The Amazon App Store hit a major milestone Wednesday, updating to version 5.0. With the update comes wider support for international users as well as some bug fixes. But is this still a clunky, slow application that puts a strain on the battery? Will that matter now that there is support for 200 countries?

Thor, he of the witty one-liners, the wielder of Mjolnir, the bane of Ragnarok, is subject of today’s not quite tower defense but heavily action-oriented game Thor: Lord Of Storms. The developers over at Animoca have recently added the Norse-themed action game to its stable of heavily, decidedly less manly, games such as “Star Girl” and series of “Pretty Pet” games. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather be playing a kick-butt Thor game as opposed to, say, Pretty Pet Salon. But that’s just me.

Last year, T-Mobile threw down the gauntlet and announced it would no longer subsidize smartphones and went to a pay-as-you-go format. Since the beginning of the year, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless have also announced changes to their pay-as-you-go strategies. While the Big Two (AT&T and Verizon Wireless) took baby steps towards making pay-as-you-go a viable alternative for their contract customers, this is still a positive development in my opinion. More choices in the no-contract space are a small but important win for consumers and will hopefully lead to more options for customers of all four of the major U.S. carriers.

You may have heard of app developer OneLouder and may be familiar with some of the popular apps it has released, including Tweetcaster, Friendcaster, 1Weather, and Reddit client Baconreader. You might find it troubling, though, that on Monday Sprint announced its buyout of OneLouder's parent company Handmark. If you are indeed concerned about what this means for the future of your favorite apps, Sprint attempted to calm your fears by promising not to discontinue them.

Vic Gondotra, Vice President at Google announced a new layout, along with several other related features to the Google+ platform. Along with the layout change, there were several changes to photos and other services, adding up to "41 new features". Google+ has become much more than a simple social network and matured into a full-fledged social platform, but has it matured for the better?

Yahoo has been making some headlines recently. With its purchase of Tumblr this week, Yahoo stands to start building a social presence to tie into several mature existing platforms from news to stocks. Monday morning, Yahoo announced a long awaited revamp of its Flickr site and version 2.0 for Android updated to match these changes.

If you've been under a rock you may not have noticed the Google Plus update that occurred right around the time of the little party called Google I/O. Like me you may have been fully expecting the Google Plus 4.0 for Android update to come along with it. It took a few extra days for those expectations to be fulfilled, but the new Android app is rolling out right now to Android devices with improvements to photos, location and stream.