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(credit: Survey Monkey)

Now that Nintendo's plans for smartphone app development have gone from persistent rumor to actual reality, it's time to start thinking about whether mobile profits can help the company's flagging console business. Earlier this week, SurveyMonkey Intelligence gave us some early information on that score, providing download, user, and revenue estimates for Nintendo's recently launched Miitomo social networking app/game.

At first glance, the results look promising for Nintendo's mobile move. Miitomo has already attracted 4 million total monthly users, with about 1 million using the game on any given day. On average, a Miitomo user spends eight minutes with the app across two or three play sessions.

More importantly to Nintendo's bottom line, plenty of those users are also paying for cosmetic items in the otherwise free-to-play app. SurveyMonkey estimates that Miitomo is already bringing in $40,000 a day in revenue, mostly from iOS users. That's enough for the SurveyMonkey analysts to write that "King, Zynga, Storm8, EA and Glu should be worried... In a nutshell, Miitomo is crushing it and Nintendo seems to have a hit on its hands!"

The front of the HTC 10. There's no giant speakers or logo here, just sensible smartphone design.

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The last 12 months have been dark for HTC. Year over year, the company's revenue was cut in half. At one point, the stock price hit an all-time low of $1.25 a share. Last we heard, HTC's market share was hovering somewhere less than two percent of the market—it's hard to get up-to-date numbers when analysts only ever list the company under "other."

HTC is clawing back, though. The HTC Vive—a VR headset it made in conjunction with Valve—leapfrogged Oculus to be the best and most complete VR package out there. For the past year or two, the company has been searching for alternative revenue stream away from the smartphone market. And while the Vive is still an early-adopter product, it's a big bright spot in the company's line up.

So what about the smartphone division then? For 2016, HTC has the HTC 10, a $700 (£570) all-metal smartphone. The specs are your standard 2016 flagship levels: a 2.15 GHz Snapdragon 820 with 4GB of RAM and a 5.15-inch 1440p display. It's the design that is the big differentiator here, though. The 10 looks a lot like HTC's post-2013 flagships, but the new phone works like a "best of" collection of past HTC design decisions.

(credit: Google)

About a year ago, Google announced "Eddystone," an open source, cross-platform Bluetooth LE beacon format. The Internet of Things initiative is a competitor to Apple's iBeacon, but it ups the ante by working on both Android and iOS and offering a wider selection of data payloads. Eddystone has been primarily focused on business and the enterprise, but today Google is providing more details on the secure beacon mode that it hopes will find its way into consumer goods.

Eddystone has four different frame types. Like iBeacon, there's the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) payload, a 128-bit value that uniquely identifies every beacon in the world. The value itself isn't of much value unless you have an app from the beacon owner that knows to look for that specific beacon and do something with it. Imagine a Starbucks beacon that gets picked up by the Starbucks app and identifies itself as being at that specific store location.

For something a little more independent, there's the URL payload. The beacon beams a URL to every device in earshot that users can tap on to load a webpage. This is great for "one time" transactions where using an app would cause too much friction, like viewing a bus stop schedule or beaming money to a vending machine from your phone.

Google Chrome version 50 was released to the browser's stable channel yesterday, and in addition to a handful of new features and security fixes, the update also ends support for a wide range of operating systems that have been supported since Chrome launched on those platforms. Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7, and OS X 10.8 are no longer supported.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since Google promised last November to end support for these older OS versions in April of 2016. Old versions of Chrome installed on these OSes won't stop working (for now), but they'll no longer receive updates and there's no guarantee that things like Google account sign-in and data syncing will continue to work.

If you're still using one of these operating systems, you have a couple of options. One is to upgrade to a newer OS, assuming your hardware can handle it. Security patches for Windows XP stopped in April of 2014, and patches for OS X 10.6 stopped a few months before that. Updates for OS X 10.7 and 10.8 ended roughly when versions 10.10 and 10.11 were released, respectively, since Apple's unofficial policy is to provide security fixes for the most recent OS X release and the two previous releases. Windows Vista is still getting bare-minimum security patches from Microsoft, but that ends in April of 2017.