Say what you want about a massive retail chain releasing an own-brand Tablet, but when that Tablet sells over half a million units in one year, clearly you must be doing something right. But while the Hudl tablet may have been very successful for massive retailer Tesco – enough so that a sequel is planned for later this year, in fact – it hasn’t all been plain sailing.

An unusual glitch that causes the screen to go completely unresponsive in certain situations has caused the store to have to replace a significant number of tablets under warranty. Over the last few weeks, Tesco have been hard at work to discover a cause for this issue; and eventually narrowed it down to a faulty piece of code responsible for managing the screen’s sensors. As a result, it’s rolling out an Android update to fix the issue for any tablets still affected.

Tesco say that some updates have passed Google certification and are already hitting affected Hudls, but it could take up to three weeks for the fix to reach everyone. So if you’re using a Hudl and finding it to stop working every now and then, hold fast – you’ll soon be back to working order without the hassle of a return.

When Popcorn Time first hit Windows PCs, Hollywood was a picture of fear and anger. Here was a service designed to find torrents of all kinds of movies past and present; and make pirated copies of movies available for FREE – and worse, they were open-sourcing the project! Hollywood eventually took down the original code and jailed the person responsible – but not before other people grabbed the code and forked it, creating similar software and projects of their own. And now, Popcorn Time is going mobile.

That’s because on the project’s most popular forks, Time4Popcorn, have released an Android app online. Sporting the same look, feel and selection of films as the desktop version, Time4Popcorn’s app is only recommended for those with generous data plans; as it also streams the films from torrents rather than offering them directly. Some elements of the Android interface are still quite low-res compared to the Desktop version and there are UI elements that don’t work yet, plus some films have a noticeable delay before they start playing due to the availability or speed of the torrent process.

Naturally, with movie piracy being a criminal offence, Google were not at all pleased to see the Android app released. While Time4Popcorn apparently submitted the app to the official Google Play store, don’t expect to find it there yourself, as Google removed it on the grounds of “theft of intellectual property”. As a result, it can only be downloaded from Time4Popcorn’s website.

If this hasn’t put you off using the new App, however, there might be an even BIGGER reason to urge consumers to avoid it. The Time4Popcorn app’s functionality is mainly served by a centralised server, which makes it vulnerable both to takedown attempts by legal bodies or angry hackers; as well as opening the potential for malware to be distributed through it. Indeed, some users allege that the app contains malware already – although this does not seem to be the case, as the developers of the app makes its source code public and no dangerous code has been found within. Whatever the case may be, the point is that by utilising this single central server approach – which is also used by the Desktop version – Time4Popcorn offers no safety net and no guarantees as to the availability, safety and security of the service, should anything happen to that server in the future. You use it at your own risk.

Just like on Windows, however, the open-source nature of Popcorn Time means it may only be a matter of time before a second Android version is released; and there’s even been interest in building it for Chromecast. Perhaps this is the sad fact of piracy – it continues to evolve and grow even as it gives the finger to the very organisations by which it harms, yet whom without which it would cease to exist.

In 2004, we had Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, remakes of the original Pokémon titles Red and Green. Then in 2010 (2009 for Japan) followed Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, remakes of the original Gold and Silver. While both had their own reasons for existing – FireRed and LeafGreen were to introduce Kanto Pokémon into Gen III games after all the previous games were rendered incompatible with the GBA due to hardware changes; while HeartGold and SoulSilver did the same for Gen IV due to the removal of the GBA slot for the DSi and 3DS, though fan demand was also obviously a factor – to many people’s eyes, a trend was emerging; and barely a few months into the release of HeartGold and SoulSilver, many people were speculating whether Nintendo would reboot the next games in the timeline – Ruby and Sapphire – with a DS or 3DS remake.

The logic was sound – with both Johto and Kanto getting their appearance updated to modern standards, Hoenn was now the only region NOT to have its own redesign. Many speculated we’d hear news of such a remake some time after Black and White – following the “two generations later” trend of the previous games – but instead, after two Black and White sequels, Generation V ended with not a whisper. Then came X and Y and the start of Generation VI; and suddenly people noticed teasers in the game that reignited the belief. 14 berries only obtainable from other regions? A backpacker who talked about a region that isn’t any of the known ones (even though this included Hoenn)?

It all added up to something; and now finally, Nintendo has delivered. Strangely timed to coincide with their annual earnings call and pre-dating E3 (itself subject to many speculations of its own) by many weeks, Nintendo this week revealed it is to launch two new Pokémon Titles, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, worldwide this year.

At first, all we had to go on was the names of the games and some tentative box art, revealed in a short trailer; nothing of the game itself was shown. However, as of today, that’s changed. The first trailer showing actual footage from the game was posted on Pokémon’s official Youtube channel this morning. Strangely silent apart from dubbed-over sound effects which the trailer makes clear aren’t from the game, the Trailer appears to show Groudon and Kyogre activating their respective abilities – though whether these are cutscenes, or actual in-battle animations is unclear.

The trailer’s subtext also confirms that these titles will be 2D with “some areas in 3D”; this combined with the visual style of Groudon and Kyogre shown seems to suggest these games are built upon the same visual engine as X & Y.

While the new Trailer answers a few questions about the game so far, much else remains to be seen. First of all, is it ACTUALLY Hoenn? Many assume so, but the first Trailer talked about “a whole new World”; and what about that Backpacker saying he didn’t come from Hoenn? Plus, we still haven’t seen any game play. E3, anyone? Let’s just say, the next few months just got very interesting…

“We are making a new Unreal Tournament”. Seven words that will make many a gamer either punch the air with excitement or give them cringing reminders of just how much the more recent entries sucked and hopes this won’t be another of those. Epic Games’ community manager Stacey ‘Flak’ Conley used those very seven words to confirm the company’s plan to build what they’re already describing as their “next-gen competitive shooter”, which is planned for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

However, this time the game is taking a whole new approach, with a different business model and more focus on the Community. The Unreal series of games have maintained a long tradition of mod support, which is partially responsible for its enduring reputation; and now, the company wants to involve its loyal community from the beginning, letting them contribute ideas from the very first line of code, using forums and Twitch streams to keep in touch. As for modding itself, Players will be able to make maps, weapons, and near total-conversions to add into the game even if they can’t get them into the main code.

“Unreal Tournament is the perfect kind of game to do this with,” project lead Steve Polge said. “It’s always had a very open community.”

To facilitate the distribution of mods in the new game, the new Unreal Tournament will feature a marketplace from which they can all be downloaded. Modders will have the option to make their mods available for free or at a price, letting mod authors get recompensed directly for their work for the first time. The biggest news however is that Epic Games won’t be following suit and using the marketplace to implement micro-transactions into the game. In fact, the company don’t plan to make money from the game directly at all if reports are to be believed – not only is the new Unreal Tournament going to be free to play, but all Epic Games-published extra content will be offered freely as well!

The studio warned that the game will take many months to be playable, and will start off with a focus on standard Deathmatch only. Other series-standard modes like Capture the Flag and Onslaught will be added over time. Not that long-term series fans shouldn’t be used to waiting: The last major title in the Unreal series of shoot-em-ups was seven years ago, when Unreal Tournament III hit stores in 2007 releasing on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

While you may never see mix tapes or bands releasing their latest albums on cassette any more, the humble Cassette Tape still has a relatively quiet life serving as backup devices for industries with huge amounts of data to keep safe, but no immediate need to get to it later. This is because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data – and now, Sony have invented a whole new method of storing data to tape which just made it even better.

Due to be discussed at today’s International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, Sony’s new method uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. This lets the crystals pack together closer than any previous method to record to tape, reducing wasted space and increasing capacity within a smaller area.

Combine this with the small size of the crystals – just 7.7 nanometres on average – and the results are astonishing: the new tape can hold an eye-popping 148 GB per square inch, or the equivalent of three full-size Blu-Ray disks. Over a 60-minute tape, that equates to 185 TB of data.

But don’t expect to be using this tape to store your huge music collection any time soon – for one thing, you’ll probably find yourself rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape for DAYS. One of the reasons cassette tapes are mostly used for storing data that isn’t intended to be regularly accessed, is because tape is a linear storage method. Files are stored one after the other; so to retrieve a single file, the entire tape has to be ran through until the specific file needed is found. This process is likely to be thousands of times slower with the new tape’s huge level of storage – but that’s hardly a concern for the long-term, industrial-sized data backup performed by the world’s largest data centres, where storing data is paramount but very little is expected to be regularly accessed later. Sony also isn’t saying when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but assuming it’s only a matter of building the hardware and marketing it, then it’s just a matter of time…