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Since its relatively impressive launch last February, there's been a disconcerting lack of quality software titles available for Sony's powerful portable. Sure, there's a few notable games on the horizon including LittleBigPlanet, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed, but it's the downloadable efforts that really hold the true potential of the system.

Sound Shapes first debuted at E3 2011, where it headlined Sony's debut of the Vita. Since then it has slipped under the radar, quietly being developed by Queasy Games and Santa Monica Studio.

Now with the game ready to go, we're wondering if Sound Shapes is the shot in the arm that the Vita needs or if it's a disappointing casualty of its own hype machine.… Read more

It may not be a mobile version of Adobe Illustrator, but Skitch can handle basic image annotations and sketches exceptionally well. It's easy to learn, its tools work well, and it can even export your work to Evernote.

Getting started with Skitch is simple. From the Home screen, you can open up a blank canvas, import an image from your gallery, or take a new photo with your mobile device's camera. Also new to Skitch is a feature that lets you pull up and add annotations directly onto a Google Map, which is perfect for giving detailed or … Read more

What more can one say about Tetris? The megapopular classic '80s action puzzle game from Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov is now available for the iPhone, featuring everything you loved about the original, and some added bonuses to keep the game interesting. The game is crystal-clear with Retina Display support and the simple interface requires only swipes and taps on the screen to move, rotate, and drop pieces on the board. Sometimes the tap-to-rotate and swipe-to-move method can be a little frustrating (it's easy to make mistakes), but we were mostly able to enjoy the classic game on our iPhone … Read more

Shape Shift is a free, ad-supported puzzler, a classic color-matching game played on a grid, but with a couple of twists that make this app stand out.

The setup should look familiar to fans of the genre: you play on a 9-by-7 grid of colored blocks, and the goal is to match up--and take out--adjacent groups of four or more of the same color. In addition to being red, yellow, orange, green, or blue, each block also has a triangle, square, or circle on it, and you can swap any two blocks that share the same shape. The scoring and … Read more

The CEA had its yearly line show earlier this week and we spent a little time in the Philips booth checking out several new audio products the company intends to release this year, including a handful of AirPlay-enabled speakers.

In case you don't know what AirPlay is, it's a wireless-streaming feature found on your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or any Mac or Windows PC running iTunes (see "10 things you need to know about AirPlay" for more info). Right now you can only stream video to your TV using Apple TV but lots of AirPlay-enabled speakers … Read more

Microsoft could be looking to give touch screens more of a tactile feel.

A patent filed by the software giant in 2009 and published last week details a light-induced shape-memory polymer display screen. In a nutshell, that means a touch screen that has a real texture and tactile feedback to it, making people feel as if they're touching an actual object.

Invented by Erez Kikin-Gil, the screen would be coated with polymers that could change or hold their shape when different wavelengths of ultraviolet light hit the pixels from underneath, according to an article in New Scientist.

The screen … Read more

Want giant biceps in all those home videos you're posting to YouTube? Forget hassling with barbells and simply adjust the muscularity control slider in MovieReshape, an image alteration program developed at the Max Planck Institut Informatik in Germany. The system allows for "quick and easy manipulation of the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage"--without frame-by-frame manipulation.

The approach is based on a morphable 3D model of human shapes and poses derived from laser scans of more than 100 men and women of various shapes and sizes. The program--which is currently … Read more

Charging issues experienced by owners of older MacBook and MacBook Pro models when using the new L-shaped MagSafe power adapters have been solved via a firmware update from Apple. … Read more

Microsoft Outlook is a very popular way to keep up with e-mail, calendars, to-do lists, and contact information. Unfortunately, it's not very portable; the information on one computer isn't accessible on another computer without some maneuvering. EssentialPIM Portable is an alternative to Outlook that makes it easy to keep e-mail, schedules, and contacts handy wherever you go.

EssentialPIM Portable's portability doesn't come just from its small size. This attractive personal information manager can actually only be run on U3 smart drives. Its interface reminds us a lot of Outlook, and anyone with Outlook experience should find … Read more