Cool Things, And Other ObservationsSo, earlier today I received and activated my brand new Galaxy S4. Thanks to using the upgrade from another line, I got to keep my unlimited plan and didn't have to pay full retail price(because fuck that).
Overall, it's just an awesome device, and it's great not having constant lagging or crashing like my old phone. Highly recommended if you can get your hands on one.

Also, Google has recently announced and rolled out a bunch of new services and overhauls which are quite awesome, including the new Google+ layout. I hope more people will start using it now, and you should totally go add me!
The reworked Hangouts seems really nice from what I can tell, and it might be a nice a...

Cool Things, And Other ObservationsSo, earlier today I received and activated my brand new Galaxy S4. Thanks to using the upgrade from another line, I got to keep my unlimited plan and didn't have to pay full retail price(because fuck that).
Overall, it's just an awesome device, and it's great not having constant lagging or crashing like my old phone. Highly recommended if you can get your hands on one.

Also, Google has recently announced and rolled out a bunch of new services and overhauls which are quite awesome, including the new Google+ layout. I hope more people will start using it now, and you should totally go add me!
The reworked Hangouts seems really nice from what I can tell, and it might be a nice alternative to Skype. At the very least I hope it provides good competition to promote innovation.
The stuff they have in store for maps is very cool, and should make using that a lot easier and more enjoyable as well.
With all of their services combined, it should make for a pretty awesome overall user experience.

Lastly, XBOX One is announced. Bad name, and far too much focus on non-gaming related things. It seems like it should be a media center kit as an alternative to a regular gaming console XBOX experience, rather than their only product. As in, if they had a dedicated gaming XBOX, and then this cheesed up family entertainment model for people who are into all that stuff.
The only thing I found interesting was the talk about the controller adjustments, but that's mostly because the speculation they had on the RT gaming podcast brought up some awesome ideas that probably won't be happening anyway.
Something strange I noticed is how they have a kind of hybrid OS platform running on the console, making it seem a lot more like a PC(having multiple things running at once). Traditionally, consoles got away with having lower end hardware because all the hardware was dedicated entirely to running the game. If this new XBOX has to keep up all these back-end systems, how will that affect performance? There was no mention of a separate CPU to handle all of the fancy OS and media tasks, so even if the 8-core processor is powerful, it still won't all be going to the game. I also noticed that the 8GB of RAM is only DDR3, which is relatively slow compared to the GDDR5 that they're putting in the PS4. With all of the multitasking, I'm surprised they wouldn't have gone for higher bandwidth RAM. I'm also assuming that there's no SSD to accompany the 500GB HDD. Does this mean that a massive portion of the RAM is going to be constantly filled with cached processes to keep the interface experience quick and snappy? Once again, something that would get in the way of maximum gaming power.
As an all-in-one box for someone who doesn't mind lots of restrictions and having something watch you constantly and judge you based on what it sees, it seems reasonably impressive. As a game console it seems kind of like a bad joke... :-/