SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: October 4, 2012

Welcome to Thursday evening everyone – just one more work day to go and then we'll have arrived at the weekend. Today we received a pair of invites from Microsoft – one for a Windows 8 launch event happening on October 25, and another for a Windows Phone 8 event happening on October 29. We also learned today that Samsung intends to update the Galaxy S III to Jelly Bean "soon," but sadly, we still don't have a specific date to speak of. We were also told today that HP will be hiring more than 50 developers to work on Open webOS, which is definitely something to get excited about.

Google is said to be looking to the Nexus 7 for inspiration for the next Nexus smartphone, while AT&T was seen touting the fact that it will be offering both the Samsung ATIV smart PC (complete with Windows 8, mind you) and the all-new Samsung Galaxy Camera, which comes packing Android. Earlier today, we reported that Facebook has been auto-liking pages without users' permission, but it wasn't long after that Facebook got back to us with a statement telling us its side of the story.

Google finally settled its long-running lawsuit with US publishers today, and Intel announced a new Atom-based storage platform. We had a fair amount of video game news today, with EA and Maxis sharing a new 9-minute gameplay video of Sim City. Nintendo held another Nintendo Direct live stream today, during which the company announced that the special edition Pikachu 3DS XL will be launching in Europe and that a number of its 3DS games were going live on the eShop. Bethesda released Skyrim: Hearthfire on PC today, we caught a glimpse of a tech demo for Notch's new game 0x10c, and learned that Mists of Pandaria sales are lagging behind launch sales for Cataclysm.NASA gave us an update on Curiosity's mission today, and we were introduced to the new PadPivot NST tablet holder. ASUS announced the VivoTab RT for AT&T, and we heard whispers that Logitech is working on a new wireless webcam for Macs. Hitachi announced a new airport gate prototype that quickly sniffs for bombs, and the iNUKE BOOM Junior speaker was revealed (though it's still pretty big as far as iPhone/iPod speakers go). Microsoft announced it's acquisition of PhotoFactor this evening, and finally tonight, our own Chris Davies asks if Google+ can eventually replace Evernote.

That does it for tonight's Evening Wrap-Up, enjoy the rest of your night folks!