Not that this will be a surprise to most readers, but it now seems absolutely certain that Samsung's long-rumoured Galaxy Note 8.0 will be officially unveiled in a couple of days at Mobile World Congress.

An anonymous tipster, presumably part of the set-up crew in Barcelona, snapped a picture of the Samsung stand and there, lo and behold, is the Galaxy Note 8.0 featured on the big screen.

Naturally, the device looks absolutely gigantic, but it seems Samsung is still intent on us using it in portrait mode with one-hand, although that could be a bit of a stretch for anyone who's not named LeBron James.

The latest leak comes just a week after the Note 8.0 was accidentally revealed at a Samsung event in South Korea.

Top billing

Speculation has suggested that the new, iPad mini-bothering member of the Note family will pack a 1280 x 800 Super Clear LCD display, Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and 16GB RAM.

The placement of the Galaxy Note 8.0 promotional screen, in the centre of the Samsung stand, suggests that it'll probably be the Korean giant's top announcement at MWC 2013.

We already know that the Samsung Galaxy S4 won't be making an appearance at the event this year, with latest speculation suggesting it will arrive at a dedicated event on March 14.

Google has delivered the latest stable release of Chrome -- version 25 for those still counting -- which includes a number of bug fixes, improved security agains rogue extensions, and voice recognition support via the Web Speech API. The latter will allow developers to accept voice input in their web applications for things like dictation, search, navigating through options or whatever else they can think of.

Chrome's implementation of the Web Speech API accepts short bursts or continuous speech, the data is then sent to the Google Voice service for analysis and the results are sent back to the browser. Chrome speech recognition supports numerous languages, including localized variants of English and Spanish, as well as French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and even some right-to-left languages.

Google has put together a demo of the API in action for anyone to try out the new feature.

The latest update to the browser also disables silent extension installs in Chrome for Windows. Back in December Google explained that silent extension installs were originally intended to allow users to opt-in to adding a useful extension to Chrome as a part of the installation of another application. Unfortunately, this feature was widely abused by third parties to install extensions without proper acknowledgment from users.

As far security fixes are concerned, Google has patched a memory corruption issue when processing web audio, a buffer overflow in decoding of Vorbis files, a memory access fault with the SVG parser, a use-after-free error in the browser's database and URL handling, among others. All in all, the update addresses 22 vulnerabilities between high (9), medium (8), and low (5) rated security problems.

Download: Google Chrome for Windows | Mac OS X | Linux

Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are teaming up, each company planning to offer the other's library of games across their respective Origin and UPlay services. The move could be interpreted as a shot fired across Valve's bow -- the mind behind Steam and arguably, the king of digital game distribution -- but probably doesn't have the company on red alert just yet.

In addition to sharing each other's gaming properties across their respective digital distribution stores, Ubisoft will also be opening up UPlay to third-party developers. Upcoming UPlay partners include Telltale Games, Warner Bros and many others. EA, on the other hand, has been doing this for some time now. However, unlike EA, Ubisoft continues to offer some of its biggest titles on Steam. Incidentally, when Origin launched, EA fled Steam like a guilty murderer and began launching its biggest money-makers as Origin exclusives.

UPlay director and PR spinster Stephanie Perotti sees the move as part of an effort to improve its relationship with PC gamers. The love-hate relationship between PC gamers and Ubisoft is propped up by numerous, A-list gaming franchises, but remains ostensibly marred by a sketchy past filled with invasive DRM schemes and "console port" criticisms.

For the past year, it seems Ubisoft has been trying to win over the PC gaming community. They removed From Dust's obtrusive DRM and promised to "scale back" DRM on future titles, eventually scrapping always-on DRM in favor of one-time activation. 

To celebrate its new friendship, Ubisoft is offering a free game for anyone who purchases one game for $19.90 or more. The selection of freebies include: World in Conflict: Complete Edition, Driver San Francisco, From Dust, Might & Magic: Heroes VI, Rayman Origins and Settlers 7 (Deluxe Gold Edition).

The next device from Apple is rumored to be the iPhone Mini, a smaller - and more importantly cheaper - version of its smartphone, and the release date may be in the summer.

There are plenty of reasons why Apple needs to start making the cheaper iPhone Mini, and the Morgan Stanley managing director of the PC hardware industry, Katy Huberty, points that out after meeting with Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer.

Emerging markets like China and Brazil have snapped up the iPad Mini, according to her comments picked up by CNET.

"iPad Mini is expanding Apple's customer base with 50 [percent] of purchases in China/Brazil representing new customers to the ecosystem," said Huberty.

Likewise, Chinese consumers are showing signs that they're willing to buy into the latest models of the iPhone instead of the smartphone's older generations.

Preparing for expanding markets as well as existing ones, she anticipates that new carrier partnerships will take place in Q2 2014 with NTT Docomo, T-Mobile, and China Mobile.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Outside of those emerging markets, Huberty notes that Apple's everyday consumers have been buying older versions of the iPhone.

"iPhone 4 demand surprised to the upside in the December quarter," she said.

She didn't speculate whether the reason for this is due to the lower price of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S or the lack of innovation in the iPhone 5.

In addition to saying that the iPhone Mini could launch in the summer, Huberty said that she expects that the iPad could be refreshed in the middle of the year.

I'm no analyst, but I think summer and middle of the year might happen at the same time.

Either way, rumors suggest that an iPad Mini 2 will roll out with a Retina display, and that iPad 5 will be completely redesigned.