FIFA 15 Ultimate Team for Android and iOS Now Available For Download

IFAA 15 Ultimate Team, a mobile video game by Electronic Arts or EA, is now available to download in select regions for Android and iOS users, and a Windows Phone version has also been announced. The game should be made available globally in a gradual manner.

The game was first announced on September 10 by EA but without much detail. However, the official Google Play listing and the EA blog post of the FIFA 15 Ultimate Team reveals a number of features what the Android and iOS mobile users would experience.

The FIFA 15 Ultimate Team app, as the name suggests, focuses on the Ultimate Team mode of the game's console version, as well as Matches of the Week, and the new Quick Simulation mode. In Ultimate Team, players can earn in-game cash, trade footballers and can create their dream team to compete with others. "Earn, trade, and collect superstars like Lionel Messi and Eden Hazard to create your own fantasy team," states the listing.


The Matches of the Week mode lets players take part in their favourite team's next fixture, plus 3 other major match-ups happening around the world. The new Quick Simulation Mode lets players can act as the team managers and have "complete control of their squad while a match plays out quickly on your tablet or phone," as per the blog post, without participating for the entire season.

The blog however added that FIFA 15 Ultimate does away with modes like Career Mode, Penalty Kicks Mode, and Manager Mode as seen on its previous versions.

The game includes various play styles, team formations, player kits giving users enough room to customize the players and the team chemistry. The FIFA 15 Ultimate Team players have the option to choose from more than 10,000 in-game players, 583 licensed teams, 33 leagues, and 34 real stadiums to play.

EA Sports' latest mobile game now has a new 'through pass; feature besides its classic control options. An option for 'Casual Controls' is also available for those players who like to play with fewer buttons on the screen. Several external controllers are also supported by the FIFA 15 Ultimate Team mobile video game.


Besides the multiplayer mode, the FIFA 15 Ultimate Team also enables players to challenge their friends via the Facebook login.

Electronic Arts first introduced the FIFA 15 Ultimate Team on September 10 along with the Peggle Blast and SimCity BuildIt mobile games as a reaction to Apple's iPhone and smartwatch announcements.

"We also have a dozen games in the pipeline that will launch over the next year, and today we're announcing the first three. FIFA 15 Ultimate Team will be available later this month. Then Peggle Blast and SimCity BuildIt will launch in the fall. All three are built specifically for mobile, and now with the capabilities of the iPhone 6 and iOS 8, all three will be bigger and better when they hit over the next few months," stated Frank Gibeau, Executive Vice President, EA Mobile, on the blog post.

Sized at 1.2GB for Android and 1.02GB for iOS devices, the FIFA 15 Ultimate Team app requires Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread or iOS 5.1.1 or later versions to run.

The Best iOS 8 Notification Centre Widgets

The iOS notification centre already included widgets for weather and calendar, but these were fairly limited. With the launch of iOS 8, the notification centre gets a huge upgrade, as you can now control which apps show up and what additional information can be presented using widgets. This can range from a calendar to a translation widget to just showing you your progress in different books.

There are a lot to choose from and some are more useful than others. We used quite a few of these widgets and here are our favourites.

Wdgts
Wdgts is a great app to start with that really makes the most use of the notification centre. This app has five basic functions - calculator, currency converter, time zones, calendar and photo frame. It puts all of these in your notification centre. Want to quickly check the current exchange rate or make a quick calculation? You can access all these functions at any time by just opening the notification centre.

iTranslate
This widget lets you quickly translate text into English quickly - all you need to do is copy the text wherever you encounter it, and iTranslate will show you the English translation in the notification centre. So if you come across a word in a webpage, email or book, you don't need to copy and paste it into Safari, and then search for it. Simple use cases like this are a great way of using the notification centre without making it complicated.

Sky Guide
Sky Guide (Rs. 150) is a great app for stargazing, more of which we have written about earlier. This app has a widget that shows you the time of the day (or night) when celestial bodies will be visible. In the widget you can see these times for the Sun, Moon (along with its phases), Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. A neat graph to illustrate this is the icing on the cake.

Evernote
Evernote uses widgets to help you speed up the note-taking process. It shows five buttons - text, camera, photos, reminders and list. You can pick any one of these and jump to typing notes in the Evernote app. This gets full marks for boosting productivity, as you save time by quickly selecting the type of note you want to create.

Yahoo Weather
The beauty of Yahoo Weather lies in its design. It is perhaps the best weather app on the App Store from a design perspective. Yahoo Weather now has a widget that shows you the current temperature and forecast in the widget, along with nice background images that are a hallmark of the app. Our only complaint is that the image doesn't fill the width of the screen, but hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Best of the rest
We also liked widgets of many other apps, and here are the best of the rest.

Audiobooks from Audible: Tracks total time spent listening to audiobooks. Version 2.2 of this app often crashes on launch, so wait for a fix (v 2.2.1) before you download it.
Parcel is a nice app for tracking deliveries of shipments. Unfortunately, it does not support courier services based in India yet.
Day One (Rs. 300): Tracks how many notes you have taken everyday and shows a them in a notes versus time bar graph. Shows a few past entries and photos too.
TwoDots: This fun puzzle game uses widgets to show game progress, lives remaining and medals won.
Dropbox: Shows most recent files from your Dropbox folder. If you use a shared folder, you can quickly open files added by others in the group.

Which iOS 8 widgets did you find like? Let us know via the comments.

How to install iOS 8

iOS 8 has been released by Apple. While the upgrade went smoothly for many people, no major update is ever completely flawless – and iOS 8 is no exception. In this case, many users with a 16GB iPhone or iPad are having problems installing iOS 8 because they don’t have enough free space — it can require up to 5.7GB! For others, the download of iOS 8 is just going very slowly.

If you’re running into the free space issue while trying to download iOS 8, or you’re looking for an alternative, faster route of downloading iOS 8, read on!

Backup and making enough free space

The update to iOS 8 is available for most iDevices released in the last three years, including the iPhone 4S and later, the iPad 2 and later, and all permutations of the iPad Mini.

Before you update any iPhone or iPad, you should update your version of iTunes to the latest version and then back up your device. For Mac users, open iTunes, then click iTunes > Check for Updates. Windows users, open iTunes, then click Help > Check for Updates. To back up your iPhone or iPad, click File > Devices > Back Up.

If you want to perform an over-the-air update directly to your iPhone or iPad, you will need up to 5.7GB of free space on your device to install iOS 8. Needless to say, if you have a 16GB iPhone or iPad, you may not have enough free space. You can either try to clear some free space by deleting photos and apps — or, alternatively, just plug the device into your Mac or PC and perform the update through iTunes. Upgrading to iOS 8 through iTunes removes the 5.7GB free space requirement.

How to officially update to iOS 8

The official update process is very simple. If you wish, you can update to iOS 8 directly from your iPhone or iPad by visiting Settings > General > Software Update. Alternatively, plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer, open up iTunes, navigate to the Summary tab for your device, and then click Update. It will either tell you that no updates are available (in which case, try again later), or the download will begin.

The download might be quite slow initially as Apple’s servers get hammered. (This can be a good reason to download an unofficial version using the links below, rather than wait for the real thing, which may take hours to download.)

Once you have iOS 8 installed, skip ahead to the end of the story to discover more about your new operating system.

Download iOS 8 unofficially

An alternative route, if you’re struggling with the official iOS 8 download, is to download the appropriate Gold Master (GM) of iOS 8 for your device. These files are legitimate versions of iOS 8 that were released over the last few weeks to developers and beta testers — and were then redistributed unofficially to the public.

iPhone 4S (Models A1431 & A1387)
iPhone 5 (GSM, Model A1428)
iPhone 5 (CDMA, Model A1429)
iPhone 5S (GSM)
iPhone 5S (CDMA)
iPhone 5C (GSM)
iPhone 5C (CDMA)
iPad 2 (WiFi)
iPad 2 (Rev. A)
iPad 2 (WiFi + GSM, Model A1396) – no download available currently
iPad 2 (WiFi + CDMA, Model A1397)
iPad 3 (WiFi, Model A1416)
iPad 3 (WiFi + GSM, Model A1430)
iPad 3 (WiFi + CDMA, Model A1403)
iPad 4 (WiFi, Model A1458)
iPad 4 (WiFi + GSM, Model A1459)
iPad 4 (WiFi + CDMA, Model A1460)
iPad Mini (WiFi, Model A1432)
iPad Mini (WiFi + GSM, Model A1454)
iPad Mini (WiFi + CDMA, Model A1455)
iPad Air (Wi-Fi, Model A1474)
iPad Air (Wi-Fi + GSM)
iPad Air (Wi-Fi + CDMA)
iPad Mini with Retina (Wi-Fi, Model A1489)
iPad Mini with Retina (Wi-Fi + GSM)
iPad Mini with Retina (Wi-Fi + CDMA)
iPod Touch (Fifth-generation)
If the link for your device doesn’t work, Lifehacker is doing a good job of locating new links that still work. Bear in mind that these links aren’t official, and I haven’t personally tested all of them. They should be completely fine, but if you’re at all concerned just use the official iOS 8 upgrade process. Once you have your iOS 8 GM, follow these steps:

Extract the downloaded file and make sure you have a file that ends in .ispw — something like: iPad2,1_7.0.4_11B554a_Restore.ipsw. Windows users might need to use a utility like 7zip to extract the file.
Open up iTunes and connect your iPhone or iPad. Go to the Summary tab.
Hold down the Option key (OS X) or Shift (Windows) and click the Restore button. Locate the .ipsw file that you extracted.
Sit back and pray that the update completes.
Bear in mind that if the upgrade process fails, you may have to enter DFU mode and restore your device from a backup. Most modern iDevices (iPhone 5, 5S, 5C, the iPad Air, iPad Mini) should have no problems at all, though.

iPhone: iOS 8

Enjoy iOS 8

If everything goes to plan, you should now be looking at iOS 8 on your iPhone or iPad! Hooray! For the most part, iOS 8 looks a lot like iOS 7 — but there are plenty of tweaks and new features that you’ll discover after a little poking around. To get you started, read our featured story about some of the better new features, and some of the hidden gems in iOS 8. After that, it’s a good idea to check out how iOS 8 compares to Google’s upcoming Android L.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Wants More Students to Explore Technology

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn more American high school students into well-paid techies - and even hire some of them to work at his social-media company.
Zuckerberg told students Thursday at Redwood City's Sequoia High School that understanding technology and computers "is going to be really critical to having a lot of options and doing what you want."

The Facebook founder said the jobs of the future will be very different from today's jobs - and young people can use that to their advantage.

"If you start with the assumption that everything in the future is going to be different than it is now, then it's not true that anyone else knows any more than you guys do about what's going to work in the future," Zuckerberg said.

Facebook announced it is donating 50 laptops and creating a class to teach students how to create their own mobile apps for smartphones at Sequoia High, a short drive from Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters.

Zuckerberg's appearance is part of Facebook's campaign to encourage more young people, especially girls, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math - so-called STEM fields.

"What we're really trying to do is to create the same types of opportunities for the next Mark Zuckerberg," said Tim Campos, Facebook's chief information officer.

Silicon Valley companies have recently come under criticism for workforces that are mostly young, male, white and Asian.

Facebook hopes to attract young techies like Rosie Valencia, a Sequoia High junior who interned at Facebook this summer and interviewed Zuckerberg on stage Thursday.

"I really want more girls to be able to code because when I started none of my friends even knew what I was doing," Valencia told the audience.

Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy group, said Facebook and other tech firms are trying to expand the pipeline of local tech talent.

"The more they can find qualified, talented people, the more successful they'll be in developing new products, new ideas and new approaches," Wunderman said.

For the latest technology news and reviews, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter

Samsung Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4 to Receive Android L by December: Report

Samsung might be the first to release the Android L update for its smartphones, soon after Google officially releases the OS, tips a new report. Additionally, in a surprising move, the South Korean giant might soon start selling its handsets only via offline retailers.
Samsung mobile reports, citing insiders, that the Android L updates for the company's premium Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphones might be released by the end of November or early December.

However, the report points out that Google itseld is yet to reveal an exact time frame for the Android L update release for its Nexus range of devices, though it should be close to the launch of the next Nexus smartphone or tablet, expected on October 31./

Google announced the next major build of Android for smartphones and tablets, currently codenamed Android L, at the I/O event. Google also detailed some of the features and confirmed that Android L will be released later this year.

With Android L, Google has refreshed the interface design of the entire operating system, which the company identifies as the new "Material Design." Other than improved performance, Google is also aiming for better battery performance in Android devices running Android L.

It is being speculated that Samsung is working hard to push out software updates faster than in the past for its smartphones, especially considering that budget handsets such as the Moto G receive more timely updates than some of Samsung's high-end devices.

In other news, a report citing differences in offline and online pricing of Samsung handsets claims has led the company to announce exclusive selling rights for around 48 models to offline retailers, due to excessive pressure from the brick-and-mortar retailers.

The report also claims that the 48 models also include the premium Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Alpha without revealing all the models. However, Samsung is yet to make any official announcement regarding the sale of its handsets offline.

The difference in pricing of Samsung handsets sold online and offline is said to be huge, and the physical sellers are unable to match the prices offered by the online retailers. Reportedly the situation has led to the formation of an All India Mobile Retailers Association (AIMRA), which is a body that will work for the benefits of offline retailers and maintain the parity in price across different trade channels.

The report quotes a senior Samsung Electronics executive, "We have taken action against many rogue distributors, who were dumping their stocks online and beating down the price of our handsets. We are working hard to bring back price hygiene in the market. Our revenues from online sales have come down from 30 percent to single digit. We also have plans to stop billing WS Retail, the largest reseller on Flipkart."

However, the Samsung executive is reported to have added that the company has struck deal with some online retailers to exclusively sell one or two models, wherein the retailer will maintain parity in price. Notably, Samsung recently launched the mini-variant of Galaxy S5, the Galaxy S5 Mini, exclusively on Flipkart.

It's worth noting that the online sales strategy has worked well for some handset makers like Motorola, with Flipkart confirming it had sold around 1.6 million Moto handsets in India since becoming exclusive online partner in February.

The other popular example is of Xiaomi, whose Mi 3 and Redmi 1S flash sale strategies might not be receiving positive feedback from consumers in India but has seen high-volume sales.