Fully Charged: Taco Bell pioneering fast food by smartphone and Netflix bags Star Wars TV series

US fast food chain Taco Bell introducing smartphone order system

Later this year US residents will be able to order Taco Bell food direct from their smartphones. The fast food chain has announced plans to roll out an app and ordering service in the coming months, allowing customers to choose whether to pick up their food in-store or via the drive-thru window and pay beforehand via credit or gift card. Your mobile’s GPS will also be put to good use: because they’ll know your location, Taco Bell employees will know exactly when to start cooking your food – no more cold takeaways.

Taco Bell has reportedly been working on the system for two years and looks to have stolen a march on rival chains like McDonalds, who are currently still in the experimentation phase of mobile orders.

[Source: The Verge]

Image credit: time anchor

Star Wars: The Clone Wars final season will be exclusive to Netflix

Netflix has announced that it has bagged the exclusive rights to stream the final season of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon. The 13-episode season (known as “The Lost Missions”) will be available to Netflix subscribers from 7th March, along with the director’s cuts of all five previous seasons and the original Clone Wars feature-length episode.

[Source: Engadget]

Sigma dp2 Quattro: the oddest-looking compact camera we’ve seen in years

Sigma has given its DP range of high-end compact cameras a new look – and it’s certainly unconventional. The dp2 Quattro is a long, thin camera with only the chunky grip and fixed 30mm lens protruding – a marked difference from its rather more staid and traditional predecessor. They’re similar in one regard however: like previous DP cameras, the dp2 Quattro features a Foveon image sensor, which separates colour in a different way to most camera sensors and uses three layers (20MP, 4.9MP and 4.9MP) to capture image data.

No price or availability information has been revealed thus far.

[Source: Gizmag]

One bird-based mobile game isn’t going anywhere…

Flappy Bird may have awkwardly flown off to the great aviary in the sky, but one mobile game franchise based on our feathered friends is still going strong: Angry Birds.

We don’t know anyone who still plays Rovio’s cash cow, but obviously enough people do that there’s yet another Angry Birds title on the way: Angry Birds Stella. Stella is a pink bird and, according to Rovio, a “fierce, feisty character with a great group of friends”. And we suspect those friends are going to be smashing into some blocks on a phone near you fairly soon.

[Source: Rovio]

About

Tech journalism's answer to The Littlest Hobo, I've written for a host of titles and lived in three different countries in my 15 years-plus as a freelancer. But I've always come back home to Stuff eventually, where I specialise in writing about cameras, streaming services and being tragically addicted to Destiny.