"The Sims" are getting in touch with their feelings.

The fourth edition of Maxis' successful life-simulating game will include more emotional versions of the virtual people whose lives players can manipulate.

Google said Tuesday it began integrating into its online maps features from the Waze traffic app it acquired earlier this year in a deal said to be worth some $1 billion.

"No one likes getting stuck in traffic. That's why the Waze and Google Maps teams are working together to harness the power of Google technology and the passion of the Waze community to make it easier to navigate your daily life," said the tech giant's Brian McClendon in a blog post.

News that Samsung will unveil a "smartwatch" next month has sent rumour mills into overdrive within the tech community as it second guesses what the much-hyped gadget will offer.

Wearable computing, including Google's smart glasses, is considered the next frontier in consumer electronics following smartphones.

After discovering a privacy bug on Facebook, unemployed Palestinian programmer Khalil Shreateh said he just wanted to collect the traditional $500 bounty the social network giant offers to those who voluntarily expose its glitches.

But when Facebook ignored his first two reports, Shreateh took his message to the top — and hacked into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personal page to prove his point.

Apple has asked its Taiwan-based supplier to begin shipping two new versions of the iPhone next month, including a lower-cost model, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision, the parent company of Foxconn in China, was readying both a standard iPhone with new upgrades and a less expensive model with fewer features.

Few are more excited about Lego's new Mindstorms sets rolling out next month than Silicon Valley engineers.

Many of them were drawn to the tech sector by the flagship kits that came on the market in 1998, introducing computerized movement to the traditional snap-together toy blocks and allowing the young innovators to build their first robots. Now, 15 years later, those robot geeks are entrepreneurs and designers, and the colorful plastic bricks have an outsized influence in their lives.

In ancient times B.V.G. (Before Video Games), here's how kids played: Take all your toys — dolls, soldiers, cars, blocks, that thing you got from a cereal box — and dump them on the floor. Forget about logic or plot consistency because the most important goal is to create an entertaining adventure. (My neighborhood is still reeling from the sordid G.I. Joe-Barbie affair of 1974.)

That's the essence of "Disney Infinity" (for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Wii, $74.99 for starter kit). Why not let Buzz Lightyear ride Dumbo? Or invite Mickey Mouse to hang out with Wreck-It Ralph? There's one limitation: the characters have to belong to The Walt Disney Co. But given the depth of Disney's roster — which now includes "Star Wars," Marvel superheroes and the Muppets — the possible combinations do seem endless.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics will unveil its new Galaxy Gear "smartwatch" early next month, ahead of Apple's iWatch, Bloomberg news and a fan site said Saturday.

The Galaxy Gear, which will allow users to make calls, access email and even surf the Internet, will launch on September 4, said the sammobile.com site.

Facebook plans to test a mobile payments service that lets users make purchases inside mobile applications using payment information they have added to their account on the social network.

Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it is working on a "very small test" and the company says there is no set schedule for making the service available to users. The service would use payment information that shoppers store on Facebook to automatically complete checkout forms of certain mobile apps. Then, the app would process the purchase.

Smartphones took a majority of mobile phone sales worldwide for the first time in the April-June quarter, a survey showed Wednesday.

The report by the research firm Gartner found smartphone sales totaled 225 million in the second quarter, or 51.8 percent of all mobile phones sold in the period.