Sprint has made a few announcements today for new devices and services coming to its customers on its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA prepaid brands. The company announced today that the Samsung Galaxy S III will be landing on both Boost and Virgin beginning in June. Both devices will be available on the two carriers’ no contract plans but Sprint didn’t make any details available for pricing on the device yet.

Also announced today is the waterproof Kyocera Hydro Edge smartphone, a 4.1-inch Android 4.1 device that’s capable of submersion up to 3.28 feet. No exact launch date or pricing as of yet, but Sprint will be making it available through both its Sprint and Boost Mobile brands later this summer.

Sprint also announced today that it is launching a new ‘Boost Mobile Wallet’ service powered by technology from mobile payments company Wipit. The service is available for Boost customers starting today through a free app on Google Play, but for now is only available to users in Los Angeles, San Diego and parts of New Jersey.

The app allows users to load cash into their wallet at Boost Mobile stores, send money to 135 countries, and Sprint will also be giving out reloadable Visa prepaid cards for ATM access:

-Load cash to the wallet account at Boost Mobile authorized retail locations

-Send money to more than 135 countries

-Pay more than 3,500 billers nationwide

-Top-up domestic and international prepaid wireless accounts

-Transfer funds instantly between accounts

-Load checks directly from the mobile phone with instant access to approved funds (coming soon)

Mobile Tech Review has posted a brief video of what it claims is a sneak peek at the rumored Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, a waterproof and ruggedized version of its flagship phone …

The front of the handset looks very similar to the standard version of the phone, but for the addition of three physical buttons beneath the screen. The rear has visible screws, possibly to permit a tighter seal than the simple snap fit of the rear cover on the standard unit.

The Chrome App Launcher is coming to OSX, providing a simple way to launch Chrome ‘packaged apps’ – web apps that are written in a combination of HTML5, Javascript and CSS but which look and behave like conventional PC or Mac apps …

Google Chrome team member François Beaufort, who has the whacky job title of Happiness Evangelist (some Google employees get to pick their own job titles), posted the screengrab on his Google+ page.

Chrome Team is currently working on bringing the App Launcher on the Mac platform as you can see in the screenshot below.

You can already give it a try by running the last chromium build available at download-chromium.appspot.com with the –show-app-list switch.

To see it in action, you’ll need to download at least one app from the Chrome Web Store in addition to Chromium itself.

Benchmark results from GFXBench suggest that Samsung’s next 10-inch version of its Galaxy Tab 3 may be powered by an Intel processor instead of the ARM chips it has used in the past. The benchmark data shows the board as ‘clovertrail’, a codename for an Intel Atom Z2560 processor originally aimed at the smartphone market …

Samsung has so far used ARM processors from either the Qualcomm Snapdragon range or its own Exynos chips, and it is believed Samsung’s 7-inch version of the Galaxy Tab 3 will be sporting a 1.2Ghz ARM chip.

A switch to Intel for the 10-inch version would represent a major breakthrough for the chip manufacturer, which has so far struggled to achieve significant adoption in the mobile device market despite its leading position in laptop and desktop CPUs. In the mobile market, Intel has so far only seen its chips used in Windows 8 tablets, which represent a tiny proportion of the market.

Consumer Reports (via BGR) has declared the Samsung S4 its “new top-rated smartphone” after detailed tests, taking the title from the LG Optimus G.

The S4 delivered top-notch performance in the most critical areas of our tests, including the camera.

The S4 has an excellent 5-inch, high-definition (1080p) touch-screen display, as well as oodles of gesture- and sensor-based tools for accessing and sharing content you create and capture on your phone. The display is sensitive enough to use with gloves on—handy during cold weather …

Consumer Reports also praised the S4′s split-screen multi-tasker and infra-red remote functionality.

Verizon recently announced that the S4 will be available from Thursday (23rd), while Google has announced it will be selling a stock version of the S4 from June 26th.

Merchants can continue to accept payments using Google Checkout until November 20, 2013.

• If you don’t have your own payment processing, you will need to transition to a different solution within six months. To make things easier, we’ve partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer you discounted migration options.

• If you are a U.S. merchant that does have payment processing, you can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy, which offers a fast buying experience to Google Wallet shoppers.

At some point, Google’s brand is going to get tarnished by these closures. How am I going to feel comfortable getting behind a new Google product if I know there’s a more than 50% chance it will close? 

Some of you might have noticed that updating to Google’s new unified Hangouts chat service in Gmail meant giving up the Google Voice calling capabilities that were previously available to users in the US and Canada. We suspected Google had plans to bring the feature back and users currently have the option of reverting back to the old Gmail chat in order to access the feature. Now Google has responded to concerns by promising that “Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls” will return in a future update.

Google’s Nikhyl Singhal had this to say about Voice integration in Hangouts:

1) Today’s version of Hangouts doesn’t yet support outbound calls on the web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We’re working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.

2) Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.

Samsung is still in the midst of a recording breaking launch with its Galaxy S4 smartphone, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t life left in its predecessor.

Samsung plans to bring many of the features of the Galaxy S4 to the Galaxy S3, according to a leaked version of Android 4.2.2 obtained by SamMobile, like new voice controls with S Voice, an enhanced lock screen experience, and additional screen modes.

Some features understandably can’t be ported to the older hardware, but its good to see Samsung delivering on its promise to update its second best selling smartphone. Android 4.2.2 is expected next month.

Software isn’t the only update coming to the Galaxy S3, which first debuted in May 2012. TmoNews reports that the Samsung Galaxy S3 will ship with LTE support on T-Mobile starting June 5. Pricing isn’t available for the updated hardware, but the Galaxy S3 LTE goes for $99 on-contract with AT&T or free on-contract with Sprint.

Finally, after months of waiting and a teaser last week that it was on the way, we’ve nailed down a release date on the Galaxy S III LTE. Assuming everything goes well and there’s no hiccups or delays , the Galaxy S III LTE should make its way on to T-Mobile shelves on June 5th. The new model will allow T-Mobile to remove supply of the current S III and replace it with the LTE variant.

Update: A report on Yahoo! Finance claims that Google paid just 2.6 percent tax on its $6b of overseas profits in 2012.

Google, one of a number of companies to come under fire for alleged tax-avoidance practices, says that it welcomes debate on how international tax treaties can be reformed so that multinational companies pay the right amount of tax in each of the countries in which they operate.

In a comment piece on the Observer UK newspaper website, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says he understands the controversy.

At a time when families are having to tighten their belts and funding for vital public services is under pressure, corporate taxation is rightly a hot topic. And as a company that has always aspired to do the right thing, we understand why Google is at the centre of that debate. In the interests of moving the argument forward – away from accusation and toward action – here are three principles we hope most people can agree upon …

First, he says, tax should be based on where profits are generated, not where revenues are accrued. In other words, if a product is invented in the USA by US engineers, the profits should be taxed there even if the bulk of the sales are made overseas.

Second, that companies should merely follow the rules set out by legislation – and that politicians should set the right rules in the first place.

Third, that any reform needs to be international in nature, with all OECD countries agreeing a revised set of tax treaties.

The third point is indisputable: it’s pretty much impossible for any one country to effectively impose unilateral rules on companies based outside those countries. His first two contentions, however, bear closer scrutiny.

If you sell a million units of a product in a country – let’s say, a phone or perhaps some electronic glasswear – is it really reasonable to argue that you should pay no taxes in that country just because the technology was invented elsewhere? Should Google ads sold in the UK to UK companies and appearing on UK websites to generate sales from UK consumers really not be liable to UK taxation because the concept of sponsored search results was devised in the USA?

And while the principle that politicians should make the laws and companies merely abide by them sounds reasonable, it is hardly the case that multinational companies cheerfully and innocently simply pay what the law says they owe. The reality is that companies hire lots of clever lawyers and accountants whose sole job is to figure out legal ways of getting around the rules in order to minimise tax bills.

It is no accident that Google bases its UK sales teams over the sea in Ireland, where corporation tax is 12.5%, rather than in the UK where the rate is 24% – not, it might be suggested, the obvious actions of a company ’aspiring to do the right thing’ …

Following showing off a redesigned three column version of Google+ for the web and new “Auto Awesome” photo editing features at I/O, Google is today bringing some of the new features to its Google+ for Android app.

The updated app, which should be hitting Google Play some time today, will include a number of new photo editing features including the new Auto Awesome effects, auto backup for photos, and other photo editing tools from Snapseed:

• Auto Backup, to safely and privately store your photos as you snap them
• Auto Highlight, to browse a selection of top shots from every set of photos you add
• Auto Enhance, to make subtle improvements to the people and places in your images, automatically
• Auto Awesome, to create fun new versions of your pictures (like animations and panoramas) based on the photos in your library

The updated Google+ for Android app will also offer improved location sharing with a new Locations section that lets you view your friends’ current locations on a map.

Lastly, after updating you’ll have the ability to access Google’s new intelligent related hashtags feature:

Last week we talked about how most feeds are rather flat. You can swipe through stuff that’s been shared with you, but it’s really hard to read more about a particular topic. We introduced related hashtags as a way to fix this problem, and today we’re bringing them to the Android app. These Google-added tags will appear at the top-right of individual posts (#GoogleIO2013, in this example), and tapping on them will reveal streams of relevant content: