This Week In Tech News: Videogame Stocks are Down, Teen Text Messaging, Free Angry Birds, and More!

This week in Tech News we have several interesting topics, so here we go.

- Videogame Stocks Are Down.  But Halo is freakin' breaking the bank!
During the month of September, console game sales dropped about 6% when compared to September 2009.  This was reported in the The Wall Street Journal.  Does this mean sales are going to be crap for the holiday season, which is no doubt the biggest time of the year for videogame manufactures?  Who knows, I doubt that the sales for Christmas will drop that much.  In my opinion, they will probably see a spike in purchases in games that are already on the street like 'Halo: Reach'.  Which leads me onto another topic, what is it about the 'Halo' franchise that basically turns all it touches into gold?  Halo is synonymous with the Xbox 360 in much the same way as 'World of Warcraft' is synonymous with the term 'MMO'.  Is Halo that big?  No definitely not, but considering it is a console, first-person-shooter.  It's doing extremely well.  And the hype leading up to 'Reach' was no small endeavor.   Does the game look good?  Oh yeah, it looks great.  Have I played it?  Nope, and probably won't.  Why?  Too much hype for my taste.  But it is interesting that with the console game industry worrying about stocks, 'Halo: Reach' is riding the cash cow to the bank with $3.3million sold so far (and counting) in the U.S. alone.  Something to think about anyways.

-Teen Text Messaging: that's a lot of non-verbal communication!
Text messaging has been around for years.  But suddenly there seems to be this huge wave of people hit the 'texting trend'.  Which for one, I don't understand.  Why?  Most of the texters are using something similar to a 'smart-phone' which has email access.  Why not send a longer message with less bounce backs between the two parties involved and make life easier?  Then again, I don't text either.  Nielson conducted a survey with 3,000 teens and compared with approximately 60,000 cell phone bills (that's a lot of bills).  And averaged out that the 'average' American teenager sends approximately 3,339 text messages a month.  That's a crap load of text data out the floating around the cell providers networks.  Now, if only they'd put that much attention into spelling right, and working on their education; we could raise a brighter tomorrow.  :)
source

-Those birds are freely Angry!
For those of you lucky Android users (which I personally adore the Android), rejoice!  For the 'Angry Birds' are free for you!  'Angry Birds' is the best selling title from Rovio Mobile which has sent raging success with this title on the Apple App Store.  Now they are spreading the love with the non-iOS users.  The app currently costs $.99 cents on the Apple App Store.  It is availabe on the Getjar.com site, and will also be available on the Android Marketplace.  Let's just say that they came is popular enough for Rovio's website to go belly-up when they released it for free.  Just sayin'.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/1015/Angry-Birds-available-on-Android-for-free-crashes-company-s-website

Other notable things from the week: Skype and Facebook are in bed together, ArenaNet goes live with the 'Hall of Monuments' calculator for Guild Wars fans at: http://hom.guildwars2.com/#page=welcome; oh yeah, and Windows Phone 7 is out too, anyways.  Have a great weekend!