We’ve already heard bad news for anyone with poor internet connections and thrifty habits, though plenty of good ones for people who want to head online with friends and crack skulls until the cows come home. But what about tweaking and adding your own stamp to the game with a few mods? You’re out of luck, at least officially…

“None of the Diablo games have ever supported mods and primarily because being able to do modding along with high fidelity art that is also randomly generated is a really, really big challenge. And when we started the project we went ‘Well, if we’re going to do mods, we’re going to add a couple of years onto the product.’”

I know people look at Blizzard and say “Well, you guys are so big and have so much money you can do EVERYTHING for your games, right?” and the answer is no, we can’t. There are so many things that we would like to do, that…time and resources; they’re real for us as well, so that was one of the things where we said ‘You know what? Diablo’s never supported mods.’”

Of course, it’s never supported broadband connections or real-money transactions either…

Regardless of this, we’d be stunned not to see any mods hooking into the game in various ways, but be careful. Diablo’s fiery wrath may have nothing on a server watching out for any naughtily extra code.

Last night, Steve Jobs shocked the tech industry with the announcement that he was stepping down as CEO because he could no longer fulfill his duties as CEO. Jobs did not elaborate on his situation but he did take the time to recommend that Apple name COO Tim Cook as the new Chief Executive. Apple obliged, naming Cook the company’s new CEO effective immediately.

As is always the case whenever Steve Jobs is photographed looking anything less than the picture of health, talk soon turned to how the company would survive without its founding father. Though Jobs was fired in 1985, he returned in 1996 and was soon CEO of the company he had founded. What followed was Apple’s ‘return to profitability,’ which is largely credited to Jobs, and many now fear that the company will flounder without Steve’s leadership skills. The worry is that Steve brought the fish but not the fishing rods when he returned in 1996 and that Apple cannot continue to be successful without him.

All of this will no doubt leave newly-appointed CEO Tim Cook with something to prove and on this, his first day as CEO of Apple, Cook has sent out an email to all Apple staff assuring them that Steve’s departure will not change the company. Ars Technica received a copy of the email (and was able to verify its authenticity). Check it out below:

Team:

I am looking forward to the amazing opportunity of serving as CEO of the most innovative company in the world. Joining Apple was the best decision I’ve ever made and it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for Apple and Steve for over 13 years. I share Steve’s optimism for Apple’s bright future.

Steve has been an incredible leader and mentor to me, as well as to the entire executive team and our amazing employees. We are really looking forward to Steve’s ongoing guidance and inspiration as our Chairman.

I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change. I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values. Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that—it is in our DNA. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.

I love Apple and I am looking forward to diving into my new role. All of the incredible support from the Board, the executive team and many of you has been inspiring. I am confident our best years lie ahead of us and that together we will continue to make Apple the magical place that it is.

Tim

The first Android-powered TouchPad is now up for sale on eBay. When the TouchPad fire sale kicked off last weekend, it seemed a lot of people were buying the TouchPad with the hope that someone would figure out a way to get Android to run on the device. The folks over on XDA Developers are working hard to port Android to the tablet, however, it looks like one TouchPad owner didn’t even have to try to get Android to run on his slate (or even wait around for someone else to figure it out), because his came running Android 2.2 out-of-the-box.

The device in question was purchased from Best Buy and flashes a Qualcomm Innovation Center logo when it boots up, which suggests that this could be a development unit that accidentally ended up in the retail channels. However, when Engadget contacted Qualcomm for a comment on the tablet, the company said it had nothing to say about the videos purporting to show Android on the TouchPad.

Whether it’s real or fake, it’s up for sale on eBay at the moment and bidding has reached $760. The seller even points out that the winner can use the tablet to apply for the $2100 bounty that’s being offered to the first person to get Android on the TouchPad.

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Samsung’s plans for this year’s IFA trade show in Berlin have been unwittingly revealed early by the company’s own teaser app for Android. A tipster went digging around inside the Samsung Mobile Unpacked APK and discovered the trio of logos you see above.

They suggest that the company will be launching three new products: a Galaxy Tab 7.7 tablet, a Wave 3 smartphone, most likely running the latest edition of the Bada OS, and a Galaxy Note, a device whose nature remains a mystery. ‘This Is My Next’ verified that said images do indeed reside within the application package, though their full spec sheets and relevant press releases are likely being held back — Samsung urges users to update the app on September 1st, which is when its grand unveiling is scheduled.

For now, we can be pretty safe in assuming the new Tab will have a 7.7-inch screen, in keeping with the naming scheme introduced with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9, and probably run a version of Android Honeycomb.

SOURCE via Android

It’s been a while since Microsoft flashed a mysterious slate in front of a crowd, but it’s resurrecting that old trick at the TechEd conference in New Zealand this week. Microsoft Enterprise Strategist Jeff Johnson took the stage in the “Windows device session” to talk about the company’s upcoming tablet strategy and showed off not one but two tablets.

The first — and the most intriguing — he proclaimed to be a “quad core Windows Slate that will be give(n) out at an upcoming Microsoft event.” What event could he be talking about exactly? Well, syncing up with information we’ve heard from our own sources, we’d say it is very likely that he is referring to Microsoft’s BUILD Conference in early September, which will focus on Windows 8.

Similarly, the people at ‘This Is My Next’ heard that the guys in Redmond have indeed been prepping a Windows 8 development tablet for the event. There’s still no exact details on the quad-core part, but they guess that it’s an ARM CPU given the thinness of the tablet and the lack of any ultra-low voltage quad-core x86 chips. (And let’s not forget that Kal El is planned to arrive around the same time.)

Johnson also flashed a second chunkier tablet with a removable battery, which looks to be Fujitsu’s Windows 7-powered Stylistic Q550.

SOURCE via This Is My Next

It’s no secret that Research in Motion has been struggling to compete in the smartphone and tablet industry. While the company’s BlackBerry smartphones are still incredibly popular among business people and the younger crowd that can’t get enough of BBM, it’s facing some stiff competition from the likes of Apple and Google. However, it seems RIM might have a trick up its sleeve to give itself a boost: Upcoming phones could be capable of running Android applications.

Bloomberg this week reports that RIM could enable 2012′s BlackBerry’s to run Android applications. Citing three people familiar with the plan, Bloomberg said that, starting in 2012, RIM will introduce QNX-based Android compatible BlackBerrys. The QNX-based PlayBook is already slated to get support for Android apps later this year but RIM has not said if this feature will also be present in QNX-based phones.

Considering the BlackBerry’s relatively small library of applications (the Android Market has six times as many, according to Bloomberg), being able to run Android apps would be a huge boon for the company’s brand. RIM declined to comment on Bloomberg’s report.

SOURCE via Bloomberg

Facebook could put a serious hurting on Google’s mobile numbers if it acquired webOS from HP and retooled the software as its own smartphone operating system. Although HP has yet to decide what it plans to do with webOS and its Personal System Group (PSG), Digitimes Research offers an interesting prediction that the company could hand its operating system over to Facebook. This would reportedly have a huge impact on the industry and could be just as successful as Google’s high-performance Android OS. And like Google, Facebook’s OS would depend solely on advertising, thus the software itself would be free to manufacturers.

“If HP decides to sell webOS to social network site Facebook, it would have the largest impact on competition in the mobile operating system market, among all other possible outcomes, since Facebook has shown ambitions to cut into the mobile operating system market with its acquisition of Snaptu, a company that has developed an application that allows feature phones to have a similar interface as that of smartphones,” reads the report.

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