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Today, Electronic Arts announced an agreement to acquire Firemint, the maker of several hit games on mobile platforms.

The news comes on the heels of EA's acquisition of Mobile Post Production, a cross-platform development studio that ports games for smartphones.

"The Firemint team is remarkable for its critical and commercial success," Barry Cottle, executive vice president and general manger of EA Interactive, said in a statement. "The added technical expertise of MPP, combined with the creative talent of Firemint and our EAi studio teams, fuels EA's leadership in delivering top-selling, high-quality games across mobile phones and smartphones, tablets, and future digital interactive entertainment platforms."

Of the thousands of games that flooded the gates of the iTunes App Store in its early days, Firemint was one of the first development companies to hold solid positions on the Paid Apps most popular list. Its most notable hit games, Flight Control and the Real Racing franchise for both iPhone and iPad, have been popular mainstays in the Top 100 Apps lists since their release. Firemint's gone on to add other platforms to its repertoire, including Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.

The deal between EA and Firemint is expected to close within four weeks. Financial details were not disclosed.… Read more

Apple has released an update for OS X that addresses font-rendering problems that cropped up for users who had upgraded to OS X 10.6.7. We initially reported on this issue in late March, where a number of people who had upgraded to OS X 10.6.7 were not able to read PDFs that were created in the latest version of the Mac OS. The issue was narrowed to how OS X was managing OpenType PostScript fonts.

If you check Software Update from within OS X 10.6.7 you should be able to apply the update there; … Read more

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Amazon.com launches a library lending program for its Kindle e-reader

Toshiba's tablet will come out in June in Japan and shortly thereafter abroad

eBay purchases geolocation service Where

Google launches Earth Builder for cloud storage of geographic and geospacial data

Gamefly wins its case against the U.S. Postal Service

A political activist and longtime blogger for The Huffington Post filed suit Tuesday against the digital publication, its founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, and its new parent company AOL, citing its use of unpaid blogger talent. The plaintiff, Jonathan Tasini, is seeking class-action status; he filed on behalf of a "putative class" of the estimated 9,000 people who have been published on The Huffington Post without compensation.

"Arianna Huffington is pursuing the Wal-Martization of creative content and a Third World class of creative people," Tasini said in a press release. "Actually, that is … Read more

A few MacFixIt readers have recently contacted me regarding an issue with not being able to view some PDFs that were made on their OS X systems after upgrading to OS X 10.6.7. This includes viewing the PDF on their Macs, as well as seeing them on other platforms such as Windows, iOS, and Linux.

Usually PDF rendering problems can happen if the system is experiencing font corruption; most of the time this can be tackled with a general maintenance routine to clear caches, coupled with checking and managing fonts with Font Book. In these cases the problems … Read more

I remember, last year, waiting on line one morning for an iPhone 4. I was on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and I gave up after an hour and a half. The lines were too long and had formed hours before.

This was two months or so past the iPhone 4's launch, and it was still impossible to buy one of the phones at a store. Lines would form every morning, scoop up whatever little stock there was, and leave the Apple Store once again drained of its supply. The cause? Grey-market resellers.

Sound familiar?

We're less … Read more

Apple closed the introduction of the iPad 2 with a discussion of what it deems the "post-PC" era. On one side of that battleground, the tablet represents a great market expansion opportunity for handset makers such as Motorola and Samsung rushing in to larger form factors. On the other side is Microsoft, standing firm in its treatment of tablets as yet another PC, albeit one that demands more flexibility in terms of processor support and user interface.

Apple--which introduced the iPad as being superior "for some things," is clearly now looking beyond those tasks. The addition of a faster processor and more sophisticated personal content creation applications, such as GarageBand and iMovie, signaled that the tablet is now about more than simply content creation.

But customers got that memo long ago. NPD found that tablet customers have been engaging in a wide range of content creation tasks with their tablets.

For example, according to NPD's Evolving Technology Trends: PC Activities on Non-PC Devices report, more than half of tablet owners reported that they already use that tablet device for personal productivity tasks such as editing music, while an even greater percentage said they used their tablets for office productivity tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets.

This stood in stark contrast to similar tasks on smartphones, where less than a quarter of smartphone owners said that they engage in office productivity tasks on their handsets and only 17 percent engage in such personal productivity tasks. … Read more

Sure, the iPad's fun. It's thin, it's addictive, it can handle a wide variety of apps and media files. There's only one problem: it still needs to sync to a PC.

If "magical" was the catchphrase most repeated at last year's iPad unveiling, "post-PC" was this year's equivalent for the iPad 2. I had hoped that, along with the iPad 2, Apple would find a way access media libraries wirelessly. They have, in a way, with iOS 4.3's new Home Sharing capability--but it needs a Mac or PC … Read more

Josh Topolsky, the editor-in-chief of Engadget, is leaving the AOL-owned property, which is one of the largest tech news sites on the Web.

Also departing is Managing Editor Nilay Patel, said sources.

Sources said the move by Topolsky (pictured here, although the coffee cup is not permanent) and Patel is not out of the tech news arena and both are considering several options.

But the departures have been a long time in coming, related to a range of ongoing issues the veteran editors have had working for the large New York-based Internet company. Sources said it was not precipitated by … Read more