Will.i.am is about to launch the i.am+ iPhone add-on, a device that'll allow owners of Apple's smartphone to take 14-megapixel photos with their handset.

Songwriter, rapper, producer, DJ and self-proclaimed “chic geek” will.i.am is about to launch a piece of iPhone hardware that’ll  boost the handset’s pixel count to 14 million.

Will.i.am told the Telegraph the device comes with its own sensor and a better flash, claiming it’ll turn Apple’s smartphone into a “genius phone”.

The i.am+ camera clips onto an iPhone 4, 4S and 5, and those using it will be encouraged to share their pictures on their own profile page at the neatly named www.i.am domain.

Little information is known about the device just now – we’ll be furnished with more details when it’s officially unveiled at a press conference in London on November 28. As part of its marketing push, it makes an appearance in the music video for will.i.am/Britney Spears recent collaborative effort Scream and Shout.

But is the i.am+ add-on just a pointless gimmick aimed at die-hard fans of the musician, or a serious attempt to take smartphone camera technology to a new level?

With the iPhone 5 already equipped with an 8-megapixel sensor, one wonders how many owners will be hankering for a contraption which will add bulk and weight to their phone even if it does boost its megapixel count.

And of course, more pixels doesn’t necessarily mean better quality pics – we’ll want to know more about the sensor and precisely what it’s capable of to see if the i.am+ really brings something new to the iPhoneography arena. And what about phone memory? These pics are going to be taking up nearly twice as much space as those taken with the iPhone 5′s built-in camera, so you might have to be more choosy about what you snap and how you manage your images.

Will.i.am has long been into all things tech, and in 2011 was signed up by chip giant Intel as director of creative innovation.

The i.am+ camera will be the first of a series of tech products to launch with will.i.am branding, the musician told the Telegraph.

[Image: Lemonpink Images / Shutterstock]

Though they've been illegal in Japan since 2009, authorities have only now been able to block the import of the infamous R4 flash cart, a device that makes it obscenely easy to pirate Nintendo DS games.

For the vast majority of people, pirating console games is a seemingly impossible task. This is mostly by design, as while the actual process of pirating a modern video game isn’t all that technically complex, the various companies that publish games have been working for years to ensure that the ins and outs of gaming’s black market remain a mystery to the average person.

Of course, with a secret like this, it’s simply not possible for companies like Nintendo to ensure that people won’t figure out some new, inventive way to acquire their games free of charge. Thus, ever since the release of the Nintendo DS, those who promote piracy have been swearing by the R4 flash cartridge. We won’t get into deep technical specifics — sorry, but explaining how to steal games isn’t something we’re about to do — but in short, these are generally oversized memory cards, similar to those found in digital cameras, that can be connected to a computer via USB. Once attached, users are able to download ROM files to the R4 from the ‘net. These ROMs (which contain all the information one would find on a legitimate Nintendo DS game cartridge) can then be played in any Nintendo DS handheld, as the R4 can be slipped into and out of the handheld’s intrinsic, proprietary game slot.

Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing Nintendo wants to see spread any further than it already has, so back in 2009 the company sought the assistance of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to make these devices illegal in the Land of the Rising Sun. The Ministry finally banned sales of the Chinese-made R4 in February of 2009, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough to stem the tide of R4 piracy in Nintendo’s native region. Thus, earlier today the Ministry also made it illegal to import R4 cartridges. Now, regardless of how you acquire an R4, if you find yourself in Japan you could face surprisingly intense legal repercussions.

To wit: In May of this year (read: well before today’s import ban was established), authorities arrested an electronics retailer in the Saitama prefecture. According to Kotaku, the 39-year-old man was charged with “selling [three] R4 cartridges over the internet between February 14th and March 9th for a total of ¥7,200 [about $91 USD].” Though it’s not specified what punishment the man faced following his arrest, he was taken into custody under the same law that backs the new import ban, so expect this move by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to increase the already rising number of piracy-related arrests in the island nation. Given that such arrests have been doubling year-on-year since 2009, we may be on the verge of an explosion of piracy crackdown.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that while both Japan and the UK have now outlawed R4 cartridges, they remain relatively legal here in the United States. We say “relatively,” as owning the cart itself is perfectly legitimate, but loading any ROM images of which you don’t also own a retail copy will bring you under the scrutiny of authorities. Bottom line: The only way to completely ensure that you don’t end up in court, staring down a posse of Nintendo’s high-powered lawyers is to avoid R4 cartridges altogether. We can’t tell you what to do, but we’ve grown fond of you over the years and would rather not see a prison IP address attached to your future comments.

The conventional designs of cell phones have evolved a lot over the years. For a while, we all had the Zack Morris. Then, along came the Motorola flip phones and later the tiny Nokia candybars. That flip design managed to hold on for quite a while until the smartphone slab arrived, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. It just means it needs to be reinvented.

What do you do when just one touchscreen won’t do? You get two, of course, as is the case with the newly announced Samsung SCH-W2013. This is a flip phone with a regular numeric keypad, but it also has a pair of 3.7-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen displays: one on the front cover and one inside. To make things even more interesting, it gets a 1.4GHz quad core processor (possibly Exynos 4412) to go along with its Android 4.0 ICS platform.

Running through the rest of the specs, we find 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, microSD expansion, 8MP camera, 1.9MP front camera, and an 1850mAh battery. Oh, and there’s dual SIM support there for CDMA2000 800/1900 and GSM 900/1800/1900. That’s because it’s being offered by China Telecom and it’s endorsed by none other than Jackie Chan.

It’s highly unlikely that this phone will ever see the light of day outside of China, but it’s still an interesting concept for people who can’t decide if they want a flip phone or a touchscreen phone. It’s going to be for China’s elite, though, as pricing is estimated to be in the US$3,000 range.

In what might be the most bizarre celebration of Thanksgiving to date, Ubisoft has revealed the details of a huge upcoming patch for its newly-released adventure epic Assassin's Creed III.

Thematically speaking, there are legitimate ways to link Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed game with the Thanksgiving holiday. After all, Assassin’s Creed III (mostly) stars a half-Native American living in the colonies immediately prior to, during and following the Revolutionary War. Given that American schoolchildren are taught that Thanksgiving started when Native Americans generously aided the starving pilgrim population by offering food and supplies during the harsh winters seen in what is now the Northeastern United States, it sorta makes sense to link Assassin’s Creed III to the holiday, no?

Regardless of whether or not that makes any sense to you, that’s exactly what Ubisoft is doing. As of this morning, Assassin’s Creed III has received a gratis 9MB update, dubbed the “Assassin’s Creed III Thanksgiving Patch.” Full details have been uploaded to the official Ubisoft forums, and it should be mandatory reading for anyone still working their way through Connor’s adventure. Not that this patch adds much in the way of novel content to extend the game’s shelf-life, but given the number of glitches and major bugs seen in the game once it launched, there are pretty solid odds that this patch may either fix an issue you’re currently experiencing, or may prevent you from experiencing issues in the future.

That said, we’d still like to highlight a few key fixes, either because we’ve experienced these problems ourselves, or because they amend rather serious issues. Have a look:

Multiplayer

Multiplayer Modes
- ASSASSINATE – Instances where it was possible for players to kill players that were not their target in Assassinate have been corrected. 
- DEATHMATCH – In Fort Wolcott, fixed a bug where players would remained stuck on warmup screen. 
- MANHUNT – The cooldown boosts for loss streak bonus are not permanently active for all abilities during a manhunt round anymore.

Multiplayer Ladders
- Players are now granted Abstergo points normally even if one or several players get the idle state at the end of the session (The idle players do not get any Abstergo points)

Multiplayer Misc
- Changing the ability set three times during a game can no longer reset the ability’s cooldown. 
- It is no longer possible for players to get up and perform a kill under certain conditions while they’re vulnerable. 
- Transitions to join Multiplayer sessions after an invite now work correctly. 
- Warm up games are no longer interrupted when the host player leaves. 

Singleplayer

Platform: All
Location: Epilogue
- Animus Synching tutorial, forced subtitles on off-camera voice, so that the player doesn’t think the game is frozen

Location: Frontier
- Fixed a bug where players could respawn and desync immediately in a loop if he died in the Valley Forge region before unlocked. Also patches players which savegame are already stuck
- Fixed a bug where the player could respawn under the ground in a loop, in two different places
- Plugged a hole in the ground where players could fall through the map

Location: Global
- A text message is now visible on-screen at all times while a skippable cinematic is playing
- Added a failsafe to the animals navigation, to prevent them from getting stuck
- Disabled special attacks with heavy weapons on animals
- Fixed a bug where the player could not finish enemies on ground if they were thrown in deep snow

Location: Menus
- Added a wait message for some cases where the game could appear frozen if some servers are unresponsive
- Fixed a bug where the player’s friends’ Uplay wall would get spammed by previously completed missions and sequences when the player reloads his game

Platform: PS3
- Westpoint DLC – mission “A SPY AMONG US”, fixed a bug where required characters would disappear and not come back if the player went too far from them
- Westpoint DLC – fixed a bug where the player could fall through the map by going through the gate while in conflict

Platform: Xbox 360
Location: Menus
- Removed Benedict Arnold icon from the map legend

As you can see, even as a truncated list of its most important fixes this Thanksgiving Patch changes quite a bit about Assassin’s Creed III. While our review (and the majority of other reviews) were quite positive about Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed title, few would argue that the game lacked a certain amount of technical polish. An unfortunately large number of the problems listed in this Thanksgiving Patch would actually cause the game to completely lock up or would cause a set of circumstances within the game making it impossible to progress the plot or extricate your character from certain situations and areas. Thus, this patch should be seen as something of a mea culpa: Ubisoft is quite thankful that you’ve purchased their latest triple-A franchise title and would like to reward your loyalty by improving the quality of their game. It would have been preferable for Ubisoft to have fixed these problems prior to the release of Assassin’s Creed III, but that ship sailed a few weeks ago, so this patch seems a “better late than never” effort.

Luckily, free is a very good price for that sort of thing.

Video game studio THQ is being sued by the man responsible for a tattoo worn by one of the fighters in the game, who claims that the company doesn't have the rights to the tattoo... because he does.

Troubled video game studio THQ is facing a lawsuit that it probably didn’t see coming over its UFC Undisputed game series, with a tattoo artist suing over the fact that one of the fighters in the game has been reproduced so faithfully to real life that his tattoo is clearly visible – a tattoo that is, according to the artist responsible, the intellectual property of the artist and used without permission.

The tattoo artist in question is Arizona’s Chris Escobedo, who has filed suit against THQ over the “lion tattoo” sported by professional mixed martial artist Carlos Condit in both the video games UFC Undisputed and UFC Undisputed 3 and, well, real life. THQ may have thought that the likeness rights that it held for Condit in order to use him in the games would have covered such a possibility, but according to Escobedo and his attorney, Condit himself didn’t actually have the legal rights to his own tattoo in the first place, and so was unable to allow anyone else to use it.

“People often believe that they own the images that are tattooed on them by tattoo artists,” Escobedo’s attorney Maria Crimi Speth explained in a press release announcing the lawsuit against the video game studio issued last week. “In reality, the owner of the tattoo artwork is the creator of the work, unless there is a written assignment of the copyright in the tattoo art.” In this case, there was no such agreement between Escobedo and Condit, and as such, the tattoo – somewhat surreally – “belongs” to Escobedo.

For his part, Escobedo said that he “would not have agreed to the recreation of the tattoo by an animator” if he had been approached, although he went on to admit that he may have agreed had he been given approval over the artwork and financial re-numeration for the use of the tattoo. Underscoring that this may be more about money than artistic integrity, the lawsuit demands that THQ provide accounting for the games and the payment of profits, as opposed to any attempt to recall the games or delete the tattoo from future editions.

THQ has yet to publicly comment on the lawsuit.

This isn’t the first time that the intellectual property of a tattoo has led to legal action; in April 2011, the artist responsible for Mike Tyson’s distinctive facial tattoo famously filed suit against Warner Bros. in an attempt to delay or prevent the release of The Hangover, Part II because his tattoo design was replicated by Ed Helms’ character in the movie. That lawsuit was quickly settled, with the terms of the settlement private; it remains to be seen if a similar fate awaits Escobedo and THQ in this scenario.