Lose the dice and cards, all you need is an iPhone. Big Fish Casinos will be the first real-money casino app on iOS when it debuts in the United Kingdom.

While Zynga plots its entrance into casino games, competitor Big Fish has beat it to the punch with the launch of Big Fish Casino, a real-money gambling iOS app, available soon in the United Kingdom. The platform will be the first real-money gambling game of its kind to be powered by the Betable gambling engine.

Big Fish acquired Self Aware Studio for its title, Card Ace: Casino, and its one million active monthly players, back in March 2011. Many of the original casino games from Card Ace: Casino will carry over and be available for real-money gambling after Big Fish Casino’s launch, slated for sometime within the next few weeks. For now, Big Fish Casino will be available on iOS devices to the iTunes App store are slots, blackjack, roulette and video poker, including Texas Hold’em.

“We believe that the first social gaming companies to offer real-money play will enjoy a substantial competitive advantage over those who wait, and we couldn’t be happier that Big Fish is getting a head start with Big Fish Casino,” said Christopher Griffin, CEO & Founder of Betable. While Big Fish is getting a head start with Casino, it isn’t the first real-money gambling application that has catered to the European players. Among the first to offer a mobile real-money gambling app was Betfair.

Those outside of the U.K. or just disinterested in real-money gambling can still download the free version of Big Fish Casino in four app stores including Google Play, Amazon’s app store, Facebook and Apple’s iTunes store.

With $32 billion up for grabs in the Internet gambling market, the business can be a lucrative endeavor to shore up the bottom line of social-gaming companies that have so far relied on in-app purchases of virtual goods or advertising revenue. If anything, it’s almost a wonder why social gaming companies haven’t jumped into real-money casino gaming earlier.

Big Fish may be a leading contender with Zynga, among social gaming companies jumping into real-money gambling. Its early launch may give Zynga the unique opportunity of learning from Big Fish’s transition from social gaming to real-money gaming.

Valve has just released an update to the Portal 2 map editor that finally makes user-created co-op maps official.

After gently inquiring about our health with a fixed, unsettling stare, the sociopaths of Aperture Science have announced that Portal 2 Perpetual Testing Initiative will sacrifice you and a friend to science — together.  For as of today, Valve’s map-making software will support co-op maps, and there’s a 75-percent discount on second copies of Portal 2 that you might tempt your friends into their fiendish traps. 

Portal 2 has supported user-created mods ever since Valve released the Perpetual Testing Initiative, the appropriately wry name for its elegant map editor. Although the editor had plenty of features to showcase budding level designers, including a place on the Steam Workshop where Valve could turn a spotlight on the best user-created content, the one thing it didn’t support was the creation of co-op maps. This was a pretty big omission, considering that the co-op content in Portal 2 impressed some reviewers more than the main campaign.

Of course, the absence of official support for co-op didn’t mean that user-created maps would be doomed to a life of solitude and onanism. The mod community always regards limitations as dares, and as soon as the map editor was in their hands, the freelance boffins of the gaming community marshaled their typical combination of ingenuity and lawlessness, producing tons of co-op maps that could only circulate underground. Valve, equally typically,quietly but firmly supported this misuse of their software, providing a list of co-op implementation commands that let modders build settlements in the spaces between level end rooms where co-op could thrive. But while Valve was willing to offer programming tips, the Steam Workshop remained closed to co-op until now.

So while this isn’t the first time dedicated hackers could put their friends through collective torture, it’s a nice coming-out party for the co-op map community, which now enjoys official status. Thinking With Portals, the largest Portal 2 mapping community, summarized the announcement not by noting what could be built in the editor, but as “Steam Workshop Now Accepting Coop Maps.”

It’s been a good summer for modders, as the ARMA mod DayZ has become the hottest thing on the Internet, vastly surpassing the popularity of the program it’s modding (while driving up the ARMA’s sales by 500 percent). Other games, though, are fleeing the mod community, most notably Battlefield 3. Battlefield 2 shipped to the PC with very popular modding tools, but Karl Troedsson, general manager of DICE, explained to the assembled throngs of the European Game Developers Conference that those tools were left out of Battlefield 3 out of a fear that giving players mod access could result in a deluge of hacks and cheats that ruin the online multiplayer experience.

It’s strange to see a company walking away from the long-tail sales that a thriving mod community can provide, but Troedsson’s concerns can’t be written off when you’re on the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is competitive console multiplayer. Valve, by contrast, has always been more willing than most to release its code into the wild, and more capable than most of patching hacks and exploits in their wildly popular online multiplayer games. Portal 2, of course, is a pretty non-competitive experience, with no enemy but your own pathetic human brain, so Valve can open up their code in a way leaderboard-driven experiences can’t. Once again, Aperture Science walks off with all the sales, and everyone else must comfort themselves with their pride. Which is, if you’re a Battlefield fan, very little comfort indeed.

We are constantly at an age where we are inspired by science fiction movies like Star Trek and Total Recall, trying to turn them into science fact. We don’t quite have hover cars or lightsabers just yet, but it looks like we’re about to get the Minority Report motion-based experience on our smartphones thanks to a company called Leap Motion.

Leap Motion already has a tiny little device called the Leap that works in tandem with your computer. It’s like the Kinect, but in a much more advanced way. There are multiple camera sensors that can map out the user’s motion in a three-dimensional space, giving a much higher level of precision and accuracy than the Kinect. Minute movements of individual fingers can be mapped. The Leap also has much greater range in terms of distance and angle.

What they’re working on now is miniaturizing the technology even further–the Leap is about the size of a USB drive currently–such that it can be implemented in a smartphone or tablet. The cost of the device will be about $70 and they plan on releasing it between this December and February 2013. Theyr’e already taking pre-orders.

Touchscreens are cool and all, but you still have to touch something for them to work. The motion-based user interface from Leap Motion is entirely different and while it could be perceived as little more than a novelty at the moment, the long-term implications could prove intriguing. One major issue that comes to mind, though, is how to prevent the Leap from detecting inadvertant movements. I imagine it would get quite annoying if you’re zooming and panning through an image when you really just want to point out something to your friend. Perhaps something as simple as a specific motion to activate and de-activate the motion controls could help.

Have a look at the demo video from Leap Motion below. It’s shown in the context of being used with a computer, but the same fundamental concept can be applied to a smaller screen too.

Apple claims security problems with SMS are universal and can't be fixed, offering iMessage as a safer alternative.

If you are a smartphone user — and if you’re reading Digital Trends there’s a pretty good chance you are — then the recent news of a security flaw in Apple iOS that allows for text message spoofing may have spooked you. After all, in the digital age you can never be too careful about communication security. If you missed the drama, let us get you up to speed.

Basically, the hole in Apple’s walled garden allows for a malicious (or simply mischievous) user to send a message from any number they choose with the intention of tricking the recipient. It may seem harmless if used as a prank between friends, but in a more serious setting the glitch could have greater consequences than a lover’s spat. The flaw was discovered by French security researcher Pod2G, who is urging Apple to repair it before the public release of iOS 6. Engadget reached out for a comment and Apple quickly replied with the following:

“Apple takes security very seriously. When using iMessage instead of SMS, addresses are verified which protects against these kinds of spoofing attacks. One of the limitations of SMS is that it allows messages to be sent with spoofed addresses to any phone, so we urge customers to be extremely careful if they’re directed to an unknown website or address over SMS.”

In other words, a limit to SMS’ basic functionality is not really Apple’s problem to fix. The blame lies on the shoddy security features of text-based messaging. But switching to iMessage is not really a solution, as surely not everyone we know uses an iPhone, and therefore regular text messaging is unavoidable. Regardless of which software platform, carrier, or device, there are numerous services that exploit the same fake reply-to address bug discovered by Pod2G. But it’s still a great reminder to stay vigilant.

Our first weekly wrap up of mobile news and apps.

It’s almost always a busy week in the ever-changing world of mobile, with news rolling out faster than Android updates. It’s easy for a few stories to slip through the cracks. Whether you couldn’t refresh your RSS feeds fast enough to catch it all or you just finally finished thawing yourself from a cryogenic nap induced to survive the heat waves, we’ve collected all of that’s worth noting from the week that was August 12 through 17, 2012. Enjoy!

News Wrap Up

The portable product world can be a crazy place. Apple and Samsung might as well place a joint patent the concept of feuding, because it’s clear they don’t plan on stopping any time soon. It’s been so unbearably bad, the judge on the case has openly urged the two companies to settle their differences. She’s also accused Apple’s legal team of hitting the crack pipe a little too hard after they announced their intentions of calling 22 witnesses to the stand, so we assume she’d like Apple and Samsung to find peace for her own sanity as well as the good of the companies. 

While Apple and Samsung continue to barrage one another with verbal bullets in the court room, it looks like Android that is the true Wild West of mobile operating systems. According to reports from security software developer Kaspersky Lab, the amount of malware making its way onto Android devices increased by threefold over Q2 of 2012. Now would be a good time to get yourself some protection.

Apps and Games of the Week

No matter what your mobile device of choice is, sifting through the app market on a daily basis can be difficult. Most of the time it feels like cleaning out a cat’s litter box–even when you get rid of all the non-essentials, most of the time you’re left with…well, you know. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a few gems to be found.

Food Network On the Road (Free, iOS) – Entering the ever competitive world of food recommendations comes the television juggernaut Food Network. Get suggestions from your favorite on-air personalities for the best food stops wherever you may be.

Postcard (Free, iOS) – It’s always more exciting to get a piece of physical mail than an email–assuming it’s not a bill. Fill your friends’ mailboxes with personalized postcards made on your iOS device but manifested physically.

WWE (Free, iOS/Android) – Do you smell what this app is cooking? Get all the latest updates on your favorite wrestlers, including exclusive content during Monday Night Raw broadcasts.

Dunkin’ Donuts (Free, iPhone/Android) – If you’re barely awake enough to pay for your coffee and donuts in the morning, this app is for you. Pay right from the app and pick up your order hassle free.

PDF Note Taker ($3, iPad) – Whether you type out your notes or prefer to handwrite them, this app will convert them into attractive, easy to open PDFs.

Pinterest (Free, iOS/Android) – The online pin board phenomena is now mobile. Take Pinterest with you and keep the pinning coming not matter where you are.

Notification Ad-Blocking (Free, Android) – For users of free versions of apps, the ad notification is an all too familiar event. Keep malicious ads from popping up with this personal pop-up blocker.

Tread of the Dead ($1, iOS) – There’s plenty of zombie games out there, so it takes a lot to stand out. This title puts a new tilt on stopping the undead.

Horn ($7, iOS) – This game may be published by Zynga, but it’s so unbelievably gorgeous that it’s sure to distract you from whatever moral dilemma you may have in the process of buying it.

Tavern Quest (Free, iOS/Android) – Love fictional, fantasy worlds with dragons? Love restaurant simulations? This game lets you play as a entrepreneurial dragon with his own tavern.

Google's Motorola division claims Apple is infringing on seven of its patents and wants to block iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers from being imported to the U.S.

Since Google’s acquisition of Motorola back in February, the Droid expert has stayed quiet about its previous grievances with Apple. But now, according to Bloomberg, Google’s Motorola division has filed a new patent lawsuit against Apple (following Samsung’s lead), opening some old wounds leftover from Motorola and Apple’s long-standing legal disputes. The complaint, submitted to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), names features like location reminders, email notifications, along phone and video players as possible infringements.

The complaints target Apple features used extensively in its product line up and given Google’s desire to block U.S. imports of Apple products (Apple manufactures its product line in Asia), a win would strike a major blow. Google seems to have its sights set on Apple destruction. The original patent dispute between Motorola Mobility and Apple was eventually dismissed in court, but Google’s Motorola division isn’t willing to lay it to rest.

“We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations,” wrote Motorola Mobility in an emailed statement.

The official document pertaining to this specific case won’t be available until Monday, so we will have to wait until the weekend’s over to learn the full details. The inevitable battle between Apple and Google may be a whole lot closer than we thought. And it’s nice to know we’ll have more legal battles to obsess over since Apple and Samsung’s recent disputes will soon reach a verdict.

FOSS Patent’s Florian Mueller notes that an ITC judge already made a preliminary judgement in the previous Motorola vs. Apple case, arguing that Apple did infringe on one of Motorola’s patent. The final ruling in the original case is expected to be released sometime next week. It’s also important to recognize, as Mueller points out, that if Motorola does achieve a ban on Apple products in the previous lawsuit, the iPad 4G and iPhone 4S would be exempt. Both use a Qualcomm chipset falling outside Motorola’s patent claims.

For mobile fans, Monday can’t come soon enough. Do you think Google and Motorola stand a chance against Apple?