Samsung's Galaxy S IV is coming, and you have officially been invited to its launch event in New York City on March 14th at 7:00pm US Eastern time. This morning Samsung released an official teaser image that invited everyone down to Times Square to watch the unveiling via a live stream.

If there was ever any doubt about what this event was about, the large number 4 in the center should clear that up for you. The invite reads: "Be the first in the world to experience it!...You can watch Samsung Unpacked via live stream and experience Samsung's new flagship smartphone at Times Square."

It is widely expected that the Galaxy S IV will overtake the iPhone 5 as the most popular smartphone, by sporting a 4.99-inch HD SoLUX LCD and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 clocked to 1.9GHz. Will any of you TweakTown readers head to Times Square for the event? Let us know in the comments below.

EA have announced that they will be building micro-transactions into all of their future games on PC and consoles, with the decision forming amidst the controversy over the micro-transactions in Dead Space 3, which was the first game in the EA-published series to be impacted by micro-transactions. Chief Financial Officer, Blake Jorgensen, when speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, said:

It looks like micro-transactions are here to stay, and I'd even be willing to get we'll move toward a future of cheaper or even free-to-play games that are financed from micro-transactions.

It was only a matter of time, but we should expect a PC-like smartphone to be released later this year. At Mobile World Congress, i-mate were showing off something that most people don't seem to have noticed, a new smartphone with a 4.7-inch display but it was what was cranking along inside that was interesting.

The smartphone from i-mate was powered by Intel's "Clover Trail" hardware and the full version of Windows 8 Pro - meaning that the smartphone is capable of running most desktop-based software, which is a huge deal for a smartphone. i-mate's smartphone is called the Intelegent, and could go up for sale later this year for $750. Featuring an Atom processor, 2GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, the Intelegent would go up against most smartphones and completely win when it comes to its OS.

Backing up the usual specs, we have HSPA and 4G LTE capabilities, and up to 10 hours of talk time. i-mate will sell the phone by itself, or part of a desktop hardware suite for $1600, this suite would include a docking station they call the "hub". Once Intelegent is docked in the hub, the phone can be used with a traditional, wired phone handset, or make video calls. It will also function as a normal desktop PC, which will include a 23-inch touchscreen display, keyboard and mouse which powers an auxiliary wireless tablet with a 10.1-inch, 1080p-capable display.

Game of Thrones is an undeniable hit, so big that it was the most downloaded show of 2012, but how does the director of the show feel being downloaded so many times? David Petrarca, director of Game of Thrones said that you simply shrug your shoulder at piracy, and that illegal downloads don't really matter because your show thrives on cultural buzz.

When talking to a group of panelists at the Perth Writer's Festival over the weekend, the Game of Thrones director said that shows like the HBO smash hit capitalize on the social commentary they create, adding "that's how they survive." Just how many times was the show downloaded? It was averaging roughly 3.9 million downloads per episode in 2012. The closest downloaded show to this was How I Met Your Mother, with around 3 million downloads per episode.

HBO is unique, as the premium cable channel has 26 million US-based subscribers, and 60 million or so across the world. With that amount of subscribers, they can afford to allow illegal downloads as it gets their show some serious press - not just in the normal forms - but socially across Facebook, etc. The director also talked about other huge shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy, saying that while they do well, they can all be consumed whenever, and wherever.

We've been hearing about flexible smartphones and displays, but before we can even imagine them in the consumer space, we need batteries to be flexible and stretchable. Well, it looks like that wait might be getting closer to an end, with researchers announcing the development of such a technology.

Using a process called "ordered unraveling", John A. Rogers from the University of Illinois and Yonggang Huang from Northwestern University say that their battery can be stretched by up to 300% of its original size, all without losing any functionality. Energy storage islands and "serpentine" wire connections are placed in a sheet of polymer. Polymer is flexible and stretchy by default, with the overlapping wiring can be installed without being damaged.

What can we expect in terms of battery life? According to the engineers, their solution performs close to a standard lithium-ion battery of the same physical size. So we're looking at around 8-9 hours, as well as the ability to charge it wirelessly, but the current prototype they're using loses some capacity after just 20 recharges.

If you're a heavy user of Pandora, you won't like this news - the company has announced they're putting a limit on how much music you can listen to through their free app. There's now a 40-hour limit, which was pushed in thanks to the rise in royalty rates that Pandora must pay record companies.

If you'd like to listen to more than 40 hours of music per month, you can choose to subscribe to the Pandora One service. This service gives users unlimited listening, on top of a lack of advertisements. You can either choose this, or pay a one-time $0.99 fee to listen as long as you'd like for the rest of the month. Desktop users still have the ability to listen to unlimited music.

Samsung is set to launch their competition crushing Galaxy S IV in just over two weeks time, but now we have some benchmarks to share with you. It looks like Samsung's upcoming flagship smartphone has enjoyed some leaked benchmark scores, with a result posted to Browsermark's database today.

In raw CPU performance, it completely demolishes the competition - scoring 2710 using Google Chrome 25. The previous champion? Apple's iPhone 5 with 2416 using Safari. Samsung's Galaxy S III LTE model scored 2359. If these results are true, the Galaxy S IV is going to be a true powerhouse of a smartphone, and you can't complain at that.

The other thing to remember is that there won't be much in the form of competition against it, as any phone that would trump it would require even faster internals. Sure, we have the Snapdragon 800, Tegra 4 (and 4i) coming, as well as Samsung's own Exynos 5 Octa, but the Galaxy S IV is going to be here, very soon. Those other SoCs are months away.

Unfortunately for those who missed the Google Glass pre-order, there is really only one other way to get a headset before everyone else: buy one from someone who pre-ordered a set. Since the competition to win a chance to buy a pair ends today, you're basically left waiting for the public release or buying a pre-release product from one of those lucky few who have purchased one already.

One such person put up an auction on Ebay, which has now been pulled. The auction started at $1,500, the sunk price for the headset, though it quickly skyrocketed to over $15,000 before being pulled. It's not clear whether the user pulled the auction or whether Ebay and/or Google had something to do with it.

From the auction's description:

Time to spill the beans on Intel's upcoming CPU and chipset plans, if our tomato sauces are correct. One of our sources tipped us that Haswell will be coming at Computex (June 2013) on the Z87 platform as the mid-range solution (much alike the previous-gen Z77), though this is something that is widely available through Google, and mostly widely known among inner circles as being fact.

More importantly, the source let us know that the next-generation performance range of CPUs will be coming by the end of the year, and not 2014 as previous speculated. This news comes from a source that is very close to the subject.

While we suspect this to be Ivy Bridge-E based, our source wasn't exactly clear and it could end up being Haswell-E, with Ivy Bridge-E being skipped. We do know, however, that the next-gen performance chip will make use of a chipset called X99. A quick Google for "X99" turns up relatively little and basically nothing about an Intel chipset.

Piracy is a big deal pretty much everywhere at this point with everything from Wii games, to smartphone apps being installed without a purchase made. Some companies simply deal with this by threatening legal action or actually filing suit. Tweetbot has came up with a unique method to combat people pirating their relatively cheap app.

Tweetbot is considered by many to be the best iOS Twitter app and, as such, it is pirated a lot. The company has decided to combat this issue by coding recent versions of the app to post an embarrassing tweet to the user's account if their copy of the app has been pirated.

As you can see in the above image, the tweet reads "I've been demoing a pirated copy of @tweetbot and really like it so I'm going to buy a copy." A quick twitter search brought me pages upon pages of users who have this tweet posted to their account. Normally I do not agree with most companies methods of dealing with pirates, but this one is about as funny as it gets.