Control as it's an ad-supported release, so is technically free.
Check out Samsung's Your Mobile Life to discover loads more about the infinite possibilities of the GALAXY Note II
The Alcatel One Touch Idol X is unlikely to find itself draped across billboards nationwide, but it's looking to take on the big guns in the mobile market.
The handset sports a sizeable 5-inch FHD IPS display with a full HD, 1920 x 1080 resolution, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and 13.1MP rear camera meaning it stacks up pretty well against the likes of the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z.
There's a rather paltry 8GB of internal storage included, but there is at least a microSD slot in the One Touch Idol X allowing you to expand on that offering - and with a 2MP front camera and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean there's more good news than bad.
Size zero
A slightly worrying aspect of the One Touch Idol X is the battery, as in a bid to reach a svelte 6.9mm chassis Alcatel has only been able to squeeze a 2000mAh power pack inside the handset.
At least at 120g it's not going to weigh you down: the slender body should slide effortlessly into the skinniest of jeans, but if your pockets aren't deep the 140.4mm height may see it peek out the top.
However, the lack of bezel - Alcatel describes it as 'zero bezel' but there is a sliver there - either side of the screen means it's not as wide as the competition, which will hopefully lead to a decent grip in the hand.
The Alcatel One Touch Idol X will be arriving in the UK soon, but price and exact release date are yet to be announced.
Over the weekend, we brought word of Apple's anticipated September 10 announcement date for its new iPhone models, the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. Now, an October 25 release date has been tipped as well - that's when we will allegedly see the two new Apple smartphones on the store shelves.
The Apple iPhone 5S is expected to feature an improved 8MP camera sensor with f/2.0 aperture, which should result in better low-light shots. There's also hints of an alleged fingerprint scanner on the home button, and a heftier battery inside, which should bump up the weight slightly over the current iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5C is rumored as the budget alternative of the iPhone 5, featuring a plastic construction that helps keep costs down. The device has made the rounds several times in rumorland over the past several months, and should come in various color combinations as well.
The October 25 release date could also see the release of a new MacBook Air, although we'll likely find out more on what to expect after the anticipated September 10 announcement.
Sony has started rolling up the Android 4.1.2 software update for both the Xperia SP C5302 HSPA+ and the Xperia SP C5303 LTE. The update brings the phone's firmware to version 12.0.A.2.245 and users report that although it's not Android 4.2.2, it brings the UI visuals to almost perfectly match the Xperia Z's.
In the software update for the the Xperia SP,which is based on Android 4.1.2, Sony has included a bunch of new Small apps and has made both the navigation and status bars semi-transparent. Another treat is the quick settings menu available on the notification shade.
The changelog also includes an improved camera, mainly in terms of low-light performance. Finally, along with the many bug fixes and minor changes, the soft keys on the navigation bar are now black instead of grey.
While the update is now on its way to the international 3G and LTE versions of the Xperia SP, you may have to wait a while to get it knocking on your screen. If you don't want to wait for, then follow the source link below for instructions on how to install it yourself.
